En Route...

Well I hope Joe's flight gets there OK, 36hrs and I'll be at the airport... too early and pacing no doubt but I'll be there... wondering what I forgot to pack.
Browsing the supermarket after work today for something "typically German" to bring, I saw a pile of Kinder 'chocolates' - I use the word loosely as I'm not sure they've seen cocoa solids in their lives, but I digress; I did think about throwing a load of these "Happy Hippo's" in my suitcase to share... but then thought again... Do I want to be known as the Hippo girl?

By the way, if anyone actually likes Jagermeister let me know - I've a couple of bottles in the cupboard, one of which has never been opened and that I certainly won't drink...

HoW Quotes: 14

HoW many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

William Shakespeare

HoW do you do what you do to me

Oh my goodness - is THIS going to be part of our  HoW weekend?

HoW Quotes: 13

It's none of their business that you have to learn HoW to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Ernest Hemingway

(a nice literary and writerly one for number 13)

HoW Quotes: 12

HoW far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

William Shakespeare

right...

...I've played around on the computer, loaded the dishwasher, am boiling the kettle for a second cup of coffee or maybe I will try the chilli & cocoa tea I bought yesterday... 
Then I will finally get down to it!  To writing a list for the things I need to get down to over the next 4 days... and maybe get some things on the list ticked off too today, nothing like ticking off things to feel like progress.

4 days!!! HoW exciting ;)

HoW Wonderful

Bad news reversed and Michael will be there after all - what better reason for a glass (or two) of wine?

HoW Quotes: 11

If I'd known HoW much packing I'd have to do, I'd have run again.
Harry S. Truman

Bad news...

Damn Mexicana! 
Michael we hope you can come up with some other plan so we can meet you in the flesh

HoW to play the Dictionary/Fictionary game

I'm not saying we have to, but suggesting that we might, and it would be an idea to come prepared ... the Dictionary / Fictionary game is similar but simpler/speedier to the Ex Libris game that Gita mentioned.   It's just a matter of choosing an obscure but interesting word from a dictionary and asking for definitions - I can guarantee that hysterical giggling will emanate from me and Gita, with or without alcoholic lubrication. 

So, Be Prepared by making a list of half a dozen words in advance.

My all time, and partially appropriate for this event, favourite was 'mallemaroking'
There were several interesting possible meaning put forward for this by the then participants, and no-one guessed that its true meaning was  'the carousing of seamen in icebound ships'

How Quotes: 10

HoW marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

Oscar Wilde

HoW Quotes: 09

We must believe in luck. For HoW else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

Jean Cocteau

HoW good - a week today ...

Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness without a doubt today - more duck egg in the blue of the sky, the neighbour's Virginia creeper now red-edged and the pavements littered with the orange dots of rowan berries.   Later today - 'after one o'clock' - I go to Yarm to collect our dollars, and later still, on television tonight, is a programme on Katrina - an amateur video account of its unfolding.

Hotel life...

Murder trail left on
white hotel pillows and towels,
red brick hair dye bleeds.


the maid HoWls?

HoW rude?

Just checked into the hotel for the night and dammit had to pay for internet access to feed my blogging addiction and blow me if in the "package" you don't get free access to adult movies... hence the question, how rude?  Kinky College Girls; Dirty Asian Girls; MILF Magic 3 etc etc... Oh well, it's only temptation & we all know how good I am at resisting that ;)
I'm going to succumb to the urge for a good curry instead!  Maybe keep my mind ticking over with a haiku on the situation...

How Quotes: 08

HoW can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

Charles De Gaulle

HoW about that?

$$$$$$$ done ordered - collect tomorrow ... then only a week to go ...

HoW Quotes: 07

Every child is an artist. The problem is HoW to remain an artist once we grow up.

Pablo Picasso

Odour pong

After three weeks of combine harvester drone we now have muck spreading.   Just hope the pervasive reek fades before next week.

HoW Quotes: 06

HoW much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Marcus Aurelius

And not to be sexist - King of New Orleans

A pretty successful  secondspin punt this:   Better Than Ezra

Another song: Queen of New Orleans

Jon Bon Jovi ... and you can hear, and see him here

arghh

it is early.  i have my passport.  i have not had more than twenty minutes of consecutive sleep all night.  in the five hours that i tried.  waiting for the hot water to warm up while you are in the shower because no-one else in the block is up yet can go into Dante's modern circles of hell.

