The Birth of Sog

  It was a cold and starry night 33 years ago today, when a certain woman went into labor. Sylvia Brown had predicted it via a vision of a woman in a ravine underwater with a yellow house nearby. Uri Geller felt the signs as his spoons bent all by themselves, for real this time. Jonathan Edwards was told by his dead aunt that the rumors were true. God was going to be a father and it was happening that night. Motsog (Mother of the son of God) and God, rushed to the local hospital, which, in this village, it was no more than a stable except without all the cute animals.

She screamed and cried because we all know that childbirth is supposed to hurt. I think she was probably something of a wuss, because I hear childbirth doesn’t hurt all that much. Getting scratched on the foot by a cat hurts, but childbirth, I hear is a breeze.

Such a breeze in fact that this woman’s child, hereby known as the Sog (son of god), decided he actually liked it inside that deep warm cave and didn’t really want to come out. He was to turn out to be something of a wuss too, not wanting to “Take on the Day” in the real world, but to sleep and possibly suck his thumb forever.

However, being the Son of God, his place was here with the rest of mortals and the pleasant hospital staff, dirty fingers and all, used a suction device to pull out our reluctant Sog. Attached to his head, they turned on the device and the next thing you know, out he plopped.

Sog, pissed, wet and cold, demanded to talk to the man in charge using a number of various languages to no avail. The pleasant hospital staff was unfortunately not educated in the ancient languages Sog used to communicate and was thus rudely slapped down on a cold table, measured and cleaned, fingers and toes counted and decided he was a pretty healthy little thing if you didn’t count the now cone-shaped skull.

His mother and God decided he was good enough to take home. Not even the cone-shaped noggin could condemn Sog to the Spartan cliffs.

Years went by and Sog was loved and cherished, as was his due. When he’d do something wrong, his parents would cluck, concerned that their boy, Sog, was perhaps not as perfect as they had thought. However, they blamed themselves and gave him more love and devotion. Sog grew up knowing he was a SoG so therefore entitled to whatever he wanted, as long as he didn’t kill people to get it. He also had a big penis. No mortal man could ask for more.

Sog grew up and became an adult. Like the Sog before him, he left his homeland to wander, learn and find promiscuous women in other cultures. He, like Sog I, productively worked with his hands.

Eventually he landed in Babylon by the Bay, a place of great temptation.

Here in BbtB, he met the counterpart to his newly found religion, capitalism. This particular promiscuous woman of a different culture (Pwoadc) had met many Sogs, and was not impressed. However, she liked his caboose and his company. So she stuck around for a while.

Eventually, it was time for him to return to his homeland, with the knowledge he had gained in his travels, and teach the uneducated massed about this thing called capitalism.

He asked Pwoadc to follow him and help him teach the poor kraut youth about this thing called capitalism and like all religious founders, to make money hawking his beliefs. He would offer her shelter, the protection of his name and all the sausage she could eat. Pwoadc decided this was the way of the righteous (not to mention her fondness for sausage) and followed. What a girl does for a nice caboose and the promise of sausage.

As of yet, there is no end to this story. Sog and Pwoadc are living well, if not happily together. In true partnership fashion, they are committed to furthering capitalism. He makes the money and she in turn negotiates to put it back into the economy. They have hung upon many of crosses (most of their own making), but as of yet have not needed to be resurrected. Sylvia Brown says that resurrection will be necessary in a couple of years and Uri Geller has not called back.

Happy Birthday, Sparky. I love you, you SOG.

Girlfriends and coffee, what else do you need?

 

Anyone who knows me knows I need coffee. When I was working, I needed it injected. Now that I’m not, a nice cup in the morning is all that’s required.

Anyone who knows me also knows I make a lousy cup of coffee. Just terrible. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but I always manage to royally fuck it up. It’s so bad Sparky won’t even drink it. I’ve tried machines and filters. I’ve tried French presses and Italian make-it-on-the-stove thingies. Nothing works. My step-mom, in effort to figure this out, walked me through the process and sent me articles that blamed the bean. Let me tell you, it’s not the bean.

Anyone who knows Sparky knows how difficult it is to add anything to the pristine clutter-free loft, regardless of how useful or necessary. I begged for an espresso machine. Sparky approved only the ultra high end machines whose price would take me years to justify. I simply did not have that kind of time. The less expensive ones were just not in Sparky’s aesthetic. As a newly married couple, that still mattered to me thus I hung myself on the cross of the coffeeless.

That was until my very good friend von Tauber bought me one.

I admired hers for years. Literally, years. (It seems so strange that its years because we met a couple of months after I moved here and its still weird to think I’ve been here for years.)

