Ah... the American experience... in Germany.
The Deutsch-Amerikanischen Volksfest with Adam was very cool.

When I go to these things with N. we never ride the rides. But today's schedule was eat something (ribs, tacos, wings), then ride a ride, then eat, ride... you get the idea. No, we didn't puke, although we did see some rides which made us almost queasy just watching.

We didn't ride anything too wild, and of course we did the bumper cars... 'cause ya just gotta! Although I did notice that I was the only woman on the whole playing floor - which had about 20 people. Geeze... bumpercars are FUN! Come on girls! Oh yeah, by the way... I got a couple of really good hits into Adam! One of them was even while going backwards!!! Tee hee hee!

The flag flying over Adam's bumper car was incredibly enough the rebel flag... you know, the Confederate Flag. I've talked about it before, the Germans really don't know that flyin' Dixie just ain't PC. In fact when trying to portray America, they seem to display it about 25% as much as the American Flag which just isn't right in my book.

Adam made his way back to his hotel with two new stuffed animals he'd won by playing the fair games. I myself shot five out of five with an air rifle and was happily able to add a keychain disco ball to my collection of crap. When faced with the fact that I had earned a whole five points, the carny told me that I could pick out either a gummy hand, a Hello Kitty pen and paper or the disco ball, there wasn't much of a choice. Although Adam said that he immediately knew what I would choose. You see, I have a bit of a past with disco balls.

It is actually a bit comical to see the German folks who are emulating what they think is traditional American style. Unfortunately I wasn't quick enough with my camera, but today I saw a guy who simply made me giggle. He had his quite new Wranglers tucked inside of an expensive pair of Tony Lama's to which he'd attached a pair of show spurs. On top of that he had the "traditional" western shirt from the 70's complete with mother of pearl snaps and metal corners on the collar. Over this shirt was a black leather vest. His head was adorned with a black ten gallon cowboy hat of unknown vintage with a ... yes... hold on... a raccoon tail hanging down behind.

To top all of this he had something attached to his belt which I have NEVER seen in all my years in America's wild west... A silver coffee-type mug. Yes, it was on a karabiner and attached to his belt... (Unfortunately I couldn't see the belt itself. He had a bit of Dunlops Disease... his tummy dun lopped over his belt, obscuring it from my view. BUT, I'm quite certain that it was VERY ornate with a really big belt buckle) My assumption is that he must keep his special mug close by to be able to pour his rotgut campfire coffee into at a moment's notice... although I'm pretty sure this city slicker has never had any rotgut campfire coffee.

With all of this garb came the walk. Not just ANY walk... this was the patented John Wayne walk. A slow shuffling strut with the hands cutting in front of the body and the shoulders swinging about in a manly way. Oh My! I wonder how long he'd been working on that one.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the Berlin Gauklerfest. Ten days of frolicking and merriment, and if the weather holds out, we're going to go tonight!

It has become a family tradition. N's parents just love this thing and this love is certainly shared by me. There are usually at least two stages that rotate between music and some sort of hmm... how to describe... some kind of art I guess.

Last year on the main stage we watched a man juggle two sticks of fire along with a frying pan as he balanced on not one but two unicycles placed one on top another! This is the kind of stage entertainment to be enjoyed. There are also artists walking among the visitors. The most memorable for me are the three men who toddle around on stilts wearing what can only be described as mafioso suits with HUGE shoulders extending far out beyond the norm. They stand fast in the large crowd giving menacing looks with straight faces which gives the whole thing this comic effect. I love it! This year I'm going to get my picture taken with them, dammit!

That Queer Expatriate (Adam) is coming to his beloved Berlin for a visit this weekend. We'll be spending some time at the Deutsch-Amerikanischen Volksfest to see how much good, old American crap food we can consume. Would anyone care to join us?

