Um, oops
Another February Baby Sweater, originally uploaded by jda127.
Observe: very cute baby sweater. Pink cotton. Sleeves may or may not be wonky lengths. Generally, however, adorable. I began knitting this when we got a birth announcement from one of D’s cousins in the mail–she has had baby #2 and something must be knit for it.
So, yesterday, upon finishing said sweet something (still needs buttons), I went into the kitchen to look again at the birth announcement and realized SHE HAD A BABY BOY!!! Everyone I know has been having girls lately, so it didn’t even occur to me to read the announcement that closely. His name is Jackson. I’ll knit him something else. Sorry, little man.
At arm’s length
Sniff, sniff, originally uploaded by jda127.
As promised–a shot of Ingrid wondering what sort of vicious creature we’ve brought into our family. Look at those PAWS. This is going to be a big Thumper. Maybe Ingrid knows he’ll be able to take her out one day. . .
Our leetle friend
Thursday night we went out to the countryside and adopted a Rex rabbit from breeders in St. George.
I had never seen a rabbitry before–or a ‘wabbitry,’ as the family’s business cards insist (groan). They had A LOT of bunnies. This corresponds to A LOT of rabbit poop. In case you were wondering.
The girls checked out four or so Rex babies and picked the second-to-smallest one. Greta named him Tobey–which is an awesome rabbit name and so much better than her first choice–Fluffy Bunny.
Tobey, at Dale’s insistence (he has more experience with rodents and their shitting ways, I guess), lives outside on our deck in a hutch. Tobey appears to like the hutch and his kibble and his ice bottle on hot days.
I’m not so sure how Tobey felt about the 6am deluge this morning though. Dale is building a roof for Tobey’s hutch to protect his furriness from the unpleasant elements of sun and rain. (cuz we are nothing if not good bunny parents) Roof is not done, though, and at 6am we woke up to thunder and a downpour and both immediately thought: oh god, TOBEY is WET and went downstairs and outside in the deluge to cover his hutch with a sheet of cardboard and dry him off and make sure he was ok.
Good Grief, people. This is a rabbit. He has fur. He found a patch of protection from the elements and was only sort of damp. Sheesh.
Nevertheless, the rain has not let up much at all in the past 8 hours, so the girls and I brought the rabbit inside (This is where I need to tell my mother: sit down, Mom, breathe, it’s just linoleum. The rodent can’t hurt the linoleum, nor make it diseased.) We played with him in the kitchen, made sure he was dry and warm. The girls tried to feed him expensive German-made “rabbit popcorn” as a treat. Tobey evidently has more proletarian, alfafa kibble tastes.
In our next post–a picture of Ingrid running away from the Fierce, One-Pound Bunny!
You want castles?
Wartburg, originally uploaded by jda127.
I’ll give you castles. My students’ language course visited the Wartburg in Eisenach this weekend. The Wartburg’s foundations are very old–12th century–and it has been remodeled and updated throughout the centuries, with a particular Grand Duke in the nineteenth century taking a shine to it and making sure that glass mosaics and “authentic” knights’ bathing quarters were incorporated. (The bath house is actually lovely–it was modelled on bath houses the 12th-century knight might have encountered on the Crusades–very Muslim-looking.)
The Wartburg is where Luther hid out for 10 months or so while the Pope was out looking for the traitor to Church and Crown. He translated the New Testament into German here, creating the first unified, written, “high” German language in the process.
He used a whale vertebra as a foot stool while he worked. It is still here.
The spot of ink on the wall where, legend has it, Luther threw his ink well at an apparation of the devil, is no longer visible. The faithful chipped it away with their fingertips–to have a piece of a Reformation Relic with them always.
Students: suitably impressed. When the beams in the room in which you stand were felled over three hundred years before Columbus discovered America, you know you’re in Europe, having an authentic cultural experience!
Status: Jetlagged
I didn’t sleep well on the plane. By the time I was done with my rubbery lasagne and they turned off the lights, there were only a couple hours left for shut-eye. And, in my sleep-deprived state, I decided to go for a run once I got my things to the apartment. Ouch. The route I took is one I ran several times a week when we lived here, and running it almost ten years later showed me a few changes in the neighborhood, and reminded me how some things seem to stay the same. To wit: some Germans will never get the hang of sunscreen. In their sun-deprived, northern-hemisphere way, they go bake half naked in a park the minute the temps get above 70 degrees. I saw an older man (early 60s) with skin literally like leather, spreading out his towel in the park so he could recline in his Speedo and enjoy the rays.
