bad hippie. no soybar.

You know, I do believe that global warming is a serious threat, and that human activity has contributed significantly to it. I do think we should stop being so wasteful of non-renewable energy, of energy in general, really. But this Earth Hour business, it Makes No Sense. What do you do for an hour in the dark? (Heh heh, yeah right, the kids are still awake, you pervert.) Watching TV or using your computer still consumes energy – lots of it. Read a book? With a flashlight (batteries! toxic metals, electronic waste!) or candles? Would that be tallow (byproduct of beef-fat rendering – overgrazing! deforestation!) or paraffin (a byproduct of petroleum refining) candles?

on the road…er, rails. Again. Sort of.

I tend to post late at night these days, and this time tomorrow night I’ll be unpostable, just so you know. We’re going up to Utrecht for a couple days. Disclaimer for any interested parties, this does not indicate that he is or is not definitely planning to take the Utrecht job, he is still waiting for Holloway’s counteroffer and no final decision has been made.

more things I can’t say

Amy sez:

I find it difficult to blog at all when there’s Stuff Going On that I shouldn’t be blogging about.

Oh, amen.

things you can’t say

For nearly a year now, there’s been something going on that I couldn’t put in the blog. It was an off-and-on thing, not a solid year of tension, but still, even when it was all I could think about, I couldn’t put it here. In that year, it’s grown huge, then shrunk down to nothing, then ballooned again. Even now, I can only give you the bare fact itself. Processing it all will be… well, quite a process.

10 Places I’d Take a Tourist in my Hometown

Ganked from the Diva, who was only just the best Secret Pal in the history of Secret Paldom.

So, a day in Port Townsend! Bring some good comfy walking shoes.

the joys of cat ownership

I was awakened this morning, half an hour before my alarm clock was due to ring, by a high-pitched squeaky noise, such as a small animal in pain might make. Like, for example, a mouse being tormented by a cat. Then Lilu came trotting in with a mouse in her mouth and dropped it on my bedroom floor. I, thinking it was already dead or nearly so, said “Lilu get out of here with that thing!” (I’m not very diplomatic when you wake me up suddenly.) She immediately picked it up and trotted out of my bedroom.

game day

We went to a soccer game today! A real one, this one, at the Allianz Arena. The tickets were the Sniglet’s birthday present to DrBob. Hm. Those of you who are familar with (or totally indifferent to) the German football league system can skip down to the next paragraph.

this makes me giggle…

For a week or two now I’ve been hanging around Stuff White People Like. Half the time I’m all, “what? No we don’t,” and the other half is “what? You mean everybody doesn’t?” I particularly enjoy the huffy comments.

Song du jour of the day: Mere Lapsed, by Koit Toome, sung in Estonian. I totally gravitate to music whose lyrics I don’t understand. I am now wondering if that’s a white-people thing, or a language-geek thing, or if it’s just me.

batten down the hatches

At ski-camp, they had a disco. My son danced. In the same room with GIRLS. Also, he has re-discovered his cel phone. We got it when he was 9 or 10, because he was taking the train to Munich by himself to visit his godfather, and we wanted him to be able to reach us if anything went wrong, which he never was because he never took it with him, ever, and there would have been no point in taking it because he didn’t keep it charged. But apparently everybody had cel phones at ski-camp, and now he keeps his with him at all times and is constantly SMS-ing three friends, Tommy, Mikey, and Theresa.

gotta love the Germans

So they have these posts on the road, about 10 meters apart – white with a black stripe, and a little reflectory-bit in the stripe. They’re good for telling how far back you should be from the next car, or where the road is when blowing snow makes it otherwise indistingushable from the surrounding fields.

Today I was walking to work, and this tractor hove out of the fairgrounds parking lot and onto the road out to Jagenau – and stopped. Then it moved on, and ten meters later, stopped again. As I came up even with it, I saw a little rotating brushy-thing sticking out the side, brushing the posts.

Just… wow. Holding up traffic with a giant machine at rush hour to clean the little road-posts. Granted, not a lot of people are rushing to Jagenau, it’s another airport community like OurTown, but still. These people are just so weird.

Song du jour of the day: Dschinghis Khan (the German spelling of Ghengis Khan – they sent this to Eurovision in 1979).