Happy birthday from Germany, jjorge!
Checking in at A2K after not being here for two weeks makes me smile :-)
Misti, these things happen. Lacey still loves you!
This morning, around 2:30 AM, I came home to find Sam still up, waiting anxiously for me. I had done Ceremony for a friend and some of her family members. Teaching, Ceremony and a feast after that made time fly for me. When I got home, Sam and the pups were very relieved. I felt bad about not calling to say I'd be late, but smiled inwardly at the concern and love they all showed at my safe arrival. Seems there was some possible tornadic activity south of us.
Later, meeting Timberlandko for coffee and lunch. Sam and I enjoyed it, even if it was rainy.
He even had to meet our pups. What a great guy, another reason A2K is so great!
Eva, msolga, Joanne, Urs53,
Thankee, thankee!
My birthday is actually on the 26th. Yesterday was the only day that my two girls could both be there, as one of them lives in NYC.
My step-daughter (who lives here in Providence) is going to take me to dinner again on the 26th.
Am I being pampered or what!
Wow, you met timber? Cool!
AND HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the cute li'l PUNKIN! (Er, in a few days anyway.)
sozobe,
Yep. Turns out that he lives in the same neighborhood I left about seven years ago. We even ended up talking about the neighbors. Sure is a great guy! He had to check out our pups, which we had in the truck. They were ready to get out and play with him. He's got a great way with critters.
You do Ceremonies? Now, I'm impressed.
Happy (almost) birthday, jjorge!
SCoates:
What's brown and sticky?
A STICK!
Seeing another A2K connection has been made - that made me smile. Wiyaka and Sam met Timber, who Soz and I (and others have met) - it's a small world. And their dogs have met Timber - who has met my dogs - even the doggie world is shrinking due to the internet!
Local FC won the cup, 'pparently, and they be celebrating. When I saw that pubs would be boarding up for the night I got curious, so I went to look. Just looked cute, though. Happy people, big flags, kids on dads' shoulders. Kinda like a demonstration, really.
Trippy tho. If anything it was all a bit ... subdued. Players were on top of a double decker slowly driving down main street and seemed either a little blase, or perhaps just a little shy ... and tho they were greeted with chants and waves and applause, it wasnt like the masses were thronging around the bus or anything. Nothing like what you see on TV when the Ajax players crowd onto the Amsterdam Leidseplein balcony to lift up their championship "dish" and there's a vibrating mass of supporters gone wild in the square ... (and always riots afterwards).
And everybody was oddly polite. Guy was told to climb down from the top of a public toilet building by some cop, he immediately did so, shook hands with the lady cop. Crowd control squad cops touching little kids' cheeks and chatting with the parents.
If there was anything grim around - apart from the mass of cops - it was the obvious ... well, like, put it this way: soccer may have become salonfahig the last decade (ie, yuppies and intellectuals now boast about liking it too) - but our FC obviously hasn't.
Crowds walking along with the buses were exclusively, like ... people of whom you could see that they'd lived through a lot, say. Or if they were young - streetwise. Oh, and white. Also struck me that there were a coupla disabled people trucking along, as well as people who, well - the socially hapless, kinda. Who wouldn't easily fit in anywhere. Yeh, I guess cause with the FC, everybody's accepted. You can all be part of the group, if you start supporting the club. (You get that with churches too.)
Meanwhile, though on balconies down main street frat students were gamely waving along in semi-amusement, the beautiful hip people at the cultural festival's tent on the Neude looked on in bemusement - and some of the elder ladies and gentlemen outside the city theatre and a man halfway in a a business suit in almost open disdain. Some asking the cops "how we can get to our home now, with all these people in the way". Striking. Hello, class society. Still there.
Doesnt mean the FC (supporters) aint with the times, tho. Before the double-decker with the players was a truck with a DJ - intermittently playing techno and Dutch-language songs - and three or four scantily dressed (tho rather hapless) dancing girls - you know, to whip up the action. All of 'em very visibly hyped up on E, passing along the bottled water and swallowing hard, funny. And the FC's supporters have, very postmodern, long picked up their cues from their Italian counterparts (much like the previous generation picked up theirs from the British "hooligans") - and so the chants go "Forza Utrecht!" and "Champione, Champione!" (who said Europe wasn't getting united? ;-)).