So last year, for my birthday, von Tauber bought me my machine. This might have been because I kept inviting myself over to indulge in a cup of really, really good coffee or it could have been because she is the epitome of a girlfriend.

She tried to teach me to make coffee. When that failed, she was always there with a cup or two waiting when I’d visit. Mostly, she understood what its like to 1. Need something so bad and 2. Negotiate with a spouse. She was even witness to an espresso machine negotiation gone bad.

So like the sister she’s become, she bought it for me, ended the debate and every morning I say little thank you as I sip my fresh and delicious cuppa joe. And for that I am forever grateful. This cup’s for you, lady!

Now, go look at her new site. She just vamped it up and out and it’s awesome. And I wrote the guest perspective this week.

Murderers and Handbags

My laptop is dead. Tot. Kaput. Finito. Gone from this world. I managed to transfer most of my files, except for my bookmarks and of course, my PSTs (outlook files) and half my music.

I broadcast from our media server, which has become my wet nurse until I get a new laptop.

Where’s Sparky, you ask? He was using your laptop for almost a year. How can he work if the laptop is dead? Really good questions.

The day MY laptop died, he got a Mac PowerBook.

What is he doing as I curse this mammoth “mini” tower with the sucky keyboard and massive speaker system that must be installed so I can use my headphones because for some unknown reason it doesn’t have a headphone jack?

He’s smiling and admiring the fish tank screen saver on his new machine. He’s spouting on and on about how great his new machine is. Blah, blah, blah. What is he doing as I’m on my back messing around with the millions of cords needed for this machine to function? He’s smiling dreamily and typing away.

Enough bitching for now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to bitch more about this later. That Sparky moved on after he killed my poor baby laptop is not a subject I can just let go. He’s a murderer, I tell you, a murderer! But it is perhaps getting old, so I will move on in my writing and suffer privately.

Now I need your help. Since I’ve lost my PST until next week sometime when I’m hoping the Useless Guy computer repair shop can retrieve my hard drive, I don’t have any of my old e-mail or contacts, which means I don’t have your e-mail address. Coordinating the Girlie weekend is difficult without e-mail addresses. Can you please resend your last e-mails so I have both the information and your addresses?

  On to a meme that Traveller One tagged me with. The Handbag meme. This is pretty appropriate considering I just picked out my new handbag a couple of days ago. I’ll pick it up in a few days.

Kim talks about how her husband won’t go into her handbag to save his life. Well, I have the opposite problem. To me my handbag is a private area. I organize it in a special way (not at all) and only I know what’s in there. Sparky has absolutely NO problem invading this private space and I have been actively trying to break him of this habit. I too carry his wallet, phone and keys. He feels that this act automatically gives him access to the handbag domain. It doesn’t.

I graciously accept his items in exchange for his occasional handbag carrying duties. This is why I consult him when picking out a handbag. I only purchase one we both like because he ends up carrying it. This makes us even.

Here it is. My green Furla. And it’s stuffed.

  This is what’s in it:
Keys
Gloves – cold hands, warm heart
My calendar – because I hate technology
My notebook with favorite pens and a mechanical pencil to write in my calendar
Tide stick – because I always make a mess
Hufnagel tickets – claim ticket for a couple of other handbags that are being repaired
LipGlosses – Am I too old to wear gloss? In shades: Lovechild, Spirited and Moonstone
Face Lotion - in a teeny tiny container
Picture Holder – My brother got it for me in Vegas and it holds a couple of pictures and a lotto ticket
Passport
MP3 player – never leave home without it
Wallet
Cell phone
Starbucks mints
Hand lotion – my hands are always dry
Splenda
Kleenex
Tampex
Migraine tablets
Make-up bag


I think that’s enough for now. Especially since this keyboard doesn’t feel very good and the keys are all different from my old keyboard and I hate it. I’m going to go bitch to Sparky about it. He’s not quite repentant enough for my taste. I want blood.

Blue Screen is Such an Ugly Color

My laptop is doing its death dance. I've been blue screened twice today. Tomorrow the computer guys are coming to the house to repair our WiFi and I hope to have the desktop up and running again. Until then, my e-mail (and everything else) is shot. If you have e-mailed me regarding girls weekend etc, I'm not ignoring you, I swear. Outlook crashes eerything right now. I blame Sparky, but then I blame Sparky for everything.

Hope to be back tomorrow.

It's going to be expensive

  It arrived. And its arrival has started a process that anyone who knows Sparky will understand was extremely hard to begin.

I am furnishing our loft.

Yep. I said it. And I mean it. I had a meeting this morning with our designer to pick out curtains and tables and sofa and rugs and pillows and duvets and all sorts of warmth for this mausoleum.

None of it will have a polished surface and all of it will be gorgeous and warm and inviting. I’m going to throw in a ton of candles for good measure.