HoW Quotes: 05

Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. HoW on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.

Albert Einstein

weather - tisn't nobler, for sure

Pitch dark and pissing it down here now.   Sky TV, seen while at the gym, showed flooded campsites in gale-stricken Norfolk, which is where elder son, wife and daughters age 2 and 4 are headed today, for a week - I wonder whether or not they went?

I DID get as far as clearing the spare bed to pile things on, and selected four books, as well as notebooks ... that's  a start, at least.

And in the meantime I am distracted by the delicious odour of curry, as my DBS cooks tea downstairs

HoW to: The Art of Procrastination

Ok, where the fuck is my passport.  I know I saw it to take a picture of it only yesterday, or no, it was Saturday already.  And I need it to travel for work tomorrow... grr... the thing has grown legs and walked!  Taken one look at the drear grey vertical wet stripes that is all the weather has to offer today, a liquid chain-mail curtain, and it's decided to burrow like the cat into a cushioned and cosy corner somewhere...
Perhaps it too has an aversion to packing.  I have to be at work for a lift to the airport at 5am, which is a little early even for me.  It means I can't pack in the morning.  So I am procrastinating.  Of course I had to update the TomTom with the latest maps etc.  Because I will be on driving duty as we are travelling to a land where they drive 'an der anderen Seite'; or, what I still call home. 
I probably didn't have to download the Dalek voice to give me driving instructions, but I just pissed myself laughing when it said "Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate... human" and it makes me smile each time I imagine the reaction of my colleague/travelling companion. 
I didn't have to come in and sit straight down to log on at the computer - I mean it had been twenty whole minutes since I logged off at work.  I did remember to get the washing out of the machine and turn on the huge towel rail/radiator in my bathroom & drape my wet clothes over it in an effort to dry at least one pair of jeans for the trip.
And I had to check that e-mail again, the one where I was cyber-dumped.  Weird.  Maybe with cyber naughties out of the way we can be cyber friends...?  Too weird if virtual relationships start following the same dumb pattern as my real ones.
Normally if the cat is hiding somewhere, opening a nice meat-stinky packet of cat food will get him to come running.  I wonder what works on passports?  I'll have my tea and maybe play a facebook game or two while I think about that one.

HoW Quotes: 04

HoW many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?

Zsa Zsa Gabor

Guest write: 'Eau d'Joe' with thanks to Joe Gensle

I’m breaking a man-rule by admitting that, sometimes, there are those occasions that I enjoy shopping for clothing for myself. Those occasions are so rare that it’s usually a $300USD day without buying any shoes, accessories, or what I’d call ‘fancy’ clothes. ‘Fancy’ means slacks that need tailoring to finish the cuffs, shirts made for neckties I own but no longer need, and suits or blazers which I love but for which I have no need.

I read the shopping blog, here, and had already made my strategic mission into the mazes of sale racks of men’s shops and department stores. The mission was simple, really. Find clothing that’s impervious to gallon-per-hour perspiration, rain, and splashed drinks. Too, there’s the unique-to-New Orleans Café du Monde syndrome, namely, a ‘house’ custom of blowing one’s powdered sugar from atop the beignet.

We fat people are a sweaty lot, anyway. But blow powdered sugar on me when I’m completely perspired, and in one of my new easy-breathing shirts, and I’m going to be imperiled. I become subject to attack by relentless waves of dive-bombing mosquitoes. I stick to nearly anything that’s dry against which I’ve merely brushed a limb or affected article of clothing. Hell, I might even be mistaken for some colossal dessert by a Southern Decadencer, and you know my size and infirm leg do not the aerodynamic sprinter, make.

So I bought some nice shirts. I already have a share-sized golf-style umbrella that’s somewhat compact. I’m okay in the walking shorts department. I have more T-shirts than fans at a country music festival. Shoes? Well, my black ‘combat’ tennis, i.e. black New Balance shoes will sport fresh stings.

The other clothing needs are adequately covered for the trip.

But I was really short of one indulgence. Whether traveling or not, I like men’s cologne, and am verrrry picky about the fragrances I wear. Lagerfeld was made for my body chemistry, I’ve worn it more than 20 years, and recently ran out. ‘Aw hell,’ I thought, I’ll call my friend, Luv.

