HATE!

Let me say right now just how much I hate this ad for an inauguration party last week. HATE! I even labeled this photo "Hate" on my hard drive. I'll give you one guess as to why. I took down the 2 copies of this flier that were in the English department and asked John to get the 1 I had seen in his department. (And then I post it on the Internet for the whole world to see.)

Oddly enough, this ad was put up by the German-American Institute (DAI) here in our town. *boggles*

The part I find offensive is the name of a band. Actually, it's not that I find the band's name *offensive* per se, but I think the juxtaposition of the name with Obama's picture was really poor judgement on the part of the DAI. It bothered me a lot. I haven't ever heard of the band before, so I can't imagine they are really that huge. Why couldn't the DAI make a different band the headliner? (Of course, I don't know which bands were there--probably Satan Eats Your Soul and Americans are My Bitch. *g*)

That is my rant of the week.

Oh, yeah...

I went to the dermatologist today, and all of my moles look fine. So no skin cancer. Yay me!

Winter has us in its clutches

We got some snow about a week ago, enough that Hannah could go sledding once.



There was snow on the ground for a week, people! Right after it snowed, a high pressure system moved in and froze everything.



In Holland, the canals have frozen over, for the first time in like a dozen years, I think I heard. Here in Germany, a lot of the rivers have frozen, bringing ship traffic to a halt. There was a segment on CNN yesterday about ice breakers having to let through coal ships so the power plants have enough fuel.



Even the Neckar has sheets of ice on it. Here’s the collection of photos I took on Tuesday.


Yesterday it snowed for a few hours, adding to the overall whiteness, coldness, and wetness.

Today it warmed up, and the ice on the Neckar broke up into small sheets that look like paving stones. I guess if you weren’t worried about drowning, you could hop, skip, and jump across the river on them.

And so ends the story of my descent into winter madness.

Except I just remembered that even my 5L watering can is full of ice and frozen down to the tiles on the balcony. WHYYYY??? Oh, yeah, because I keep filling it with the run-off from the condensation clothes dryer.

Bye-Bye, Brunette

You may remember that Hannah talked me into putting semi-permanent black dye on her hair 2 summers ago.




Over the xmas holidays, she pestered me into giving it another try. Here, her last moments as a natural brunette:




And here she is in mid-dye:



I have to make a note that we should have bought 2 bottles of dye. One problem is that I have no idea what I am actually doing, but Hannah has SO MUCH HAIR. Her hair is thick like John's (almost as thick as her Aunt Kee's), so it was impossible to get the dye over all the layers.

Want to guess what color she ended up with?




The bottle says “pomegranate red”, but I like to call it “strawberry shortcake”:




She was disappointed that no one noticed the new color when she went for a play date last week—that didn’t stop her from pointing it out herself—but she got a gratifying round of “no way!” when she went back to school yesterday. It’s nice to be validated.

Wii Updatery

Well, the Rock Band software arrived, and John and Hannah broke out the instruments and started jamming. Only, the microphone didn’t work, so I should be hearing from the store where I bought the Instrument Edition when their shipment of replacement microphones comes in. From what I read online, the microphone is the weak link in the kit.

Hannah, as drummer, insisted on being the leader of the band, and she took her responsibility very seriously. Here is the contract she forced John to sign:

“I, (your name there ->) Mickey Mouse, do promise my Soul, my heart and my Music to the band leader and manager, Hannah S.”

He knew she meant business when she booted him out of the band until he signed. She had stored the contract in the box the instruments came in, but John went crazy straightening up before our company came over yesterday and burned up all the cardboard packaging that was still lying around, so now we have to find a different place to put it.

First we need to get rid of our ridiculously big xmas tree that is taking up a sizable chunk of the floor space in our living room so we have space to store the drum kit, etc. The volunteer fire department won’t come until Jan. 10, though, to tote it off, and I don’t know what other alternatives there are, so I guess we’ll have to tough it out for about 8 more days until we can take it down.

Hannah seems to like the Mii part of the Wii better than the actual games. She has made about 40 avatars, covering the 3 of us, several alternate personalities, and at least one avatar per letter of the alphabet, giving us Zoey and Xena to pick from. I did not appreciate her creating an alternate for me with my real name, gray hair, lots of wrinkles, and short and squat. She may think it is a good likeness, but I pay out the allowance around here, and she would do well to remember that.