What arrived, you ask, to start this manic spree? My chair. The chair that fits none of Sparky’s requirements for a chair. Meaning it’s comfortable with rounded corners and soft fabric. He, the chair, is inviting and warm and I can’t wait to sit and read a book in his arms.

I fell in love with Chairy (a new name to come) last June. He is a beautiful stone gray microfiber suede. He’s firm yet cozy. He’s big and he loves my butt and my toes as I dig them into the cracks when I sit on my feet.

Three years ago I moved in to our place. I had only a blow-up mattress and a conviction that if I lived with Sparky’s mother for another night, I would be on the next plane out of Germany. Oh and I had a working toilet. That was it.

September the previous year, Sparky and I walked in Ligne Roset and picked out a few pieces for when the construction was finished. This took days of negotiation and a few in store heated debates. We haven’t added to those few pieces.

  Oh I have, but only in the most temporary Ikea sense. I bought a dining table one day for 89 euros because I was sick of not have a table. I added 19 euro chairs because I was sick of using my Aeron chair in the dining room. I bought bookcases out of desperation and a TV stand because I was sick of the milk crate Sparky refers to as high art.

My dad calls it minimalist. Sparky calls it heaven. I call it hell wrapped up in a pretty package. Our designer loves it. But I have to live in it. As Sparky is gone more than not, the museum look is on its way out.

Hell, I might even get another cat. I’m feeling a little crazy today, drunk on the power of one chair and silk samples.

Girlie Weekend Date Decided

Its official.

March 16, 17, 18.

Let me know if you can make it. My e-mail is jen(at)heissescheisse(dot)com. If you need more details to decide, drop me a note.

Dixie, Dixie, Dixie: Next year we'll work around your schedule. I want to do it before it gets to hot and buggy. I am a wilted flower of femininity when it gets hot and not very much fun.

Christina/Mausi: I'm counting you in. Sparky will be so happy.

Christina/AEinD: We are baby friendly and all you would have to do is sit your pregnant butt down and perhaps lift the glass to your lips. I'm sure James can put together a really long straw if that is too much work. We are nothing if not accomadating.

Heather - You are officially signed up. And we'll have to do something for St. Patty's.

Maria - You are close enough to come for the day if you'd like a little break from The Boy.

Amy and Kim - Book your tickets and come on over for the weekend.

Jul - Just do it. Its loads of fun.

ET - Perhaps you are free that weekend? I can make it worth your while.

Operational System Not Found

It started with a doorbell. At 8:30 am. Sparky was gone and I wasn’t expecting my liebhaber until much later. Like after I put on a bra or used a toothbrush.

It was my neighbor/architect/guy who knows how to fix everything broken. He was accompanied by a Biologist Dan, come to check my timbers.

Aside to clarify: Right before I left for SF in Dec, we discovered water damage in our bathroom due to an unfortunate lack of experience in drain cleaning by our upstairs neighbor’s girlfriend or daughter resulting in our ceiling (his sub-flooring) becoming the receptacle for vast amounts of water.

After many weeks of drying out, I came back to find a big hole in my bathroom ceiling with a beautiful garden of mold growing happily in the warm recesses of 400 year old timber. After asking if the blooming black stuff was mold I was told no, that citric acid was sprayed to prevent mold. I was however looking directly at it, making eye contact if you will and was thus not convinced that this wasn’t mold. In vague German terms, the citric acid explanation means “I don’t really know, but I’m going to say no until I get a biologist here and I’m not going to tell you I’m doing this until I show up at you house at 8am unannounced.”

Up on the big ladder, Bio Dan sighed, Ja-ed and nodded in a resigned way that my rudimentary German could not differentiate typical run of the mill German melancholy from “It looks like poisonous mold and this is going to cost a lot and cause a lot of trouble and we should just ignore it for a few years or until they die of mycotoxin poisoning.

They were talking really fast and I just couldn’t keep up. Bio Dan took a couple of samples and sighed, shook his head and looked really grim. As an expat with the language skills of a three year old, I depend heavily on body language. Bio Dan’s bod was communicating a long mold battle and construction work. The actual English language communicated they’d get back to me. Then they left leaving me with my over active imagination and absolutely no access to the Internet.

Why no Internet? Because the night before I came home to find my laptop communicating with me from the dead. It said: “Operational System Not Found”

Beautiful words to be sure. Right up there with “Darling, I know we’ve been married for three years, but I’ve discovered I’m gay.”

After Bio Dan left, I went back to the carcass of my laptop to see if I could start it up. Because I am a complete moron, I had not backed ANYTHING up for like, I don’t know, years.

