A day in Upstate NY...

Forecast for Today

Updated: Jan 3, 6:45pm EST

Right Now -6°F FEELS LIKE -6° Clear, Bitterly cold.

Earlier Today 4° HIGH AT 2:05 PM Sunny

Earlier Today 4° HIGH AT 2:05 PM Sunny

Tonight -12° LOW Clear

Past 48 Hours Snow: 12.0 in (est.)

A very quick update

It's been a long time since I checked in and there are very many blog posts waiting to be written, photos to be posted, and books to be reviewed.

But just to dip my toes back in the water, I thought I'd post a quick update on what has happened since the end of November.

I have read some books (though not many recently), and might actually post a combined review sometime but the biggest news of course is this:

That and moving back to the US, of course. More to follow (and probably be backdated to the correct times).

President Obama's Acceptance Speech and Transcript

OBAMA: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward.
It moves forward because of you. It moves forward because you reaffirmed the spirit that has triumphed over war and depression, the spirit that has lifted this country from the depths of despair to the great heights of hope, the belief that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.
Tonight, in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back, and we know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come.
I want to thank every American who participated in this election. Whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time.

By the way, we have to fix that.

Whether you pounded the pavement or picked up the phone. Whether you held an Obama sign or a Romney sign, you made your voice heard and you made a difference.

I just spoke with Governor Romney and I congratulated him and Paul Ryan on a hard-fought campaign.

We may have battled fiercely, but it's only because we love this country deeply and we care so strongly about its future. From George to Lenore to their son Mitt, the Romney family has chosen to give back to America through public service and that is the legacy that we honor and applaud tonight.
In the weeks ahead, I also look forward to sitting down with Governor Romney to talk about where we can work together to move this country forward.

I want to thank my friend and partner of the last four years, America's happy warrior, the best vice president anybody could ever hope for, Joe Biden.

And I wouldn't be the man I am today without the woman who agreed to marry me 20 years ago.
Let me say this publicly: Michelle, I have never loved you more. I have never been prouder to watch the rest of America fall in love with you, too, as our nation's first lady.
Sasha and Malia, before our very eyes you're growing up to become two strong, smart beautiful young women, just like your mom.

And I'm so proud of you guys. But I will say that for now one dog's probably enough.
To the best campaign team and volunteers in the history of politics...

The best. The best ever. Some of you were new this time around, and some of you have been at my side since the very beginning.

But all of you are family. No matter what you do or where you go from here, you will carry the memory of the history we made together and you will have the life-long appreciation of a grateful president. Thank you for believing all the way, through every hill, through every valley.
You lifted me up the whole way and I will always be grateful for everything that you've done and all the incredible work that you put in.

I know that political campaigns can sometimes seem small, even silly. And that provides plenty of fodder for the cynics that tell us that politics is nothing more than a contest of egos or the domain of special interests. But if you ever get the chance to talk to folks who turned out at our rallies and crowded along a rope line in a high school gym, or saw folks working late in a campaign office in some tiny county far away from home, you'll discover something else.

You'll hear the determination in the voice of a young field organizer who's working his way through college and wants to make sure every child has that same opportunity.

You'll hear the pride in the voice of a volunteer who's going door to door because her brother was finally hired when the local auto plant added another shift.

You'll hear the deep patriotism in the voice of a military spouse whose working the phones late at night to make sure that no one who fights for this country ever has to fight for a job or a roof over their head when they come home.

That's why we do this. That's what politics can be. That's why elections matter. It's not small, it's big. It's important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy.

That won't change after tonight, and it shouldn't. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty. We can never forget that as we speak people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today.
But despite all our differences, most of us share certain hopes for America's future. We want our kids to grow up in a country where they have access to the best schools and the best teachers.

A country that lives up to its legacy as the global leader in technology and discovery and innovation, with all the good jobs and new businesses that follow.

We want our children to live in an America that isn't burdened by debt, that isn't weakened by inequality, that isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.

We want to pass on a country that's safe and respected and admired around the world, a nation that is defended by the strongest military on earth and the best troops this -- this world has ever known.
But also a country that moves with confidence beyond this time of war, to shape a peace that is built on the promise of freedom and dignity for every human being. We believe in a generous America, in a compassionate America, in a tolerant America, open to the dreams of an immigrant's daughter who studies in our schools and pledges to our flag.

To the young boy on the south side of Chicago who sees a life beyond the nearest street corner.
To the furniture worker's child in North Carolina who wants to become a doctor or a scientist, an engineer or an entrepreneur, a diplomat or even a president -- that's the future we hope for. That's the vision we share. That's where we need to go -- forward.

