Living in America

Maybe all my blog titles will be song titles from now on. . .

The first week has raced by, very busily for Ralf and I and very happily for the kids. They like their kindergarden and are having a blast with the week-long slumber party we've arranged for them with our Californian friends.

A few highlights:

Leafing through People Magazine's tribute to the 70s. K wanted to know about Star Wars so I explained about wars in space, bad guys with super mind powers, light sabers (she already knew about that one from her breakfast cereal), etc. She took it all in but when I made the spurious claim that Star Wars is the most famous movie ever, she scoffed. 'More famous than Pufnstuff? I don't think so!'

Letting my youngest raise herself. A few months back L announced she was ready to ride her bike with no training wheels. I hesitated, she cried and insisted. She was so positive. Finally, heart in throat, I strapped on her helmut and let her go. Perfect execution, just a big wobbly and only one spill. That's why when she announeced she was ready to sleep commando (i.e., no diapers) two nights ago, I let her. Sure enough, she was up to the challenge. I think I'll just retire.

Repaying our hosts with a flooded kitchen. We're staying with friends who kindly stepped in when our July house fell through. They have two kids of the same age but not so much space, which makes their hospitality especially generous. Last night after dinner I loaded the dishwasher, added soap and turned it on. About an hour later while we were playing Scrabble, which Ralf the German always seems to win, there was an ominous 'bloob bloop' sound. Soap foam was gushing out of the dishwasher like in an I Love Lucy episode. Ralf, who lives with me and still loves me, immediately assessed the situation. But I ask you, why call it 'dish soap' if you can't use it in the dishwasher???

Another busy week ahead but I'll do my best to keep up with your doings.

I've arrived

Just a quick update: We're in California, the flight was uneventful, the kids were rock stars and I watched 17 Again on the plane. And I admit that I loved it against my will. How fun to get your teen age body back and go to school with your own kids! The only drawback would be that I'd probably still like 40 year old men and my classmates would think I'm a skanky ho.

So, that's the news.

Happy Valentine's Day!

OK I'm late. I actually forgot that yesterday was Valentine's Day until R hugged me from behind and asked what I wanted to do with the evening.

'I thought I'd work on my article,' I responded, distracted by all my cutting edge thoughts about talent management.

Yes, I write real articles sometimes for HCM trade journals. Occassionally they are even published.

Ralf: 'It's Valentine's Day. You shouldn't work tonight. How about you cook us a delicious dinner and we watch a movie?'

Not a bad opening bid - after nearly 7 years of marriage it's finally sunk in that inviting a bunch of friends over to watch an FC Bayern game isn't romantic.

Me (upping the ante): 'OK but I want to watch The Women.'

I had no expectation of The Women being any good - and it wasn't - but I still wanted to see it.

Ralf (hasty counter offer): 'I was thinking we could watch 'Die Maenner.'

Translation: 'The Men.' Some classic German movie about men. A half-hearted counter bid he knew had no chance.

Me: 'So. . . I cook dinner and we watch your movie? Where's my diamond tennis bracelet?'

Let the backpedaling begin.

Ralf (magnanimously): 'Tell you what - since Valentine's Day's a chick holiday you can choose the movie.'

I couldn't resist a determined romantic overture like that so that's what we did.

It was nice, especially the loud, expressive snorting sounds Ralf kept making during the movie.

Think about it - would you want to be married to a man who enjoyed The Women? The whole point is that he hated it but watched it for me.

He loves me. :-)

Anyway, Happy Valentine's Day!

Burn After Reading

I’m waiting for Ralf to download a bunch of pics from our camera but since he’s working on taxes today it feels like the wrong time to ask.

So, I will try to post a picture of the new do as soon as I can. If, that is, I can get a good one because only about 2 out of 100 pictures of me turn out well. So it could take a while. . .

In the meantime, here is my all-time favorite picture from HS, apparently before there were color pictures. This self-portrait depicts the expression I had on my face in government class as well as from 2000-2008. It is also the expression I had on my face while watching Burn After Reading last night. Or was it Burn Before Watching?

To set the scene: Last night Ralf and I had our SECOND date night in two weeks, probably the last one for a while since his parents are going to Vietnam for a month. Just enjoying it while we can.

We wanted to go for dinner and then catch Benjamin Button in the English Theater but he movie started at 7 and I didn’t want to give up my nice dinner out. So we opted for dinner out (Ethiopian, my favorite) followed by Apple TV at home.

We watched Burn After Reading, which was OK but not great. It had a fairly messy plot involving a disgruntled ex-CIA agent, his unpleasant wife, her shifty married lover, his cheating wife and a couple of unbelievably stupid health club employees who stumble across a disk of somewhat classified information and think it would be a good idea to sell it to the Russians.

Why would they commit blatant treason, you ask? Well, you see, one of the stupid health club employees wanted plastic surgery and thought the Russians would give her money to pay for it. I kind of lost interest in the movie at this point because no one could possibly be so stupid - in fact, I spent the rest of the movie wondering if she should be shot for treason or stupidity.

