Just now the Confessor came up to his mother and informed her solemnly that he told his sister to do a time-out because she called him a dummy.

Caught the opening game with the Braves on tape delay on NASN with the kids, and though we missed the opening innings (where the Nats jumped ahead 2-1) it was a great game -- great way to break in the new stadium, particularly with Zimmermann's walk-off homer to win the game 3-2.

While Gloriana was decked out in her Nats ballcap and was swinging a Nats kiddie bat, the Confessor interestingly enough didn't want to wear his Nats or his Braves gear...until the Braves tied the game on an error by the Nats catcher and sending a runner home, when I asked him out of curiosity which team he wanted to win. The Braves, he said. (Em is now grinning ear to ear.) Shortly after that, the Nats got the winning run, and he was a bit unhappy about it...oh well, kid, welcome to baseball. :-)

[THE SCENE: Ethelred is talking to BoE about a woman he got to know online who is coming over for a visit.]

ETHELRED
As it happens she's in the vicinity to pick up her veil at the cathedral in $NEARBY_CITY and wants to stop by and visit.

BoE
Veil? What for?

ETHELRED
She wants to be a consecrated virgin.

BoE
Sounds interesting. How's that work?

ETHELRED
Well, it's a bit late for you.

BoE
Not really. You don't count.

Earlier today we finally got around to doing this year's installment of an annual tradition in Europe, especially in Germany, referred to as Sternsinger. In the usual form, children dressed as the Three Kings arrive around Epiphany, sing songs, and say a blessing for the household, writing something like this above the door, using a piece of chalk or crayon blessed by a priest for the purpose:

20 * C + M + B * 08

The 20 and 08 is the year; "C + M + B" stands for Christus mansionem benedicat, which means "Christ, bless this house". (The CMB may also be related to the folklore origin of the "names" of the Three Kings -- Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar.) The tradition goes back to at least the 16th century.

Since our parish is so scattered, we don't have kids in the neighborhood to visit homes and do it, so we improvise by inviting our priest over to do the honors, and we have a little something to eat, sing some songs, have a Bible reading and then get out a thurible, load it up with incense and cense the whole apartment, room for room.

So the priest duly got out the thurible and we put in some incense (we had a nice mixture with a good bit of sandalwood), and I went from room to room, starting with the workroom and kitchen and working our way to the bedrooms. The Confessor found this all hugely exciting and was following me around, with smoke billowing all over the place.

When we got to the master bedroom (which adjoins the kids' room), the Confessor excitedly asked if I'd do his room as well. Sure, I said. So I walked into their room and started swinging the thurible around (using the technique I learned as an acolyte -- held at chest height, swung twice to the left, twice to the right, and twice again to the left), and the Confessor instructed me to swing it around his bed some more, because his bed smells.

(Needless to say, we all just about fell over laughing.)

[THE SCENE: Ethelred returns home from grocery shopping, where he spots a copy of Pocahontas on special on DVD. Since the Confessor has been asking a lot about Virginia lately, Ethelred seizes the opportunity. However, BoE generally dislikes Ethelred's impulse purchases...]

ETHELRED [producing DVD from behind his back]
Surprise!

BoE [looking squinty-eyed skeptical]
What's that?

ETHELRED
It's a bit of Virginia history!

BoE
Uh-huh.

ETHELRED
I got it just for the Confessor!

BoE.
Uh. Huh.

ETHELRED
And she has a nice rack!

BoE
Really. Well, I'm calling your mother.*

ETHELRED
You wouldn't!

* - You see, BoE has the rare advantage of having her mother-in-law always on her side, so she gets to complain about me to a sympathetic ear all the time. Further evidence that women-folk are just generally incapable of understanding my greatness.

It's great having my parents here for the holidays, but...I notice that as they get older, they start being, ah, rather open about their bodily functions, going into great detail about it.

Example conversation just now (BoE was mercifully not around to hear this):

PAPA D'ETHELRED
Woo, I just barely made it to the toilet!

ETHELRED
[cringes]

PAPA D'ETHELRED
Man, that stool was soft!