Luv works at a local drugstore’s cosmetic counter. So I asked her, “Do you have any of the nicer men’s fragrances at disaster-closeout prices?” and she assured me she did.

Although it seemed a bit sweet, there was something about the fragrance as I sniffed the box. Since she didn’t have a tester, she opened the box and produced a small square of index card-like material, and was ready to shoot. “Wait, Luv-- I need to know what it smells like on my skin.” And it was sweet, but there was also some subtlety to it, and it was mindful of something else of which I couldn’t think at that moment.

I’m the proud owner of a 3.4 ounce bottle of Tommy Bahama cologne. I wore it to work the other day and caught a whiff of myself on the commute. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I smelt of a fucking tropical coconutsy pineappely drink. It was so spot-on, that when I got out of the car, I had the urge to look around to my massive bum to see if a paper umbrella had sprouted from my arse.

Please don’t blow your beignet sugar on me because I think this cologne is going to give me all the looks, comments and bugs I can handle. Or not handle, causing me to flee to my room and shower, clothing and all.

HoW soon - another song

The good news is that the countdown is short and it's NEXT WEEK - so HoW soon?, as Martha Wainwright sings, is now very soon ...

HoW Quotes: 03

HoW vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Henry David Thoreau

Educating Julia

Well, having earlier finished my voracious gulping down of one of my latest sci-fi/fantasy novel purchases (Above The Snow Line:  Steph Swainston)  I now have to choose a new book to go to bed with, so I have picked "Me talk pretty one day" since several sixers have mentioned their admiration for David Sedaris. 

Humour is a strange thing and often doesn't cross boundaries well, so I am interested to see how much I get out of this book.  I'm not sure how many American comedians/comediennes I could name/enjoy.  Apart from Bill Hicks, obviously ;)

According to Kate Fox (anthropologist & author of the fantastic book Watching the English) the "rules" of English humour are anti-earnestness, irony, understatement & self-deprecation; and the "rule" of English comedy is embarrassment.  Think 'The Office' & 'Fawlty Towers'; Alan Partridge if he crossed the water.  To quote from her book:-
In other cultures, there is 'a time and a place' for humour; it is a special, separate kind of talk.  In English conversation, there is always an undercurrent of humour.  We can barely manage to say 'hello' or comment on the weather without somehow contriving to make a bit of a joke out of it, and most English conversations will involve at least some degree of banter, teasing, irony, understatement, humourous self-deprecation, mockery or just silliness.  Humour is our 'default mode' 

Of course, this is not to say the English are "better" at humour, just that we are always looking to lighten a potentially awkward social situation by being a bit silly... forgive us in advance?

HoW I spent my afternoon

Blue sky and sunshine here in sunny Teesside, and the combine harvester droning in the background, as it has for days now. I went into my studio for the first time in ages and printed four prints from the Jenna collagraph plate, however, being made of tile grout, the detail on the plate deteriorates with each use.

HoW soon is now?

Oh, any excuse to bring a Smiths song into the blog ;)

HoW the...

It's just gone dark at 3:30pm, as a summer storm hits my little town of Siegburg.  There are hailstones exactly the size of peanut M&M's (I know, I have just comfort eaten half a packet) battering my fuschias, and poor little Seville, never the bravest of cats is cowering under the kitchen table as the forked lightning appears in the strangely colourless sky...

It is August...  it is summer for crying out loud!  
It does match the rather torrid day I have had so far, but I am struggling to imagine HoW hot & humid it is half a world away...

HoW Quotes: 02

HoW sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!

William Shakespeare
(I picked this one especially for you, Sandra!)

HoW bad do you want it?

Perhaps this song of Tim McGraw's could be our anthem?

HoW Quotes: 01

HoW many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

Coco Chanel

HoW much!!!???

The Access bill arrived today. Gulp. And nearly everything on it was bought on the 10th August when, in the company of my daughter, I went to York for a day's shopping. Clothes shopping.

Now, anyone who knows me will know I don't do clothes: I am a natural-born scruff and wear nothing but jeans 95% of the time (daytime that is - I wear nothing at all at night), so this Access bill, with its list of purchases from M&S, Ecco, Debenhams, H&M and Long Tall Sally is a rarity. And in fact, although I thought I'd be buying clothes to try and look as thought I was someone who made an effort when visiting friends, many of them were not at all suitable for a visit to New Orleans. Some of the books might be, probably will be, and on other dates the haircut was essential, as was the battery for my car.