That's where we need to go.

Now, we will disagree, sometimes fiercely, about how to get there. As it has for more than two centuries, progress will come in fits and starts. It's not always a straight line. It's not always a smooth path.

By itself, the recognition that we have common hopes and dreams won't end all the gridlock or solve all our problems or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward. But that common bond is where we must begin. Our economy is recovering. A decade of war is ending. A long campaign is now over.

And whether I earned your vote or not, I have listened to you, I have learned from you, and you've made me a better president. And with your stories and your struggles, I return to the White House more determined and more inspired than ever about the work there is to do and the future that lies ahead.

Tonight you voted for action, not politics as usual.

You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours. And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together. Reducing our deficit. Reforming our tax code. Fixing our immigration system. Freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We've got more work to do.

But that doesn't mean your work is done. The role of citizens in our Democracy does not end with your vote. America's never been about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us together through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government. That's the principle we were founded on.

This country has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military in history, but that's not what makes us strong. Our university, our culture are all the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores.

What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth.
The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations. The freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for come with responsibilities as well as rights. And among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That's what makes America great.

I am hopeful tonight because I've seen the spirit at work in America. I've seen it in the family business whose owners would rather cut their own pay than lay off their neighbors, and in the workers who would rather cut back their hours than see a friend lose a job.

I've seen it in the soldiers who reenlist after losing a limb and in those SEALs who charged up the stairs into darkness and danger because they knew there was a buddy behind them watching their back.

I've seen it on the shores of New Jersey and New York, where leaders from every party and level of government have swept aside their differences to help a community rebuild from the wreckage of a terrible storm.

And I saw just the other day, in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his 8-year-old daughter, whose long battle with leukemia nearly cost their family everything had it not been for health care reform passing just a few months before the insurance company was about to stop paying for her care.

I had an opportunity to not just talk to the father, but meet this incredible daughter of his. And when he spoke to the crowd listening to that father's story, every parent in that room had tears in their eyes, because we knew that little girl could be our own.

And I know that every American wants her future to be just as bright. That's who we are. That's the country I'm so proud to lead as your president.

And tonight, despite all the hardship we've been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I've never been more hopeful about our future.

I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight.

I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.

America, I believe we can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try.

I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America.

And together with your help and God's grace we will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on Earth.

Thank you, America. God bless you. God bless these United States.

(with thanks to The Christian Post)

Tears of Joy and Relief

Four More Years

More Ch.ch.ch.changes....

It's been a while since I wrote a real post and that's because we have been completely up in the air about life and what we are doing in it.

Short form:

We are having twins in the spring and we will be moving to upstate NY in late December (if the container actually gets scheduled in December and I am feeling nervous about it).

So if anyone in Berlin is reading this, we are looking for a nachmieter who would like an apartment full of furniture, lights, appliances, and a kitchen- feel free to contact me for more info. We love our apartment and our (Wilmersdorf) neighborhood.

We vacillated between NY and Munich for a long time– even checked out houses and neighborhoods in Munich over the fall holidays. But family and personal reasons cast the vote for NY, for at least the next three to four years.

That means I have been boxing books (up to #12) while waiting to hear from the moving firm as to when we will be containerized. Have put several boxes out to give away, but I think that I have overloaded the appetite of my neighborhood for free English-language books and the 50 books left over (and added to) will need to be dropped at a Buecherboxx this weekend.

So, I am well, but exhausted. Twins and being older make this pregnancy both harder and requiring more testing and resting than either of my earlier ones.

In addition, having our Internet go out for 11 days right after the decision was made made things even tougher: hard to list the apartment or address, hard to follow up on lost luggage of friends visiting from CA (and never found, though we called repeatedly:-( ). The constant calls to O2, met by menu-driven and incorrect responses, the dragging a heavy computer off to Starbucks, the new router that did not solve the problem, the complete disconnect while Hurricane Sandy was raging in my area and my dad was undergoing surgery... it was very stressful.

Finally, a third-line tech managed to fix the issue, although after we gushed gratitude, he said he had no idea how he had fixed it, because the type of problem that we had (internet down, phone working) was actually "not possible".

We were still very grateful and grateful that he had listened long enough to see the strangeness and think that some of the issue might actually have to do with the phone and its switch being in some way crossed with the internet.

While this was going on, we were running about, setting up Drs appts, making others, having exams, having field trips, being visited by the tooth fairy: life is chaotic.

Priceline and rental cars.

I want to make a digression to talk about one of my favorite companies: Priceline.

