Celebrate !

Merrry Christmas, everyone, and don't forget to celebrate your life and the life of all those dear to you. Rejoice in love and smile with that joy.
Let us ALL do what we can to ensure that all those in our world teetering on the edge of life are able to continue to live, let us help the sick and the needy, let us bring smiles where there are frowns, let us constantly think about how wonderful it is to be alive.
With that, Christmas and the New Year can be a gift for everyone.

So, giddy-up, giddy-up, giddy-up, let's go ... life is a wonderland.

Strolling through the neighborhood

A Wonderful Day

The Countess would have turned 85 today.
My doctors in the outpatient clinic were pleased today and did a marrow biopsy on me which will certainly show that I am continuing in full remission. Detlef maneuvered me through the narcotics allowing them to puncture my pelvis again and get me quickly back up on my feet.
The CMV test last week was negative, meaning the chances are good it was so today as well and I can soon drop the pills against it.
Micha is feeling better, fever free, will probably get out on Friday, and we can all have a nice evening together.
Life is wonderful.

Mini-Golf in the Big City

The mobile phone pix may not be so great, but Petra's idea of taking us to play mini-golf Saturday a week ago was a super great idea.
Who cares if I came in last, cause I don't think I've ever won at putt-putt, not even as a kid back at White Lake.
The idea was to spend time while home from treatment with friends doing something enjoyable together.
And afterwards we went out to eat dinner, pigged out completely, and were then driven back home after a perfect outing.

Happy Thanksgiving !

If I had a pumpkin and if I had some real sweet potatoes, I would do this today. Perhaps I will see what my local supermarket has to offer, as it is not at all easy here to make anything close to the traditional American Thanksgiving treats, but I'd love to bake a pumpkin pie for this evening after work, since we sure will not be having turkey anywhere during the day that my American friends and relatives observe with family and friends and full bellies at home on holiday today.

PUMPKIN PIE RECIPE
Ingredients
• 1 (2 1/2-pound / good 1 kilo) pumpkin (or half of a 5 pound / 2.5 kilo pumpkin)
• 1 pound (ca. 500 grams) sweet potatoes
• 1/2 cup (120 ml) heavy cream
• 1/4 cup (60 ml) whole milk
• 3 eggs
• 2 egg yolks
• 2 cup (480 ml) light brown sugar, packed and leveled
• 3/4 cup (180 ml) Steen's cane syrup
• 1/2 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon (approximately 1/4 of a pod) freshly grated nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon ground white pepper
• 9-inch flaky pie crusts
• 1/4 cup (60 ml) cinnamon sugar, to top
• 1/4 cup (60 ml) raw sugar, to top
• Sweetened whipped cream (optional), for garnish
________________________________________
Directions
1. Quarter pumpkin and scoop out seeds. Roast pumpkin and sweet potatoes in a 350-degree F oven for 45 minutes to an hour, or until sweet potatoes are soft in the center. After cooling, peel off and discard the pumpkin skin and puree meat in a blender or food processor. Peel the sweet potatoes and puree as well. Combine pumpkin and sweet potato purees with the heavy cream and milk.
2. In a separate bowl, combine eggs, egg yolks, brown sugar, cane syrup, cinnamon, ginger, salt, nutmeg, and white pepper.
3. Blend pumpkin and spice mixtures and divide between two 9-inch pie crusts. Sprinkle tops of pies liberally with cinnamon sugar and raw sugar.
4. Bake at 325° F (ca. 165° C) for 45 to 55 minutes, or until pumpkin filling is set. Allow to cool for 1 to 2 hours and serve at room temperature or slightly chilled, with sweetened whipped cream if desired.
[Source: http://www.delish.com/recipefinder/fresh-pumpkin-pie-top1110 "delish"]

Enjoy your holiday or working day everybody!

Where's the Snow?

I keep asking that question, because they keep threatening it will come and I'd love to see a lot of it, but, well, it just hasn't amounted to much of anything here yet. We did have those couple of mornings of white dusting, but it was all mush and melt before we ever made it out the door with a camera.
U.S. friends and family are all ranting about their Thanksgiving festivities, and I'm glad they had fun, but we are just patiently working on until the real holidays come. Tomorrow I'm seeing one class off on their last day with my usual final difficult program mixing Mother Goose and Shakespeare, will however regale them as well with 'Twas the Night Before...
Next week the next-to-the-last session before Xmas with another group of English afficionados followed by the final one the week thereafter and two days of monitoring written and assessing oral exam performance for another group's international certification diploma at the beginning of Christmas week.
All not such a load, hardly any stress, and all the more importantly, I've almost finished with the magnus opus on plastics (thermo, engineering, etc.), intend to kill it off today, as it is truly one of the most boring things ever written in any language. And I've had to deal with it in TWO.