She claimed when she started adding all the extras that she would rather have avatars of her own making as opponents in the various Wii Sports games, and not just the random Wii figures. But I know that she totally digs anything resembling Sims. She even used part of her xmas money from Gwamma to buy Sims 2 for her Nintendo DS. Five minutes into her first time on it, she was getting a shake-down from the Mafia in the hotel she was running. Who designs these games?

Since then, she has been making pictures for an art gallery inside her hotel. The people who have been buying her pictures include one fan (a crazy pirate) and one hater (who calls her work vulgar and buys it to prevent it from coming to the attention of the public at large). Like I already said, who designs this stuff?

Maybe the new DS Sims will keep her off my laptop and her old Sims game so I can get more of my own stuff done.

A Rockin’ Chocolate New Year’s Eve

We spent New Year’s Eve with our friends down the street, bringing along some friends from Sweden. Not wanting to overload our hosts, we offered to bring some of the food and the dessert. I baked some yummy cupcakes and chopped about 5 pounds of fruit to dip in the chocolate fountain John gave me for xmas. But first Hannah and I hit the marked-down xmas candy.

Here you see the half-price chocolate Santas marching to their doom.



Here Hannah prepares the sacrifices.



And here are the happy celebrants.



Finally, here are some tips on using the chocolate fountain, if you are ever so decadent as to purchase one, like us:
1. Make sure your chocolate is broken into very small pieces. Letting the children smash the chocolate Santas does not lead to very small pieces. Large pieces take forever to melt directly in the fountain, and you will end up getting a heat-gun out of your tool shed to speed the process up. As our friend said, it is part of the modern woman’s kitchen.
2. Even faster is melting the chocolate in the microwave first. Then you don’t have kids popping in every 30 seconds to pester you about the state of the fountain.
3. Cover everything in a 5-foot radius of the fountain in plastic. There will be drips, drops, and splats. The fountain really should come packaged with stain remover.
4. Fondue forks work pretty well for dipping fruit into hot (well, warm), melted chocolate without suffering burns, but some fruit is a bit too soft to dip well without breakage/smushing, like kiwi. Cupcake bites are right out.
5. Hot water does wonders in cleaning solidified milk chocolate off stainless steel if you don’t have a 9-year-old with a turbo-metabolism and a sweet tooth at hand.

Weird to be back

Hey, y'all! (As Britney Spears would say. Or Britney Spears as interpreted by the Fug Girls. Which is actually weird of me to bring up, because I have only looked at, like, 3 blogs since I went cold turkey a month ago.)

All those asides aside, I seem to have survived my horrendous semester so far. I still don't have a grade back on my one exam, and I still have to study for and pass my second exam, so there is still plenty of time for me to crash and burn scholastically before the end of the semester, but for now I am not worrying about it. John and Hannah have toddled off for groceries, and I am trying to remember how this thing called "blogging" works while I have some time on my hands for the evening.

For xmas, John bought me a chocolate fountain, which I hope works as cool as it sounds. Hannah insisted on going with John to the store this evening--we normally have to bribe her to come along--so she could pounce on the left-over choco-Santas to feed into the fountain. We have unverified plans for company at New Year's, and we were thinking of using the choco-fountain as the dessert centerpiece, with fruit and such for dipping into the cascades of cocoa-y delights.

In other xmas-y news, Hannah hates the city's decorations downtown.



These lights hang over the middle of the street her school is on, and she calls them "Death Stars": "I am afraid those death stars are going to fall down and puncture my flesh." Yes, that is something we are all afraid of.

Another thing she hates about winter is the Winter-scented Charmin her father mangages to sniff out (ha ha! see how I did that?) each year and drag home by the car-full. "Great! Now bears are going to be attracted to my pine-cone-smelling butt." Not too many bears in this neck of the woods, but maybe Hannah should stay away from Bavaria and the Tirol.

We had a nice, quiet xmas at home this year. I color-coded the wrapping paper this year, and Hannah didn't manage to guess which color was hers before the big unveiling, so I guess I was successful. She was guessing blue, because there was a big package wrapped in blue under the tree. In kid logic, big=kid's, right?