I only wish that I could Priceline my trips from Europe to the US (they don't allow it with trips originating in Europe:-( ) because the amount of money that I have saved on vehicle rentals is absolutely amazing. We rented a car for one day from Miami airport at 35% of the cheapest rate we could find (for a minivan, which turned out to be a fully loaded Town & Country), but got the car from a top three company.

We decided to rent the car for one day only because the prices from an airport location are substantially higher (on a daily basis, not a one-time) than those of a vehicle rented from a non-airport location due to an airport surcharge. In the past we had taken a shuttle to an off-site location, but in this case we were both time-constrained and expecting to be exhausted.

We then booked the much longer package, at a 60+% savings off the daily rate, 44% of the weekly, that evening. It turned out that (on the day we booked, although not on the day we had booked the first rental!) we were able to get a very good rate at a different airport, which must have had an oversupply of minivans (they must have been renting briskly at MCO aka Disney).

We were able to drop our Miami van off at FLL without any penalty, pick up our new one (also a T&C, though this one was not leather) in less than 30 minutes and continue on our way to meet the parents. This was foreshadowing that we were actually supposed to drop this van off at FLL (we expected to take an airport shuttle to Miami, but when we saw the price for 4 of us, said "No way!") and wound up taking it to Miami (which has a handy gas station less than a mile from the rental drop off area, and also has a wonderful monorail directly to the terminal— just sayin'!) instead.

Priceline saved us an incredible amount of money (particularly as more than 30% of the cost of the rental was the taxes and fees, all of which are based on the base contract cost). It took some time, some logging in and out, some basic calling to get expected amounts, and some bravado, but it was well worth the time spent.

---They also have great rates on hotels , but between points and discounts, and because I also like to know exactly where I am staying, I stick to my free (points) rooms or look over at hotels.com (or hotels.de which strangely sometimes has even better prices on hotels in Orlando than hotels.com.).

(edit: I received no compensation for sounding like an ad, but if you have a good experience one day, I'll be glad someone else save money too.)

Some swag and Black Friday

I'm still overcoming the jet-lag and won't be interpolating the missing vacation pics and posts for a while, but this is what I came back to (and I am absolutely luxuriating in not having German class and not planning on an intensive full-time course for at least a semester).

The left pictures are a portion of the swag brought back from the US: soft underwear and clothing for the children which fits, is 100% cotton, doesn't cause them issues with tactile sensation, and costs incredibly little: 9 pairs of socks cost less than two pair here.

I really appreciate the ease of shopping (I'll have posts up in "Decluttering" to show what was passed down, recycled and donated soon), but heavens, I also really appreciated Black Friday.

Although some people have mentioned that day as one where one should not consume, I think of it as the day when I can get each of my children two pairs of shoes and have it cost approximately 30% of what it would cost to buy a single pair of shoes in Germany. I finally got myself a pair of (great)Uggs knock-offs (for $32), and Sketchers for all (including the German- very nice looking walking shoes).

One of the first stores we hit after arriving in Miami was Costco- our favorite store. Among the normal purchases, such as brown sugar, craisins, dried blueberries and hot sauce, we buy clothes there. And this time we wanted a GPS (needed a US one) and some other odds-and-ends. After we completed our purchase, the greeter gave us the Black Friday flyer on our way out: for some "Missing Man" feeling we discovered that most of what we had purchased would be going on sale: we were able to go back the next week, re-buy our items and then return them and reap the 35% discount on the items in that one week period. I was even able to use Costco coupons from 2006 and exchange a camera that I had waiting (which had undergone a deeper price cut in the 60 days it waited at my brother's house) to allow an additional $50 discount. Almost made it seem as if I was saving money by purchasing items:-). The German bought a suit for 60% off, or 20% of what the same suit costs here. We also bought jeans to replace the ones with holes (I really hate shopping in Germany) for 10% of the cost of the same ones here. And so on. In all, we bought absolutely nothing that we had not planned to buy, with an average savings of 70% on what the items cost here.

I love Black Friday and if I ever move to the US again, I hope to buy all my furniture on that week, even if I have to live on crates until that point.

The Rapture

I flew to NY on the 20th, on the way upstate to see my parents and then back down to go to BookExpo. It was a long trip, made easier because I was travelling alone.
While I was waiting for the shuttle at JFK, I used the rest room and saw this scene: a pair of shoes abandoned in the Women's Bathroom.

I wondered if the Rapture had come a day early?