By the way: I'm pleased about O's selection of Hillary for Sec. of State, had always hoped they would finally come around and work together. He can keep her in the right direction and she can use her mettle where it counts.

Enough procrastination: I must return to the plastics, test to distinguish them at this point, and wrap up the whole thing before it renders me incapable of touching a plastic bag, a keyboard, or any of the nearly all other things made of that stuff. Give me paper, metal, wood, glass, flesh. And give me real words!

Eating Chilli With an Old Friend

She's back from her exile in Karlsruhe, actually she's been back for more than a month, but her move and her company's move, which prompted hers back to the Berlin she left to take the job a few years back, had so monopolized our dear friend's time and energy that we had not yet been able to get together, until yesterday.

And that was to help her with one tiny aspect of her move, getting her old or her new second-hand computer up and running before the telephone company comes on Thursday to hook up her phone and dsl connection. You'd think it'd be easy, but, as she confirmed with various stories as examples, it turned out to be typical of the whole move, her company's and hers.

The old computer had gotten some quirks and she couldn't resolve them, so first move files to a usb stick. OK. Then start up the new second-hand one from some friend: American profiles on that one prevented it from operating properly with her German keyboard, and it didn't have some programs she had on the other. So, fix it, open the cd drawer to alter the profile and guess what. The drawer just won't open. Makes it as useful as the proverbial screen-doored submarine!

All right: clean up the old one. All done, super, then virus check: clean. Then make sure it has a socket for a LAN cable so she can use it for the DSL connection. Surprise: it's so old it doesn't have such a socket! So today she's off to buy a new computer, which was not in the plan, but now proves necessary.

Anyhow, she had made an enormous pot of chilli for Detlef & me for coming to fix her computer, and we got to eat it anyway and heard the stories to prove that this little problem was really only minor.

(The following are mere pithy summaries)

THE REFRIGERATOR STORY
Since July her 2-year-old fridge has been heating instead of cooling. Under guarantee still, it was serviced several times by the company to no avail. Then not being able to fix it, they refused to replace it. The whole thing is going to court, even though her guarantee is iron-clad and the lawyer says it's an open and shut case. He costs nothing, cause she has legal insurance. The fridge company has left her without a fridge for nearly half a year and she had to bring it to Berlin with her even though she is to have a new one in her place here, cause the lawyer told her to.

THE OPEN SPACE STORY
Her firm has dispensed with wall and evidently with any facilitating of work in the new headquarters here. There's a central printer-copy-fax-scanner-machine for her "community" of more than 30 staff members of all echelons sitting cheek and jowl with aisles through the desks instead of corridors, and you have to run to it and log in for it to print whatever you sent to it, wait, then go back to your desk. But the coffee machines are good, all agree: they even make latte macchiato!

THE BUILT-IN KITCHEN STORY
Nothing has arrived yet, though it was all ordered months ago for October 1, no oven, range, sink, counter tops, washer, dryer, dishwasher, new fridge. Every call produces a new promise of coming soon, now by the end of November.

THE DEPOSIT STORY
The landlord of her old apartment, given plenty of notice but apparently unable to rent the place anew, is now playing games about her deposit even though she's paid double rent for October and November. Now a lawyer has to go with her to turn in the keys and do a walk-through with her to ensure that she gets her deposit back. Till now that landlord had always claimed that there'd never be a problem about anything, just don't worry.

The only thing that make's her life possible is that she can use her former husband's place just around the corner until hers is finally completed as he's out of town and won't be back til early January.

So we wish her an end to these on-going sagas by Christmas so she can finally enjoy getting moved back to Berlin by the same company she had to leave it for. She surely deserves some peace of mind now....

And the chilli was as good as ever; plus she had brought me more of those special French notebooks with the unique ruled paper that you can only get there. (Karlsruhe is only a stone's throw from la RF.)

And we now believe she's back, cause we saw her, talked with her, and ate a meal she cooked and we are truly glad we can now get to see our dear friend more often.
So give her a break everybody, she's the best cook in Berlin and has a sense of fair play that is a gift to all who know her. She deserves fairness, too!