Well, “lukuly” my son’s teacher thinks that he is using interesting words in his composition. I wonder when the interesting words will turn into simply wrong ones? Also notice Thomas’s creative interpretation of the word “until”… especially charming since he knows how to spell this one correctly, normally. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be so hard on him, he’s only 8, and he’s doing great. Who knows, he might have been just “tierd”…
Things aren’t much different in Germany since I’ve been here last, in 2007. It’s been three years, but they still have the same foods in the supermarket, and a few more, and they still watch the same shows on TV, and a few more. The same re-runs, the same American Sitcoms, the same German original content that nobody watches. The yogurts are still the same, the cheeses, the chips. The chocolate aisle is the same length (yes, a whole aisle just with chocolates), but the types are a bit different, a bit more refined, a bit more exclusive. I still would like to eat my way across that whole aisle, backwards and forwards, but I’m still not allowed. There are a few less small stores, because the economy isn’t kind to the mom and pop store at the corner, and a few more immigrants because the economy here is better then elsewhere. There are a lot more ecological products available, Bio-This and Eco-That, even Ikea sells Biopasta on the kids menu. They only Walmart they had went under, and the milk is sold in bottles. The neighborhood looks the same, but the trees are bigger, and the cars all look even smaller. Yes, they have pretty small cars here. Hardly any Smart Cars, because most of the cars I see are not much bigger then those, and cost less. And because there are smaller cars, and the gas costs more, the streets have become a wee bit slower. A wee bit, not much. I drove to Ikea today with Thomas in the backseat, and at one point I made him notice that we were driving indeed 170 km/h, and he was stunned.
“Aren’t there any speed limits here?”
“Not here”, I said. He wanted to know anyhow what the limit was.
“There isn’t one,” I kept insisting.
“So nobody can give you a ticket for speeding?” he wondered.
“Nope,” I said, “not on this Autobahn.”
“I love the Autobahn,” he stated.
After finally purchasing a “serious” barbecue a couple of months ago, we have been trying to grill the heck out of it when the weather allowed, and in the past two weeks, the weather has been perfect. Steaks, check. Pork tenderloin, check. Chicken breasts, check. And that’s where it ended. Boring.
But then Kelly lent us her Barbecue Bible. So this weekend we invited our Argentinian friends over for dinner and we managed to whip up a simple but effective dinner: Barbecued Provolone Cheese on Bruschetta, Steak with green Chimichurri Sauce and grilled oregano zucchini, a green salad with balsamic maple syrup dressing and craisins. And it was FABULOUS! I was so proud of Erik for the great work at the grill, and of myself of course for putting it all together.
We won’t be opening a restaurant just yet, but we’ll continue to try our luck. Can’t wait for the next weekend to come!
My son has a problem. For some, it might not be a real problem… but for me it is. Well, he forgets stuff. He forgets everything that is not important to him at the time. It might be important afterwards, after he has forgotten about it, but by then it’s already too late.
Take his Planner, for example. He keeps forgetting to bring it home from school. His planner is important. Stuff is written in his planner. Appointments, notices from the teacher, things to sign. His homework. His spelling words. But what good does it do if he writes it all in his planner and then forgets the planner in school? I really got fed up with it. The final straw has been reached. So today I threatened him.
Where to begin? Oh, I know: The internet. A computer. The very thing you’re sitting in front of right now. Without the internet and a couple of computers connected to it, and two lonely people sitting in front of them, nothing of all this would have happened, or at least, the chances for it to happen would have been extremely slim.
Back then, Erik already lived in the Lower Mainland, and he really liked it here, except for the fact that the dating thing wasn’t working all that well in such a small town. And then came Matchmaker.com. Funny enough, I happened to be one of the members of that website, in search for … well… my match, who I could not seem to find either, on the other side of the globe, in Italy. I lived in a very small village in Tuscany, and my dating hadn’t been going too well, either. Actually, it went so bad that I gave up on it altogether, good ones or bad ones, they just weren’t for me. So I ventured into the world wide web and stumbled onto this website I had come across on Yahoo, where tons of equally frustrated people were looking for a match made by a piece of software.
We have a very annoying cat marking problem. Chester marks a certain window with a little spray of pee once a day, like clock work. I clean it up, like clock work. If I don’t allow him access to the window, he’ll mark somewhere else. Now if Chester wasn’t the most adorable, lovable, funny, well mannered cat in the world, he’d be dead by now. Seriously, I would have brought him to the vet myself last week when we got back from our weekend trip to Erik’s mom and I found pee in my toaster AND my kettle. That was enough for me. I was ready to get him to meet his maker. Only the fact that he’s so cute made me change my mind. And of course the fact that he isn’t really MY cat, he’s Erik’s.
My vet said, “use a pheromone spray”. No success. “Play and cuddle with him more!” We do that all day. “Feed him canned cat food!” Huh? Anyway, we also put him on an antidepressant and it did not work. Google to the rescue. Apparently, Prozac - yes, “human” prozac - is the most effective treatment against unwanted behavior in cats, especially spraying and marking. You can also give it to your dog if he’s aggressive or chews your couch to bits.
