Four Things

I saw this "Four Things" post on a blog  I often read (a Different Piece of Sky - isn't that a lovely title?) and through that writer found several others who did the same thing. They were fun to read, and I thought I'd do one too, especially since I'm in a writer's slump again.

Four Names People Call or Have Called Me

1. Bethy Boo (my grandpa called me that)
2. Nervous Nellie (friends)
3. Betty (only a special select few, because I hate the name)
4. Mom

Four Movies I Have Watched More Than Once

Goodness gracious - just four?! I'm more likely to re-watch a movie I know I like than watch a new one.

1. The 13th Warrior
2. Nirgendwo in Afrika
3. Dances with Wolves
4. The Man from Snowy River

Four Jobs I have Had

1. Counter Person at McDonald's (can I say "Customer Service Professional"?)
2. Cashier & Assistant in a pharmacy
3. Customer Service Coordinator at Allied Van Lines
4. High School English and German Teacher

I'm not working here - but I hired Allied to move my stuff to Germany,
and this was the day they loaded it all up!

Four Books I Recommend

1. The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran
2. Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
3. Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
4. The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham

Four Places I've Lived

1. Sheboygan, Wisconsin (USA)
2. Appleton, Wisconsin
3. Fond du Lac, Wisconsin
4. Horb, Germany

Horb am Neckar

Four Places I've Been

1. Vienna, Austria
2. Berlin, Germany
3. Concord, Massachusetts (USA)
4. Rome, Italy

Rome

Four Places I'd Rather Be

Sorry, this one I really can't do. I am exactly where I want to be.

Four Things I Don't Eat

1. Beans
2. Coconut
3. Nutella (anything with hazelnut flavor)
4. Snails, oysters, or sushi

Four of My Favorite Foods

1. Beef tenderloin
2. Lamb chops
3. Geschnetzeltes und Rösti
4. Cheese

   

   Geschnetzeltes und Rösti

Four TV Shows I Watch

1. The Big Bang Theory
2. die Kochprofis
3. The Mentalist
4. Any Quiz or Trivia Show - especially German ones where I learn something!

Four Things I'm Looking Forward to This Year

1. A week on the Isle of Mull and some extra days near Edinburgh
2. My daughter's college graduation from my alma mater in June
3. Twelve days with family and friends in Wisconsin in June
4. Day trips to new towns in Germany

Four Things I'm Always Saying

1. "Thank you" or "Danke."  (I'm not just being sappy - I say it all the time!)
2. "Ich liebe Dich."
3. [In answer to "What are you doing?"] "I'm writing an email to your mother."
4. "I'm cold."

Four Things I Do Almost Every Day

1. Nap
2. Read the newspaper
3. Read new blog posts by my favorite expat bloggers
4. Write

What about you? Pick a category and leave your list in the comments, or write your own "Four Things" post!

Shoveling, German-style

Here on the edge of the Schwarzwald we've been getting a fair bit of snow lately - for us. I realize it's nothing compared to the recent blizzard that shut down the city of Boston, and also really not much compared to a normal winter in Wisconsin. But we've had plenty for this winter and I want it to stop.

I should say that I am glad for the businesses and people who rely on snow and cold for their livelihoods - ski hills, snowshoe salesmen, etc. And yes, the snow is pretty when it sticks to the trees.

But I'd just as soon have a snowless winter, personally.

I'm using the photo below to illustrate what makes a few inches (say 12 cm) of snow a pain in my ass here. Notice that the street is just wide enough for two cars to pass each other - unless, of course, there is a car parked on the side of the road, which there usually is. With a car parked on either side of the street, a Wisconsin snowplow wouldn't get through. Also notice that there is no patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street. You don't miss it 'til you ain't got it. More on that shortly.

Lastly, that hedge. That's our hedge down a little ways on the left, but it's not that high anymore. We had it cut back two years ago, and now it's about chest-high on me when I'm standing on the sidewalk. After today I may suggest we cut it back again to about knee-height.

This was today, just after I'd finished shoveling the first time:

My Wisconsin readers are thinking, "Wait, you call
that a snow storm? You can't be serious."