Decluttering my Parents-in-Law's house

While we were in the UK over Easter weekend, the girls were at my in-laws, always something they look forward to.
When we got back, my father-in-law asked if we could take a box that we had forgotten in his Kellar. I was a bit surprised that we had anything there, because we occupy the attic and we are generally very good at keeping our things out of their way and tidied up.
Once I saw the box, I was pretty happy: this is some pretty fabulous wine, brought over in our container from the US and quite unavailable here. (My father-inlaw assures me the box was stored on its side.) If the picture is magnified, it might be possible to see a few bottles of Opus One that I shipped to myself from when I was doing a drive through the Napa area in 1995, as well as some Grgich Hills from the same time and a bit later.

We haven't opened any yet, but I expect that we will in June and I hope to plan an evening around each bottle.

I was glad to help declutter the in-laws' house and the bottles are now neatly tucked away in our wine rack, clutter no more.

Discourse

I don't want to specifically discuss the horror of what happened in Arizona on the 8th. Already people are pretending that this should be a knee jerk of one side defending itself against (justified) charges that it has embraced polarizing discourse.

Instead, I want to think aloud about the state of public discourse.

A few days ago I posted some thoughts on the New Year and one of those thoughts was that I needed to remove certain people and attitudes from my atmosphere. I talked about how individuals, empowered through the internet, were increasingly using ad hominem attacks and how glad I was that the bullying could not become physical because I live in a civilized society.

I spoke too soon. Or the USA is not civilized. At least here in Germany the likelihood of someone attacking me with a gun is vanishingly small and my odds of surviving other physical attacks is much greater. The verbal attacks are, to a certain extent, forbidden by law. And those in the internet which I find intemperate or uncivil, I have removed from my view.

But the question is why individuals feel entitled to act in such a manner? So I'm going to look at three specific examples in the past year that have either silenced me or forced me to curtail my activity and active exchange of thought.

The first was earlier this year. Another expat blogger posted an ad campaign that she found amusing. It was a British campaign and I found it sexist and as such, a bit misogynistic. Some other commenters saw my point and some thought it was funny in spite of that and some did not see my issue.
That's not the point: what happened as the result of my comment was. Another blogger attacked me, took a post from my blog to say that I myself was sexist, posted it on his blog with commentary and without telling me or permission. Then another of his friends told me that I had no sense of humor, suggested that I needed to have sex more frequently to give me a sense of humor and used common misogynist language to belittle me. His wife told me that being told I "needed to get laid" was neither an insult to me nor to my husband (whom they had both met). She assured me that she had taken feminist studies and therefore knew that this language was not sexist or misogynist. I didn't point out to her at the time, but will now: I understand that we all tell ourselves stories to live with the unbearable. Telling a woman that she has no sense of humor about sexism and misogynism, that she needs to have sex enacted against her, that her ideas and opinions are formed by her hormone levels: this is indeed the heart of misogyny. Let me direct you to Feminism 101 and more specifically to this.

I removed these people from my blog reader.

The next issue that arose came in the context of the removal of Elizabeth Moon from the Guest of Honor position at Wiscon 35. Wiscon is a science fiction convention concentrating on issues of feminism. This is their statement of intention:

Wiscon is the world's leading feminist science fiction convention. WisCon encourages discussion and debate of ideas relating to feminism, gender, race and class.

Moon was "dis-invited" as the result of an interview that she gave wherein she stated that Muslims in the US have the same responsibilities as all Americans.

This is a small quote:

...I can easily imagine how Muslims would react to my excusing the Crusades on the basis of Islamic aggression from 600 to 1000 C.E....(for instance, excusing the building of a church on the site of a mosque in Cordoba after the Reconquista by reminding them of the mosque built on the site of an important early Christian church in Antioch.) So I don't give that lecture to the innocent Muslims I come in contact with. I would appreciate the same courtesy in return (and don't get it.) The same with other points of Islam that I find appalling (especially as a free woman) and totally against those basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they're demanding of me and others--how much more they're asking than giving. It would be helpful for them to show more understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship in a non-Muslim country. (And the same is true for many others, of course. Libertarians, survivalists, Tea-Partyers, fundamentalist Christians, anyone else whose goals benefit only their own group. There's been a huge decline in the understanding of good citizenship overall.)...

Leaving aside whether one disagrees with what Moon said, I see nothing against feminism here: in fact, it stands up for women against a religion which when followed as Islamists do, is misognistic. This ( from Reclusive Leftist) is a good discussion of that aspect.

However, I personally agree with what she said. I am a member of a religious minority and I want the country I live in to protect me from other religious groups. I am a woman and I want my country to protect me from groups and individuals that seek to curtail my freedom as a tenet of their religious faiths. I am afraid of Islamists and I have every right to be so, as I pass through gates guarded by policemen with machine guns on a daily basis and know that in India, people just like myself were sought out by Islamists, to be murdered, for no other reason than their religion or their visiting of a place associated with my religion.

