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1. It feels like Christmas. Time change, it's darker, and hooray, the kids are on holiday this week!! We can sleep in!!! Er, well, not really, since our boys like to get up at 6 am when they don't have school. (We have to drag them out of bed on school days.) I got more Christmas choir music today--In Dulci Jubilo, Buxtehude's arrangement. I've always loved Very Old Christmas Songs, so I'm looking forward to this macaronic carol.
2. When you move enough, you end up knowing everybody. My friend Sarah in Iceland went to a Halloween party this weekend and met someone originally from my area in Germany. Like, I know ALL this woman's relatives. And this weekend I ended up seeing a whole lot of them, and passed greetings back and forth. Is this weird? I think this is weird (in a good way, of course).
3. Germany is so pretty! We rode the train early this morning and saw green fields full of soft white fog. We walked past huge stone towers to enter Nurnberg, trod on stones people have walked for hundreds of years. I've been to Nurnberg so many times, but it still gets me. Lovely.
4. Today I talked to people from the US, Germany, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria. Okay, I grew up in Arkansas, where no one moves to and no one moves away from. I've always been extremely curious about how normal people in other countries live, and especially during the whole Cold War thing I was interested in the people behind the iron curtain. The "enemies," you know. But I never thought my kids would have the chance to play with Russian kids. The world may still be a dangerous place, but I'm glad this part has changed.
5. I bought my German copy of Harry Potter yesterday. Okay, so I've already read the book three times in English, so there are no more surprises (er, I hope not, anyway), but it's still nice to hold it in my hands and to see the shining faces of the German kids whose English isn't that far along yet and who had to wait until yesterday to finally find out what happened! I also got to browse the bookstore alone. I wish I had a lot of money. Which brings me to books in general. I saw books from two Verla Kay regulars on the new releases table, and out of curiosity I checked the library and found they are not only there, they are all checked out, with waiting lists. It was a cool moment for me to see that real people--people I know, even!--are able to take a book out of their heads and put it in the heads of kids on the other side of the world. Wild.
6. And then my want-to-read list. DH observed that an awful lot of the books I want to read aren't published yet. Sigh. Some of them aren't finished yet (hurry up, Rebecca! I need another chapter!) And Robin, I'm totally jealous that you have already read A Curse as Dark as Gold. I'm not a very patient person, alas. The books I have ordered are aggravatingly slow to arrive, and the ones I want to read at the library are all checked out. (Gatty, by Kevin Crossley-Holland is one of them--I browsed it in the bookstore, and it looks really good.)
7. Hotmail seems to be having issues with livejournal notification, and now I'm not getting notified when someone replies to me. It worked for about a day, and now it seems to be back to not working. Arg.
2. When you move enough, you end up knowing everybody. My friend Sarah in Iceland went to a Halloween party this weekend and met someone originally from my area in Germany. Like, I know ALL this woman's relatives. And this weekend I ended up seeing a whole lot of them, and passed greetings back and forth. Is this weird? I think this is weird (in a good way, of course).
3. Germany is so pretty! We rode the train early this morning and saw green fields full of soft white fog. We walked past huge stone towers to enter Nurnberg, trod on stones people have walked for hundreds of years. I've been to Nurnberg so many times, but it still gets me. Lovely.
4. Today I talked to people from the US, Germany, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria. Okay, I grew up in Arkansas, where no one moves to and no one moves away from. I've always been extremely curious about how normal people in other countries live, and especially during the whole Cold War thing I was interested in the people behind the iron curtain. The "enemies," you know. But I never thought my kids would have the chance to play with Russian kids. The world may still be a dangerous place, but I'm glad this part has changed.
5. I bought my German copy of Harry Potter yesterday. Okay, so I've already read the book three times in English, so there are no more surprises (er, I hope not, anyway), but it's still nice to hold it in my hands and to see the shining faces of the German kids whose English isn't that far along yet and who had to wait until yesterday to finally find out what happened! I also got to browse the bookstore alone. I wish I had a lot of money. Which brings me to books in general. I saw books from two Verla Kay regulars on the new releases table, and out of curiosity I checked the library and found they are not only there, they are all checked out, with waiting lists. It was a cool moment for me to see that real people--people I know, even!--are able to take a book out of their heads and put it in the heads of kids on the other side of the world. Wild.
6. And then my want-to-read list. DH observed that an awful lot of the books I want to read aren't published yet. Sigh. Some of them aren't finished yet (hurry up, Rebecca! I need another chapter!) And Robin, I'm totally jealous that you have already read A Curse as Dark as Gold. I'm not a very patient person, alas. The books I have ordered are aggravatingly slow to arrive, and the ones I want to read at the library are all checked out. (Gatty, by Kevin Crossley-Holland is one of them--I browsed it in the bookstore, and it looks really good.)
7. Hotmail seems to be having issues with livejournal notification, and now I'm not getting notified when someone replies to me. It worked for about a day, and now it seems to be back to not working. Arg.
