“How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story”

John Scalzi has posted a shareware short story on his blog, Whatever.

It's “How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story” and it's quite funny. Shareware means that one can pay whatever (that word again;-)) one feels it's worth and Scalzi has given Paypal and Amazon links. He's donating half (aftter the cost or funds transfer) to the Lupus Foundation of America, so I felt comfortable overpaying a bit for a short. I thought it was quite amusing and pulpishly charming. Check it out.

It's raining again...

But of course, that's no different from any other day here in Berlin.

Yesterday had masses of dry time between the rain, so I ran over to pick up my tickets for second seder (held at a large hotel near here). I need haggadot (the 'lesson plan' for the Pesach meal) as well because I left mine at the in-laws and some shmera matza, so I'll be running back on Friday morning to pick them up. We had reserved the tickets earlier and I wonder if the reason we needed to pick them up in person was to ensure that we were not psychotics? I always wonder, here in this country where all Jewish organizations and facilities require a permanent police presence.

I am not looking forward to trying to gather all the ingredients that I need to make a seder with my little trolley this evening. particularly because I need to go to first causes, that is, to make the charoseth and horseradish and all the other underpinnings required. I even need to pick up a seder plate and the local Judaica store is wildly overpriced: I may wind updrawing one with crayon and putting it under plastic!

We would have done both seders out, but first night the community seder starts after 21:00 and considering that the children are in bed by 19:30-20:00, that would make it difficult to share it with them! Second night we have a babysitter.

I am, however, looking forward to hearing Thing1 singing the 4 Questions: I already hear her practising and I can't wait.

Today I finally have the introduction session for my gym. I am writing this here so that I will be too embarrassed to blow it off and sit here drinking coffee instead (I assure you I would prefer that). I need to get going: I am more unhealthy than I have been in years and more physically inactive than I have been in decades. Add that to the inability to get fat reduced dairy here and the (forgotten but high) cholesterol levels I had before I left the States means I had best get going on exercise.

(My goodness, I love wikipedia! How did I live without it?)

Upcoming trips...

1. The Keukenhof on the weekend of April 26th. Please let there be a single day without rain!
2. We want to go to Venice mid-May. Diane persuaded me that there are decent air rates out there and she's right. But to get them we will be flying out of Duesseldorf, which is a bit of a pain. I've never been to Venice - anyone have any hotel/hostel/B&B recommendations?
3. Denver in mid-August (without kids, yeah!). I'm going to the World SF convention. I had thought that I would be going alone but the German has decided that for various reasons he would prefer to come along, so this should basically be the honeymoon we didn't have;-).
4. Upstate NY in early October. My niece is Bat Mitzvah and we want to be there.

I need to get a little more European vacationing going here, but it's a start!

Green Point... what is it, exactly?

I keep asking my husband, the German, what Green Point (Grune Punkt) is. He says that I think everything is green point and I guess I do: at least, everything that is metal, plastic, or coated paper. I am borne out in this belief because just about everything that is coated paper (boxes, in particular) has a green point symbol on it.

Last night, we damaged/broke an Ikea light. I think that the cover must be green point, as it is made of paper and metal. I don't know what I should do with the base. The German thinks I am insane and that the whole thing is garbage and that I should stop thinking everything is Green Point. Can anyone give me some guidance here?

Free electronics recycling...how cool!

I was bumming through my Reader and in Scalzi's comments I found the most wondrous site: a free recyling program through Costco for electronics. There is also a trade-in valuation, but really, for me, the most important thing is to find a place which will take items such as old computer monitors and recycle them for free. Thank you Costco, and thank you David for posting this on Whatever. I have paid to recycle these in the past, and also kept them in perma-storage because I could not think what to do with them to keep the toxic heavy metal components out of the waste stream.
This is for the US, but I think it's a wonderful resource to share with everyone, so spread the word!

7 random Things (about me)

Hmm, this is actually a toughie.Thanks, Diane, for making me stop to think about the random bits of my life.

1. I am seriously reading addicted. We are talking, read toothpaste tubes if all else fails,to fall aleep. In the olden days, when I would do a 7 day hike, I would bring at least two books and one had to be re-readable.
2. I used to smoke. I started when I was 19 (I know, no excuse) and said for years that I would quit when I could replace it with another fixation. I quit January 1998, after dating the German (a non-smoker) for two months (we had met in August). He never asked me to, and now I can't believe how tolerant he was: I hate cigarette smoke and stale smell now.
3. The older I grow, the more intolerant I become of intolerance. When I was younger, I might have piped up about egregious bigotry. Now my list of attitudes and (even unconscious) bigotries that I won't let pass has really gotten quite long. Hey, if my opinions are too strong for you, you probably don't want to be my friend anyway. And at least I won't feel complicit.
4. I like science fiction conventions. Not media conventions, science fiction cons. They are a place where like minded readers of science fiction can come together to meet with, talk to, and talk about their favorite genre writers, both living and dead. I generally go to at least one major convention and a minor one every year.
5. I am a cat lover. I have had cats (generally plural) since I was 6. I moved off campus my sophomore year because I felt my parents weren't giving my girls enough love. Right now, I have only 1 boy: his older brothers passed on before we moved here, at 16 and 18. We all still miss them.
6. I am in some things a food snob. I like my coffee and my wine. I drink far more of the former and have had to hurry to drink some of the latter in my cellar as they have over-matured. There really is a difference between types of coffee and Starbucks burns theirs.
7. I love sushi but have eaten it only once since I reached Berlin. With the limited time we have to go out (babysitters are expensive) I haven't wanted to waste time and money on the mediocre sushi that was so expensive when I first tried it. But the Vietnamese, Nepalese and Indian I have tried since getting here has both been good and a welcome relief to my blanded out taste buds.