Speaking of American crap food. For last night's book club - which was 75% American expats I might add - I scrambled up some Cocoa Rice Krispies Treats. They were presented late in the evening unfortunately; I had forgotten them as they were cooling. Thus they were barely touched. This morning N. had thoughtfully placed the almost untouched container on my "lunch pile" for me to take to work. I'm assuming that she didn't want me to eat the whole thing, although you just never know. :)

As I got to work early this morning before anyone else I thought it reasonable to put the pan in the kitchen... no "this is from me" paper or anything. Within 30 minutes after work time started two people had come into the room and asked if I had brought that sinful-looking thing which was tempting people.

Now WHY is it that the American gets the immediate blame for such stuff? Just because it is most certainly a sweet thing... a VERY sweet thing... does this mean that I provided it? Obviously it does. We'll see if the normally bland palate of the Germans I work with will take to this sugary/buttery concoction. My guess, (heck, my HOPE) by 3pm the whole thing will be gone.

Last night's party went well. As far as I know, there was not one giggle behind my back about my dirty house! N. was an absolute trooper. I had been completely buried in work and found myself at the office 10 and 12 hours per day leading up to the event. She picked up the slack so wonderfully, not only tidying the house but also setting up everything required for the party, even finding the time to make some homemade cheese bread sticks.

Now. I must find a way to pay her back for her kindness. Think about it, this was NOT her party. She didn't stay around for it, came in after it started and then retreated to the bedroom to be on the computer. WHAT can I do to pay her back? She was so sweet about it, and I would like to do something nice for her. Any ideas?

Yes, I feel like I am back at school.
I've come back to so many responsibilities and so much catching up that it just sucks. I miss the days when I could wash, dry and put away four loads of laundry in one day... For this reason only the German system of "no dryer" sucks. My work has exploded, with two unforeseen things requiring my attention on top of the three big projects I knew I would come back to.

On top of this we spontaneously volunteered to host a book club party with three days set up time. Even in the event planning world, three days is NEVER enough. Our house had already been neglected enough, and now we need to catch up AND super tidy. Unfortunately I think that my fellow book clubbers will simply be faced with some piles of crap which have up to this point been happy waiting for me to get to them... and I think they will remain that way!

Eh, the book club folks are "real" people and I don't expect them to leave in a huff if the receipts from the last trip are piled on my desk! They might giggle behind my back though...

But hey, Frank will be on hand to entertain the crowd. Yes, Sir Himself has been blogging and has an even bigger head now that people have told him that he is beautiful and that he should be have a blog of his own. We haven't let him on the computer again though, which I think is a good thing. I had tuna in my keyboard! Can you imagine how hard it is to get that smell out of a keyboard!?! And I must say that what he did to the mouse was uncalled for. He must have been chasing the laser again and knocked it off the desk unintentionally. Opposable thumbs comes in handy in these moments.

So maybe someone is interested in what we did/saw. If not, skip to the bottom from this point.

It was a road trip... one that took us to places I've only read about up until now:
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Spyer, Germany
Schönau, Germany
Regensburg, Germany
Metzingen, Germany
Strasbourg, France
Colmar, France
We went through several other towns and cities, but there wasn't enough time to get a real feel for those cities unfortunately.

Of course I have tons of photos... 5Gb in fact. But the time to edit and share them isn't in my immediate future I'm afraid. As I get them edited down and loaded to Flickr, I'll post some here.

My poor N is so sweet about my picture-taking addiction. We will be walking along just enjoying the scenery when the mood will strike me to take a picture. She rarely gets any kind of clue that I am going to stop walking and spend a minimum of 30 seconds with no forward motion. Thankfully we've slowly worked into a system and now she can almost feel when I drop behind her. She waits patiently for me, trying to find interest in something else as I take as many as 10 photos of the same thing with different angles and focus. N certainly gets patience points.

Observations:

Oh well, there it is. Now I feel like I need to come up with the visual aids for my "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" speech in front of the class. I promise the pictures will be coming soon... Maybe I should have Frank edit them.

