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Fasching is Past

Posted on February 19th, 2010 by Retired-Ed in Daily Life

A sure sign that winter is on the wane is when Fasching season finishes. This past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday. That means that the few days before were wild here in Europe (and also in New Orleans). Yes, it was Fasching…or Mardi Gras…or Fat Tuesday…or Carnevale…or Carnival…or whatever you call it. There were Fasching parades throughout Europe. Many of my former colleagues went to Venice for Carnevale. By the way, my misspent time in high school Latin class tells me that “Carnevale” means “goodbye to meat”. That harkens back, of course, to a time when the Christian faithful would eschew meat for Lent. I have given up creme de menthe sundaes. Naturally, as a diabetic, I never eat them, but it sounds good.

I celebrated the big day on Tuesday by going to the Fasching parade in Schweinfurt. It can’t compare to most of the other cities around. A friend and her husband went to Croatia, and she told me that the parade in whatever city she was visiting lasted 4 hours! Mine lasted 45 minutes. What can I say? Anyway, I took some pictures which I will share now.

The citizens turned out in small droves

But things got a little “buggy” even before it started

We had floats with elves…

and drunks

and pretty girls…

horses…

people with “the clap”

musicians…

even John Deere made an appearance…

…pulling a wacky float (scrap metal press)

my little village had a float

more pretty girls…

more drunks…

some illegal immigrants…

but when all was said and done…

Of course, there was much more, but enough is enough. I’ve bored you with enough pictures to last for a while. And besides, I need to get this published so I can go over to the Queen’s computer and begin downloading her tv show  from iTunes.

Retired-Ed

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Snow…an Explanation…Snow…a Proposal

Posted on February 14th, 2010 by Retired-Ed in Travel, politics

It’s still snowing in my little Dorf here in Germany. Not to imply that our problems can even begin to approach what the mid-Atlantic states are experiencing in the US. However, we may be better equipped to handle the problem here, because we’re used to snow. Our communities have snow plows! Sometimes they even have salt to spread on the roads, but this year’s problems with lack of salt seems to be a new phenomenon. I have already shoveled once this morning around 0700, and it’s now 1000 and I need to shovel again. I’m not even bothering with trying to clear out a path for my car. My beloved BMW may have given up the ghost. While driving on the Autobahn yesterday, some young lady (around 2o, I would guess) decided that she wanted to pass the truck in front of her. Never mind that I was already passing both of the vehicles at around 90 mph. She was driving a Smart Car, but that didn’t make her smart. She didn’t even know I  was there, and she pulled out right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, skidded, and miraculously avoided a collision. Don’t ask me how. I flashed my lights a few times at her, but she seemed oblivious. She’s an obliviot, to borrow a word from one of my favorite bloggers, Randy Cassingham. So, there was no damage to either vehicle. Or so I thought. Immediately, my car began to vibrate. I thought that maybe I had lost a weight from one of the tires, and the wheel was out of balance. I especially thought that when the vibration stopped at certain speeds. But alas! The vibration is coming from the engine. I’m hoping that it’s something as simple as a bad spark plug, but how would that be caused by a quick braking on the Autobahn? I’ll take it to the shop on Monday, unless Monday turns out to be a holiday (it’s Rosenmontag and some communities declare it to be a holiday). Keep your fingers crossed for me.

I have been absent from the blogosphere lately. I’ve still been here, but my computer has been busy. I have been getting a little nervous about the possibility of a hard drive crash or some other malady that might affect my computer. So I decided to try Carbonite, the online backup system. It will back up your most valuable files such as photos, documents, emails, and music for a flat rate of $55 per year. I figured that it was money well spent for the peace of mind. You get a 15 day free trial when you sign up. During the trial, the program will back up your files….all except for your music. That took 8 days! After I decided to purchase the subscription, the program began to back up my music files. I had no idea that I had so much music on my computer! That took 10 days. Subsequent backups will only take a few minutes. I’m satisfied with the program. If you think that you’d be interested, please contact me and I’ll send you a referral. The cost is the same, but I will get some extra months on my subscription for the referral. Thanks.

OK, so that explains where I have been. With the backup in progress, all of my other online activities were degraded. We already have a very slow DSL connection here. It seems that Germany has fast and half-fast DSL connections. You’re stuck with whatever lines your community has. My village has half-fast DSL. Yes, I know how that word sounds, and the pun is definitely intentional. I even had to pause my backups so that the Queen could download her TV shows from iTunes. But I seem to be back in business now.