Letters, pictures, writings. Losing my hard drive would be like having a fire. I’d lose the last three years. Then there’s the crap that Sparky has on here. Taxes, work stuff, e-mail. Our calendar and address book and all the everyday stuff that you don’t know you need until you can’t access it. Oh and then there was that little folder cleverly named a clever little name that screamed “Open me!” that might have contained photo items that I would not particularly like to share with the computer repair guys or anyone on the face of the earth. I can’t begin to describe the terror I felt, hoping that if the machine cooled down, I could get in and make some backup copies and clean up that which needed to be cleaned. Really, this was more than not wearing clean underwear and getting in a car accident. This was like wearing nothing but S&M gear and getting in a car accident and having your Sicilian father be the first person on the scene.

My cell phone chose to ring at that moment. I picked it up and my fingers, finding no purpose without their beloved keyboard, opened before I had it half way to my ear, thus dropping my beautiful spy phone directly into my half-empty cup of coffee.

Cell phones don’t like coffee as much as I do. Really. No matter how much they beg, do not give in. The spy phone works again, but it took a few days to dry out. I still have trouble with the hearing part. I don’t look nearly as cool and spy like saying things like “WHAT? I can’t hear you? Can you repeat that bit of about the top secret spy stuff?”

This phone problem became a bigger problem when I brought my laptop into the computer guys. With Sparky in whatever part of Germany he was in, namely not in Boweltown, I needed him to communicate to the man behind the counter, herby known as The Useless Guy, exactly how much of an emergency it was that this particular laptop was down and that we needed it back ASAP. ASAP does not mean 10 days. I mean, what would Jack Bauer do if if Chloe couldn't get access for 10 days? And I am just as important to national security as Jack Bauer (Thank you, Hamish, for passing on the 24 addiction. It's like crack, man.)

Again, my language skills must have hampered my communication because this guy could not stop smiling. You know that smile of incomprehension, the one that indicates way too long of a stay in the birth canal. And this was way before he had seen those pictures.

Using the spy phone to call Sparky yielded nothing. Coffee soaked chip or what I don’t know. My speed dial connected me over and over again to a man totally NOT Sparky.

All I have to say is that it is a really good thing it was a man the phone connected to because with the way my day was going, had it been a woman, I might not have been very understanding. I might have jumped to conclusions because jumping to conclusions is my favorite form of exercise, especially when everything seems to be going wrong. And I had already been to the gym, so I was warmed up and limber enough to jump far and wide.

The day just got worse from there. The destruction part ended around 8 pm with the dropping of a brand-new-never-been-used MAC eye shadow and having it shatter into a million powder pieces. Mim – It was Sable and I totally feel your pain. It must be a really soft color.

The week did not improve and ended with a bang. Not the fun kind. The flu kind. I was totally sick Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I thought I was better enough to go with Sparky to Munich on Monday. Truthfully, I wasn’t but I had a coffee date with Schokolade Mädchen and did not want to cancel.

She and I talked for hours, literally. She’s fabu and backed up my belief that I haven’t met a blogger I haven’t liked. But then again, I don’t usually meet up with bloggers I don’t think I’ll like. In my usual habit of not writing about my real life visits with cyber people, I’ll leave it at that.

I can only hope I didn’t pass my bug on to her because the rest of the week was a blur of fever and delusions. At one point with my fever was over 102°F, I thought I was going to die and Scrunchy was going to eat my face before Sparky got back from his business trips.

When Sparky did come home, it was to fall feverishly into bed beside me, both of us down for the count. And I mean down. I haven’t been that sick since I was hospitalized with a super cool meningitis/pneumonia combo in college.

This is where the mold comes into play. This super-bug combined all the worst bug symptoms from the stomach flu and bronchitis to strep throat and sinus infection and it did not follow the three-three-three pattern. Three days coming on, three days sick and three days getting better. Nope. It was Sudden Onset with a good seven days of sickness hell. So obviously it had to be toxic mold, right? I didn’t have more than my imagination to back up my conclusions because I still didn’t have my computer. And let me tell you, my imagination is a powerful, powerful thing. If only I could use it for good.

It wasn’t toxic mold. I got the call yesterday. Our mold is harmless.

I got my computer back, 10 days after I brought it in with the instructions that it will die again soon, but should get me through the next couple of weeks. I didn’t lose any data and have since backed up all my stuff. (All incriminating photos have been deleted, but I’m still not going back into that shop ever again.)

Sparky on the other hand, can’t stop reading What Would Tyler Durden Do long enough to back his stuff up. The only way I can even touch this machine when he’s home is to read Edna St. Vincent Millay poetry out loud until he can’t stand it anymore.

So that’s where I’ve been in a nutshell. A really big nutshell. I am spending my day returning e-mails etc… The girls’ weekend will proceed now that I know I won’t poison anyone with toxic mold.