What she didn't know was that the red package next to the big blue one held a Wii. The big blue one just held a Wii game--Rock Band. Unfortunately, the instrument pack did not come with the game software--I managed to not notice the large, red sticker on the package announcing that--so we had to make a special amazon-run yesterday. It should be here on Monday, and then we will rock!

Until then, we'll have to make due with Samba-ing.



At John's request, I made a goose. It was really easy to roast, and I made some delicious roast potatoes in the drippings, but it was a bitch to cut up and serve, and there wasn't really all that much meat on it. And it was rather expensive. It cost me about 8 bucks per person, which hurt my penny-pinching little soul. It was pretty, though, no?



At least we got some sunshine on xmas day.



Hannah thought that if we couldn't have a white xmas, we should at least have a dismal gray one that looked like it was trying to be white. I, for one, was glad of the sunshine, even though it only lasted part of the day.

After being extra good and loving for two whole days, Hannah was starting to show a few cracks around the edges yesterday evening. I called her Grumpy Smurf, and she replied, "No, Smurfette-on-her-period-grumpy." Hannah identifies so strongly female that she refuses to be called male in any form or fashion, so she had to come up with a grumpy alternative, even if it meant thinking about Smurfette in a completely new way.

Oral Exams are Done!

Yay! That means 6 topics are over and done with. Hooray!

I took the English exam last week and made a pretty good grade. Which is weird, because I was super nervous the whole time, and I started shaking toward the end like I had caught a chill. Also, I started my period 5 minutes--not joking--before going into my professor's office, so that was a good start to an hour-long exam.

I did the German exam today, and I totally choked. That faint gagging sound that woke you up around 3 am? That was me. I passed the exam, but I am so glad it is over. I told John I'd have to wake up with the plague in order to surpass last week's pre-exam unpleasantness, but really I was hoping I'd wake up with the plague so I wouldn't have to go through with it.

The strange thing is that after the English exam, I felt all elated and tearful and just overly emotional. Today, I felt completely empty afterword. No music in my head--as opposed to last night when I was trying to get to sleep--no sense of relief. Just nothing. I guess that's better than self-recrimination, because I know if I had gotten on the ball sooner, I could have pulled it off in German. Well, that's water under the bridge now.

So next up is catching up on all the proofreading I promised people this month and all the housecleaning I've put off over the last few weeks. But first some lunch. Cheerio!

Somebody's Checking Out!

I am giddy with relief that the presidential election is over and that Obama has been elected our next president.

Moving on, I am putting my blogs on hiatus at least through November. I have so much to do, I feel like I am coming apart at the seams. I still have half of that dissertation to edit, plus a 30+ page article to edit for my student job, and 3 English courses per week to teach, on top of studying for my exams. And in case the last bit doesn’t actually sound too bad to you, check out my schedule for the rest of the semester, *just for the exams*:

Nov. 11: 45-minute PowerPoint presentation in German on suppletion and morphological markedness

Nov. 20: 1-hour oral exam in English on 4 topics
15 minutes on Toni Morrison
15 minutes on 18th-century women writers
15 minutes on cognitive semantics
15 minutes on language change

Nov. 26: 1-hour oral exam in German on 2 topics
30 minutes on locative adverbials
30 minutes on cognitive approaches to second language-learning pedagogy

Dec. 18: 5-hour written exam in German on topic from Nov. 11 presentation

Jan. 8: 5-hour written exam in English on a linguistic topic (TBA)

Thinking about all the above, plus normal day-to-day stuff, makes me want to curl into my natural pill-bug form and sleep the winter away under a log somewhere. But since that is not really an option—since I want to finish my degree and my family likes clean clothes and eating—something else has to give. And that something is my Internet addiction. Bye, bye, blogs. Sayonara, favorites list. Catch you on the flip side, World Wide Web. I won’t be checking the email account for my blogs at all, and my personal yahoo account only infrequently. Since my students contact me via my gmail account, that is the only one I’ll be checking, and only once a day. I hope to be back, if only briefly, around Thanksgiving.

And to keep you from being too bored while I’m gone, here is a photo riddle.

John brought home flowers. What do you think?

Rose?



Overly trimmed cabbage?



Audrey II?



Discuss. See you in a few weeks.

Halloween

Hannah was very excited about Halloween this year. She made, unmade, and remade plans for the big day, including having a party, going to an amusement park's Halloween day, and finally setting for plain-ole trick-or-treating.