When I said that, I was attacked personally for my beliefs. No one explained why my fear was wrong, but I was told that I was racist (it's tough to not have a word for fear of religious extremism or one for hatred of a specific religion or cult, I know– that's why Jew haters are called antisemites although they really only hate Jews). Someone who I had been corresponding with for years told me that she was "afraid of me".

Here we see the concept of the Big Lie. Here are some specific words of Hitler from Mein Kampf, where the phrase originally arose (and was used specifically against Jews) and was then used by Göbbels:

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Was my acquaintance afraid of me? No. We go to conventions together– does she feel in any danger from me? No. Does she feel that any of my actions will damage anyone's freedom or speak negatively against a single individual? No. But when I say that I am afraid, she says that she fears me. Now the emphasis seems to show that my saying that I am afraid (we won't discuss lack of action) has engendered a sense of danger in her.

That's the same type of lie where Sarah Palin says that when the world looks at her "attack map" with gun sights and says it helped to create an atmosphere of rancor and acceptance of violence, that: it's a blood libel. Does she even understand the Jew hating context of that phrase? This type of appropriation is often part of the big lie, as when the above blogger takes my fear for her own and dismissed mine in its entirety.

Lastly is the reason for my New Year's post, after which I determined to continue to rid my environment of people who think that attack is a replacement (or synonym) for debate or discussion. Another blogger had posted a list of posts that had the most viewers this year and one was a discussion of the way some parents fear allowing their children to go to school alone, in relation to commuting. I mentioned that the same morning I had heard, on the BBC, the statistic that 2000 children in the US go missing every day.

The same expat blogger from my first example told me I was wrong. Now, he didn't say the BBC was wrong, so the implication was that I lied. In a few seconds, I looked up and supplied the link from the interview where the pertinent information can be seen: "An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing each year – more than 2,000 children every day." This information is sourced from the FBI and the Department of Justice.

But the blogger told me that I was wrong, that statistics lie, that my unwarranted fears and these lies were responsible for the atmosphere of fear in which people live. He also said that the organization lied and made up a bunch of statistics to prove that the numbers were not possible.

Here we see misdirection: he was shown the source for what he called a lie, and now has no direct response (because he won't apologize). Another commenter posted that many of these missing children would have been taken by parents: absolutely. With a little Google-fu one can discover within moments (also from the FBI and DOJ) that many kidnappings are guardian or non-custodial parent(although that certainly does not make them less tragic to the child or parent/guardian, although one could at least hope that in those cases the children were not being harmed). This same magic of research comes up with 7000 children "permanently" disappearing a year: still quite a lot, but not 800,000. Not pertinent to my original comment of having heard an interview, but would have been useful if mentioned later by someone commenting.

I do look forward to seeing the FBI and the Department of Justice change their statistics in response to the blogger's off the cuff analysis.

I didn't respond, because responding to individuals who attack in this unreasoning way leads one to be attacked by them and their friends but as I understand (and do not know because I don't read this person's blog) he has discussed this at length on his blog and once again attached a link to mine: I see this because individuals I don't know are coming to my blog through his. That's what stats view allows. These individuals are attacking and I have moved to comments moderation as a result.

And that's what silencing is about. (Or as wikipedia calls it, suppression of dissent.)

What's been happening in the US is remendous stridency and usage of terms of violence and hunting terminology from the Right, but whenever anyone mentions this atmosphere, the right responds that the left does it as well.

Well, they really don't. But many normal individuals just can't deal with the violent rhetoric and in your face behavior of the new normalized wacky Right, and we give up.

Here's a look at the Insurrectionism Timeline put together by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (which one would have hoped was non-partisan, even if it isn't to the wackos).

That's sad and that's dangerous.

From many to few.

These are the bags of shredded documents that are the result of finally putting together our '09 taxes: that extension deadline is coming right up (US, that is. Germany is not due on regular filing until the end of the year).
It's amazing how many documents can be shredded into two bags. I took the opportunity to discard as many other documents as possible while I was looing through the pertinent folders.
Another expat assures me that this can go in the paper recycling (after being dumped out of the plastic, of course) but I'm afraid that the neighbors will not appreciate it: it seems that the only recycling that goes in those bins is newspaper.
Do other people need to deal with this stuff? It seems that my in-laws have no paperwork issues at all. As I finish up going through the medical claims alone(which I know that my in-laws don't need to deal with), I have 218 lines in a spreadsheet with back up documentation, about 20% of which is resubmissions because the company in question likes to deem the paperwork "illegible".

