7 Random Things

Adam (That Queer Expatriate) has tagged me for a meme... hmm... must have been about a month ago, and I'm just now FINALLY getting to it. Thanks Adam!
I've been thinking about ya man, unfortunately I've just been a bit busy.
I can't even begin to remember all the folks who have been previously tagged, so I'm going to break this meme at this point instead of embarrassing myself by re-tagging them. Besides, I have to rebel SOMEHOW!!

Rules:

1- Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2- Share 7 random or weird things about yourself.
3- Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4- Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

7 Random or Weird Things About Myself:

1. I do goofy things with my fingers while bored. It is not unusual for me to be found reading a book with my fingers twirling through my hair, snapping individual hairs between fingernails, or weirdest of all shoving a small group of hairs under a fingernail.
2. My tongue is a bit long, causing it to extend over my bottom teeth when I'm not paying attention, touching the back of my bottom lip sometimes making it look like I am pouting. (I'm not above the irony of this situation - me being a lesbian and all)
3. Speaking in front of a large group of people doesn't really bother me. This is probably thanks to Dale Carnegie and a few years in radio.
4. I want to go sky diving some day.
5. I was born in a little town in southwestern Utah, but my family moved to Pennsylvania when I was three months old. Since then I've only seen my birth city once.
6. My parents got my first name off of a Cheerios box advertisement for personalized pencils. I guess when you have five kids you end up running out of options, or creativity or something. Turns out that they even ended up pronouncing it incorrectly.
7. I count weird things... things like how many times the phone rings before it is answered, and how many steps there are, and the amount of people getting on and off of the subway train, and on and on...

There ya go... if that stuff isn't weird, I don't know what is.
I think that having almost a month to come up with these things was good. When Adam tagged me with it, I really didn't know what to write... but hey, I think I came up with some good things!

Bad Timing

A kink has been thrown into my preparations for travel to the States for Thanksgiving. Don't get me wrong, I'm still going come hell or high water, but it is looking more and more like an insurmountable task.

The plane leaves on Saturday, and here is the list of things which I must do before the wheels can leave the ground.

• Pack - this wouldn't be so bad, except lots of what I have to pack is still in the dirty laundry or has already been packed away in the summer clothes... who even thought about this trip to Arizona while we were putting away the shorts/t-shirts/sandals?
• Work - yup my boss is a good woman, but likes to wait until the last moment and this means that she's waited until this past week to pile tons of work on me.
• The LIST - there are about 15 things which I plan on "self-importing", for the most part they are picked up every time we hit the shores, but there are some items which should be ordered beforehand, and we've been trying to catch up with that list, hoping that everything gets delivered in time.
  
• Pictures - I had good intentions of making a DVD with a selection of pictures from the past year or so which I could show my family allowing them a little view of my life... but NO! I never got that done.
• Housework - the house is an absolute wreck, and I hate the thought of leaving N. the nasty mess.

Making all of this so much worse is the fact that on Monday I noticed a funny tickle in the back of my throat. By Tuesday it was a full-fledged sore throat moving into my ears, which eventually lead to me leaving work early on Thursday.

Getting sick has put all the things which I MUST do onto the back burner. The laundry is stacked so high that it is now exceeding its confines, and of course my brain isn't thinking as clearly as it should, making the tasks at the office all that harder.

As usual my ears are clogging up horribly which makes me a little fearful about the whole plane experience. At least I'll only be touching down for one change instead of the more normal three changes. Perhaps my scuba training will help me keep the ears open and if the training doesn't help, then I'm thinking the "self-imported" Sudafed will!

Anybody know of any "cure all" for the common cold?

I Wanna Be A Rockstar!!

OK, I admit it... I wanna be a rockstar.
Now that Nickelback's song is getting some airplay on RS2, I'm being treated to it every two hours or so. The lead singer's voice is made for arena rock.

Check out the video below.
There are at least two segments that were filmed right here in Berlin!!
Sweaty Teddy's in there, Billy from ZZ Top, Orange County Choppers, Wayne Gretzky... lots more... very cool.



What's up with the editing of words in songs?
Gotta tell you that is ONE thing I simply do not miss about America.
German radio has enough sense to play the whole song without the edits. It's really nice to hear the WHOLE song without the stupid bleeps. If I were a kid I would be even more interested in what they REALLY said in that bleep, and it would make me notice it even more when I heard the unedited version... duh.

Enjoy the lyrics.

I'm through with standin' in line
To clubs I'll never get in
It's like the bottom of the ninth
And I'm never gonna win
This life hasn't turned out
Quite the way I want it to be
(Tell me what you want)

I want a brand new house
On an episode of Cribs
And a bathroom I can play baseball in
And a king size tub big enough
For ten plus me
(Yea, So what you need)

I need a credit card that's got no limit
And a big black jet with a bedroom in it
Gonna join the mile high club
At thirty-seven thousand feet
--(Been there done that)--

I want a new tour bus full of old guitars
My own star on Hollywood Boulevard
Somewhere between Cher and
James Dean is fine for me
(So how you gonna do it?)