But it's a bloody big bill.

And it was also a highly enjoyable day

HoW Pile

Of course, the pile of packing so far is basically books, and I'm getting slightly anxious, as some of them look awfully thin...  What if I read them all in the first couple of days?  It's going to be a long trip there, three flights & fifteen hours flying...  I'm wondering if I should stick the old faithful, battered and bent copy of Lord of the Rings in, that's always good for 3-4 days... 
I did choose these books as a selection of American fiction, although not necessarily typical of Louisiana or New Orleans itself.  I have recently read Anne Rice's "Feast of All Saints" but wasn't all that impressed, found it a little slow until around 75% of the way in, and the characters basically not particularly sympathetic or interesting.  If anyone else has read this I would be interested in hearing your opinion.  I just finished James Lee Burke's "Black Cherry Blues" which suited me far better, the characters jumped off the page at you, and the descriptive parts added mood and didn't slow the pace.

Of course, I could just interact with everyone instead of reading ;)  But I'm guessing there will be bookshops in New Orleans in case of emergency...  so here goes with the first HoW haiku:-

Pages like cloudy

veils, hiding my lack of words

with others' writing.

HoW Packing

Don't get me wrong, I am getting pretty excited about the trip, but there is one thing looming in the way of me enjoying the anticipation... Apart from my work wondering if I can fly to Detroit for a meeting on 30/31 August, come back to Germany on 1st, and then I would have to turn around & fly back over the Atlantic the following day.  

No, it's not that that frets me, it's packing.  I hate packing.  Ideally I would just pick up the things below (maybe for this trip, my camera & laptop too, and a few essential books for the journey, stuff them in my hand luggage, and when I arrived at the hotel, magically, the things I would want to wear would be in the wardrobe (whether I possess them now or not!), and favourite and familiar toiletries would be in the bathroom.

I often end up packing, not the night before, but the morning of the travel itself.  I reason that you're going to forget something you want anyway, and I've never forgotten anything important... you can always buy toothpaste, contact lens solution, clean knickers etc.  I once left my driving license in Chicago O'Hare airport, at the check in desk, only discovering that it was missing when I tried to hire a car in Atlanta... but that's another story.
I guess I don't like depriving myself of things by putting them in the suitcase too early.  I might want to wear that t-shirt one more time before I go.  My organisation ahead of trips is usually just about sufficient enough to ensure that all the clothes I might want are washed by the night before so they are mostly dry by the time I shut the case.  And even more deprivation with books, not being able to pick up and read that one, because it is in "the pile".  I have planned well this time though, with my recent trip to the UK I have around ten unread ones, not counting the four I plan to take with me.
And my "last minute things" bag which is basically toiletries... but now I am wondering... should I put nail varnish in?

HoWling limericks

We arrive after dark at the Doubletree
And partake of a nightcap with double D
He says he’ll be shaven
And we’ll be behavin’
Too knackered to down more than two or three.

Next day J and I will explore
Return for a drink about four
Unpack all our notebooks
Refurbish our good looks (!)
And go down to watch near the door.

I’m sure we’ll both recognise Gita
(So much have been longing to meet her)
No doubt she’ll be coming with Mike
Who, fuck knows, I’ll probably like
(Tho’ my language might be more discreeter)

Michael DJ Brown, in his thinking Rodin pose
Borrowed shirt of yellow, blue .. or rose?
I wonder will his visage sometimes frown?
I don’t believe he’ll really put us down
Just astound with the perfection of his prose.

Her email says “You’ll find me at the bar”
And I’m sure none of us’ll have to look too far
But it might be hard to seize her
Though we’ve seen pics of Teresa
‘Cos everyone will be there, that’s for sure.

Shauna says she isn’t socially aware
And never knows exactly what to wear
I suspect we are all equally cussed:
But what we’ll have between us all is trust
And we wouldn’t do a deed that isn’t fair

Grey says she’ll waft in, like mist
(I hope that by then I’m not pissed)
We’ll none of us talk like we write
(That we might would sure fill me with fright!)
But this How meet is not to be missed.