Dead Jeans

I lost my favorite pair of jeans yesterday.

No, I didn’t misplace them, although you wouldn’t be foolish for thinking that, given my proclivity for stashing things under the bed, in boxes, etc.

My favorite pair of jeans was a pair I bought while my buddy Linda and I were shopping in Athens one afternoon. As PhD students, occasionally our need for stress relief would outweigh our need to be frugal, at which point we would head to the nearest clothing store and try on stuff, assuming that we could replace our feelings of inadequacy stemming from dissertation trouble with feelings of inadequacy stemming from poor body image. Anyway.

I happened to find these jeans while on one such shopping trip. They fit me perfectly, didn’t bind at all, didn’t need to be hemmed (a minor miracle in itself!), and were decorated with a subtle embroidery pattern down the left leg.  I loved these jeans! I wore them all the time. They were dressy enough to wear in the classroom, yet comfortable enough for shopping and such.

Unfortunately, even the best jeans won’t stand up to years of constant wear, and the fabric finally wore through in places. So alas, I had to retire these jeans to the trash bin. Sigh.

Tech Tragedy!

We’ve had a major injury here at the Squirrel household. Sheridan’s laptop, typically stored on the keyboard tray of her desk, suffered a nasty fall when said keyboard tray slipped off its tracks and crashed to the floor, taking her laptop with it!

The good news is that it still works, mostly. The bad news is that the screen is cracked, so it’s now a very small desktop — LCD’s are fidgety, and while it’s mostly viewable at the moment I’m afraid if she moves it around too much she will lose the screen entirely. Continue reading

Mind Boggling

Things like this just blow my mind. Two people I knew are dead, and an entire community I’m friends with is rocked to the core. Just when you think you have this crazy thing called life figured out, an incident like this occurs and reminds us all how damn random and fragile it all is.

That’s about all at the moment, really. My mind can’t get itself around much else at the moment.

Eggs

Germans love their eggs. Year-round you can buy brightly-colored hardboiled eggs at the grocery store, in 6- or 10-packs just like regular eggs. Also, most of the “belegte Brötchen” (literally, little breads laid with stuff, or sandwiches) will have slices of hard-boiled egg on them. And I’ve seen a number of pizzas with “Eier” listed as an topping! Continue reading

And there was great rejoicing…

Well, I finally got a call from Vodafone today! Apparently we’ll be getting our DSL hooked up on 30.04.09 – two weeks from the phone call (sigh)…. So I was wrong about “three weeks and a stamp” – apparently it’s going to take more along the line of 6 weeks!

So here I am again, sitting in the ubiquitous Mr. Bleck, plugging away at my Lappy. I have to say, I’m really glad I got the Acer netbook. At about a kilo, it’s a hell of a lot easier to carry around that my MacBook, and I’m not as worried about losing it. Not that I want to lose the Acer, but it was only $300 rather than $2500, and it doesn’t have all my research work on it either! So it wouldn’t be the end of the world if it disappeared. Continue reading

I'm Still Standing…

… and that’s about it, right now. In case you’re wondering, no, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. We moved to a new apartment on March 20, and the only internet access I’ve had since then is at the local coffee shop (Mr. Bleck, it’s called, and that’s about how the coffee tastes. I hate German coffee, but that’s a topic for another post!).

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Fasching!

We’re coming up on the end of Fasching season here in Mittelfranken, otherwise known as Karneval, or as we know it in the South, Mardi Gras. It’s much more of a family celebration here, though, with lots of parades and parties for the kids. It’s been interesting explaining to the students in my English classes that Mardi Gras is NOT a kid’s holiday! Explaining the whole “bead” thing was a source of great amusement. Continue reading