It appears that our nation’s capital (I’m American, so I speak of Washington, DC) has been paralyzed by several feet of snow. Now, not to make light of their situation, but I can think of 535 morons on Capitol Hill that have been paralyzed for a long time. And that doesn’t even include the White House. No, that’s not a political statement; there are fools in every administration. However, I’m still waiting for Rahm Emanuel (or someone even higher) to blame the snowfall on Bush. But I digress.

In a city that is totally unprepared for snow, the government was closed for 4 days last week. Even a half inch of the white stuff seems to trigger government closures. What are they doing with over 2 feet of snow? Wow! Not ready for all of that. So I have a proposal, as radical as it seems. This is actually only partly tongue-in-cheek. It’s time to think about moving our capital to someplace that can cope. Washington has become a political cesspool, and moving outside the Beltway…WAY outside the Beltway…may be the solution. Maybe we could leave the lobbyists, the political hacks, the “consultants”, the morons, and those in the federal workforce who are more interested in a paycheck instead of public service (and there are a few of these people!) behind.

Where to go? I have two cities in mind, but I dismiss one of them for obvious reasons. My first thought was Chicago. Now they know snow! But Chicago also knows all about corrupt politics. The city that gave us Anton Cermak, Rod Blagojevich, Richard J. Daley, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emanuel, and, yes, our current president, probably would not be the ideal place to re-plant the nation’s government. Anyway, Congress would be divided between Cubs fans and White Sox fans, and they’d never get any work done.

My suggestion is Minneapolis. It’s a wonderful city that can cope with the snow, and can probably even cope with the snow job that politics would produce. It has an international airport and also the Mall of America. It has a major league baseball team and an NFL football team. It even has Bret Favre, who is old enough to remember when the Washington Monument was first built. Oh, it would be expensive. New buildings would have to be constructed, but think of the jobs that that project would generate. Sven and Oly would not have any trouble finding construction work. And Garrison Keillor would find plenty to talk about on his radio show “A Prairie Home Companion”. It’s on Public Radio, which would probably send the Republicans into a tizzy, but he’s funny. Why, Minneapolis even has skyways that allow one to walk from building to building about about the 3rd story level (if I remember correctly) to avoid having to slosh through the snow at street level.

And it is used to snow jobs. The city ignores them. An ideal location, eh?

Retired-Ed

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Super Bowl Sunday….So What?!

Posted on February 7th, 2010 by Retired-Ed in History

I guess I am a heretic. As a red-blooded American male, I should be getting excited about the Super Bowl. I just can’t. Don’t get me wrong; I used to love NFL football. I remember sitting in the basement of my fraternity house watching Super Bowl I. Of course, it wasn’t called the “Super Bowl” back then. It was the NFL-AFL Championship Game. As a rabid Green Bay Packer fan, I delighted in watching the Pack down the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10. The old, reliable quarterback Bart Starr broke the game open with a touchdown pass to Max McGee. Max, a bachelor and man about town, was rumored to be nursing a hangover at game time, but he came through in the clutch. I can remember some great games prior to that. About 8 or 9 years earlier, I remember sitting in my grandparents’ living room and watching the Baltimore Colts play the New York Giants in a championship game in the snow. I think that the Colts won that one under Johnny Unitas. Maybe the Colts will win today (or tomorrow for us here in Europe) under Peyton Manning.

But what happened to me? How come I don’t care any more? Well, I can’t seem to get this idea out of my head: It’s just a football game, not an event of apocalyptic proportion. That Super Bowl I was, believe it or not, played during the daytime! Oh heresy! Although, I can’t remember exactly, but I think that the pre-game show lasted about an hour. And there was no  2-week lead up to hype the game. Yeah, that’s what is my problem. There’s just too much hype. It’s all about money. The owners and the networks want to milk it for all it’s worth. As I recall, the cost of a 60-second commercial in the first game was $100,000 or thereabouts. What is it today? Several million for a 30-second spot? Yes, times have changed.

I can remember watching some memorable games. In 1968, I was watching a game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders. NBC was covering the game (sorry, Drew) and they screwed up royally. With only 65 seconds left in the game, NBC (yes the same NBC that caused the Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien situation) cut away to air the movie “Heidi”. When the show stopped, NY was ahead 32 to 29. But then Oakland scored 2 touchdowns in 9 seconds to win 43-32. To add insult to injury, NBC had a trailer scrawl across the screen with the final score. I think that the switchboard at NBC blew a fuse that night!

