2010 State of the Nation

Gosh, I haven't blogged in a long time! I mean real blog-blogging and jiggity-jogging, not just posting amusing vids and random commentary. In fact, I don't think I've done an actual update all year! Yee!

Too bad the Ideal Time (free evening, stuck inside with a cold, Berti out on the town) happened to arrive when I'm not feeling particularly witty or insightful. No matter, duty calls! I must keep my self-absorbed windbagginess elastic and exercised if I'm to grant my 2011 self any sense of dismayed, oh-how-young-and-foolish-I-was satisfaction!

So. Yes. What is up. What is nyeww. Bbbp bbbp bbp. Hm. Think I'll get some chocolate.

That's better. How about I just start back in January and find my way to April from there.

Not that finding the way to April was easy. No sir, it was a long, dark, cold, dark, cold winter!

December.

Mom and Shauna and Steve all arrived on the same day toward the end of December to celebrate Christmas, and what with our new couch all ready to envelop ze guests, I was practically delirious with glee to have the first wave of butts sitting on it that I had pictured/hoped would sit on it. I was really excited for Christmas this year: it was the first time the season would be done at my place (Michael was missing, but Mom and Shauna were there) and I went out and bought a little potted tree and new tree decorations to hang on it. It's so funny, knowing that I've been settling in here for 3.5 years now, but that I still don't really have all my "stuff." Books and DVDs, for example, which I'm sure I bought at some point are simply not on this side of the pond. (I'm set for Halloween decorations, though!) Pictures, mugs, all those little things you gather up over the years that make your place yours were pretty much re-set in 2006. Not that this is necessarily bad; I didn't own any Picassos. And I took my favorite mug with me. And now I have new favorite mugs. And new things that make my space "mine," like this gorgeous riot-of-colors quilt that Sarah gave us for Christmas a couple years back and brightens up the futon in my office. It all just makes it slightly startling to say, hey, maybe I'll put up some Christmas decorations! Aaaafter, I buy them, I mean!

Anyway, it was blasted freezing outside, forcing us to stay inside and have the sort of visit I'd been needing for a while. Berti and Steve spent the week with their folks and grandfolks in the Erzgebirge and Black Forest, respectively, while we remained in Lu did nothing. No plans, no obligatory running around; just sleeping in late, getting up and lighting the tree, spending the day in our pajamas experimenting with making soups and talking, talking, talking, before decadently deciding to put in a movie in the middle of the day. Mom was a trifle (!) ill, which kept her snuggled on the couch for the first couple of days (hence the soup endeavors on Shauna's and my part) but it turned out not to be Swine Flu, for which we were all so grateful that we willingly sat through 2.5 mind-numbing hours of the Worst Arthurian Movie Ever Inflicted Onto a Strip of Film, "Excalibur." Seriously, did teenagers make this movie? You spend the first half of the film spraying gingerbread crumbs on the carpet in (unintentional) mirth, and the second half recoiling from the screen going, "What the f....?" We needed much soup and Glühwein to recover. Then we watched "Braveheart" and all was well.

I also liked how we did presents this year. We didn't really have a Present Ceremony as such, instead just whipping out appropriate items at what seemed like a good time. Shauna and I were getting ready to brave the negative-Celsius temperatures in a quest for more alchemy ingredients, when she said, "Oh hold on a second! I got you a Christmas present," and rootled around in her suitcase to hand me a pair of beautiful, chocolate-colored, sheepskin suede gloves. Just as we were leaving, Mom commented, "I'm almost done with this book, mind if I raid your shelves for something new to read?" and so I gave her the new book I'd bought her. It was quite laid-back and pressure-free.

A couple days before Christmas, Mom was feeling better so we went shopping in Mannheim, and then on the 24th we took the train down to Bavaria to spend the holiday with Sara and her family in Burglengenfeld. Naturally, there were lots of holiday hordes, and so we somehow ended up with an almost 4-hour wait for the connection in Stuttgart. Tsk! we said, We'll just have to spend a cozy evening out at the Stuttgarter Weihnachtsmarkt, listening to music and eating snacks and drinking Glühwein, doing some last-minute Christmas shopping as we peruse the booths with their crafts and trinkets!

Christmas day was lovely, and noisy. I forget how grown-up my life is, until I spend time with a family with tots and remember how lively a house can get! We exchanged presents under the (beautiful, huge) tree the morning of the 25th, and the boys were thrilled to discover what Santa had brought them. Soon, there were new treasures spread out over the house. I was partial to the toy airplane, myself, and played with it long after I was supposed to be finished assembling it, while Shauna helped Augie balance on his brother's new bike, which the latter was quite afraid of and the former couldn't wait to get back on after repeatedly, inevitably falling off. (Don't tell Augie that two-year-olds aren't really meant for big-kid bikes.) Then daddy and the boys chased each other around with plastic ray guns while Mom, Shauna and I helped Sara prepare Christmas dinner.

