In the 91st minute!

Goooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaalllllll!!!!!!



(Hahaha, "Ohh, it's incredible!" "Thumbs up for guy in purple!")

So we're still in the World Cup! It just warms me little heart that we seem to actually want to play with the rest of the world, instead of just crouching on our isolated island-continent and sticking our noses up at anything that doesn't involve guys in shoulder pads bashing at each other. Not that there's anything wrong with both kinds of football, but I like being able to cheer for the USA outside of the USA!

We watched the previous US game, versus Slovenia, at Lui's, a cozy beer garden with "Public Viewing" (the adopted Englishy words to indicate when a bar shows a game on the big screen). I got there beforehand to nab a table, and then waited impatiently for everyone else to arrive... which they finally did, just before Bert came zooming around the corner on his bike, American flag tied around his shoulders and flying in the breeze like a superhero. Now he does this for all the US games, and I've taken to calling him Captain America. We rode the bus home last night after 1-0 scores for both USA and Germany, each wearing the other's national flag around our shoulders.

Now we need to get some red white and blue face paint!!

Flag Day

I've never flown an American flag from my apartment before.

But yesterday on a whim, I bought a large German and large American flag at a gizmo shop in the Rathaus Center. Bert was very pleased -- he'd been wanting both, for the World Cup -- and this morning, he hung both from the clothesline across our balcony. They sure look pretty.

Admiring them from my office, sipping coffee, I glanced over at the calendar to see what date it is. June 14th: Flag Day.

Well! Just in time.

Lavender, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme

Oh boy oh boy, it's June! We can have plants on the balcony again!

Last year I grew some questionable-looking things from a mixed bag of seeds, which was a fun experiment until they really started to get belligerent and frighteningly large in their planter boxes. (I still remember Florian, wondering dubiously in his Pfälzer accent: "Warum habt ihr Unkraut gepflanzt?") They did flower for a while, before we left town one weekend and neglected to ask anyone to water the things. Indeed, they looked perfectly capable of walking on their stalks into the kitchen to get a drink themselves!

This evening, we decided to skip last year's incubus experiment and simply picked up some unmistakably recognizable herbs from the Obi Markt for about twenty bucks. Part of what helped kill the zombies -- I mean, what ruined our garden -- last year was that we have a radioactively sunny balcony, and so it's important to get plants that like that sort of thing. Mediterranean ones do: thus we now have a rosemary bush, sage and thyme plants, and deliriously fragrant lavender twins are all getting to know each other in their new homes outside our glass doors. The balcony smells delicious. An oleander is also lording it over the far corner, feeling important because he's the biggest and needs the most water.

I decided to go ahead and do seed basil and coriander again this year, too, along with some rocket I planted next to those viney objects that miraculously appeared again in the planter boxes of old, somehow surviving diligent weeding, followed by total neglect and a deep-freeze winter. I pulled a suspiciously zombie-ish one, but let the others stay because they have intoxicatingly honey-scented, tiny white flowers. Some sort of alyssum? We shall see.

We'll also see how many bees are attracted to our lavender and opt to investigate our beers while they're at it. I may have doomed us to an eternal struggle with fuzzy stinging things. Hopefully they'll be the cute bumble type, in which case I'll pour some beer on the lavender for them.

It's Whirled Cup time again!

Can you believe the last Weltmeisterschaft was four years ago?? Where did that time go? (starts checking for age spots on the backs of hands)

Deutschland kicked things off (haha) to a good start today, wiping the Australians across the field to a 4-0 victory. I am, of course, one of those irritating quasi-fans who are -- have I mentioned this? -- completely apathetic to organized sport of any kind, until suddenly it's the World Cup, and then I fever right along with everyone else just as if I'd been paying attention all that time. Admittedly, though, I'm more into the month-long flag-waving party than the sport itself. (Commence stoning.) In a place where it was, until recently, varying degrees of taboo to not actively apologize for being German, it's exhilarating to sit in the middle of a crowd of red-black-and-gold bedecked folks and roar "JAAAA!!!" with each goal. Sehr cool.

Naturally, however, if Germany plays the USA, I'm wearing the tallest and most obnoxiously starred and striped Uncle Sam hat I can either find or glue together myself. But until then, I'll root for my home away from home. :)