Diese Woche in Kürze / Week in a Nutshell

31. August, 2014

This week I...

• ...wrote letters to my children, who are now both in college. The hand-written kind of letters, sent via snail mail, that take 5-7 days to arrive.


• ...startled my husband, who was watching TV in the living room, with a shocked gasp when I discovered a typo in a blog post I had just published. I apparently used my "OMG, SPIDER!" noise, because he leapt out of his massage chair to rescue me.


• ...spent a day in Stuttgart (walking through the Rosensteingarten, a huge park) and Herrenberg (wandering the Altstadt). Forgot to turn off my GPS tracker when I got on the train - AGAIN! - so the data is screwed up and I don't know how to fix it.


• ...wrote the following memo: "Seriously, Fruit Flies, STOP drowning yourselves in my wine! I'm sick of it! And what is that noxious odor of nastiness you emit when you expire? Knock. It. OFF!" They didn't get the memo.


• ...linked two of my day trip blog posts in a blog hop on Young Germany. Wondered whether I should be participating; I'd hardly call myself young!


• ...wished from afar that I could have helped my son move into his college dorm on Thursday. Unlike a lot of parents who lose their minds a little when a kid (especially the youngest) goes off to college, I am nothing but totally excited for him and can't wait to hear about his experiences - the ones he's willing to tell me about.


• ...learned that a 9-year-old accidentally shot and killed her weapons instructor with the Uzi (a semi-automatic machine gun?) he was teaching her to fire at the Bullets and Burgers gun range in Arizona, USA during a family vacation. Just when I thought I'd heard the most ridiculous of U.S. gun "regulations," I find out that children as of age 8 are allowed to fire semi-automatic weapons in Arizona. Boy, was I cheated out of a childhood. My parents didn't even let me play with matches at that age. All I had were dolls, model horses, and stuffed animals.


• ...rode the Stuttgart U-Bahn for the first time.


• ...attempted, with M's help, to bake my first Zwetschgendatschi (Bavarian plum cake) with Zwetschgen the neighbor shared with us from his plum tree. It wasn't bad!

• ...successfully created and inserted a table on a page of my blog, so now I have a list of German words I commonly use here along with the English translations.

• ...for the fifth time this summer, did not go to the historical city tour of Horb as I had planned. The first time I got the meeting point wrong. Twice, including today, it was chucking down with rain. Once there was a town festival going on and I couldn't find a place to park. Another time we'd had a big lunch at our favorite restaurant and I crashed on the sofa instead. I've got two more chances in September.





...passed on another opportunity to drive on the Autobahn to Esslingen.