American customer service, as accessed abroad. aka Kenneth Cole is great.

I spent the weekend celebrating a birthday by going to DiscWorldCon for a weekend away with my husband. It's a celebration of Pterry Pratchett and his world and I may talk about it later.

But I started with a lovely conversation with Kenneth Cole customer service. As I have been decluttering, one of the first targets is damaged or broken items. This suitcase had a broken wheel. We had thought about taking it back with us to the US this summer to have it repaired, but the thought of dragging it along without a wheel, while traveling en famille, was insupportable (ah, Steampunk, it's catching).

So, I called their customer service. Who gave me the number for their warranty service for luggage (as opposed to The Luggage). When I called the number, a got a voice-mail telling me for a faster response I could use e-mail, as the person in charge would not be available.
I sent an e-mail and got back an out of office reply. I also said that I did not have a receipt and could only make a guess as to the store I got it in (although I knew the approximate time period).
Within 5 minutes the person whose e-mail it was got back in touch with me and asked for a specific piece of information that was attached to the suitcase.

I sent that and reminded her that (as per my address), I was out of country and wouldn't want to return the suitcase for warranty work until next back in the US: I was calling only to see what I would need to do and whether there was a possibilty of having it repaired in Europe rather than in the midwest.

She waived the requirement and said that she would get a replacement suitcase right out. Wow.

That is just amazing. I had thought the cost of shipping and repair would be too great and that I would just discard the suitcase and feel bad.

Instead I had several great experiences with people who knew exactly how to direct me and were generally chatty and friendly while looking up information that I required, someone who helped me out while not even at work, and who actually took my personal circumstances into consideration.

It was great and in celebration, while on the way to shop so that my (unbelievably great) in-laws could have food for the weekend, I stopped off at the recycling Hof and T2 and I recycled it:).

Heading Out

I haven't started packing yet, but I'm heading out in the morning for the US. It's a quick trip, without the kids and husband, and I am both looking forward to it and dreading it.

Looking forward to it because:

• No husband and kids:). That translates into an easy trip, reading books, watching movies, sleeping.
• I'll be visiting my parents, seeing my Dad just shortly after his 80th, seeing at least one brother and his family: I miss them.
• I'll be stopping at the BEA--- and what could be better than ARCs for the forthcoming year's publishing schedule, meeting authors and listening to interesting panels?
• I'm going over with a half empty suitcase and another within it and I expect I'll fill them up with Carters' clothes, Stride-Rite shoes,and Target t-shirts for myself (the husband has already got a few pairs of Zappos ordered shoes waiting). Another blogger recently found and posted how to get Splenda in Germany, so I'll be looking to bring back Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee and CrystaLite (I'm stocked on molasses and baking soda right now and make my own vanilla extract). The books will be shipped back at M-bag rates (half the cost of regular shipping) and I may ship a box or two of lighter things over as well, but I expect that I will fill that second suitcase. At least I don't need to bring any books with me because I'll be using the Kindle (300+ books last I looked, not all those I want to read:)), bringing magazines that I'll recycle on the way, and a book or two as presents that won't make their way back here.

Dreading it:

1. Because I will miss the kids. The German not so much, because I'm used to him being gone all week.And because I expect he will call, but that I will frequently miss the kids becuase of the time difference and cell phone blanks in NYC.
   
2. And because, due to following the cheapest ticket, I will be flying out of Newark, rather than JFK. It requires that I find a shuttle bus that I have never been on before, after making my way by train to NYC from visiting friends upstate after the Expo, while dragging two suitcases and a carry-on, alone. Yich. I'll be allotting myself plenty of time to discover that there are no handicapped (that is, luggage dragging) accessible ways from one public transport area to another. Ah well. It's something that I have become acutely aware of as a parent and now as a non-business traveler (never cared much when I was only carrying a carry-on!).
   

It doesn't end! Happiness keeps coming!

First, I get this in my inbox from President Obama, at 10:27 am ET:

G --

It has now been well over a year since the near collapse of our entire financial system that cost the nation more than 8 million jobs. To this day, hard-working families struggle to make ends meet.

We've made strides -- businesses are starting to hire, Americans are finding jobs, and neighbors who had given up looking are returning to the job market with new hope. But the flaws in our financial system that led to this crisis remain unresolved.

Wall Street titans still recklessly speculate with borrowed money. Big banks and credit card companies stack the deck to earn millions while far too many middle-class families, who have done everything right, can barely pay their bills or save for a better future.

