wedding jiggles

thank you, every wedding website ever ever ever (except offbeatbride.com) for making me feel like i am supposed to drop to a 12 BMI for my wedding.

autumn air

i don't leave the apartment often because i am a homebody. there, i said it. even though we are surrounded by restaurants and bars and cafés, a ten-minute bike ride away from the city center (and zara, perhaps i should mention #sillyamerican), like 100 miles from berlin, etc cetera and such, i rarely leave our apartment.

it must be stated that i have been called the laziest person in the world by most of my closest and some of my further friends.

so imagine bastian's (and my) surprise when i took the initiative to buy cat litter yesterday. that's all. cat litter. if i have to do anything job-related (work, pick up materials, the vacations spent at the ausländerbehörde) i'm out the door, no hesitation. but when it comes to things that can wait (i.e. everything else), oh well.

i mean, today i have to go buy some butter. and drano. which, i might add, i was really surprised exists in germany. for me, finding products in germany is this huge process.

1. need for product arises
2. automatic thought-of solution
3. nearly simultaneous realization that i can't just pop down to target and buy some, ffs.
4. ffs.
5. ask (whine?) bastian if he knows what i'm talking about.
6. he does.
7. does he know where we would buy it?
8. but we could just use _____________, he says.
9. i don't want to use _____________, i say.
10. oh, he says.
11. hm, he adds.
12. he turns back to matlab.
13. what am i supposed to do, i ask.
14. we can just use ______________. it'll work fine, he says. his eyebrows are raised.
15. but maybe it doesn't work as well, i say.
16. why wouldn't it work as well?

and somewhere around step 26, bastian buys it and i read the label, all suspicious and tell him a million times about the american equivalent while we're using it and maybe that's the end.

but one day i was all, "our sink water goes down really slowly."
and he was all, "ok, i'll pick up some drano tomorrow."

and that was all.


so right, autumn air, right? it's cooler and i had quite a nice walk to rossman to get some bio katzenstreu! yes! and i got some nail files and i stopped in the euro shop because you never know? and there i got a lint roller. with a cover! for a euro! can't beat that with a stick.

and sometime before this, i cleaned the bathroom because life is just so much better with a clean bathroom.

i also hung out with the cat and she's been doing this quite a lot. perhaps in the last couple days she's just been very insecure about the cleanliness of her underside, which i should reassure her about, but i enjoy watching her contort too much. 

also: i wore this shirt when bastian and i went to hebeda's across the street for a couple beers. it was the first time we'd been out in months because we're dinosaurs.* and he was all, "i didn't know that shirt had hearts on it! at first i thought it was just dots. now i understand why you had to buy it." 

and i was all, yes! yes! 

*last night we watched a couple documentaries, one from national geographic called "when crocs ate dinosaurs" it was was pretty terrifying. then we watched "fire ants: texas border massacre" and eeesh. 

mutual forgetfulness

me: do you know what we accomplished yesterday?
bastian: ...no... what?
me: being together for a year and a half!
cue hysterical hugging.

"us" and "them"

this comes up on a google image search of "germans" a lot quicker than you'd think.

as covered in this article, a social network asserts that americans are the coolest in the world--according to a poll of 15,000 people. and number 1 is americans--i immediate looked up badoo because i assumed it was american-made, owned, headquartered, something, but it's not.

anyway, here is another article that is in german, but it's quite funny because they say how germany has the reputation of having hard-working people and amazing engineers and designers, which is just not cool. however and but, the article says, VW beetles! berlin! (time's article on berlin being europe's capital of cool) levi's jeans! (levi-strauss was born in bavaria... i thought it was a stretch too.) plus! recycling!

this masterpiece of tolerance has a lot of international commenters who are apparently very upset that american made number 1, and are pointing out the death and destruction america causes all the time because of the wars that american citizens pressure congress into because we have nothing better to do. also, we don't recycle and we're fat! fat! can you believe that and they got number one?!!!11

i'm just as frightened about my patriotism as the next american outside the border, but sometimes comments make me angry, which i hate because who cares? if i met these people in a bar we'd probably have a beer and not care.

one briton says the article was "written by a yank i presume." you're still calling us yankees? GET OVER IT.

see, that is the kind of thing i think.

but if you put, we'll say, six native speakers of english in a bar, two are from britain and another two are from australia and one from the US and one from canada, it gets loud, drunk, and hysterical.

i mean not always but sometimes.

and it turns into a discussion of "us" and "them."

"did you ever notice they take their dogs everywhere?"
"yeah, but we have people like that in australia, you know."
"oh, ok."
"but what about rudeness?"
"you think people are rude?"
"not outright, no, just a little, you know..."
"standoffish?"
"exactly, right."
"it's your turn."
"oh, sorry, right. which letter are we one?"
"wait a second. have you guys ever played a game like this before? with germans?"
"...no"
"no."
"as if that would happen."
"that's what i love about us! cheers!"

and a cacophony of clinked glasses and spilled beer rounds off the night.

free date ftw

we went to the hygiene museum yesterday to check out the images of the mind exhibit (free on fridays after 3p, fyi dresdners). after lamenting we didn't have much time to also see the on your marks exhibit, we left at closing time (i will never understand why museums close at 6p).

here's a video we saw at the sports exhibit though, "Monty Python Philosophy Football"--

we went to the altmarkt-galerie afterwards, which we tend to avoid, but in this case we needed some cat food. we also stopped in saturn to browse vacuum cleaners. and, cut to lust. 

i'm baking a cake a week nowadays and our hand mixer has served every purpose i've ever had.... BUT...

autumn

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. -George Elliot


autumn is no time to be in the city. 

dance dance dance

we found a boxful (8) of ball mason jars, clear and blue mixed, at a garage sale in ohio (oh i how i miss thee) and i negotiated the price down. hooray wedding vases/canning jars/dry goods and odds-and-ends storage! 

while i'm stressing out about etiquette and the guest list and the budget, bastian is doing this on his breaks from his taking-over-the-world-with-engineering thesis work (and apparently getting his colleagues to join the wedding planning): 

we’re having a conversation about the best mathematical model to predict the amount of food eaten at a wedding. we’re not sure if we should use a stochastic or analytic model.

is your bed made? is your sweater on?

the only time i ever make a bed is if:
1. someone is coming over and i need to make the room look neater
2. if i've spent the night at someone's house

and i suppose that exhausts my bed-making situations.