Well, it shows again, animals are just human, too.
Erik tried to wash his car today. Emphasis on “tried”. The weather wasn’t half bad, so he got the bucket and the sponge and the soap and grabbed the hose. No pressure. Just a dribble. With the dribble, he tried to fill the bucket but it would just take too long. So he turned off the water and went inside to fill the bucket. When he got inside our basement suite, the whole floor was covered in water. Somehow, somewhere, something is broken, and the water came pouring in underneath the walls. I haven’t got a clue where. I only know I am sporting a nice headache now because I was on my knees, trying to suck up as much water as possible with old towels and eventually (genius!!!) the Spotbot. However, now we are faced with the a possibly huge repair bill and other troubles I don’t want to even think about right now.
One day the little girl took indoor pictures with her new camera. She was puzzled by how much noise there was in the pictures, and she couldn’t understand why her new camera was so much worse than her old one. She took picture after picture and the outcome was always the same, and by no means as good as everyone had said it would be. She had spent all of her lunch money for the new camera and when she realized that all she got for it were noisy pictures, she sat down and cried.
The Brain Fairy up in the clouds noticed the crying came to see what was going on. She whispered “Why are you crying, little girl?” The little girl tried to explain how she couldn’t understand why her new camera wasn’t as good as her old camera, and how she had hoped it would be a lot better, just like everyone said, and how sad she was that she had spent all of her lunch money and all she got were noisy pictures… The Brain Fairy felt sorry for the little girl. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a hand full of brain dust, and while gently sprinkling it onto the little girls head, she said: “Your new camera is a lot more sophisticated than your old one, and certainly you must have missed something that is new to you… There are so many options in the new camera, and the default settings are different from what you are used to. Don’t dispair. Check the settings.”
The little girl wiped the snot from her noise and grabbed her camera. She flipped throug the settings and found that Noise Reduction was OFF. The Brain Fairy flew back to the clouds and the little girl felt like an idiot. The end.
Thomas wants a story every night before falling asleep. Of course. Reading is important.
Every thursday, Thomas’s kindergarten class gets to go to the library and pick up a book to take home for the week. Thomas chose a dinosaur book, like most thursdays. The other days he chooses books about snakes, spiders, bats, rats, sharks, bears, and so on. One day he actually brought a real story book. I was in tears.
Well, ok Thomas. Let’s read the dinosaur book. Here is an excerpt:
“The Family Tree.
The Ankylosaurus was an ankylosaur. Ankylosaur dinosaurs had armor and horns. Other ankylosaur dinosaurs were the Panoplosaurus and the Edmontonia. These ankylosaurs were smaller than the Ankylosaurus. The Ankylosaurus was the biggest ankylosaur.
There were two groups of ankylosaurs. One group was the ankylosaurids. The Ankylosaurus belonged to the ankylosaurids. The ankylosaurids had club tails and wide heads.
The second group of ankylosaurs was the nodosaurids. The nodosaurids did not have club tails. The nodosaurids had spikes on their sides. The Panoplosaurius and the Edmontonia were nodosaurid dinosaurs…”
By this time, your tongue is in nots and you don’t even know anymore what you are talking about. You just keep reading and hope that the “story” is going to be over and done with soon, and you secretly hope that you can find a little nook into which make this book disappear until next Thursday, when it’s due back to the school library… just in case he wants you to read it again!
We bought our house in November 1999. A couple of months later we got tired of opening our garage door by hand and bought a garage door opener for our single car garage. The device came with two remote control “clickers”, one to attach to the sun visor in the car, and the other one to hang on a key chain. In November 2000 we were involved in an accident in which our car was totaled. Somewhere around that same time we realized that the keychain clicker was missing. We assumed that it had been left in the car wreck and stopped looking for it. Last Saturday, almost 6 years later, we found the keychain clicker neatly placed on one of the chairs on our porch beside the front door. Someone must have put it there. But who? Who found it, and where? And if someone found it, how could they know it was ours? And if someone found it outside after all those years, how come it wasn’t weathered and broken? And if we lent it to someone, why did they not bother brining it back sooner? Maybe they had forgotten and were now embarrassed about the delay? We tried hard to understand how this garage door opener ended up on our front porch after almost 6 years. Nobody seemed to know, and the mystery deepened. But we couldn’t but think what an incredible coincidence it was to stumble over the missing garage door opener just one week after our big basement clean-up and yard sale. And then it hit us: Someone must have bought an item from us, maybe a purse, or that old motorcycle jacket, and it probably had the opener somewhere inside it, for all those years. Those incredibly nice people who bought the item from us must have come back a week later to drop it off at our house, and we probably weren’t home at the time, who knows. But they left it for us anyway, without expecting a thank-you, just neatly placing it somewhere we could easily find it. Well, whoever it was, we would like to thank you so very much: Not only did you bring it back, but you also FOUND it for us. We might have another garage sale next week, because I can’t find my wallet anywhere…