We cannot delay action any longer. It is time to hold the big banks accountable to the people they serve, establish the strongest consumer protections in our nation's history -- and ensure that taxpayers will never again be forced to bail out big banks because they are "too big to fail."

That is what Wall Street reform will achieve, why I am so committed to making it happen, and why I'm asking for your help today.

Please stand with me to show your support for Wall Street reform.

We know that without enforceable, commonsense rules to check abuse and protect families, markets are not truly free. Wall Street reform will foster a strong and vibrant financial sector so that businesses can get loans; families can afford mortgages; entrepreneurs can find the capital to start a new company, sell a new product, or offer a new service.

Consumer financial protections are currently spread across seven different government agencies. Wall Street reform will create one single Consumer Financial Protection Agency -- tasked with preventing predatory practices and making sure you get the clear information, not fine print, needed to avoid ballooning mortgage payments or credit card rate hikes.

Reform will provide crucial new oversight, give shareholders a say on salaries and bonuses, and create new tools to break up failing financial firms so that taxpayers aren't forced into another unfair bailout. And reform will keep our economy secure by ensuring that no single firm can bring down the whole financial system.

With so much at stake, it is not surprising that allies of the big banks and Wall Street lenders have already launched a multi-million-dollar ad campaign to fight these changes. Arm-twisting lobbyists are already storming Capitol Hill, seeking to undermine the strong bipartisan foundation of reform with loopholes and exemptions for the most egregious abusers of consumers.

I won't accept anything short of the full protection that our citizens deserve and our economy needs. It's a fight worth having, and it is a fight we can win -- if we stand up and speak out together.

So I'm asking you to join me, starting today, by adding your name as a strong supporter of Wall Street reform:

http://my.barackobama.com/StandForWallStreetReform

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

(edit: I have changed the link from my personal, my.obama.com, to the posting that links to the President's address on the issue. I hope that anonymized it sufficiently:)  And the speech is interesting in itself, for those who follow it out).

immediately followed at 10:39 am ET by:

US accuses Goldman Sachs of Fraud

Can my day get any better? (Politically, economically and socially, in a realistic way, that is.)

Every day brings a new joy.

Who could be against this?

Officials said Obama had been moved by the story of a lesbian couple in Florida, Janice Langbehn and Lisa Pond, who were kept apart when Pond collapsed of a cerebral aneurysm in February 2007, dying hours later at a hospital without her partner and children by her side. 

Apparently, the law. It was a heartless act and any decent person who read this story wept for all the people involved. 

One more victory for decency, true decency, in the USA.

This makes me happy part 2

This.

Exploring space is a dream that I had given up on. Perhaps my dreams will come true for my children, or grand-children.

This makes me so happy...

One of the many things that I hoped for when I voted for our President:

The United States Breastfeeding Committee (USBC) applauds the passage of the health care reform package, in particular, the workplace breastfeeding support provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The provision states that employers shall provide reasonable, unpaid break time and a private, non-bathroom place for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for one year after the child's birth. Employers with less than 50 employees are not subject to the requirement if it would cause "undue hardship."

This was the primary reason that I did not return to my last job: after discussing what would happen when I returned before I went on maternity leave, my workplace told me, two weeks before my scheduled return, that my "private place" would be the bathroom on my floor. They were aware what issues I had had with breastfeeding my first and how dedicated I was to being able to breastfeed my second.

So I did not return to work and we started looking for a way to live on one income while being a two income family. 

Hello, Germany!

When we think about when or whether we will return to the USA, one of the most important factors has been health care. I was laid off after 9/11 and luckily COBRA covered me until I found a new job, as the German and I were not yet married. I never want to be in a place again where the loss of a job could leave me or my family without healthcare. Our lives are too important to take that risk.

Thank heavens it looks like this will not be an issue in the future.

It's going to happen.

Even though women have been stabbed in the back. America will have the first step to a decent and humanitarian health care system. 32,000,000 more Americans covered. 23,000,000 living in the US uncovered, of whom 1/3 will be illegal, leaving, if my math is correct, 14,000,000+ citizens uncovered. A good start.

Remembering...

I spent today in class and dropped off and picked up the children without a single person seeming to remember the date.

It took me quite a while to get over my PTSD after 9/11, not helped by the waves of layoffs at PwC that caught me in their third wave.

When I think about it, I still feel the emotions roll over me in waves. Yet I lost no one personally, only friends of friends, a person met in training, people from my town and from my neighborhoods, co-workers a division removed. I commuted through there, worked there, had friends and loved ones who have also done both. The smell permeated my neighborhood for months. The loss is personal and universal and my remembrance is both visceral and involuntary.

