the deep moans round with many voices

1. My peppers continue to flourish as of Wednesday evening. (I am not quite sure how they are doing right at this very moment — we had a crazy downpour around 9pm and it’s been too dark and wet for me to check on them.) The jalapeño seems to be growing some sort of moss or algae covering over the soil in its pot, so I sprayed it with fungicide. I sprayed a bit on the bell pepper as well, just in case. We shall see if that makes any difference.





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2. In other news, my parents duly arrived, visited, and departed. We had lunch at the daily buffet at New Delhi Diamonds, a local Indian place just off the Commons, after which we went to Six Mile Creek vineyard because wineries are kind of what we do when my family visits me. Then we drove to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where we took a walk on some of their trails -- we were expecting rain to be the weather issue, but it turned out that sun was more of a problem, whoops. We didn't see very many birds, though we certainly heard them all around, but a walk in the woods is always pleasant.

On our way home, we stopped to buy groceries and gas. Then we had some peachenkuchen (...okay, explanation: my dad's mother had an awesome recipe for pflaumenkuchen, my mom likes other fruits better than plums and has adapted the recipe in various ways, and we tend to bastardize the name between German and English -- so, peachenkuchen rather than pfirsicherkuchen (pfirsichen?) or peach tart/pie/torte/whatever) and wine, because why not, followed by both my parents taking twenty-minute naps while I checked my email and so on. After that, we ate takeout from McDonalds for dinner and carted all their donations in to my church for the August recycling sale.

All in all, a successful trip. :-)

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3. I wanted to get the beta edits on "Secrets" ch. 15 and the epilogue finished this evening, but I had a vicious pounding headache by the time my parents left -- perhaps a mix of sun and lack of caffeine early in the day -- so I kind of collapsed into bed and took an extended nap instead. But I do have everything printed out and will cheerfully attack them with a pen Thursday night.

Things I was not expecting:

When I was seventeen, I spent a month in Nürnberg with a host family (less a week in Berlin) as part of an exchange program between an American association of high school German teachers and some part of the German government. It was an awesome experience, one of the two best things I have ever won in my life.

My host mother and I have kept in sporadic touch over the years; we began with semi-regular postcards and have now lapsed into nothing but Christmas cards. I briefly encountered my host brother on Facebook earlier this year; we exchanged greetings and that was about it.

So I was very surprised to get a phone call from Frau Martin this afternoon!

My German is quite rusty at this point, alas. I can more or less get my point across, but my grammar is shaky and I've lost a lot of vocabulary. It was also a bit tricky to understand what she was saying, since there was static on the connection, but it did get easier as the conversation went on and my brain went, "Oh, right, Deutsch! Um, where's the protocol for that... *rummage, rummage* This, maybe?" and things sharpened into better focus, as it were.

Frau Martin tried to give me her name on Skype, so we could talk again, but I have trouble with Skype and also am not at all sure I wrote down the right thing. But! I have agreed to write my email address and Skype handle and send them to her son via Facebook, so hopefully something will come of this.

She also told me that her son is now married (which I knew) and that he and his wife are expecting their first child in May. I did NOT know the latter news, so that was nice to learn. :-)

*Re the subject line: Like I said, my German grammar is shaky these days. Please feel free to correct my inevitable errors. :-)

ETA: Thank you to thady for the fix!