A big change though was how many runners I saw. Nine years ago I could go weeks without seeing another runner and today the park was filthy with them. Just filthy. Young, old, male, female, with dogs, without dogs, fit, not so fit. It was great.
And then I did some sightseeing. This is the Berliner Dom with the remains of the Palast der Republik–the parliament building of the former GDR that is finally being torn down, amidst some protest.
It appears that a group of private citizens have swayed the city and federal governments to re-build, on the site of the Palast, the former palace of the Hohenzollern kings. It was damaged a bit in WWII and then leveled by the socialist government of the GDR, signaling their break with the monarchist past. Since you need to go back at least that far to find a German history remote enough as to be innocuous, the palace represents an attempt to recreate a Berlin center that sends positive messages about Germany’s history and identity.
Long live capitalism.
My ticket to fame and glory …
… is reality television. I’ve given up my hope of winning the Amazing Race with my friend Mare (even though I know we would so rock if we could get on the show), so it’s time to move on from my brief career as reality television wannabe contestant, and, as with all aging stars, move into the production side of things.
So, here’s my idea and, yes, I’m writing this down so that when someone makes a mint with my idea I can sue their pants off and use this post as evidence. As a librarian, I sort of get copyright law. One cannot claim copyright for an idea, only for its recorded expression. Well, here’s the expression.
So, we’ve had Idol and Survivor and Fear Factor and Useless Bachelor Slobs and so on. Well, most reality TV is just pure schlock, of course, with the lone exception of Idol. Yes, it’s schlock, too, but what sets it apart is that there are talented people in the mix doing what they do well, not driving double decker buses in London to get their next clue or eating roaches, and they emerge at the end and sing their little hearts out. It’s not a reach to say that there are literally thousands of individuals with great voices and stage presence in the US, yet most of them will never have the opportunity to pursue their dreams of glory if they don’t get a lucky break. Enter Idol. The drama is real, the competition can be intense, and one sees real heartbreak and triumph amidst the flimflam.
So, take that recipe, and apply it to a sport that already has heartbreak and triumph in spades: cycling. The title of my soon-to-be-produced reality show was going to be Who Wants to Be the Next Lance Armstrong, but I realized I’d have to have his pesky permission, as well as that of his sponsors (Lance has no existence but that defined by the NikeGiroOakleyTrekINGSquibb machine). That’s just too much work, and while I absolutely worship the man’s performances in le Tour and le battle with cancer, I have no real desire to meet him. Nor he me, I’m sure. So, the new working title is Who Wants to Be the Next Tour Star. When the organizers of le Tour come calling for royalties, I’ll show them the door by noting that there are many cycling tours, so who says I meant theirs and not the Tour du Faso. Besides, as you’ll see below, I really don’t.
The premise behind the show is the same as for the singing competition, namely, there are literally thousands of super-talented cyclists in the US toiling in obscurity in local races or not even racing at all because they have to work another job or two to feed themselves. There are no scouts for T-Mobile, Gerolsteiner, Quick Step, et al., showing up at local races, as there are with, say high school football or other such sports. To get from the US to a European team is like passing through the eye of the needle. It takes money and luck. Even making it big in the US is hard given the dearth of money to be made from training incessantly and racing every weekend in a sport with minimal cash input. The American cyclist in me says that if we had a real system that developed talent and sent it out globally, we’d stomp on those weenie European riders something sick. As it is, a few brave souls have to carry the flag. I’m not a jingoist at all. I just want to see cycling drama.
So, to find contestants, we stage a series of regional three day races, involving a flat road stage, a time trial, and a climbing stage. Depending on how many races are held, the top set of finishers, say, ten per race, ten races, so one hundred total, qualify to move on to the show. Men and women compete in their own divisions. This is going to be about cycling, not about men. Oh, you can only ride in these races if you meet some minimum criteria. I have yet to work those out, but they have something to do with one’s ability to generate wattage, an application listing vital stats such as height, weight, age, training regimen, and an essay about why this is important to them. The last part is to give us material in terms of human interest stuff and find some characters, but the height/weight stuff is all business. Practically no one over six feet tall will ever ride professionally, and if you’re 5′7″ and 170 pounds, you may be super fit, but you will just die on climbs. It’s power to weight, baby.