The girls are on their way back home.
Soon my ready supply of hackpeter will disappear along with humans which still humor me ceaselessly. My temporary keepers are more than willing to jump out of their chairs at my every whim, including allowing me to stroll about the balcony at will.

What else could a kitty king want?

This also means I have only one or two more chances to educate the people of the world in the plight of some of my less fortunate feline friends.

I would like to introduce you to Ovaria, she is a hot tabby held captive by an evil man named Yogi Karl. I find her face very attractive, but I don't think I could get past the long fur... I'm just not a guy who is into unnecessary fur length.

I warn you, the video below is not for the squeamish. Ovaria is subjected to the extreme lengths of cat abuse which is practiced by kitty yoga freaks worldwide. She does however get back at Yogi Karl in the end. MeOWW for her!

Would you like to learn how to combat this atrocity? Start by visiting the YogaKitty home page.

I've been here in Berlin over three years. In that time I've never really looked back at my former home/life with any regret at having left. Unfortunately that changed just recently.

An e-mail with the innocuous subject heading, "Happy July 4th" from my Dad's wife was in my in-box. I assumed that it would be the normal catch up e-mail, but I was wrong.

There was nothing about the 4th in this e-mail... it was only written on the 4th. When I started reading it, I had a horrible sinking feeling which has been with me since that first sentence.

"Your Aunt Virginia is slipping away."

I'm not a sentimental person. I'm not prone to crying or to fits of emotion. But this news has really bothered me in a way I never thought possible.

Aunt Virginia is my father's sister and has lived in the same small Kansas town for the last 85 years. About twenty of those years were spent in an insane asylum because life was not fair for women in the 40's and 50's.

She was a beautiful woman who married a handsome man when they were not even 20. After about 10 years she discovered her husband had been having a long-standing affair. This sent her off full-bore. Of course there is never a good time for learning this kind of information, but they had a daughter aged three years, a house, and many bills.

Details from my family are sketchy, no one likes to talk about these things, but I gather that she hauled his ass out of the bars a couple of times making lots of noise. Then there were many loud and semi-violent fights at their home. Before she knew it, he was signing papers to have her committed and to take their daughter away.

Of course she was livid, and let her anger out at the hospital with anyone who would listen. Unfortunately this did not help her situation, and things only got worse for her as she started learning what was happening on the outside. Her shit husband disappeared and put the daughter in Foster Care. Her family was freaked that their Virginia was in a mental institution and I gather they were not supportive. The doctors put her in a different ward and soon she was getting shock treatments.

Fast forward to 1976, when I met my Aunt. She was 53, I was a tender 8 years old. My immediate family lived in Pennsylvania and I was almost completely ignorant of my father's family in Kansas. We made the long driving trip halfway across the country on one of the last trips we were all together. Five kids, two parents in one '73 Ford van pulling a Coleman trailer.

On the drive to Kansas I heard a few hushed conversations between Mom and Dad in which Mom was wondering about "Ginger". I had no idea who this Ginger was, but I knew that it was an unpleasant subject for my father just by his tone of voice.

We pulled up to the "family compound" (my Grandmother and two Aunts lived within  shouting distance of each other) and I was blown away. It is so SMALL! There were three houses together in the same area as the space our house occupied. Grandma's four room house was the same one in which she'd raised five children. HOW!?

Of course Grandma (Goldie - nicknamed for her golden hair when she was just a girl) came running out, and my Aunt Juanita and her family followed close behind. Hugs and kisses were passed around and as the noise started to die down I saw her. She was standing in the back of the group just looking blankly towards the rest of us, not really focusing on one, almost looking through us. The hair on her slightly lowered head was graying and disheveled, her shoulders were slumped, and she was noticeably listing to one side.