Getting a costume for her turned out to be a logistical nightmare. It's not like you can run out and get any type of costume here. Your choices basically boil down to witch or vampire, with the occasional skeleton here or there. Hannah insisted she wanted to be a Storm Trooper. **insert sound of dismayed silence** And of course she found a costume on an expensive, American costume site. I thought Toys R Us might have it here, but Hannah insisted they wouldn't. She also claimed that she had gone to a department store at the bus stop and checked their costumes with no luck (see witch, above). Finally, since I was ordering her some clothes from Target, I checked their costumes, and there was the Storm Trooper, on sale even. Target doesn't mail internationally, so LMIL forwarded the stuff to us last Thursday via Express Mail.

So far, so good, right?

Wrong. The package came before Halloween, but it is sitting in Customs. We got the notice in the mail ON Halloween AFTER the Customs office closed for the weekend.

BUT, on Thursday, Hannah and I had found--wait for it--a STORM TROOPER COSTUME at the department store she had previously been to, but in their toy department. So on Friday afternoon, I ran out and bought the local costume:



She caught the bus down to her friend's house later that afternoon, and they trick-or-treated their way back up the hill to our house. They managed to get a pretty good haul, despite the fact that Halloween is not a big holiday here. People who didn't have candy dug into their pantries and refrigerators and change purses: I think they ended up with 2 new packages of cookies, a full bag of gummy bears (not individually wrapped), and over 9 Euros in small change.



Then they hung out here until her friend's mom came to pick her up after 11. Our doorbell only rang 2 or 3 times, despite having a glowing jack-o-lantern on our balcony. I expected it to act as a beacon for the little sugar-fiends, but there was a light rain all evening, so I guess that kept them indoors.



I cut the lid into this pumpkin, but Hannah did all the other work: scraping out the guts, designing the face, even making a mole hole next to the nose. She doesn't seem to have inherited my tendency to self-inflicted injuries, thank the 7 dwarves. We have lost the skull on our plastic skeleton, so Hannah did a little mix-and-match decorating with what we had.



The kids spent the rest of the evening gorging themselves on candy and watching Tim Burton movies, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetlejuice. I am such a wiener that I was having trouble staying awake until the friend's mom came, so who knows what they were doing between the end of the last movie and then, but the house is still standing this morning, so it couldn't have been too bad.

Signs, signs, everywhere signs

In the German as a Foreign Language Department:
“Monolingualism is curable”

In the copy room of the English Department:
“Reading is hazardous to stupidity”

Best. Warning sign. Ever.

Speaking of "fiscal conservative"..

I just came across this video on Salon from the Wasilla Project--yes, Sarah Palin's hometown--about how she spent their city government into a hole during her time as mayor.



Personally, I think it shows not only that she has a weak grasp of basic economics and doesn't understand what an appropriate role for the government is, but also how she doesn't care who she craps on once she gets the next bit of power she craves.

Pissed Off

John and I have a pretty set morning routine. We get Hannah up and make her a snack for school, then once she's caught the bus, we drink coffee and watch CNN International until it is time to hop in the shower and gear up for the day.

Today, they had part of an interview with Sarah Palin. For once, she didn't sound like a complete moron, but that doesn't mean that the words coming out of her mouth were any more accurate. What finally pissed me off enough to say something political on here--which I generally avoid--was her assertion that the Democrats were tax-and-spend. How in the hell are we supposed to fund our government, if not with taxes? And as for those "fiscal conservatives", I think this comic by Steve Greenberg at the Ventura County Star says it all.



I mean, the fucking National Debt Clock RAN OUT OF SPACES. There are too many digits in our national debt to fit on the clock. It is now 10 TRILLION dollars and climbing. Who was the majority in Congress for over 10 years from 1995 to 2007? Not the tax-and-spend Democrats.

ETA:
There is a fantastic blog called War or Car that suggests other ways the 3 trillion dollars(!) that is the estimated total cost of the Iraq war could have been spent.

I Got Nothing

I’m having what I like to think of as “life block” right now. It’s like writer’s block, but it applies to everything. *sigh* Unfortunately, I have to start teaching tomorrow morning, so I have to gather up all my stuff, make a few print-outs, that kind of thing before 10 am.