We were home again on the 26th, welcomed Steve back from the Black Forest, and bathed ourselves in wine for the next two days before all sadly going our separate ways again for New Year's. At least a rocking time was had by all. Mom danced 24 hours nonstop to celebrate her first "Hogmanay" in the Highlands, and Bert and I tootled over to Dresden to set off fireworks and champagne corks with friends in the middle of the city. (A little spooky, actually, watching explosions over Dresden. I voiced this to Bert, and he admitted to the same thoughts. We wondered how many old folks were choosing to stay inside with the curtains drawn.)

January.

January was cold, cold, and damn cold. Unusual for this area, which is mild and full of vineyards and grows figs and lemons, and is known as the Tuscany of Germany. Bert and I went for a couple of magical winter Wanderungen through the snowy Odenwald, sometimes wading through thigh-deep snow as we navigated the sparkling icy forests.

I also spent a great weekend with my English-speaking girls in Strasbourg. We had no particular objective, except to have a girly weekend looking for Theresa's wedding dress and eating French food and embarrassing ourselves with our long-forgotten French. We've assembled ourselves into a nice little collection of expats these last couple of years: a group of Americans and Canadians who have found ourselves settling in Germany for one reason or another. We don't get together very often -- maybe a couple times a month, more often for Linda and Chrissie and me, since we live closer -- but when we do, it's always a breath of fresh air to hang out with fun girls and make English jokes and cultural cracks. We gleefully took note that our holiday flat was located on the "Rue de Bitche" and since then, we have been the Rue de Bitches.

Also in January was a stompingly fun concert. Bert -- my little metal head -- has a few bands that he and his friends grew up listening to as twelve-year-olds in the GDR. And although they are, every one of them, by now painfully dated and cheesy, and the performers are well past middle age, Bert and his friends devotedly attend every concert they can get to. One of these bands is called "Manowar." (Yep.) Are you picturing album covers with flaming swords, warriors clenching freakish abdominal muscles, and cat-shaped naked women? Okay, then you can probably imagine what the music sounds like.

That right: it was A. Total. Blast. Bert and I walked to the concert hall in Ebert Park, where we joined a surprisingly mixed crowd who was palpably happy to be there. Really, the crowd dynamic just makes the event. Everyone was so jolly, so pleased to be wearing their cheesy '80s band tees and to get another plastic cup of frothy beer and sing boisterously along to songs about Thor the Thunderer. We stomped and sang and made operatic gestures at each other and took pictures with strangers, before stumbling giddily home serenading the neighborhood with, "Across the rain-bow bridge, to Val-hal-la! Odin's waiting for meeee!"

February.

Naturally we didn't neglect the annual sleeping-in-a-cave madness that is Boofen. A hearty thumbs-up to this year's location, too, which instead of a wind tunnel, was a dry and cozy hollow in the foot of one of the rocky cliffs jutting out of the Pfälzer Wald. We built up a huge fire, cooked us up a pot or two of Glühwein, skewered some sausages, and then settled down cozily in the leaves for a long winter's nap. Or at least Bert did. I stuffed my sleeping bag in my ears in a fruitless attempt to muffle his contented snoring. The performance left me quite in awe. He is not usually a snorer, but for some reason a little Becherovka and some cold air and he put on a symphony for the whole forest. While the others were puzzingly able to sleep (maybe because they were also providing some light woodwind accompaniment to his brass section), I gave it up as soon as the sky began to lighten and decided to take a little constitutional in the fresh morning frost.

Goodness me, is the Pfälzer Wald beautiful on a cold February morning! So quiet, hardly any birds; just the whisper of wind through elegant, clattering trees in the valley below. The crunch of patches of snow under your boots. The sonorous rumble of your boyfriend as you come within earshot, but not yet eyesight, of the campfire. (Haha, sorry Berti!)

February was also especially great, in that it was time to check out the little niche that Mom has carved for herself up there in the frozen (quite literally this year, did you see that famous satellite picture of snow-covered Britain?) North, and see what the Highlands have to offer in winter. And I'll tell you: whisky, cozy pubs, blood-thrumming music, dancing, laughter, and fellowship. I adore Inverness. I love Scotland. I love the Scots! Mom is one lucky gal, and if I weren't so danged happy toasting Odin down here in Germania, I would be shoving to make room in her dresser for my clothes.

March.

By March, we were all pret-ty tired of the cold. I would still rather have snow than drizzly muck, so that was, well, all right, but the darkness just took its sweet time in slowly receding from the 5:00pm mark. I was sick of bulky sweaters and never having warm feet. Fortunately there was much travel to look forward to!