ETHELRED
[looks appealingly at Maman d'Ethelred]

MAMAN D'ETHELRED [to Ethelred]
Well, when you eat a lot of fatty foods like we did last night, that does have its effect on you, y'know.

ETHELRED
Um, I didn't really want to know about all this.

MAMAN D'ETHELRED
As if we weren't intimately aware of your stools all the time as a kid.

ETHELRED
That was 35 years ago!

MAMAN D'ETHELRED [gives patented withering look]
So?

You see, that So? is the unanswerable question. For thousands of years the greatest minds in philosophy and religion have tried to answer their mother's question So? and have ended up generally going completely mad, instead turning to writing impenetrable tomes like Beyond Good and Evil, all as a reaction to their mothers. It's true.

The following conversation ensued this evening after I got back from our monthly English service. BoE and the kids didn't go this time because BoE was feeling under the weather.

BoE
So how was the service?

ETHELRED
Oh, it went well enough.

BoE
And what was your sermon about?

ETHELRED
More or less about why we celebrate Advent and Christmas, and being awake--

BoE
Oh, well, whatever you said, I'm sure it was wrong.

ETHELRED
Er...

BoE
Obviously people started celebrating Christmas so they could have a White Christmas.

ETHELRED
[wondering where this is leading]

BoE
...and obviously it's the best time of year to go shopping for presents. So what are you giving me?

ETHELRED
A lump of coal.

BoE
Oooooh, you mean the tiny compressed kind you wear on your finger?

ETHELRED
No, you have to compress it yourself.

BoE
Well, you could always put it between your cheeks for that, then.

---

You see what I put up with? Mutiny in the ranks! Insubordination! Insurrection! MATRIMONY!

Roasted turkey breast with bacon and stuffing
Glazed carrots
Au gratin potatoes
Spoon bread*
Gravy
Cranberry sauce (kindly provided by a guest, homemade)
Cucumber and bell pepper salad
Pumpkin pie

Aside from the pie (BoE did the crust, I did the filling) and cranberry sauce, that was all me in the kitchen. Keep in mind the lack of mixes here for typical American foods (i.e. everything was entirely from scratch). I was in the kitchen yesterday for five hours. Yeesh.

But the family and guests seemed to like it all... ;-)

* - I couldn't find my old recipe for it, so I went online to find one. There are some serious WTF recipes out there for spoon bread, let me tell you. Hint: All it's supposed to be is just boiled cornmeal, milk, eggs and salt...but I found a good recipe and it turned out pretty well.

Already wrote this in Tammy's blog, but saving it here for posterity.

When BoE and I were still studying, we would occasionally drive from the town where we lived at the time to where BoE's family lives. The route took us over land and through a number of small villages, one of which had a fairly large house at the main intersection (the town was just a wide spot in the road) and with a parking lot in front, conspicuously with cars only having out-of-town plates.

Once my parents visited us, and BoE and I were driving them to visit her family. Naturally we drove through that town, and my dad (who tends to be amazingly naïve sometimes, and who likes to vocally point out anything and everything of remote interest to him) pointed at the house and said, "Ooooh, look at the purty red lights!"

BoE and I sniggered while my mom asked him through clenched teeth if he knew what the red lights were for. He was utterly mystified.

Of course, in his defense the house otherwise looked pretty innocuous -- obviously an old half-timber farmhouse that had been converted to the purpose, and there were no obvious signs other than the parking lot and red lights. If you didn't know what red lights mean, you could have taken it for a restaurant or club or even a private home with too many cars. Even so, whenever my parents are here and we're out for a drive, invariably "look at the purty red lights" comes up.

The funny thing is that Hannover has a big bordello (link semi-SFW) that even advertises on taxis, street signs and the radio. That kinda blew my circuits when they started up.

And yes, prostitutes have to pay taxes on their income. It is considered a regular profession. It used to be that prostitution was technically illegal (or in a legal grey zone), but prostitutes had to pay taxes anyway. But some years ago they just fully legalized it, removing the last major bars from doing it.

