The Westmonster Daily

Good things that happened to me sometime or other.

Here’s hoping that this section of the blog will always be the largest! *clink*

My, but they grow so fast! My niece is one year old now. While I’ve stopped showering her with gaudy toys when I figured my brother’s house couldn’t take any more and she’s successfully climbed the first mountain set in her way by life, health, and fate (those bastards) she’s managed to stay the cutest little button the world has ever seen! Seriously, this is not an aunt’s subjective assessment at all! Everybody says so! And yes, I know that everybody always says so, no matter how ugly or egg-shaped the respective baby actually looks. But in this case… well, never mind, I don’t have to prove anything to you! *hmph*

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Anyway, she started being shy with strangers a couple of months ago. While Hubby is a constant source of joy and wonder to her (she’s flirting with my man! Always has!), me, not so much… Since I’ve never really had a lot of contact with a lot of small people she wasn’t usually very thrilled with my carrying her awkwardly around. I guess she sensed my general insecurity with babies and didn’t like the feeling, since she herself hasn’t had the opportunity yet to build much confidence in her own ability to keep herself alive. Whenever I’d pick her up she’d start wailing pretty much right away and fling her little hands toward the next best grown-up nearby. Settling into safer arms, she’d stop crying and smile again.

So that crushed me a little bit.

I knew, rationally, it didn’t have anything to do with sympathy or lack thereof. But it made me question myself anyway. Would I stand a chance with children of my own, if they ever happened? Or would they prefer their more experienced (and obviously more attractive to babies) daddy over me because I’m generally insecure with kids? Rationally, I knew that those questions, too, were nonsense. But emotionally… whole different story!

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Then, one day, shortly after her first birthday, I went over to my brother’s to have dinner with the three of them and take my bro out to the movies. As I walked in the door, my sister-in-law and my niece were home alone, sitting a couple of meters away from the door on the floor. When my niece saw me, she took me in with that quizzical look of hers, then started to grin and gurgle, and actually scuttled toward me! She didn’t stay with me long because she had to go pick up another load of confidence from her mom, but she returned often and seemed generally comfortable in my presence. And it has stayed that way for a couple of weeks now. I can actually make her laugh, and she watches me all the time and grins when I look at her. What A Feeling!!

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Rationally, I know that she probably has overcome her shyness of strangers or maybe I’ve been over there often enough so she knows I’m harmless now, but emotionally, I’m partying inside.

Today, I was invited by a friend from work and her husband to take their recently adopted viper red ’65 Mustang for a spin with them.

Please hold the line while I *faint*.

For those out there who are not familiar with this magnum opus of a car, here’s what it looks like:

(click on image for source)

The funny thing about this picture (which I googled) is that my colleague’s car also has those dice dangling from the rear view mirror. I’m not entirely sure but maybe that’s a required original part? I don’t know.

All I know is this: Once you set foot and then butt in this car, you’re instantly californicated and it becomes virtually impossible not to be completely blown away. Also, it seems improbable to be in a bad mood in a car like that.

Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not a car nut or anything (I drive a Suzupel, for crying out loud – more on that at a later time), but this baby is just so perfect, I can hardly stand it.

The steering wheel is made of some sort of wood, all of the handles, and knobs, and switches are made of chrome, the gas cap is very much not conveniently located at the very back of the car (motor in the front) – and there are no safety belts! The first thing I did when I sat down in the surprisingly comfy black leather seat was reach for the belt – alas, to no avail! This is one of the very few actually dangerous things that are allowed in Germany: Having no safety belts in a vintage car if they’re not originally there. While everything else is strictly regulated here, the law has not dared to advance into this domain and ruin everything. I was actually very careful not to touch the car door when we were going around a bend, for fear of falling out, but even though it was painfully unusual for me not to be wearing a safety belt, it had a very liberated feel to it, adding to the whole Californication experience.

And the sound! You should hear the sound! There are a few hiccups when you turn the key in the ignition, and then there’s a roar, a short but full-bodied, dangerous roar before the engine finally settles into its rumbling growl.

Also, today being my first time actually sitting in one, I finally understood why a Mustang needs to be called a Mustang: It squirms and prances and skips and bounces, just like a wild horse.

Golly, gee, fellas, he’s so dreamy.

For the last two years, whenever I’d been staying at Hubby’s, he’d make me sit on one very uncomfortable wooden folding chair after another in front of the computer. I even had to steal my own cushion out from under the cats purring away sleeping in the old armchair.

Those folding chairs would, one by one, fold under our respective weights – you know, Hubby is actually quite the gentleman and would, from time to time, offer me his comparatively comfy swivel chair and take the folding chair himself. The first wooden chair perished all to pieces and with a real bang under Hubby when we had dinner watching a DVD one unsuspecting evening. The second payed its debt to nature unter yours truly when we had another dinner watching another DVD another unsuspecting evening. Makes me think whether maybe the having dinner part had something to do with all that… Maybe we oughta switch to lighter fare. On the other hand, those chairs might have just been the crappy junk they looked and felt.