I also have to make an appointment with my profs for my oral exams, which I think I have to complete before mid-November. **anxiety...rising**

Before I start having a psychedelic freak out, let me leave you with the wisdom of Hannah:

We were watching a commercial on tv for a sharing game for little kids, “because children sometimes have problems sharing.” Hannah said: “I don’t have a problem sharing. I just don’t like to.”

Hannah the balloon artist

No, not like a clown on the sidewalk twisting weenie dogs out of balloons. She likes to draw on inflated balloons. Here is a portrait of our family in balloon format:



That's John on the left, Hannah in the middle, and me on the right. Don't you like the forehead wrinkles and unfeminine lips? Hannah thinks it is a good likeness, but I think it looks like Hans Moleman. Don't you think?



Here she has two members of the Evil Wienie (her spelling) family:



Evil Wienie, Jr. is on the left and Evil Wienie Dada is on the right.



And to round out the family, Evil Wienie Momma. I like to see a Wienie Momma looking so evil.

Don't forget the family friend, Mr. Rich Italian Wienie.



All this started with an experiment she saw on tv that she wants to demonstrate for her Natural Phenomena class. You put some soda and vinegar in a bottle (like making a volcano) and top the bottle with a balloon. Depending on how much stuff you put in the bottle, the balloon will expand to varying degrees. See?



Anyhow, she was hoping that the balloon would float if she put enough stuff in, but we never got enough stuff into the bottle for that. She ended up with extra balloons, and we booted her off the Internet last night so we could hog up the Internet connection ourselves, and the above balloon art was the end result. It's nice to see her entertaining herself without electronics for once.

At Chez Nee

I kind of wish we were recording our home life some way—hidden microphones, live-in camera crew, whatever—because Hannah is constantly saying hilarious stuff, but my mind is too sieve-like to remember it. (Really. Just ask John how successfully I am able to convey the contents of something I just finished reading.)

Hannah seems to be overly concerned with the logistics of death recently. She keeps asking us about inheritance lines in our family, and we finally had to tell her we found it gruesome and to just stop. On the other hand, she has some elaborate plans for her afterlife. She has changed her mind about being “burned up” and thrown in the ocean; now she wants a double-decker casket with tv, internet, fridge, etc., etc. She even wants an international power converter to ensure that her power needs after death will always be met. She thinks of everything! This lead, of course, to a talk about theories of the afterlife. Hannah thinks it would probably be too crowded up in heaven. Anyhow, she seems to have a very ancient-Egyptian mind-set, minus the patience to wait for the afterlife in order to start enjoying her grave goods. I think she is leaning toward voodoo and zombie-ism in her conception of religion and the afterlife.

I don’t know if I have told this story here, but if I have, too bad—here it comes again:
Hannah is keeping a running tab of the various old-folks homes in town, so she can pick a nice one for us when we get old. I think she has her heart set on one near the city library; she keeps mentioning how convenient it will be for me. A while back she asked about how homes are funded. I pointed out that the people have to pay for it themselves with their savings or social security, or their near relatives, like their children. While we were in Italy, Hannah hatched a new and improved plan: if we let her live with us while she finishes cooking school and starts up her restaurant/hotel, she will buy a house and we can live with her until we are too senile to remember who we are or who she is, then she’ll dump us in front of the home and make a get-away. That way we end up well-cared for, and she doesn’t have to pay for it. Sweet, eh?

When we were in Texas, my mom noticed a mole on the inside of my upper arm and suggested I get it looked at. It didn’t look too weird to me, but I made a mental note to get it looked at over the summer. Luckily for me, German insurance companies were required to pay for a skin cancer check once every five years for everyone over 35. Well, what with one thing and another, I haven’t been yet, but I guess it has been praying on my mind more than I had realized, because I recently had a dream where I looked down at my arm and a grey-ish brown mole the size of silver dollar had formed on my upper arm, and it had *tentacles*. I slapped a large band-aid over it and made a bee-line for the doctor, but I kept getting intercepted along the way. (After I told John about my dream, he told me how weird it was to get these insights into my psyche. Thanks, Honey!)

Thoughts from yesterday

I am all hopped up on hormones and a severe lack of fat, salt, and sugar, which has lead me to raid the tiny stash of ancient, wizened Halloween gummies. Trust me, this is not satisfying when what you really want is something deep-fried and smothered in chocolate.*

John has been pestering me to make brownies, but 1) I have been trying to work on a huge editing job, and 2) we don’t have enough butter. So sad. After 2 international vacations this summer, we are reduced to a state of brownie-less poverty. John actually has some money coming in, but we are still waiting on it. So annoying.