One day I watched a game between the Chicago Bears and the Detroit Lions. One Lion player who was not really involved in the play ended up lying on the field. We watched in horror as the trainers came out on the field (as they frequently do) but then began to do CPR on the player. Obviously, something was very wrong. In the end, we all watched a football player die on national television. Ever since that game, the NFL has had paramedics and trauma equipment at the games.

I also remember Tom Dempsey, a player who was born with a deformed foot. He only had half of a foot, and that was the one that he kicked with. In 1970, he kicked a field goal of 63 yards, which at the time was an NFL record. For all I know, it may still be the record. Oh, you should have heard the complaints that he was “cheating” because he didn’t kick with a full foot.

So, you can see that I used to enjoy the games, but I have really lost interest. Maybe it’s because I have lived overseas for the past 36 years. The time difference makes it very difficult to watch games live. For example, the big game today will not start until 12:05 Monday morning for us. I will not stay up. But many of my fellow Yanks over here will. In fact, I will not be surprised if the Army has a late start tomorrow. They might schedule a “training holiday” for Monday morning. We’ll see. In the past, some of our schools had a late start or even had a day off for students while the teachers attended an “in service”. OMG! It isn’t a national holiday, is it?

Should I record the game? Maybe I should, just in case someone in The Who (halftime entertainment) has a heart attack. Those guys are older than I am, or at least they ought to be. They’ve been around since Peyton Manning’s daddy was a college quarterback at Ole Miss, but that’s another story.

So what’s the good news? Hey, it’s February, and spring training is just around the corner. Pitchers and catchers will report in just a few days. The rest of the teams will be right behind them. Opening Day is less than 2 months away. Can’t wait for baseball to start!

Retired-Ed

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Visits from Vermin

Posted on February 2nd, 2010 by Retired-Ed in Daily Life

OK folks, this one will be a little gross. I was prompted to write this after reading a post from a fellow blogger, Holly Burns. Holly does an absolutely magnificent job  with her blog “Nothing but Bonfires”. She had a recent post about some stories that her mother had told her about some unfortunate happenings in their lives in various countries where they have lived. Check out her writing. I am impressed, but I digress. She told a story about a gigantic cockroach that attacked her mother in Hong Kong. That anecdote prompted my daughter Wendy, who is also a fine writer in her own right, but again I digress, to comment. Wendy wrote about when we lived in a high-rise apartment  building in Seoul, Korea. Our apartment was much like a penthouse overlooking the Han River. As I recall, we had 5 bedrooms and two bathrooms for our family of 4, not including the 6-legged critters that shared our quarters. And there was an occasional 4-legged critter as well.

Wendy wrote of waking up with cockroaches crawling in her bed or on her body. It’s probably a true story, as those cockroaches were everywhere. However, they were smaller than what you’d find in the tropics or sub-tropical climates. But, boy, were they numerous. No matter what I did, we couldn’t get rid of them. When our landlord wanted to raise our rent (even though we had a two-year lease) after one year, I took matters into my own hands, literally.

I bought a bunch of “roach motels”. You remember them and also their commercials on tv, I am sure. “The roaches check in, but they don’t check out.” I placed them in strategic places in the apartment. Then I took just one of them from a bathroom and carried it to the landlord’s manager. I cut open the “motel” to show him the roaches that I had caught in just two days. I counted 72 of them if I remember correctly, and that was just from one room! Nasty place and a nasty landlord too. His comment upon seeing those squirmy insects on this desk was simply, “Ewww!”. I still had to engage an attorney to fight the rent increase. We finally settled out of court for $500. I had to pay him! The cool thing was that the Korea lawyer charged me nothing. I had located him through an American attorney that we knew from our church in Seoul. Because this attorney was a Korean Christian, he was aghast at what was being done to us (or so he said). He said that there would be no fee. My kind of guy! But the landlord was a cockroach with two legs.

Another cockroach story happened when Wendy was just a toddler, about 2 years old, so she wouldn’t have remembered this. We were living on Okinawa at the time, and we had two household pets of the four-legged variety. Two dogs named Bonnie and Clyde (mother and son). I fed them dry dog food normally, which I bought in 50 pound bags. I kept it in the utility room. I used an empty beef stew can to scoop out the food and put it in their dishes. One day, as I was scooping out the food, I felt something crawl up my arm. I thought it was a mouse. I dropped the can and spilled dog food all over the floor. Well, it wasn’t a mouse, but was a cockroach about 4-5 inches long. The damn thing flew at me like a dive bomber. Having studied entomology in school, I am well aware that most insects have wings, including cockroaches, but I really hadn’t seen one fly until then.