I remember going up to her and asking if she was Ginger. She kind of snapped back into our reality for a moment and looked at me with the biggest brown eyes I'd ever seen. One side of her mouth went up in what I learned was a Ginger smile, and she slowly nodded her head up and down too many times. When it was time for everyone to move on, Grandma took Ginger's arm and they shuffled toward the house at a slow, controlled pace.

My new-found Aunt was almost catatonic, in a drugged up state, and barely able to take care of herself, and this had been going on for over 20 years. Not long after we got back home we learned that Virginia was in the hospital... the regular hospital. It seems that she stopped eating and that worried her mother enough to take her to the doctor. This time Virginia went to my Grandmother's doctor who immediately took her off of all mind-altering medications. Within a week a spark was back in her eye and she was talking and giving everyone her own kind of Virginia love.

With this new awareness of her self also came a sense of pain from her abdomen. A few more doctor visits and she was diagnosed with stomach cancer. The medications had masked the pain enough that it had been allowed to go without treatment too long. When that same doctor opened her up for an exploratory surgery he promptly closed her back up without doing anything. He said that the cancer had spread everywhere, and he had seen it on her liver and several other organs. His suggestion... take her home and enjoy her last three to six months.

When she did get home she loudly proclaimed to anyone who would listen that the silly doctor didn't know what he was talking about. She had been told by God that now was not her time and that she would be just fine. That was 1977. No chemo, no radiation, nothing was given to her in the way of treatment for cancer. In fact they kept her off of all mind-altering medication as well. She was soon able to live on her own with only slight supervision.

And live she did! She never went to work, but she began going to a different church in town... the others all knew about her. When she would go to the doctor for checkups he would consistently say that there were no signs of the previous cancer. After a year he got the OK to open her up again for a status check. His report... the cancer was all gone. There were signs of where it had been, but certainly no further damage. It appeared to be in full remission... I guess God was right.

She was never a "normal" person. Too many years in the hospitals had stained her behavior forever. She was very much like a child in that she spoke only the truth, never softening the blow of "you're too fat" or "I don't want to be here". At family gatherings she would eat loudly and without table manners. She would get wound up for no particular reason and suddenly be argumentative with seemingly nothing to set her off.

In 1980 my grandmother, Virginia's caretaker, died. This put the burden of caring for Virginia on another aunt, the closest sibling. The houses were side by side, so the distance just worked out to give my aunt Juanita this hand full of trouble. Unfortunately for Juanita, Virginia saw her sister as some kind of nemesis, and treated her accordingly even though Juanita tried her very best to take care of Virginia, bless her heart.

When I moved to Wichita in 1984 she was very affectionate towards my father who she credited herself with raising, as their mother had so many other children "to look after". My Father had moved back to Wichita from Pennsylvania in 1982 or so and she had her "little boy" back. She would call him and talk for an hour about nothing. He would listen patiently, smoking one cigarette after another and nodding his head... nodding because he wasn't allowed a word in edgewise. When he would try to get her off the phone she would get angry and say nasty things which caused such a look of sadness in my father's face.

1996 saw the death of Juanita. Bless her heart.(This is what we mid-westerners say as a way of showing that she was a good person. It is not reserved just for death, simply as a way of showing that whomever we are speaking about is close to sainthood in some way or another.) Now my father was Virginia's unofficial and official caretaker. Virginia was still argumentative, often being quite mean to my father's new wife, making it difficult to invite her to family meals. The distance from her small town to where we lived in Wichita was just too much for her to bear, even though it could easily be traversed in about thirty minutes. She did not enjoy going too far away from her home, her comfort zone, so she spent many holidays mostly alone.

Since the time I had a car, somewhere around 1986 or so, I would go to visit Virginia occasionally. We would have nice chats and nasty spats. She would get upset and I would calm her down. I would take her to a restaurant and she would embarrass me by spitting the food back out into her hand, or needing that 5th napkin because she was so messy, or telling the waiter her life story as he tried to pull away - then screaming at him across the restaurant that she didn't like him anyway.

