halfjapanese hamburger (HH)

I thought I heard the distant sound of an approaching thunderstorm and then realized it was merely the grumbling of my upset stomach. I’m full of caffeine and have been lying in bed in a half-sleep for the last three hours. If only I could find the switch to turn off my brain…

I finally started sorting through the thousands of digital photographs stored on thumb drives, SD cards, external hard drives, back up CDs, unmarked DVDs and yes, floppy diskettes scattered throughout our apartment and in various cardboard boxes in the basement. What prompted this undertaking was a combination of insomnia and a warning that my laptop’s internal hard disk was running out of space. Sigh.

I came up with a plan…

1. My main folder will be called Images. It’ll have two subfolders: Photographs and Illustrations.
2. Photographs will be further divided into Originals and Modified.
3. Originals will be organized by Photographer.
4. Since the Akiko photographer will be the largest folder, the photographs there should be organized by Camera. (I have three or four, I think.)
5. Within the Canon Powershot folder, I could organize by Person, Place or Thing…

The schema at the end gets a little sticky. I finally decided to just look for all my food photographs and stick them in one folder.

I love taking pictures of food, which is where I found the cute photo of the pink sugar cookie I used for this post. It’s from last year, when I was staying with Jacqui, the same time period I wrote the post Addicted to Sugar.

Ironically, I am still addicted to sugar. They don’t sell sugar cookies here in Hamburg and the Happy Kappy cupcake bakery is too far for me to drive. So, I’ve been making and eating lots of divinity fudge. And pumpkin pie. Mmm mmm.

It does come with a price, however. I am now 30 lbs. overweight and jogging an hour a day hasn’t the slightest effect. I took a glucose tolerance and insulin resistance test this morning and in nine days I’ll get the sober results.

Until then… I’m going to enjoy my last week of diet freedom.

Gnome Hiding from the Snow

Matthias left early this morning. It was still dark outside and I was too exhausted to get out of our feather mattress bed. Without the energy to move the muscles in my mouth, I said to him telephatically, “You look so handsome when you wear your black suit.” I fell back to sleep instantly.

A few hours later I awoke to the sound of something tapping, gently rapping at my chamber window. I pulled the covers over my head to block out the light, but the sound was consistent, insistent, persistent. Finally I threw off the duvet to see what it was. A piece of velcro tape holding down the mosquito net had come loose and was flapping in the wind. Satisfied in having solved my mystery, my eyes focused past the window sill into the garden. My frustration melted into surprise and joy. It was snowing! Big, HUGE, fluffy flakes of snow!

Without brushing my hair or making myself a cup of coffee, I pulled on my snow boots and went for a short walk down my street.

The last time I saw snow was around this time last year while driving the Mustang cross-country. I had stayed the night at Bishop’s Inn in Santa Fe, New Mexico and woke up to snow. Steve McDonald had found my blog, so I detoured to visit him in Albuquerque. He never did send me those photos he took of us there.

One of my neighbors accidently left their clothes hanging on the line…

The weather has turned colder. The clouds paint the sky a permanent cotton white. Branches of evergreen and shiny red balls decorate the streets and shop windows. Glitter-covered reindeer and Santas abound. Christmas is coming and I have a hankering for divinity.

Perhaps it’s just a tactile association brought on by the crispness of the air and the cool florescent white of a November sun. Or perhaps it’s a smidgeon of homesickness for Mississippi. Whatever has triggered this craving has triggered it bad. So bad that I dug into my secret and well-guarded supply of Karo syrup to try out a recipe I found in James Villas’ The Glory of Southern Cooking.

As seen in the photo above, my attempt to create divinity failed. The taste was yummy, but the texture turned out all wrong. It came out sticky and gooey when it should have become solid, soft and almost powdery. It should have looked more like this photo from the Savannah Sweet’s website.

An interesting note about the flavor and ingredients: I noticed the divinity glop tasted like something between nougat and marshmallow. When I did my research to see how nougat and marshmallows are made, I surprisingly found they are all from the exact same ingredients: beaten egg whites, corn syrup / honey, sugar and water. No wonder.

The autopsy report? Apparently, achieving divinity requires patience. Maybe it even requires a better recipe. [Sorry Mr. Villas.] It definitely requires a candy thermometer. I think these are the things that went wrong:

1. Beating the egg whites first and setting them aside allowed them to return to their liquid state. It would have been better to boil the syrup first and then beat the egg whites later, just before they were needed.
2. Other recipes for divinity use half as much liquid ingredients: 1/2 cup corn syrup + 1/2 cup of water as opposed to 1 cup corn syrup + 1 cup of water.
3. There might have been errors when guessing the “string stage” of boiling the sugar syrup. A candy thermometer would have been a much better guage. I was so scared of getting to the caramel point that perhaps I stopped too early allowing the water content of the syrup to remain too high.
4. Later I read in another recipe you should beat the divinity mixture until it loses its glossy texture. This is the step in which we should have been more patient and had more faith. We probably should have had a stronger mixer, too.

A guilty pleasure and random musing: Matthias and I have been watching the first season of Heroes on DVD. Daniela let us borrow her box set. After spending the morning trying out the divinity recipe, we couldn’t just throw away the batch. We poured it into a tray and put it in the fridge. All day Sunday, we watched Heroes, spooning divinity into our mouths for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The funniest part was looking at the tray one hour after eating from it for breakfast. The parts we had scraped out had been filled in again and it looked like we had never touched it. We couldn’t help but exclaim: “The divinity — it’s like Claire, the cheerleader; it’s self-healing!”

It’s 1:28 AM and I’m sitting on the computer. I still haven’t done my German homework, but tonight I have a very good excuse… I’ve been chased down by a headhunter on Xing. In Europe, Xing is a far more popular professional networking tool than LinkedIn. (That’s my excuse for never updating my LinkedIn account.)