The first weekend in March, I zoomed out to Berlin to visit my friend Conny, whose husband was busy checking out China in preparation for their move there in August. (!) Meanwhile, Conny is busy finishing her Ph.D. and taking care of her (incredibly cute, charming) 3-year-old daughter while cooking up another daughter, due just before they leave for China. It was a lovely visit. Sophia Charlotte is an extraordinarily bright and inquisitive kid who uses English with her dad and German with her mom. Okay, actually she hasn't yet gotten to where she sees the point in answering her dad in English, which is cute to observe. I would read English books to her, asking questions like, "Where's the hippopotamus?" and she'd point to it with a "Da!" "And what's this?" I'd ask. "Horse," she said. Then corrected herself: "Pferd."

On Friday, Conny let Sophie go to childcare as usual while she took the day off to have a grownuppy afternoon away from mommying. We explored the Neues Museum in Berlin, which is actually older than the Altes Museum, but has been renovated and re-opened for the first time since WWII in a most intriguing style: they've let most of the building retain its original frescoes, exhibit signs, and worn pillars, alongside the new marble staircases and grand windows, and the result is a very cool insight as to how the building really looked in the mid-19th century. The exhibits themselves (mostly ancient stuff, including Greek and Roman sculpture and the famous bust of Nefertiti) are splendidly arranged in spacious, inviting, well-lit rooms that show the collection off much better than in that dusty old Ägyptisches Museum on the lawn by the Cathedral. You could even find a blogger there who uses run-on sentences and excessive parenthetical remarks! Extraordinary.

We spent Saturday in wholesome family mode at the pool and pizzeria, and then Conny and I chat-chat-chatted the evening away over chocolate and movies after Sophie went to bed. It was so nice to catch up. Thanks for the hospitality, Conny!

And speaking of catching up with old friends: a week later, Amy came to visit!!! She'd been expressing an interest in coming back to Germany over the last three years, and we just never really found a good time until she just said, screw it, how is mid-March for you?

I have a mammoth blog post about that trip all prepared. I'll post it separately, however, since it's about twice as long as this one... (I hope the blogspot servers don't crash under all this weight...)

Let's see, what on earth did we do after that? Oh yes, Easter!

April.

It finally started to get a little lighter and a little lighter, and so we said, what the heck, we'll spend Easter in the freezing cold Erzgebirge just to shake things up a bit. Besides, it was high time to visit Bert's dad in Bad Brambach, his uncle Gert in Sehma, and his friends scattered all over that lovely mountain range.

We rubbed our hands together as we schemed how to avoid the whole Easter weekend travel rush, how to outsmart all those foolish fools who drive east on Easter Friday, oh yes, we'll rise at 5 o'clock in the morning and be triumphantly arriving in Bad Brambach while the rest of the drivers are still gnashing their teeth in 20 kilometers of stop-and-go on the Autobahn.

Haaaa, you see where this is going, of course. There was little gnashing, but plenty of silent scowling at the taillights of our fellow fools who also didn't get on the road until 10:30 in the morning, because we're not 18 any more either, and can't seem to shake ourselves out of bed four hours after turning off a late-night movie. It's probably better that we got a good night's sleep, anyway. We exited the Autobahn, and crossed a large portion of Bavaria on country roads, enjoying some nice scenery and a cozy lunch in a village pub before hitting the road again and rolling into Bad Brambach in the early evening. Bert's dad took us out for dinner across the border. (Please, Czech Republic, don't adopt the Euro! I like enjoying piles of fresh fish and potatoes and mug after mug of grog all for a pittance of Koruna!)

The rest of the weekend was lovely: cooking with Gert, making the rounds of visits, petting baby bunnies at the Schreiters', attending a small village rock concert with Bert's old friends and putting back pints of Krusovice. We passed so close to Burglengenfeld on Monday evening that it was the perfect opportunity to stage an invasion of Sara's home, and so we came by for dinner and a short visit before heading back to Ludwigshafen and our Bettchen.

Since then, it has just been getting lighter and lighter and warmer and warmer. I continue to be awed at the miracle of seasons, particularly spring. It seems like just two weeks ago, those trees outside my window were doomed to remain craggly stick figures for all time. Then last week, I got up one morning and they had been replaced by pink clouds! Suddenly the pink clouds are gone this week, and glossy bushy things have taken their place. I have a rotten head-cold right now, but that was just the perfect excuse to sit out on the balcony in the middle of a weekday and soak up some sunshine in the deck chair while listening to birds chirping in spring-crazed glee. Bikes! Birds! Weinschorlen! Spring!!!

Okay, I have officially spent Too Much Time sitting in front of this glowing screen, and so it's time to sign off for the night. And post the post about Amy's visit. Good night, Interwebs, and see you in May!