exploring my hometown (89/365a)

whenever one is gone for a little while from a place a lot can change. the change can be right after you leave or right before you get back. big changes or little changes.

A house down the road burned to a crisp a few weeks ago.

🎶🎶🎶♪♪♫♫we didn't start the fire

There are sculptures in our local park as part of an annual exhibition called Art In the Park.

look at those windchimes

It was kind of fun walking around exploring and finding little things that have always been there still there, and other little things having changed. (there are bike lanes now! - I hear they were here last year already, but I have the memory of a turtle. no matter, slow and steady wins the race)

Rainer heads back to Thailand (88/365a)

Our trip overlapped with Rainers by 2 days. Today he heads out. We "celebrated" (boo hoo hoo! :( :( ) with eiskaffee and mannerschnitten - some very non-thai stuff.

yummy

tearing up near the car. three nephews group hug

the light's really good right now, please smile nicely.

It was golden hour so we posed for pictures. Katelyn had a craving for sticky rice, but since that is not available and would take 24 hours anyways with soaking etc. we made a delicious alternative. I ended up falling asleep before 9pm.

July Fourth with family (87/365a)

Celebrated with red and blue berries with white whipped cream. Also with a long walk with everyone, except Rainer who had paperwork to do.

at the wpi fountain

grossmutter with her three grandsons

grandpapa practicing rachmaninoff

Found out that the liquor store is open on July 4th.
 
Ended with 1776 the movie, a kind of classic family tradition. We all sat in the driveway and watched John Adams fighting with congress in song about whether or not to open the windows in the heat. The screen is an old paint-spattered drop-cloth. the projector is one that wpi threw away years ago. the laptop is one given away.

Ben Franklin wishes that King George feels like his big toe all over.

It's so nice to be home with everyone and sitting around relatively unproductively.

my laptop is a new funny story. i needed a new computer last year because my current one was falling apart in every way. papa gave me an old one, which i brought to austria, but never used - i just kept using my old falling apart one. my falling apart one couldn't be moved back to the US, so i decided to bring my new one with me, and finally start using it. yesterday i started moving files onto it. rainer tested the gutter and found one hole.... right over my laptop. dried it out all night on the fan and all day in the sun, and turned it on. it works! it's just very very slow. i doubt that has anything to do with the waterfall.

double anniversary with palatschinken (86/365a)

it was my both my brother herman's and my father herman's anniversary today. 35th wedding anniversary, which apparently is the coral anniversary. 1 year together for my brother.

happy kids

My brother is officially uncle ludwig, the palatschinken meister. we are still extremely jetlagged, the kids haven't slept enough either, but they were excited enough to have an opinion about dinner - palatschinken. so we made them with savory fillings like onions, mushrooms and peppers. really good. we celebrated with some austrian frizzante.  mmmm..........

"quarreling about correl"

ended the day with cyrano the movie (try number two - nobody fell asleep this time!)

on our way to the us! (85/365a)

a very nice steward with a moderately higher pitched voice than is typically expected from a male was walking by, and henry asked if that was a man or a woman. i said quitely i thought it was a man, and henry said, no the one who sounds like a woman, and i told him that all people have different voices and asked him what he thought a man sounds like, and he pointed quite expressively and said quite loudly, "that man sounds like a woman." ok. well, the steward continued quite nicely, but i felt like he didn't know that perhaps i am trying to show my kids daily that people of all genders can have all kinds of voices and shapes and figures.

the absolutely smoothest day of travel i have ever experienced. ever. with or without kids.
a 50minute layover in amsterdam, and we were 10 minutes late and delta closes their gate 30 minutes before departure. and we made it, the doors were opened for us, and we flew through, even with extra "random" security checks for brian ("you're a lucky guy," said the guy wryly. "you have been selected!"). american immigration and customs without a question, despite the expired passport.

and then home again, nearly passing out from tiredness, unable to stay awake for the first 2 scenes of cyrano.
 papa and mama and rainer and edward and katelyn had been waiting all day, only to find us incapable of constructing simple logical coherent sentences.

boston touchdown!

sing together! (84/365a)

our to-do list is long and growing longer, our time is short is growing shorter......

......until today, when i lost my to-do list to the ether, and so i guess i have officially nothing to do. stupid automatic reboots (and stupid me for forgetting to save things, and just have otherworldly many tabs in notepad++ open

one more day of bleach picture taking. i mean, i took some pictures with theodore's camera, and brian's cell phone, but mostly i just let henry play around with the cameras, and spent the day trying to balance my sense of urgency with my sense of presence.

we used up the last of our food. i made truffled mushroom sauce with pasta, and brian picked a salad from our garden. I would say it was our last one this year, but i'll probably have one for breakfast tomorrow.

tiger lilies, sorrel, arugula, and of course regular lettuce, dressed traditionally with pumpkinseedoil

QUICK - we still have to pound in mushroom spore dowels so we can grow maitake mushrooms and have them sometime next year maybe (ok that takes a long time. the first drill has no battery. the second drill blows a fuse. the kids all want to pound in dowels with the same mallet (they fight about everything right now!) and i burn my fingers several times, refusing to give up and use a "real" candle) but it's done now!

jacky and andi and nina and i sat in the back of the church watching Sing Together. felix didn't want to sing along or go on stage, and i was a little sad about that. but at the last song he did and i was so excited. he's wearing a crown and not standing with his group, choosing instead to be close to theodore (understandable, since henry had apparently pinched him)

thanks nina for grabbing this picture!

after which kerstin and pia and erik (friends from kindergarten) came to the concert that theodore and i played with ysop. henry watched by himself in the front row, and his mama was so proud of all his answers to all the questions. (best one, "who plays the cat in prokofiev's peter and the wolf?" henry, loudly from the front row "clarinet!!!")

we *were* going to go get icecream on our way back, but a thunderstorm came up and we raced back, soaked, only to find manuela waiting for us, and having not much time to stay. :-/ oh well, we had a very quick nighttime snack, because we both hadn't eaten since dinner.

packing, baking, packing, cleaning, packing (oh and brian of course had to go for a run in the rain) ...... now it's technically 2am, but i'm backdating this till july 1st so that i can be officially on track/target before i leave.

calm before the storm (83/365a)

theodore's last day of his first year of school. his mama's a little bit verklemmt.

i'm running on a major sleep deficit. i haven't been asleep before 2 this week, and i haven't been up after 7:30. people, i need my 8 hours!

i started with coffee and kathi - we finished proofreading music and text for the songs for her second book. then we talked and talked.  

 we filled the day brim-full. i was pruning hedges in my high heels, carrying my purse "on my way" out the door. kids here, kids there. theodore at swimming, then rehearsal. kids up late. and of course all the packing.

i'm just kidding on the packing. we've been so unproductive on that front, not that it matters. my brain is just being taking up by all the things that have to get done.

when nina came over this evening, she found me like this:

cleaning all the stuff out of the kitchen to leave all the cabinets empty

i guess it's not that i didn't have time to take any pictures today. it's just that ....... my memory  is too full to want to add anything else to it.