Once we’ve got a hundred people in each group, we move to a central location and get to business. The location will have great cycling terrain, but be out of the way so that traffic control, crowd control, etc. is a bit simpler. Also, some smaller towns might love to have such a show in their neighborhood and offer all kinds of incentives. It’s part training camp–we get some coaches with good reputations to run this–part racing, with a new type of race every week that winnows the field down. It will have every type you can think of: sprint, mountain, criterium, time trial. To add spice, certain weeks will feature teams, so that riders have to learn to help each other or all get booted. We all know that cycling is only about the individual to a degree. Without tactics, you’re just another overpowered schlub on a nice bike.
The prize: a contract with a US pro team, a la Jelly Belly or Toyota United. Sure, I’d love to offer a slot on Astana or Discovery, but I’m not sure that’s really in the cards. I think anyone who could emerge from such a varied competition will shine at that level, and from there the leap to Europe is actually a doable prospect. This is the recording contract that Idol offers gone cycling: a chance to skip years of grunt work and make the connection to a team that otherwise would never, ever find you as you got beat up in a bunch of local races.
Anyone who watches cycling–and anyone who takes a few hours to watch a Tour (yes, that Tour) stage will be hooked for life–knows that it is high freakin’ drama and that those riders are sick little puppies with no regard for pain or suffering. Now, add to that the incentive to ride yourself stupid for a chance at a pro contract, and I think the races this show would offer would be a demonstration of some of the most courageous and outrageous cycling that’s ever been filmed. In pro races, if you finish second or third or even eighth, that’s pretty good and you know there’s another race ahead. In this competition, such failure means you go back to your non-cycling life and someone else moves on. I don’t know about you, but I’d get out of the saddle and push myself into hypoxic-lactic-acid-overdose-induced dementia to avoid that fate, and that would make some fine television.
So, who’s my dream announcer? Bob Roll. Bob, buddy, you I do want to meet, unlike Mr. Armstrong, and the way you burn for cycling is tailor-made for a show like this. Your gift for colorfully illustrating the pain and agony of cycling would be most appropriate for such a spectacle. So, relying on the notion of only six degrees of separation, I’m hoping, dimly, that someone reads this who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Bob and says, hey, Bob, this crazy f*** wants you to do his show. Besides, my dream locale for the races is Grand Junction–great weather, fab scenery, varied terrain, open roads–and I seem to recall he lives in Durango. It’s a match made in heaven.
Oh, contestants will pee in bottles and offer blood samples. Anyone caught doping will have their arms removed and eyes gouged out. Really. Ride clean or suffer the shame.
Anyone know how to make a TV show? I’m taking applications …
The End is Near
Tomorrow is the last day of finals in these parts and the mood among those weary souls left on campus is lifting. Just now I heard a voice ringing out from the quad below my office window: “Today is my last day of college!” He sounded so happy.
Knee be free
Much to my relief and joy, I was told by both my physical therapist and surgeon this week that unless I feel an overwhelming personal need to see them to say hello and have them touch my knee, that they are done with me. Oh fraptious wonder! All things considered, given that I tore the ACL about ten months ago and had it repaired eight months ago, it’s been a mercifully short process to get back to some semblance of normalcy.
I still have a ways to go in terms of strength and agility, but this means that I no longer require professional care or monitoring to get that back. As I sat in bed last July looking at my puffy, shaved, and aching leg, with its hideous betadine yellow waxy pallor, I despaired of ever feeling normal again. Glad that was just the percocet talking.
More Steve Jobs love
OK, so maybe he backdated options and will soon be pilloried as an evil corporate executive, but he also is the creative inspiration behind the most wonderful device ever invented. To say that I want one of these is like saying that I look forward to my next breath, it’s that obvious.
I don’t even like talking on my cell phone, but a phone that is also a real mp3 player, has a multitouch user interface (if you don’t know what this is, rest assured that in three or four years you will not remember how you ever lived without them), and takes all the apps I love and condenses them to a tiny package, makes me want to lose my mind with longing and desire. Please, Santa bring me an 8GB iPhone for Christmas. I’ll be good and use it only for benevolent purposes.
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