Unfortunately, I’ve suffered two hard disk crashes in the last year. One in October 2007 and another one last month. This means, not only did I lose some contacts, e-mails and purchased music, but when I looked for it, I couldn’t find a copy of my resume anywhere! I looked through a stack of backup CDs and DVDs to no avail. I’m afraid it’s either lost or sitting on a backup external disk in an unmarked box somewhere in the basement.

Oh well. Since I have to write my Lebenslauf from scratch anyway, I figured I’d go ahead and translate it into German at the same time. It’s a bit of work, but I’m counting on it getting me one step closer to being asked in for an interview than had I left in English.

Wish me luck. Both positions require SQL. So yes, you know I will be really happy.

I’m such a bad blogger: 21 days ago, on October 1st, I posted “Blog Drought” as an apology and an attempt to get sympathy from my lost readers. I thought a publicized confession would kick my butt into bi-weekly writing gear, but it didn’t. Sigh

So here I sit, about to click the PUBLISH button after composing a measly three sentence (65 word) post without pictures.

We had our first chilly day yesterday with a high of 61° F after several weeks of late summer afternoons in the mild mid-70s. Small piles of dried leaves in burnt sienna and caramel paper brown have been raked and collected next to their parent trees. And somehow I am happy there is finally a lightening up in the load of work in the garden. This morning, it only took me 25 minutes to water the garden, as opposed to those hotter midsummer days when thirsty plants drank 45-60 minutes per day.

With intermediate September rains, God waters the lawn for me on days when I just don’t feel like doing it. God doesn’t weed, though. So, today, I’ve picked the raspberry bushes as my weeding and pruning project.

Updated December 6, 2008.

I made a mistake.

In Germany, when a foreigner gets a residence permit, they are entitled to 600 hours of German lessons. The foreigner only pays € 1 an hour while the government picks up the rest of the bill. It sounded to me like a great deal.

Three weeks after Matthias and I got hitched, I showed up at the immigration office with my marriage certificate in one hand and my husband in the other and I was able to get an 18-month residence/work permit valid in Germany. The lady behind the counter smiled at me and (hoping she didn’t have to do any more paperwork) said, “Soooo… your German is good enough! You don’t need any German classes, do you?”

Well, I didn’t want to lose out on 600 hours of nearly free German school, so I told her I still struggled a little with the grammar and wanted to make sure my German was good enough to find a proper job. Disappointedly, she agreed and started the process of printing out all the paperwork and vouchers entitling me to reduced tuition prices. I thought I had struck gold.

Back in the days before Matthias and I got married, the easiest way I had found to stay in Germany longer than three months was with a student visa. My student visa prohibited me from working and required me to stay enrolled in an intensive German course meeting five days a week, five hours a day. The full price of this class without a voucher? € 420 per month. (Approximately $ 580.) It bit a little into the savings account after a year.

Happy with my work permit and language vouchers, Matthias and I skipped merrily out of the immigration office and I set out to find a school I liked. The Deutsch-Institut für Ausländer couldn’t take me because they weren’t on Immigration’s approved list of schools. The Volkshochschule was on the approved list, but all the classes were full and the only thing I could do was to put my name down at the end of a very long waiting list. Eventually, I just went back to Colón. I love this school anyway. I love the teachers there and the students and the administrative staff.

The hammer came down when Kerstin told me I was not allowed to take an advanced level B2 class. Apparently, the vouchers are only good for beginner’s levels A1, A2, and B1. SHOOT! I had already completed level B1 five months ago, back in April. I wanted to move forward, not repeat.

At this point, I started to read the fine print. The Immigration Officer had given me a mandatory order to attend German school. If I failed to immediately sign up for a class, they could send me back to the U.S. If I signed up for a class and failed to attend regularly, they could send me back to the U.S. If I signed up for and attended a class and then failed the Zertifikat Deutsch proficiency test, they would allow me to repeat the class a second time. But if I failed the Zertifikat Deutsch twice, they could send me back to the U.S.

Aaarrggh. !?!?!?!!! Looks like I shot myself in the foot. The only way now to get the government to pay or subsidize a B2 level class is to convice the Unemployment Office no one will hire me because my German isn’t good enough. Won’t be able to do this until after I’m done with my current class. Sigh.

Mmmm. We’ll see. For now, I’m just going to go study the N-Declination of Masculine Nouns. ‘Til the next post…

I’m desperately trying to recover from a blog drought. My readers are parched, thirsty. Or maybe they’ve altogether forgotten about me and left this desert to move onto greener pastures.

There are eight partially written posts in my drafts folder…so it’s not like I lost interest in writing. I’m always taking pictures and coming up with good ideas of things to blog about. I guess I just lack a true writer’s discipline.

Anyways, I’m writing now while sitting at my desk in sweaty jogging pants after coming in from a 40-minute run at sunset. It’s a start. It’s something.

I’m going to finish listening to Bob Dylan’s new album now. If you are curious, you can listen to it too: Exclusive Preview: Bob Dylan’s ‘Tell Tale Signs’.

"Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long"

… tastes disgusting.  Blek!  I still can’t get the nasty chemical aftertaste out of my mouth.  My mouth and sinus passages feel numb.

I had no idea a lemon sorbet could be ruined so badly in the substitution of white sugar and corn syrup with 30 packets of Splenda.  What a failure!

Especially after sitting in the garden, grilling chicken rubbed with organic rosemary, olive oil, freshly ground pepper and some Spanish sea salt purchased on my trip to Wiesbaden.  Green beans stir-fryed with garlic and lemon, followed by a small handfull of raspberries, a surprise September harvest in our garden.

I’m going to eat some seedless white grapes imported from Turkey.  Maybe that will help…