*Yes, I am shamelessly stealing a line from Shrek 2. That’s just how I roll around here.

***

I came down off the hormone high yesterday evening with a crash. Today I've been on a little more even keel. *whew!*

Hannah, Temporary Cripple

Hannah’s first week of school was pretty hit or miss. We overslept the first day thanks to setting the alarm clock to 6 *PM* instead of AM, oopsie! The second day Hannah was in tears over the new note-taking training. On Friday during P.E., a kid kicked a ball that Hannah was making a mad dive for and drove it right into her hand, bending it backward. I ended up taking Hannah to the doctor, where she got her wrist wrapped up in a lovely hot pink bandage that she picked out herself. She made us sign it when we got home, then I had to help her make a sling out of a scarf, see?



The doctor had told us to go into the clinic for an x-ray if it was still hurting or swollen when the bandage came off over the weekend, but fortunately it was just a little sore and wrinkly from the bandage. That doesn’t mean that Hannah wasn’t going to milk it as much as possible: “Mom, would you get me a drink? I would, but my hand…”, said with the most pitiful crying clown puppy-dog eyes you ever saw. She also asked about how one would go about getting a handicapped parking permit. Well, first, you have to be handicapped. See how that works?

Of course, her "injury" didn’t stop her from playing with Legos all day on Sunday.



Then she wanted a note for P.E. today, which I was cool with, because I don’t want her re-injuring it just 2 days after we were at the doctor’s, but she seemed disappointed that I worded it so it only applied to sports. After she left for school with her note bitterly clutched in her hand, John said, “Why doesn’t she laminate it?”* Oh, the hilarity that ensued at our dear child’s expense.

Afterward, John confessed that that line came from Heaven Help Us. For some reason, I can never remember the name of that movie (even after typing it here and not 2 minutes later trying to look it up on the Internet Movie DataBase *grr*), or the word “fiberglass.” I can tell you who is in the movie and the general plot, and I can tell you about the composition and uses of fiberglass—tactics that usually allow me to associate my way to things I’ve forgotten—but there are apparently 2 big holes in my brain in the shape of those names. *sigh*

Brain Dump

When we left for Italy, I still had that cough, but it seemed to be improving. I don’t think I disturbed too many of our fellow travelers with my night-time coughing in our various hotel rooms. I do remember that one night before it completely cleared up, I rolled over in bed and there was this weird *sucking* sensation in my sinus, as if something were detaching itself slowly from one wall of my sinus and flopping down on to the other side. Think one of those gummy-toys that you slap against the wall. Yes, it was *that* pleasant.

The cough got better, and I didn’t think much more about it. Then on about day 7 or 8 of our trip, when we were on the Mediterranean coast, I bent over to pick something up off the floor, and it felt like someone had sprayed my sinuses with salt water. Wow!* I chalked it up to the salty sea air and tried not to bend over any more. But then, the salty sinus feeling never really went away, even when we went further inland and away from the sea.

While walking along the Reuss River in Lucerne, Switzerland, I felt a little dizzy, but at the time I thought that the water rushing by was giving me vertigo. Since then, I’ve had minor headaches, a slight sore throat, and a painful spot that I think is a swollen gland at the back of my throat.

As you can tell from all this whining, I do not like being sick. No sir, I don’t like it. I am hoping this laundry list of maladies clears up quickly so I can move on to complaining about other more interesting things.

*I can hardly write “Wow!” without thinking about that comic strip dog Fred Milton, the beat-poetry reciting poodle.


Hannah has been back in school 3 days, and it has been a mixed experience for her. On day 2, she called home in the middle of the day to inform us that her teacher had already brought her to tears. It wasn’t completely clear what kind of dastardly deed he had done, but she was hoping he would get hit by a bus. I fussed at her about saying that, but she wouldn’t budge on her position. This is going to be a long year.


