work when you don't have any

"Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad."

That's from Dostoevsky's prison memoir, Notes from the House of the Dead.  His fellow prisoners found all sorts of ways to keep busy, from moonshine to making shoes to working out deals with the guards to do odd jobs and get a little spending cash.  Others went totally bonkers.  I don't think I'm that far yet, but recent photographs might disagree.  

Oh!  Hi, crazy face!  I'm going to take a step or two back now...

there is only one proper way to eat a pear

In Germany, things are classier.  If they're going to put beans in a can, they're going to spice it (which makes your chili sweet and your garbanzo beans suitable pretty much only for eating on their own.)  And these are not simple "green beans."  No!  These are princess beans!  

And they come in a can with a pull tab.  Because they're fancy.  Like a Mercedes.  And because Germans like their stuff fancy, it's hard to find a simple white sauce.  There's three cheese, and carbonara, and all sorts of other flavored sauces, but apparently humble white sauce can only hide under the edge of the shelf by its lonesome because it's not fancy enough for Germans.  But what if you want to make your own pepper-and-chili-white-sauce?

i about burned my retinas trying to get this shot

I took about a dozen pictures to try to get this, and as it turns out, the first one was by far the best.  Turning dials, using special settings, etc., apparently have less effect than luck if you don't actually know how to use your wife's fancy camera.

Oh well.  But I think it turned out all right, considering that no photograph really looks like the original.  Just imagine a cool morning breeze and a couple of thrushes (robins, but not) whistling in the trees:

i'm glad i can write you letters on the internet

I was just chilling, listening to the new Beirut album The Rip Tide (streaming here till it comes out on 30 Aug as a part of NPR Music's First Listen series) when it occurred to me that you might not care for my music very much.  That's OK, though.  I might not care for yours, either--we can still be friends, right?

Sure, this isn't high school, it's a blog, so I think we'll get over a little musical difference of opinion.  We have better reasons to hang out than music.  But it's interesting how you can tell a lot about a person depending on what music they listen to, and how we classify people and groups by different aspects of their "culture," the things they like and don't like.

what to do if you have a skype interview

First of all, DON'T PANIC.

a house is only a home if you can get inside it.

So, for example, if you lock yourself out when taking out the trash, you will have to find another until your wife gets back from class.  But if you can find a nice park bench to sit at  while work on story ideas in your little notebook, you'll hardly feel locked out.  Well, you'll still feel locked out, but it won't be so bad.

the case of the strange soup

Papa always says that writers write.  You may need another blog to read, but really, when has that stopped anyone from writing a blog?  Since Catherine keeps a pretty good blog of our doings over at Her Romantic Mind, I've been hesitant to start one myself, but I think our experiences of Germany are going to be different enough that I'll have something interesting to tell.  I'll be leaving the heavy lifting of a more-or-less chronological narrative to her and focusing instead on more incidental things that might be interesting.

For example, okroshka:

Yes, I'm going to write about soup.  I told you that this blog would be about incidentals, but there's a story attached.  Stay tuned!