Today, Hubby told me the last of the folding chairs had a slivered leg and he wouldn’t stand for me sitting in that piece of crap any longer! So to IKEA we went and had a look around. Here’s the little baby Hubby bought as an addition to the careful interior design of his room, for me to sit in exclusively:

Ain’t she the prettiest little lady chair you’ve ever laid your eyes upon? I know she is the prettiest little lady chair my eyes have ever had the privilege to be laid upon. And a cinch to assemble, too.

So basically, I just wanted you to know: I’m in love!

Aaaaah, what a feeling!

I don’t have it often enough.

But when I do have it, there’s this fuzzy gush of yay soaring through me, and I can’t seem to find my head because I’ve used it all up.

Do you know that feeling? It’s “being-proud-of-yourself”.

In my case, it’s being proud of myself because I think I’ve managed to write a (first draft of a) research proposal in almost no time that would have taken most other people half a day.

I could be wrong, of course. Maybe what I’ve written isn’t even worth the paper I’ve written it on (well, I typed it on the computer, so there’s no paper, which means I should be safe as far as the value of the hypothetical paper is concerned). Maybe most other people could have finished it in less time, and done a better job, too. Maybe I’ll be told tomorrow that it’s all just a big fat load of bull crap and the worst thing I’ve ever written and how dare I steal everyone’s time. If that happens I’ll be ruinously embarrassed.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Just doesn’t. Because at this moment I’m feeling really proud of myself, and I don’t mind telling anyone who’ll listen, because I think I’ve done well. If I haven’t, I’ll find out soon enough, but until then I’m just going to enjoy that feeling of having no head because I’ve used it all up. I like it. And I need to cultivate that feeling since, as I pointed out earlier, I don’t have it as often as I should.

Something good happened to me today.

Very spontaneously, I went to a spice exhibition with Hubby and a couple of friends. Yes, spices. Exhibited. When my friend first mentioned it I didn’t really know what to expect, because… spices!? I mean, you could just go to the supermarket and have a good look without paying 10,-€. She was a bit offended when I told her this, I’m afraid. Well, she’ll forgive me. And I have to admit it was a worthwhile experience (okay, “experience” is a bit of an exaggeration but you know what I mean).

It wasn’t just spices, of course. It was the history of spices and spice trade seasoned with six or so spice “stations” where you could touch and smell samples of different spices. There was a fun diorama on the upper floor telling the story of Columbus’ and Magellan’s travels, there were exhibits comparing the average German dinner table before and after America was discovered (no potatoes in the bleak times before 1492, no corn, no tomatoes… oh! woe was us), there were models of Chinese and English and Portuguese ships, and metal cut-outs of people who had something or other to do with the distribution of spices. There was a plague mask on display whose long beak was filled with herbs and spices in order to prevent infection (fat load of good that must have done them), and a bunch of nifty silver vessels for different spice-related purposes (perfume containers, small jars with several compartments for different, expensive spices, …).

I learned that merchants who got rich trading spices were often called moneybags (says the online-dictionary of my choice, while the literal translation from German would be pepperbags - but there you go) and that Hildegard of Bingen (German benedictine abbess and medicinal pioneer) thought that cinnamon could cure headaches (which I will have to try at my earliest convenience (or rather inconvenience which headaches usually are)).

Also, at the aforementioned spice stations, there were recipe cards utilizing the respective spices on display. Those were my favorite for so many reasons, the best of which is this:
On the front of the card, the spice of interest is embedded in a pun! The cards say things like carda mom & dad, chill i out, and curr i? curr you? (not the wittiest puns in the world, maybe, but the fact that someone thought to give out recipe cards and spice them up with puns! I believe I’m in dire need of smelling salts!) The puns have nothing whatsoever to do with the recipe on the back, but that makes them all the more charming to me.

I collected all the cards, even though most of them call for meat of some sort, and I’m planning on trying out the vegetarian parts of the recipes in a one-and-a-half-week-long cooking marathon. I’m also planning on documenting this marathon in the munchies section of this blog. And by one-and-a-half-week-long cooking marathon I mean, of course, that I will be cooking something from those cards whenever I feel like it, and since there are exactly nine recipe cards, this will take, all in all, one and a half weeks, not necessarily on consecutive days. There.

Anyway, look forward to

• • Nutmeg Truffles
  • Coriander Carrots
  • Bean and Herb Pesto
  • Lukewarm (does that sound gross to anyone else?) Fried Potato Salad with Porcini
  • Cinnamon Tomato Soup
  • Nettle Vanilla Spinach
  • Tomato Salsa (without the capers the recipe calls for because they’re one of the few things that neither Hubby nor I would touch with a ten foot vanilla bean pole)
  • Chili Sour Cream with Elder Blossom Jelly and Strawberries
  • Spicy Red Wine Gugelhupf

*yum, i guess*