I remember September 11, 2001.

Summer Plans...

It's been a little harder making summer plans than I thought it would be.

First, the German keeps working Fridays. I thought I signed on to be a single parent Monday through Thursday and having him show up on Friday after the girls are in bed is breaking our bargain. The girls are pretty good, kita is wonderful and we are all trying, but it seems that I am just starting to recover from the flu/bronchitis/pneumonia that started mid-April and felt like it nearly killed me. I am still easily exhausted and I am pretty certain that what I had was originally an undiagnosed and untreated H1N1. After all, I started the entire process of my illness with IV antibiotics and things just went down from there. Clearly should have attacked with the Tamiflu. So by the time the weekend is here I am too tired to do anything and then I feel bad about not doing things. And the German keeps scheduling Friday off, then changing his flights and working.

I hope that next week mellows out, as day camp starts for the girls and it's just walking distance. I will visit a museum next week, I swear!

In bigger news, it took me three days of intense pain (and melting ear drums) to book our trips to the US. We had talked about going for some weeks ever since we decided to up our stay here for at least another two years. I worry about the fact that my children are forgetting Nana and Grandpa, particularly Thing2. Since they just won't get on a schedule to Skype, the kids are obviously going to have troubles remembering them. After all, Thing2 has lived in Germany longer than she lived in the US at this point.

But booking the tickets was a lesson in Catch-22 and circular logic. See, I wanted to book the girls' tickets with (you can't believe how much) money and our tickets with frequent flier miles (half a gift from the parents). But one cannot book children's tickets over the internet without purchasing an adult ticket at the same time. I couldn't book my ticket without knowing the children's tickets because, you know, it might be a bit awkward if 1. I couldn't get them seats on the same flight(s) or 2. if the only way to get them such tickets would be to pay so much for their tickets that I could go ahead and pay for all 4 of us for the sme price.
The second option came up three times with AirFrance and KLM. I spent hours on the phone with agents in the US and Canada (because with our rate plan it was way cheaper than speaking to people here in Germany, which I did just long enough to find them unhelpful at .14 Eurocents/minute). I'm not kidding: three days of spending hours on the phone after the girls were in bed, my brain melting and sweat pouring down my jaw from my melting ear. I got transferred, told to speak to other groups or airlines, repeatedly told to do things that were not doable, apologized to for lack of technical capacity, lied to, put on hold, transferred, dropped, lied to, told how I could do something (on the basis of which I transferred miles and wound up not being able to do that thing and freaking out), was multiply offered tix for the girls that were the same price as the schedule I'd found on momondo or other sites for the girls plus an adult... you just can't believe how horrible the experience was.
Then I spoke to someone at NWA. She was like an angel from heaven. She was able to find me a reasonable flight for the kids (versus the one I had on hold for the price of 3 of us). She was able to book it for me with the note that I had another FF flight with the required adult. She was able to seat the kids with a space next to them that I could fill in. She was able to book it as a KLM flight so that they would stop f***ing with me.
When I went back to KLM and asked them to re-book my FF flight to match the confirm number of the childrens' flights, the call center woman said,"No, it's not possible."

I lost my temper. After I explained how it was possible, the lady was actually to change my reservation to math the childrens' so that we are actually travelling together.

This process should have been easy. It was made extremely difficult and even with my saving angel of NorthWestAir I was required to pay the "over the phone" booking extra fees for the children, which really wasn't fair as it was their own systems which made it impossible to do what I would have preferred: booking on-line.

I haven't booked the husband's ticket yet: that's waiting for the transfer of yet more miles to allow me to do that. Transferring the miles from my AmEx account was problematic because we ditzed out this past month:our AmEx cards had expired and they had a no forward on the replacements. We hadn't noticed because there really isn't a lot of use for credit cards in Germany. But one can't transfer miles without a current AmEx card. So last month we had ordered new cards. They had arrived when the groseltern were taking care of the children and I had them put away where they would be safe.

I can't remember where that place is. Luckily, AmericanExpress' Mileage Rewards has a US based customer service model, and with some discussion theyw ere able to transfer the miles for me. So sometime tonight I should book those flights for him. He will be staying with us for two weeks, with my parents, and then I will be staying on another week.

With us staying here for who knows how long, we thought it was important that they know my parents, my brothers, their cousins. The trip is hideous and I'll be coming back alone with them, which is a horror I wish not to contemplate, but we think it's necessary. I'm not sure we will be able to afford the time or expense next year so I hope we can get some enjoyment this year with everyone.

I'm not looking forward to the 18+ hours travel time, though.