One other fun bit about prostitution in Germany: One fairly traditional way of doing it was (and still is) for individual prostitutes to buy an old trailer, RV, or camper, park it alongside a country road and that was their place of business. If you see her sitting at the wheel, she's open for business. If not, she's...occupied. (If the RV is rocking, she's really occupied.) You see them once in a while, though not too frequently. But the funny part was that last year we drove to Wolfsburg with my parents to visit the VW factory (they have a snazzy experience museum). I had never been on that stretch of road before, and it was packed with those RVs.

And once again my dear old dad innocently wondered what all these women were doing parked on the side of the road. :-D

Our apartment is, by German standards, fairly good-sized -- 105 m², to be exact, with four rooms, plus bath, kitchen, hallway and balcony. Thing is, the building was restored just after the war, and being an old building it's got pretty high ceilings (almost four meters high), so heating it isn't too fun.

The additional thing is that the windows in the living room and kitchen were replaced a few years ago with vinyl double-glazed thermal windows -- really good ones -- and just before we moved in, the windows in the workroom were also replaced with the same type. Unfortunately, the window and balcony door in our bedroom and the window in the kids' bedroom were still the old single-glazed wooden-framed type -- and worse, the balcony door (which could both open swinging inwards or also hinge on the bottom to tilt in, a common type in Germany) wasn't closing properly, sometimes popping out of the hinges and only hanging on by one hinge and the latch.

We complained to the management about it a couple times, and they sent a guy over, who sprayed WD-40 on the hinges and proclaimed it miraculously healed. Unfortunately for the management company, no such magical healing powers exist in cans of WD-40, and I pointed out the rapidly worsening signs of water damage in the frame and on the floor in front of the door (not to mention not being too happy about the door not latching properly when two small kids play in front of it).

So they finally caved and agreed to replace the door and window. The workmen came by today and did it. The only downside being that I couldn't get any work done while they were here, since it made a huge racket cutting out the old frame and installing the new one.

I immediately noticed a difference in how the living room (which adjoins our bedroom) and our bedroom felt warmer. Just in time for winter, hopefully saving us a ton on heating costs.

It sucks that the kids' room (adjoining our room) is still badly insulated -- it has two exterior cinderblock walls and most of the ceiling is also exposed to the outside (being the upstairs neighbor's terrace), and the window is still the old type, but at least it's not as leaky and drafty as our old balcony door was. It used to be that, if we left both doors to the bedrooms open from the living room (but had the windows closed), you could clearly feel the draft of the cold air coming in from the bedrooms (which is why we generally closed the door to the bedrooms in winter). Now that is no longer the case and we can let the kids use the bedrooms in wintertime more. w00t!

There is a brouhaha over here about a well-known German TV presenter, Eva Herman, who for some time has been pushing her ideas about how women shouldn't do careers, should stay at home and just be good mommies. It began, oddly enough, about the time she had her baby; then she began praising breastfeeding on TV, and gradually she started a sort of mommy crusade, culminating in a controversial book, The Eve Principle ("Das Eva-Prinzip"), where she called men who didn't provide for their wives "wimps" and laid out her belief that it is a waste of time for women to pursue a career (pretty rich coming from a wealthy career woman who is still working after becoming a mother).

In other words, she is having a mid-life crisis and is doing it very publicly.

The crowning glory, though, was her recent assertion that the Nazis had a good family policy. (To quote: "...much was of course bad, such as Adolf Hitler, but some things were also very good. For example the high esteem of mothers. This was gotten rid of by the 1968 generation, and that's why we now have our social mess.")

When her employers demanded an explanation, she offered a half-hearted apology (or non-apology -- more like an attempt to explain it) which only served to tick people off even worse, and her state TV network, NDR, promptly sacked her. And sure enough, neo-Nazi parties such as the NPD are claiming her as an icon.

Yesterday's edition of our local paper has an editorial that is suitably acid (quick and dirty translation by yours truly):

Please stop babbling!