Oh, and "Kanker Joden en PSV" of course - "Cancer Jews and PSV", that is - the "Jews" being rival FC Ajax Amsterdam (PSV is just PSV).
(In another postmodern trick, the supporters of Ajax now proudly call themselves "Jews" too, waving Israeli flags during games and everything - even though there isn't, of course, a single Jew among them, post-WW2.)
Lexicological mayhem in the newspaper.
You know, the police has radars up every here and there by the freeways, to flash drivers who break the speed limit - camera flashes, you get the fine sent home.
So, innovative speeders started buying so-called "radardetectors", which signal when you're approaching one, so you can brake in time.
Now recently, the law has finally outlawed those, and the cops have been clamping down. Problem was, it was easy to harvest the cheap car-window radardetectors, but the really "clever" guys had invisibly installed radardetectors. And they're the worst offenders.
So now, the cops have brought in a new weapon: radardetectordetectors, or rdd's.
This has caused some panic among the speeders. On chatboards, they're busily discussing tricks: eg, buy a cheap car-window model, and when you're caught, you hand that one in and pay your fine, but you get to keep your expensive invisible model.
But technology trumps tricks, and thus the chatters are now touting a new model rdd-detectors. Yes, that stands for radardetectordetectordetectors.
The dogs and I just got home after three and a half days with Setanta. Which was nice - and had many smile-worthy moments. Both dogs handled the 8+ hours each way drives well - also smile-worthy. But hugely grin-worthy?
After we got home, I let the dogs out in the backyard to take care of, well, you know. When they came back in, Cleo romped right past me, bounded up the stairs into the bedroom, and jumped onto the bed. She then flopped over onto her back, and started to wriggle. She did her best doggie-happy-grin, and I had to laugh along with her. Seems she missed 'her' bed.
This story morphed -- I had already planned to write it down here as what I thought it was when it became something else.
Sozlet and I went for a walk today, ducked into the friendly local antique shop. (Have lots of gaps to fill in our new bigger house, they had a big sale going on.) She was very interested in lots of things, but especially wanted one of several plastic "pearl" necklaces. They had a range of colors, pink, purple, green, etc., and I was surprised when she chose the white one, since she usually goes for pink. I had just worn my grandmother's pearls to a big event the other day which she was very impressed by, so I thought that might have been why she wanted the ones that looked most like mine.
So I looked around but there was nothing else that I wanted to buy (yet... gorgeous sideboard 50% off, but I digress), and so went up to buy the measly $3 necklace. Felt kind of sheepish. But the people were super nice, and charmed by the sozlet, and kept piling on the goodies; gave her some free sunglasses (!), wrapped up the necklace in pink tissue paper, and put it in the gift bag of her choice, a very nice one with little frogs on it that she selected. (She loves to play with gift bags qua gift bags.)
So it made me smile, how nice they were and how they reacted to my daughter. That's what I planned to write as we walked home.
Then, when we got home, sozlet right away started unwrapping the necklace, I bustled around doing this and that, then turned around and she was grinning at me. I was like, what? and she pointed to the chair, where the necklace was draped. I said, yep, it's a beautiful necklace you have there sweetie, and she said, "It's not my necklace... I bought it for YOU!"
Then she explained that she had just been pretending she wanted it for herself, she really had picked it out for me, and that's why it was all wrapped up -- she'd told the antique store ladies it was a gift (which I didn't notice.)
She was just so sweet and pleased with herself. Evidently she thought I should wear pearls more -- I'd told her that my grandmother's pearls were very special, only for special occasions -- and so she got me some more everyday pearls. "Now you can look beautiful."
I thought it might be a ploy, but no, she hasn't asked for them and keeps telling me how beautiful MY pearls are. :-D
Oh, that is so dang sweet!
:wink: 