Finally,  during one of our first years on Okinawa, back in the late 1970′s, we were undergoing one of our frequent spells of water rationing. If you aren’t familiar with island life, fresh water is often a much-needed commodity. You are surrounded by water, but you can’t drink it, cook with it, or bathe with it. Fresh water comes from the reservoirs which often run dry or nearly so. That precipitates (no pun intended) some form of rationing of fresh water. During this particular stage, our water went off at 8 pm and came back on at 6 am on a daily basis. One morning, the Queen woke up and needed to make a trip to the bathroom. It was about 5 am, and she made the short trek from the bedroom to the john. Then I heard her call me. The Queen wears contact lenses and didn’t have them in at that time; she was wearing her glasses, I suppose, and thought that maybe she wasn’t seeing correctly. When the water went off, you had one flush left in the toilet tank. After that, you had to rely on any water that you might have saved in your bathtub. If you had filled your tub (which totally defeated the purpose of the rationing) you could dip a bucket into the tub and pour the water down the toilet bowl to flush it. Hmm. She saw “something dark” in the bowl and thought that maybe I had left something there and didn’t use the bucket. Nope! After a closer examination, I discovered that the dark thing had four legs and a tail, and was one of the biggest rats I had seen since I worked in a steel mill for US Steel in Gary, Indiana. Those rats were so big, they waddled instead of scurrying.

But what to do? We had already used our one “free” flush. I took the dog in there with me in hopes that she could scare the life out of the rat. Didn’t happen. But wonder of wonders, for some reason the water got turned on early that morning. You’d hear the air being flushed out of the pipes as the water came on. Once the toilet tank filled up, I tried a flush. Bye-bye rat. Good riddance. Can you imagine what could have happened if the Queen hadn’t looked before she sat?

An odd sequel to that story is how far gossip can travel. Of course, we told that story to our friends. One Thanksgiving about 2 years later, we hosted two teachers from my school for Thanksgiving dinner. One of them was a young woman who later got a transfer to Germany. Several years after that, I had been promoted to principal of a small school in Korea, and I had a teacher at the school (a transferee from Germany) who had been friends with the young woman who had been our Thanksgiving guest. We were friends with our new teacher and her husband and socialized frequently. One evening as we were telling our usual lies to each other (teacher stories are like war stories, but not like fairy tales.  Fairy tales start off with “Once upon a time”, whereas war stories and teacher stories start off with “This is no bullshit!”) We were treated to the story of how some woman in Okinawa almost sat on a rat who was swimming in her toilet. Imagine her surprise when the Queen said, “I was that woman!” Always good for a laugh.

That completes my vermin stories, and as I look out the window, I see that it has started to snow again. I am really getting tired of this. Could someone send a few hundred tons of road salt to my village, please?

Retired-Ed

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Hospital Hijinx

Posted on February 1st, 2010 by Retired-Ed in Daily Life

Sometimes the language barrier can provide a few laughs. Such happened to me while a patient at the Leopoldina Krankenhaus in Schweinfurt, Germany. My German is pretty fair, but I speak and understand Hochdeutsch or “High German”, and it is the language that I learned in college. I took two years of German in order to satisfy the foreign language requirement of my BA degree. However, there are just some words and phrases that aren’t taught in school.

For example, on my second night in the hospital, two of the nurses came into my room. One was taking my vital signs. The other had a question for me. I was mystified when she asked me (in German) if I had made a chair. OK, you get it already, don’t you? After several attempts to make me understand, she gave an exasperated look to her colleague and finally said to me, “Shit?”

“Ja,” I responded. That word I definitely understand. I also was able to provide her with the information that she requested, which would be TMI for this blog. (too much information).

I also had a young American roommate. He was a 19-year old GI who had some stomach pains. He was scheduled for a colonoscopy, and I recall the floor doctor explaining to him that he would be sedated for the procedure. When he returned to our room, he was still pretty groggy. After he recovered, he related this story: The doctor performing the procedure explained to him exactly what would take place. In great detail! Now I, being a man just a little over the age of 19, know all about prostate examinations. But a lad of 19 probably hasn’t had the pleasure. Obviously, the doctor decided that since he was already in the area, he might as well check out all of the real estate there. So he told my roomy that after the colonoscopy was finished he would perform a digital examination. Roomy didn’t understand, even though the instructions were in English. Finally, the doctor said, “I’m going to stick my finger up your ass.” Ouch. Roomy did understand that one.

Sometimes I think that our German friends have learned their English by watching American TV. Bad choice. Perhaps the BBC would provide for a more genteel grasp of our mother tongue.

Retired-Ed

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