People say a lot about women. For example, they like to say that women talk too much. There was even a scientific study recently that took up the question and recorded the flow of speech of men and women with a stopwatch. Without scientific aid, a prominent TV presenter has offered proof that not just men, but women too should sometimes rather remain silent. Eva Herman could have saved herself -- and her public audience -- a lot of trouble.

But she didn't do that and impudently blabbed on about what was supposedly "good" about the Nazi dictatorship. It resulted in her dismissal by the public TV networks. Rightly, in spite of her proffered apology. For a little basic knowledge would have sufficed to expose the reality behind Hitler's praise of the family for what it was: a façade, hypocritical and part of an inhuman racial ideology that removed the rights of families and destroyed them. Even in the rearing of children, parents were mistrusted: Jungvolk (German Youth), Hitler Youth and Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) were there to twist them to the will of the Party. Ms. Herman's problem is not so much her sloppy handling of the blackest chapter of Germany's history, but rather -- see above -- her loquaciousness and her strident crusade for home and hearth. Both paid off well until now. In talk shows, in which endless babbling and shallow provocation are of the essence, she made a name for herself as the jokester and big mouth. With books about God-willed gender roles, she became a leading woman for all those who dreamed about returning to a time when women would clear out the dirt without complaint and wouldn't compete with men for jobs.

What went wrong, Ms. Herman? A PR gag turned into a campaign; the campaign turned into a mission. For applause is addicting. That it came increasingly from the far right was -- apparently -- unimportant to the author and antifeminist Herman. For every provocation -- that's the rule in the media circus -- wears out. She had to lay it on again to secure her own success. And keep on babbling -- preferably that which Joe Sixpack also says. That the 1968 generation is to blame for everything. That not all was bad "back then"...until the gaffe that didn't even get the point across.

Men, according to Herman, are unfortunately sometimes wimps. Nonsense. The men at NDR certainly aren't. They fired their employee. Now Ms. Herman can live the life that she proclaims -- a life for the family, without a career. Wanna bet she doesn't make it?
(Gabi Stief)

Last week, Gloriana had her routine checkup at the pediatrician for her second birthday. BoE took her there (I had to take the Confessor to a different appointment and couldn't go) and told me about what happened.

The doctor had her do some tests to check on her development, and Gloriana kept exceeding expectations rather wildly. One in particular was pretty funny -- she was going to ask Gloriana to make a tower out of some bricks, but she'd hardly finished asking when Gloriana was already half-done.

On a similar note, for her birthday last week one of her godmothers gave her a puzzle with cutout animals, supposedly appropriate for two-year-olds (well, she did turn two). Gloriana unwrapped it, dumped out the pieces, and promptly put them right back in exactly the right spots without batting an eye. The godmother grinned and suggested eBay. :-)

Meanwhile it's become a running joke about how Gloriana leaves a trail of socks behind her wherever she goes. From all the grannies whose socks she charms off. Gloriana likes to chat them up, is all smiles and giggles, they coo over her and her blonde curls and big smile, and pop their socks are off, and off to the next granny she goes.

Somewhat oddly, lately she seems more interested in baseball than the Confessor. If the Braves aren't on, he won't watch (or only grudgingly), but she'll curl up next to Daddy and watch anyway, and gets into it.

That's my girl. :-D

Naturally I'm already having her fitted out for her chastity belt and constructing the high tower to lock her away, being a good father and all.

Thankfully, my parents weren't on this bridge. Though I used to drive across it all the time, and so do my parents.

Hope SW, Jane, Helix, Alan and all the others in MN and their loved ones are OK.

Update OK, after knee-jerk posting here after reading my e-mail but before reading Multiply, I now see SW already posted about this.

In another online forum -- unfortunately one that is closed to the public -- the topic of Dawkins, Harris, et. al. came up. Naturally yours truly was drawn into it (surprise, surprise). Most people there are of the agnostic, non-religious sort. A few are of the strong atheist sort. I am the only active believer type (as in, part of a specific religious group). I did, of course, mention my fandom of Sagan (including linking to that video I mentioned not long ago). Some others mentioned surprise that a believer like me could be a free thinker, but that didn't seem to make an impression on some others...for:

I have just been informed by one of the atheist types that I have no right to teach my children about my beliefs or that I should not take them with me to church, even if they express the wish to come along*. Furthermore, society (according to this fellow) has an overriding interest in protecting my children from my so-called superstitions (without of course bothering to examine just what it is I believe or why).