You can see that the street is now a single-track (but two-way) road, and there's a pile of snow all along the sidewalk in the street. Germans - at least in this area - tend to shovel the snow from their sidewalk into the street for the plow to take with it when it passes. And the plow does take about half of it. The other half is, of course, pushed back onto the sidewalk. To be shoveled back onto the street... This cycle continues until it gets warm enough for the snow in the street to melt and drip into the sewers. The plow makes one or two passes, and the plowed path is the width of one car. Driving, which I already hate even when the roads are dry and obstacle-free, takes on a whole new level of fun when the already-narrow streets and roads lose half their width.

I can't get on board with the shovel-it-into-the-street method, and I want a clean sidewalk. So I throw the snow over our hedge into the yard. It's additional exercise out in the fresh air, right?

This was the street I lived on in Wisconsin:

Things I miss:

1. residential streets that are 5 cars wide
2. 65-gallon (246-liter) garbage and recycling bins - collected every week
3. that beautiful, wide patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street that may have no purpose beyond being a place to collect plowed and shoveled snow in the winter

When the plow comes by in Wisconsin, he pushes the snow off the street onto the grassy patch and across the end of the driveway. You have to then shovel out the end of your driveway again, but you don't have to worry about the snow on the grassy strip unless it covers your mailbox - then you have to dig that out too or wait until spring to get your mail.

Here in the Schwabenland, since yards are bordered by fences, six-foot hedges, and/or high stone walls, there's just no place for the snow to go - hence the shovel-snow plow street battle, which in Wisconsin is only a problem at the end of one's driveway.

Speaking of driveways, ours is made of bricks and there are two deep tire grooves where the car comes and goes. If I had a dime for every time our shovel has a head-on collision with a misaligned brick... "Sccrraaaaapppppeeee.....BAM! 'Shit!'"...as I get impaled in the stomach by the handle of my shovel.

In the end, big deal. It's snow. Shovel it and shut up, right? I started writing this blog four hours ago, and as I sit here now I'm looking out to blue sky, sun shining on the snow drifts, and snow throwing itself off the tree branches and dripping from everywhere. The snow in the street has already melted, and now the sun is going after the piles of snow on the side of the street.

So the joke's on me. The snow that everyone else pushed into the street while I was heaving it over our hedge like an Amazon? Melting as I type and dripping into the sewer.

Is it spring yet?

Yes, yes...lovely, if you like that sort of thing.

January Highs and Lows 2015

Well, that's it for January. I don't really like January, especially when it snows. To me snow means extra work, cold, and chaos and additional danger on the roads, though I admit it looks pretty from a distance if I'm snug and warm inside. It snowed again yesterday, and I'm hoping that's it for the season. M and I have decided we're going to tackle Ben More (the highest mountain on Mull at 3850 ft  / 1174 m) in September, and it's time to get training! When I was in Esslingen the other day I climbed the 350 steps to the Burg overlooking the Altstadt, and I had to stop to catch my breath three times! This is not good news.

On with the month's highs and lows...

HIGHS

• New Year's Day duck dinner - it was fabulously delicious! One of last month's lows was forgetting to buy the pork roast for our New Year's Day dinner, but M saved the day by cooking duck legs (which were in the freezer) in the Römertopf. After my first bite I was glad I had forgotten the roast!
  
  
  
  


• watching "Little Women" with my Schwiegermutter, which I gave her for Christmas. I wept. I always weep, dammit, and I've seen this movie several times! Ordered the book... (I read it when I was young but only remember being annoyed by my namesake and wanting to be Jo.)


• learning about my son's good grades from his first semester away at college. I had been confident that this college was a good move for him, and he has obviously been working hard.


• getting permission via email from musician Iain Thomson to use one of his songs before we posted the video M made of pictures from our trips to the Isle of Mull. 


• hearing that my daughter was accepted into her first choice school for graduate school and earned a merit scholarship besides!


• receiving an invitation for coffee from the mother of one of my Englisch-AG students. She said her son enjoys my class so much!


• M's company's Christmas party - we went bowling and I didn't totally embarrass myself, and we ended the evening with dinner at our favorite restaurant.