Brad Pitt played the other stupid health club employee and when he unexpected gets his head blown off the movie loses what little spark it had until that point.

The best part was the final deadpan conversation between two CIA agents about the major screw up caused by all these idiots.

In the end, the treasonously stupid woman gets her plastic surgery paid for by the CIA to shut her up so there’s no poetic justice, either – believe me, you’re NOT routing for this moron, especially since she gets all her friends killed too in her single-minded quest for surgically enhanced beauty.

The End.

Scooped

It's a calculated risk because normally rational people who are amazingly tolerant about everything from religious slander to being told they are evil have been known to totally FREAK OUT when someone utters a word against Twilight. But that's me, I like living on the edge.

Wait a minute. . . damn! I wanted to make fun of the Twilight movie but Kristina got there first. A month ago! And she compared it to watching a Book of Mormon movie so there's just nowhere to go from there. Why do I even bother?

So instead of adding to the growing body of literature about how unibrows aren't really sexy I'm going to scoop Charlotte and invite you to create an Obamicon. They look like this:

Pretty cool, huh?

Oh and yesterday was apparently national delurking day, so all you people who visited my blog were supposed to leave comments and not just, er, lurk. Feel free to make up for it today, even if it's just Twilight-related hate mail.

Taking your medicine

I have proper medicine now: I have antibiotics, codeine in capsule form (no more drops!), and cortisone, again in capsule form. Yay! Last night I woke up coughing so badly I got something like an asthma attack and we had to call an emergency doctor who makes house calls. He didn't find much wrong with me - clear lungs, no sinus infection, no throat infection, just this damn cough and slightly inflamed lungs. So he gave me something to help me sleep - I won't mention how it was administered - and told me that after 3 weeks of chronic coughing I need to go see a lung specialist.

When I pestered him a bit for more information he opined that I probably have some sort of chronic lung weakness that is preventing me from kicking this cough on my own. Lung weakness? Isn't that for people with asthma that are short of breath when they have to climb stairs?? I am a hearty person. Sort of. When it's not winter. But he stubbornly maintained that uncontrollable coughing for three weeks is not normal. He also said I probably should have already been on antibiotics for such a persistant, uncontrollable cough.

So today we saw the lung specialist. I was deeply annoyed because it's the day before New Year's Eve and no one has office hours, there's one clinic serving all of Munich today. I also couldn't help reflectng that there's nothing much wrong with me that antibiotics couldn't have cured a week ago and even if I do have some lung thingy I could have made a proper appointment in the New Year to check it out properly, rather than shuffling downtown in a weakened state to sit for two hours in a small enclosed waiting room with all the contagious respiratory emergencies in Munich.

As it happens, however, the doctor was able to see us right away without an appointment, although they conducted a longish series of tests and the whole thing took over an hour to complete. That, my friends, is the beauty of private insurance in Germany. It costs the earth and you better hope your employer picks up half but you get in right away and they don't stint on the tests.

So. . . they took my blood pressure, had me breath in two mystery machines in different ways, took some blood, took a chest x-ray (my first ever unless I got one at school years ago) and put some burning cream on my ear lobe before piercing it with something that felt like an awl and squeezing blood out of it for what seemed like ten minutes. That was the suckiest part - no one leaves that office without a bandaid on their ear.

The results of these various tests were then presented to Dr. Friedrich and told him what I already knew: I have a light but persistant infection that can be treated with antibiotics (with a tiny but unlikely chance that I've contracted whooping cough) and I am pale. I probably also have some underlying non-life threatening condition such as an allergy that explains why my colds tend to turn into chronic bronchitis three years running but to find out more I'll have to come back and get a CAT scan and goodness knows what else.

Now we're home and I've taken my first antibiotic tablet, which is sitting a little uncomfortably but triumphantly in my stomach, and poor Ralf is upstairs exhausted and trying to catch up on his work. I am making him coffee and grandmommy eggs (soft-boiled eggs over broken up toast with lots of salt and pepper) to try and make up for my poor health. Tonight he has late calls catching up with his team, or his 'bitches', as I jokingly refer to his superstar all-male team of technical software designers since we watched 'You Don't Mess with the Zohan' the other night.

I'll probably have to come up with something else if he ever hires a girl.

Speaking of Zohan, if only Middle Eastern problems could actually be solved by Israeli counterterrorists becoming hair dressers . . . here are a few Zohan quotes that made me laugh despite my sadness for that war torn part of the world because they are so absurd:

(Zohan the Isreali counterterrorist upon being shot at by a Palestinian terrorist): "OK, I get it. You don't like my country."

(Zohan's mom over dinner): "They've been fighting for 2000 years. They're probably almost finished."

(The Hizballah hotline): "Terrorist support operations are temporarily suspended due to peace talks. Normal operations will resume as soon as the peace talks break down."