Welcome to fascism, 21st century style. I won't mince words. That's just what it is.

Yep, Smooch. Now you know why I'm worried by Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and the rest. It's one thing to want a secular, neutral state (something I happen to think is a good idea). It's totally another to tell me how I should raise my children or even where I'm allowed to take them, just because someone doesn't like what I believe.

I don't think I have ever been so angry in my life.

* - I have never once made the Confessor go to church with me against his will. I generally go alone. Sometimes he asks to come along, and if so, I take him (but only on Sunday mornings -- vespers has has to stay home, because it's past his bedtime). Gloriana only comes along if BoE also wants to come; often BoE prefers to stay home anyway. And if the Confessor wants to leave the service, which he sometimes does, then we leave. The notion that I am forcing anything on him or Gloriana is infuriating and wrong.

I practically grew up on the campus of Virginia Tech. My dad was a cadet there for a year; both parents were grad students there (as a result I spent much of my early childhood in the university library); my mom worked there for several years; I studied there a year myself. Of all the places where I have lived, Blacksburg is the one I consider to be "home", even though I haven't really lived there since I was small (though I lived in the vicinity until I was 12 and was in a dorm when 18).

When I went to Tech, I went to classes in Norris; I had friends who lived in West AJ.

Blacksburg is an idyllic place. It is quiet, up in the mountains, with a couple nice lakes and lots of hiking trails nearby. Nice people, too. Great place to raise your kids. I'll always fondly remember it.

That something as monstrous as the outright cold-blooded murder of (as of now, according to CNN) over 30 people could happen in a place like Blacksburg is almost unimaginable to me. Seeing the campus I know like the back of my hand even now on German TV with policemen carrying around bloodied bodies is surreal to the point of making me nauseated.

Needless to say, my mom called earlier and is in tears. Just total shock and disbelief. The worst school shooting in US history, possibly the worst mass shooting in US history, period. In Blacksburg, of all places.

I was sitting here in the workroom, minding my own business while surfing Multiply a bit, and BoE poked her head in the door to say the following:

You know this big brown thing in the corner of the bathroom? Made out of wicker? It's called a hamper.

I stared at her blankly.

You know, it's for clothing.

I continued to look at her blankly.

I can give you the precise GPS coordinates if you want.

Then I gave her a look of recognition, nodded and demonstratively turned back to my computer. She chortled. :-)

My grandfather gave my brother and myself a US Savings Bond (Series E for what it's worth) for Christmas each year that he could. Unfortunately he became ill not long after I was born and died about a year later, so I only got one $25 bond, issued in 1971 (meanwhile my brother got seven of 'em).

Needless to say, I don't remember my grandfather much -- oddly I do remember bits of his house (my dad's childhood home, in Alexandria, VA), but nothing of him personally.

I knew I had one bond -- I'd seen it at one point as a kid when my parents were going through their safe-deposit box at the bank -- but had totally forgotten about it. When my parents came to visit this Christmas, they brought it along (no idea why, really) and gave it to me. So now I've had it sitting in its envelope on my desk since Christmas last year.

I finally decided to see what it's worth for the hell of it. Turns out it's worth $126.66 and stopped accruing interest in 2001.

Since it's stopped accruing interest, the financially smart thing to do would be to cash it in (though unfortunately as shitty as the dollar is these days, $126.66 amounts to EUR 96.61, not to mention exchange fees and whatnot, so maybe it isn't so smart to do it now anyway).

But oddly I am reluctant to cash it in anyway. Here is the one Christmas present I ever got from my grandfather.

So I put it back in its envelope and set it aside.

Strange how a mere piece of paper can suddenly take on a meaning totally different -- and arguably greater -- from that which was originally intended.