While taking care of all our last-minute trip preparations, including cleaning the cats’ litter box and the mice’s cage, we discovered that one of Hannah’s mice had *something* sticking out around her mouth. Hannah thought she had a bit of hard, carroty food stuck between her teeth, but on closer examination, we decided it was her tongue. It wasn’t going back in, so we rushed the mouse to the vet, who was able to get us in. It turns out that it was some kind of swelling or growth on her lip. It had probably been growing inside her mouth for a while but got so big that it flipped outward. Somehow this mouse, who has been safely ensconced in Hannah’s closed room for 15 months, picked up the papillomavirus from somewhere. The vet said it would probably go down and that we should just keep an eye on it. Ok, but we’re leaving on vacation tomorrow, said I. We had a pet-sitter, but that seemed like too much to ask of him: Please observe our sick mouse, thx bye. So the vet snipped the growth off. Hannah was concerned by the lack of anesthesia, but I told her to let the vet do her job. Then I had to run out and buy another cage for a little mouse quarantine—a travel cage did the trick—plus another food bowl and water dish (and cat food, because somehow John overlooked that when cat-litter shopping earlier. Good thing I remembered, or we might have come home to a gnawed-on pet-sitter). The mouse survived her surgical procedure and our absence just fine and is now back in the big cage with her mouse friend.


Hannah keeps coming out with weird stuff. Part of it is her; part of it is her age. At the beach, she would get in the water, then run out to cover her feet in sand a little, then run back in the water. If John and I lay out on the blanket, she flopped down next to us in the sand and wallowed around. Because she was breading herself, you see.

Then while we were walking around in Siena in Tuscany, she asked about dieting. I explained about how food is made up of different components, and how those have different caloric values, etc. Then I pointed out that eating healthful food and exercising is the best way to stay in shape, not by restricting your food input. That is when she said that she wants to diet “so I don’t end up like you”. (Lil Sis—you can forward that to Mom, if you like. She’ll be pleased.)

I was offended for a few days until I realized that my fluorescent orange swimsuit, which I thought fit me pretty well, probably wasn’t the most flattering when I was bending over to wash off my hands at the beach. As a matter of fact, it probably looked like my ass had gone supernova. So if Hannah doesn’t want to look like me, more power to her. Fortunately for her, she seems to take after John’s mom in body shape. No ham-shaped calves for her.


Today was a deeply sucky day. I had to go into town for my student job, so I made a little list of things I could take care of while I was there. It was sprinkling when I got off the bus, and an hour later, when I got off work, it was raining lightly. And of course I did not have a jacket or umbrella, just a long-sleeved shirt over a t-shirt. So I walked through the rain to John’s department for a couple of things, then over to the stationers for Hannah’s school supplies, then over to the bank. I was wet and my throat hurt, so I was going to call it a day and head home, but then I noticed that the rain had let up, so I decided to take care of my library errand while I was already in walking distance. Except when I got to the library, it was closed for a service day. *sigh* Then I was about 3 minutes too late for the bus—I saw it at the other end of the bridge as I approached. At least I could sit under the bus shelter while I waited 17 minutes for the next one, but it turned out that I had walked the length of the shopping district and back—in the rain—for naught.

I did laundry for 3 straight days after we got back from Italy, but I think the last 2 loads will just have to wait for a less sucky day to get done. And the organic garbage to get taken out. And maybe the stairwell to get cleaned.


I need to go into my YouTube account and close the comments on the couple of videos Hannah and I have up. I haven’t specifically said, “Video made by small child,” so people can’t know that when they comment, but typing “fagfagfag” isn’t really constructive criticism. Yes, I agree that that is the swishy-est undead cephalopod to come nancing down the pike, but your comment is not really adding to the discourse. *delete*


Hannah sometimes goes to this Halloween costume site where she will spend hours—if given the chance—looking at costumes. We have started a list of themed costumes for her, me, and John to wear, ignoring the fact that we don’t go trick-or-treating or to costume parties. But anaways (as my Grammy would have said):
Tropical theme: monkey, banana, hula girl
Natural enemies theme: cat, mouse, cheese
Garden of Eden theme: Adam, Eve, apple with worm
Half of the fun is arguing about who has to wear which costume.


And now I may go lie down before making dinner. Ciao!

We're Ba-ack!

Yes, we made it back from Italy on Saturday, no worse for wear.

Hannah started school this morning, but we overslept, so things were a bit hectic--did you know we can wake up, get ready, make a snack, and run out the door in 3 minutes?--but she made it on time.

I am still hip-deep in laundry and receipts but will be back in the saddle again soon.

Ciao!