• spending three days in Esslingen where I a.) met a college friend for dinner, b.) met my host mom for lunch, c.) attended a meeting of applicants for the 2015 Esslingen-Sheboygan middle school exchange, and d.) stayed with and hung out with my Schwiegermutter.
  


• reaching 15,000 hits on my blog the morning of 27 January. I'm not aiming to be famous or anything, but it's nice to know a few people beyond my parents read what I write. :-)

LOWS

• finishing the last four cream crackers in our possession, a stash we'd replenished in June. This is both a First World problem and a personal tragedy. They're insanely expensive on Amazon, but I think we're going to have to bite the bullet. I'd sooner give up chocolate than Jacob's Cream Crackers.


• realizing three days after I published a post about Mull that I had already written about the island back in October. Well, that was embarrassing. But that's how much I love Mull! :-)


• returning to our car with groceries and hitting the "unlock" button only to notice that the car didn't flash its lights AND it hadn't been locked. M has taught me well, and I always lock the car. Crap! 


• realizing, as I reached for the back door handle, that it was not my car. In my defense, it was also grey silver, and a Combi (like ours). I'm calling this a low because M would want me to recognize our car next to another grey silver car. If they had been two silver grey horses, I would not have made the same mistake. But all grey silver Combis look the same to me. 


• taking the entire month to finish Little Women because it just wasn't as satisfying as I expected it to be.


• noticing, while reading over an email I'd just sent to a group of English- and German-speaking colleagues, that I had typed "to" when I needed "too." After a distressed and anguished moan of despair, eye cent another massage correcting myself and insuring them that eye due no the difference between to and too...


• learning that the governor (Ministerpräsident) of my home state in the U.S. is proposing that one doesn't need to learn how to teach in order to teach. He says a bachelor's degree, some job experience, and a competency test in the subject area is enough. Apparently he thinks teaching is so damn easy, anyone can do it. I'd like to see him try - but luckily for the students he wouldn't be eligible because he never finished college and therefore has no bachelor's degree.


• getting our water usage report for 2014. We paid €80 for rain. There's a charge for owning land fully or partially covered with cement - like sidewalks and patios, because the rain water that falls there ends up in the sewer system rather than in the ground.

Other Moments

• cooking a vegetarian dinner but first walking to the store to get M some meat to go with it.


• while sitting in his mancave outside during his lunch break, M heard someone vacuuming and wondered with a scoff and scowl who was disturbing the Mittagsruhe. When he came back inside he discovered it was his wife.


• Overheard on the train: "Ok, aber sprechen wir von echten 10 Minuten, oder deine 10 Minuten?" ("Ok, but are we talking about an actual ten minutes, or your ten minutes?") The speaker was a man, and he was talking to a woman on his cell phone (like that wasn't obvious).


• entering our bedroom after a two-night absence and realizing M had been enjoying an open window for sleeping while I was away. Holy beachballs it was cold in there!

In the News II

Several gems came up this week in both the newspaper and on an alternative news program we watched on Saturday evening.

First, from the local paper on Wednesday, 21. January...

Geisterfahrer* wegen Navi / Wrong-way Driver because of GPS

A truck driver near Bingen in Rheinland-Pfalz turned around on the Autobahn-60 to go in the other direction because his GPS instructed him to "Bitte wenden" ("Please turn around"). The Highway Patrol reported that no one was injured - it's probably a good thing the incident happened during the night. An on-duty police officer happened to see the manoeuver and pulled the 42-year-old driver over shortly afterward. He was not drunk, but rather just blindly trusted his GPS (called a Navi over here).

Under supervision of the police, the driver turned his truck around, but during this manoeuver he bashed into a guard rail and caused €1300 in damage.

*The Germans have a word for a person who drives the wrong way on an Autobahn, road, or street - Geisterfahrer, which can translate to "ghost driver." This is unfortunately a somewhat common accurance, according to the frequency of such reports in the newspaper and on the Verkehrsfunk.

Fünfjähriger tötet Bruder / Five-year-old Kills his Brother

You know this one had to come from the U.S., and I'm not making light of it. I find these reports tragic and absurd.