I'm not certain whom I should tag as memes seem to be running about wildly. I'll try my new blogfriend A at My Wintersong, if she has time. I'd love to hear her 7 random things.

Things I have done today...

• Of course there is an automatic extension for Americans out of the country on tax day (for filing, and we expect a refund, therefore no need to estimate taxes) but how strange that in Germany if one uses a professional preparer (and we will be using the German's firm) the tax filing deadline shifts to the end of December (ie 12 months later than the year one is filing for).
  

• I'm making banana bread.

The German kept on trying to discard my old bananas (the Things and he like only firm bananas) and i kept saying that I would make banana bread, so here I am. It's a James Beard recipe that my mother sent me. I have converted the F to C and then converted again to a convection oven and I had no lemon juice and so squeezed some orange into it so I have to see how it works out. If it's good, I'll make another with the remaining bananas I froze to use and I'll put a picture in. (It was good and I made a second loaf. I'll put the recipe in later, when I figure out how to arrange recipes in this blog.)

• I'm on my second load of wash and have put away an overflowing basket of folded laundry.

On Saturday I ran out to C&A, the only cheap clothing store that I know of around here, and bought the girls masses of inexpensive spring things. Can't beat 2 colorful tops for 3 Euros! in any case, I needed to wash everything thoroughly. Not only because I saw the House episode where the children nearly died after wearing unwashed clothes that had been contaminated with a pesticide, but because I had this experience with Thing1 after letting her wear a new pair of pajamas without washing them, and I never want to go through that again. I also now use Persil for sensitive skin.

• I had asked Jenn if it were too late to see spring bulbs in the Netherlands (something I have been saying I will go to see for years and years) and she said, not yet and recommended the Keukenhof . I need to head west with the family over the 26th for the big Geburtstag bash my sister-in-law is having as she turns 30, so I am now planning to take a day of the long weekend we had planned and head over with the family to the Gardens (only two more open weeks after that, so my timing is j-i-t! thanks, Jenn! I would have been really disappointed if I missed this.

Lee Evans

Isn't he amazingly funny? I ran across Lee Evans (on TV)while we were in London and I laughed until I cried.

Reading online, or on the screen.

I've actually been reading quite a bit recently, although it's not showing up in my "Good Reads" widget. That's because I have been reading e-books, and I'm not quite certain how to put them up. First I read Rollback by Robert Sawyer. Now I have just finished Old Man's War by John Scalzi, which is a reread prior to reading his The Last Colony. As you might guess, I am reading my way through the 2008 Hugo nominees preparatory to the vote this summer. All the nominees (except The Yiddish Policemen's Union) have been released in e-form to the members of Denvention III, the voting body for the 2008 Hugos.

What this has shown me is that I don't really enjoy reading books on screen. It's not that my screen isn't great: I have the option of a 17" or a 13", both with good clarity. It's that I like to walk around with my book, cook with my book, carry my book downstairs while waiting for the girls, have my book in my backpack for public transport or queuing. I have Mobireader for my Palm and I used to use it while commuting, when the laptop and work literature made carrying hardcovers painful, but now, I just want to hold the book in my hands.

In the past, if I like the book after the first 50 pages, I would just order it from Amazon and have it tomorrow morning. But here, where it can take weeks for me to get English language books (if they are even a bit abstruse, or not yet published in the UK) I am just reading online. And it's annoying.

Mmm, rhubarb compote on the stove...

You really know that it's spring when rhubarb and its companion strawberries are on the shelves at the fruit market. I bought a large punnet of strawberries and a large bunch of rhubarb on Monday at the market at the Bahnhof when I went back to Charlottenberg to visit Broken English. It was an interesting market: all Russian. I was tempted to try some of their deli, but my bag was already too heavy (I added kiwis and pears to the above). I had been going to make a strawberry-rhubarb pie (can't quite get my mind around pie crust without shortening yet), but the Things demanded strawberries as their due yesterday and today at snack time, so I wound up throwing together compote.

I love the ease of compote: slice the rhubarb, add whatever strawberries you have left, toss in some lemon juice (I was out so I squeezed an orange in), a little bit of water and start adding sugar (or honey to taste). Yumm.

Oh, and it rained again. Is this the 120th day of some type of precipitation?