Ponderances, Inanities, and other Nonsense
Archive for May, 2008
Everything is hunkey-dorey…
May 28th
Looking back on the last several blog posts, they all seem to be a little negative; however, despite all of the little aggravations that occur day-to-day everything is going pretty well.
Sophia sings all the time. She is very musically-inclined. I heard her hum “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” the other day, which was interesting. She is far more interested in sounds than words. She really has no interest in being able to communicate with us, apart from “Please” and “Thank You.” Yet, she picks up songs relatively quickly, especially if they have hand gestures, a la “Itsy Bitsy Spider”. So, we make up gestures for songs and she picks those up right along with the song. She sings while she runs, too. Well, it is more of a “Dee dee dee dee” thing, but she does it in time with her steps.
Yesterday, when I came home she was so excited she screamed a couple of times and ran around in circles. While she has always welcomed me well, she has never done that before.
Also, she slept last night from 8:30 pm to about 9 this morning, which is great compared to the 4 AM to 1 PM schedule she was on a few months back.
Hope everything is great with everyone, and I hope you all had a memorable Memorial Day.
Gas prices
May 27th
So, I wanted to find out what exactly are the reasons for gas prices being so high.
I found a site that has everything you want to know…and then some.
Some funny.
May 21st
I tend to agree with those people that say YouTube is the “Root of all Evil” (Lewis Black, et al.) However, it does have an up side. Sometimes very clever people take something that is mildly interesting (Bill O’Reilly’s rant on Inside Edition) and take it to new levels.
For your viewing pleasure: (A la Sesame Street, this episode is brought to you by the letter “F”)
Click here, and here.
The Accord Strikes Back…The Saga Continues
May 14th
So I went on Monday to get the car. I was almost out the door, when my trade in, the old Honda Accord was not about to have any of that. “No leave old car,” it said. (Cars don’t have formal education, so they sound like cavemen. They also wheeze, ping, and whirr.) It thwarted me by having a different VIN than was on the title. It was clearly a typo, as only one number was different, and it wasn’t the unique identifier in the sequence…it was just part of the description. For those of you in-the-know, please skip to next paragraph. A VIN, or Vehicle Identification Number has more than just a unique number…it tells stuff like Make, Model, color, interior color, emissions, etc. It is kind of like your driver’s license, which is a coded with some of your personal info.
Anyway, I had to leave the car, to return for the fourth time in a week to take care of all that crap. I have to go see if the MVA (the DMV in MD) and see if they can get it right for once. Wish me luck.
New car debacle
May 12th
For some people, things just don’t go smoothly. Take me, for instance. My last name isn’t Murphy, but it always seems that things go “tits-up” whenever the opportunity presents itself, and it is usually correspondent to the worst possible time.
Antonella, Sophia, and I drove up to Laurel to the CarMax on Saturday. (Laurel is like an hour and a half from here.) I found a used car that I like, a 2007 Nissan Sentra. (I know it is not the greatest car in any aspect, but it does get good gas mileage, which is important these days.) Anyway, I wanted to trade in the “Old Beater” on it, so I drove back up there the next day. When I was almost done filling out all the paperwork (virtual paperwork these days), the salesman noticed that the inspection had a mileage recorded that the car had not reached yet. So, unless a flux capacitor was one of the options on the car, I doubt it was accurate. The thing was it was Maryland law to not be able to change that until 12:01AM this morning. So I have to drive all the way back this evening. Fun fun fun.
Munich
May 2nd
Because I really didn’t deliver as promised in a previous post (with regards to blogging about my trip to Munich), I figured I would do that now.
I awoke to a phone call at 4 AM to hear my wife saying that a) she didn’t have her green card with her, and b) Lufthansa wasn’t going to let her on the plane to Dulles. So, I tried to see what I could do. I called the U.S. Consulate in Munich and they said that she would have to go there to do anything. So, she paid for like a fifty Euro cab ride and they still did nothing. So, I was going to post it via Fed-ex, but the “absolutely, positively has to be there overnight” only applies to the U.S. (whether that is CONUS or not, I am not sure). Anyway, they would estimate it would be Tuesday (it was then Thursday). So, I did the math, and it would not be much more for me to fly over there on a last-minute deal on Expedia, and got a hotel for Antonella and Sophia for that night.
I left from BWI about 6 PM that day and arrived in Munich around 11 AM the following day. I took a cab to Hallbergmoos, where Antonella was staying at a nice Gasthaus. Sophia was excited to see me, and I her. We took a shuttle to the hotel in Neufarn that we were staying at, which got us a little closer to the city. We spent the rest of the day walking around Neufarn.
The next morning, we took a train in to Munich Hauptbahnhof, where we boarded a sight-seeing bus I had purchased in conjunction with my Expedia ticket. Sophia had had enough of travelling (after the train and whatnot) so she was a bit of a handfull on the bus. We got off at the Opera house and found our way to the Hofbrauhaus. We had some spaetzle and some pretzels and a couple of different beers. The beers were really good, but with the microbrews in America these days, there was not much of a gap between those beers and the stuff I normally get on tap. That is a big departure from the way it was when I was stationed in Germany from 90-92.
From there, we caught our bus again and took it to the Rathaus (Marielplatz). We walked around some mall for a little bit and then proceeded to the Rathaus and saw the Glockenspiel. Sophia chased pigeons around, and we watched a string quartet play some Mozart and an accordian player play some stuff. (I know the accordian is a bitch to learn to play and I can respect people who play it for the burden of learning, but to me an accordian doesn’t sound much better than bagpipes).
Watching the Glockenspiel was neat, but it is hard to be too excited. I mean, sure it is neat when you think about how old it is and how it was the 1800s equivalent of animatronics you see at Disney. But, I have seen both and being a geek, I got bored after about a minute of watching it. Sophia really didn’t care, either. But, we have little movies to remind her she was there to see it, until she can get back and see it for herself. (at which point the technology will have progressed even further and make it even less interesting by comparison).
From there, we got back on the bus and finished our trip back to the Hauptbahnhof, then got on a train and went back to Neufarn. The next day we got to the airport extra early and everything went off without a hitch. We called our friend Steve to pick Antonella up at Dulles and take her back to his place in Penn Quarter so I could pick her up on my way back from BWI. We got back home about 9 PM.
That’s it in a nutshell. It was far too brief to be interesting, but made for a very tiring weekend for me.
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