A young boy in Elmo, Missouri shot and killed his nine-month-old brother with the loaded 22-caliber pistol he found lying on a bed in the home. He picked up the pistol, shot it, and the bullet hit the baby, who lay in a playpen, in the head. No charges will be filed - of course not against the boy, but also not against the parents - because in the U.S. there are no regulations regarding proper storage of loaded or unloaded weapons. It's perfectly legal (though a little stupid) to leave a loaded gun lying around anywhere in one's home whether small children are present or not.

But to end on a positive note...

AirPnP

You've heard of Airbnb, right? People who have unoccupied apartments or rooms in their homes can register with Airbnb and rent the space to travelers, often for less than what a hotel would charge. I haven't tried it out yet but want to and know of plenty of other travel bloggers who have used it repeatedly.

Well! Now there's an app called Airpnp for people who are out and about and find themselves in urgent need of a toilet. The original idea was mainly intended for women, but anyone can use it. Those with toilets to offer register with the site and indicate how much they charge for use, and travelers who find themselves in sudden, urgent need can use the app to find the nearest private toilet. Some charge $1 or more, but believe me, I myself have been in a state where I would have happily paid more if only I could find a pleasant place to...uh...sit for a few moments. 

Although the program did specifically mention a few Airpnp spots in Stuttgart, the app doesn't yet have a big following in Germany. In the Netherlands and Belgium, however, there are tons of people offering their loos for hire.  The idea will probably never catch on in the U.S. because there are public restrooms all over and in pretty much every store. Besides that, except in the big cities people are rarely about without their cars, with which they can easily get to a place with a restroom.

What's been in your news?

Life in the Schwabenland

You know you're acclimating into life in Swabia when...

• your collection of books about your [adopted] Heimat and its people continues to grow.


• on a winter's day when your house feels uncommonly cold, instead of turning up the heat you don long johns* and ski socks.
  *Long johns are called "lange Unterhose" (long underpants) or "Liebestöter" (love killers) in German.


• that same evening you light 12 tea candles in the living room in decorative candle holders because, even if they don't actually warm up the room, it seems warmer.


• you snort in disgust in grocery stores in the U.S. when you see "Black Forest ham" in packages from Oscar Meyer, knowing full well what Schwarzwälder Schinken is and should look and taste like.


• you grow concerned when your wine cellar is down to five bottles.


• you have a conversation with your husband one evening about saure Kutteln (tripe, or stomach/intestinal lining of cows or pigs), Blutwurst (blood sausage), Niere (kidneys), and Hirnsuppe (brain soup), which were not unheard of meals when he was a child.


• you get extra excited about a present that has two useful purposes - like a weekly calendar whose pages become postcards when you tear them off on Monday morning!


• you hear a joke about how frugal the Swabians are (see below), but you wonder what's so funny about it since being frugal seems to be a very good idea.


• you understand the prepositions 'nonder, 'nauf, and 'nei.


• you feel dreadfully guilty on Sunday morning when you realize you forgot to sweep your sidewalk and the road in front of your house the day before (this is not to be done on Sundays).


• you mean what you say and you do what you say you will do - without fail.


• although you are pretty frugal and strive not to waste money or food, you are willing to cough up the cash for a good bottle of wine and/or an occasional good meal out. You can do this because you save in other ways.


• you want a Butterbrezel from the bakery but you buy a regular pretzel instead - saving 20 cents - take it home, slice it open, and put the butter on yourself.


• two of your language teachers are called Äffle and Pferdle. It's from these guys that you learned what "Mei Uhr isch hee" means.

source

• although you find beautiful every part of Germany you have visited, you wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

Swabian jokes:

Winegrower Carl and his wife Caroline emptied the contents of their cess pool into two barrels (to use as fertilizer) and carried them up to the top of their hillside vineyard. Then Carl tripped and the contents of his barrel spilled over the retaining wall. "Oh, oh," Caroline wailed, "you idiot! We spent half the winter shitting for nothing!*

Football/Soccer match in a Swabian village: To decide sides, the referee tossed a coin into the air. 2000 people were injured.


*Your Swabian Neighbors. Larson, Bob. Stuttgart: Schwaben International Verlag, 1981.