I'm gonna trade this life for fortune and fame
I'd even cut my hair and change my name

[CHORUS]
'Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars and
Live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
And we'll hang out in the coolest bars
In the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's
Gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny
With her bleach blonde hair
And well...

Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

I wanna be great like Elvis without the tassels
Hire eight body guards that love to beat up assholes
Sign a couple autographs
So I can eat my meals for free
(I'll have the quesadilla, ha ha)

I'm gonna dress my ass
With the latest fashion
Get a front door key to the Playboy mansion

Gonna date a centerfold that loves to
Blow my money for me
(So how you gonna do it?)

I'm gonna trade this life
For fortune and fame
I'd even cut my hair
And change my name

'Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars and
Live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
And we'll hang out in the coolest bars
In the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's
Gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny
With her bleach blonde hair
And we'll hide out in the private rooms
With the latest dictionary of
Today's who's who
They'll get you anything
with that evil smile
Everybody's got a
Drug dealer on speed dial, well
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

I'm gonna sing those songs
That offend the censors
Gonna pop my pills
From a Pez dispenser
Get washed-up singers writing all my songs
Lip synch 'em every night so I don't get 'em wrong

Well we all just wanna be big rockstars
And live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
And we'll hang out in the coolest bars
In the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's
Gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny
With her bleach blond hair
And we'll hide out in the private rooms
With the latest dictionary of
Today's who's who
They'll get you anything
with that evil smile
Everybody's got a
Drug dealer on speed dial,well

Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

Cheddar the Cheeze Man

Our little household has had a feline visitor this past week. His Mommy and Daddy are vacationing in Mallorca enjoying sun and temps in the high teens (middle 60's F) as we freeze here in Berlin.

Our visitor's name is Cheddar, but he very often gets called Cheeze-Man or Chester Cheeze here in this house. He's a rather annoying youngster that tends to irritate our grumpy old man Frank. Ya gotta understand, Frank is probably 10 years older than the Cheeze Man, and on top of that, he's stone deaf.

Here's a pic of the Cheeze Man:
It's rare to get him sitting still this long.
Mere seconds after this photo he was once again flying through the air to attack something else.
Nothing is safe in our apartment. Nora's juggling balls are a favorite right now... they are strewn hither and yon just waiting for the black-nosed fiend's next strike.


Cute, eh? Don't be fooled, he is a devil in angel's fur!
Frank simply doesn't move as fast as he did in his youth... our visitor just runs up behind Frank, does something annoying, usually a little nip or a bit of paw boxing, jumps over the old boy, and runs off... mostly before Frank even knows what happened. The original Hit and Run Kitty.

Good 'ole Frankie Blue Eyes

The First Snow of the Season

Today was a rather unusual day in Berlin and much of Germany.
The skies opened up and let forth with snow... the real stuff... in November!
It was good timing for us, we'd just come back from the store, and were taking the stuff inside as little pieces began falling. Twenty minutes later there was a white coating on almost everything.

OK, NOW I'm ready for my trip back to the states. I'll be going to Phoenix for Thanksgiving, and while the weather will of course be much warmer, it is really beginning to seem like the holiday season. When the first Christmas Market stalls go up, THEN we'll break out the Gluhwein and have a fine time!

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

November 9th, World Freedom Day in the States in commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall and in celebration of democracy and freedom.

Eighteen years ago a bureaucratic mistake opened the gates which had been closed for twenty-eight years, allowing the East Germans to finally join again with their West German families, friends, and to put it simply... the rest of the world.

I remember very well where I was when The Wall fell. In college I did a stint at an all-night convenience store... it was pretty convenient for me all right, my last class ended at 9pm and the job started an hour after that. About one in the morning the business really fell off and if my work was done I was allowed to study, which I did. The entire time I would listen to KRZZ a now defunct classic rock radio station (thanks ClearChannel for taking away that piece of magic).

About three hours before the next shift was due to come in and replace me, the first stories came to me by way of good old KRZZ. "There are reports that East German citizens are storming the gates separating east from west...". Then later in the night, "It seems that with no fanfare, no explanation, suddenly the wall separating east from west Germany has been opened".

Wow, I was a million miles away in a little Kansas town, years before I would ever consider living in Europe, let alone in Berlin. It was the middle of the night and something so fantastic was happening a world away that it gave me goosebumps. Just thinking of all those people who had been forced to live behind a wall, forced into communism, separated from their family and friends simply because of an arbitrary line decided after a war. They would now be allowed to reunite, free of political and physical barriers - strike one up for freedom.

It was a monumental peaceful revolution, and I will remember that night for the rest of my life.