On any topic brought up she would tell me that she had seen it all on TV. When my headlights would stay .. we would get out of the car, she could not understand how they would shut off all by themselves, and would insist every time on standing there watching them until they would go off. I would take her to do her weekly grocery shopping and she would walk the aisles for up to two hours talking out loud to and with herself about all of the options she was seeing. "Libby's green beans, forty-nine cents... Kroger green beans, thirty-nine cents... I should take the Kroger, but the strings get stuck in my teeth, and Kroger has strings. Yes, Libby's" Sometimes when I offered to pay for her groceries she was sweet and gracious and accepted my proposal. Other times she would almost spit at me and tell me that she didn't need my charity.

Virginia loves to feed the birds, and I "fed" that habit. Four or five times a year I would take her a five gallon bucket of bird seed. She would squeal in delight and exclaim that her "red bird" was going to just LOVE that. It was not unusual for her to tell me about conversations she would have with the birds, about how they needed more water, and that it must be fresh. It was the reason she couldn't have a cat... because the birds told her that they wouldn't like that. My father and I would buy her bird feeders but she was quite happy giving them food in the lid from a butter tub. She was a simple woman who only wanted simple things.

There was the microwave that was a present from my father and his wife but hardly used because even though I showed her how to use it, she never got the hang of it. The rotary phone she continues to rent from the phone company to this day because "it has never caused me a lick of trouble, why should I replace it". The curly gray/blue wig that had outlasted its reasonable wear about 20 years before, but was still in use. And of course the boxes from Meals on Wheels that were "so useful", leading her to save them in piles in her already small kitchen.

Through the years she was kicked off of the "Senior Bus" for bad behavior... I wonder how bad you have to act before the senior bus kicks you off? She had gone to every church in town except the Catholic ones of course. Eventually she would find the parishioners not so friendly and she would just never go back. When she called a taxi to go get groceries on weeks that I could not be there, the driver would have to understand that he would be required to wait for her outside (off the meter of course) the whole time she was inside the store, AND of course he would have to carry the groceries into the house ... all of this for no tip I would suppose.

The last ten years or so have been a bit different for my aunt Virginia though. She's slowly become easier to deal with. It is as though old age has tempered her... that or the Presbyterians across the street from her house. She's been going to that church for about the same amount of time, and she's made many friends. Until her most recent bout of health issues, she was going on outings with the church ladies, and even counted several as friends. She would go to the neighbor's house for lunch almost everyday and was proud to say that she could bring something to the feast even though it might be a can of peaches, she brought something.

It is as though she had come into her own. All of her life had been a struggle and she simply stopped the fighting. On the other side was acceptance and openness. When the son of my aunt Juanita called my father to say that aunt Virgina wasn't doing so well, my father arrived at the house and found that one of the church ladies was visiting Virginia while preparing a meal and cleaning the kitchen.  Soon he learned that the church ladies had arranged a rotation to make sure this was done for Virgina every day, and this had been going on for some time.

Now she is being sent to a home because her doctor judges that she can no longer take care of herself. Time means nothing to her now, so taking medication is a risky procedure. Her hearing and her eyesight have been getting steadily worse, and her normally razor sharp memory is gone.

It is sad how age takes us. About a year ago we could have clear conversations on the phone, and I got something from her in the mail at least once every two or three months. Her logical way of thinking and her sharp way of talking will be missed.

Maybe what makes me the maddest is that I'm really the only family she has that seems to understand her and have the patience to deal with her. It's almost as though she is alone, even when I know that she is not.

What frustrates me the most is that I am so damn far away!
I would like to be able to see her, to hold her hand or give her a hug the way I used to as I tried to calm her down. It is no longer a drive into Butler County, the land of hanging electric lines... it is no longer a thirty minute drive... There is an ocean between us, and I hate it!

Maybe her God is ready for her now. Bless her heart.