In case anyone was offended by the previous post, you may now cleanse your palate with this picture of a pretty church.

Because one cat post per decade of blogging is not so bad

As some of you know, Rick and I moved to Germany 9 years ago. One of the dumbest questions anyone asked us before we did this was, "Are you bringing your cat?"

Can you imagine this conversation? "Oh, you're moving? Exciting news! Are you bringing your kids?"

Of course we brought the cat. Tabitha Queen of the Whinybutts is part of the fam. Even if we could have found someone else to take her in for some unknown period of time (which turned out to be a year and a half), no one but us could stand living with her. She hates strangers. Our friend Craig in LA came over at least once a week for like 4 years before she even started ignoring him. Yes, being ignored is a compliment from a cat whose usual response is hissing and growling.

We drugged her up good and flew her to Germany under the plane seat in front of me. She didn't like her carrier much, but when faced with an empty apartment instead, she refused to get out of it. She was back to normal in a couple of days.

In 2003, we moved to LA. Time for kitty to take a cross-country drive! Tabitha went to Niagara Falls! Inside the carrier, of course. Here she is in a motel in Columbus, Ohio, patiently waiting for us to return from Waffle House.

I tell you all this not to show you what terrible pet owners we are (I still say dragging her around the world with us is a lot better than abandoning her) but to show that she has been through a lot of major moves and generally reacts fairly well -- for a sociopath with a brain the size of a walnut, anyway.

She's gotten even weirder since this last move.

For one, she is now a picky eater all of a sudden, and eats exactly one of the two types of dry food we usually give her.

Also, she has discovered that pillows are comfortable.

Seriously. She's 13 years old, and has been a housecat all her life, and has just now figured out that pillows are soft. Soft, I tell you! For your face AND your butt!


I wonder if she still likes broccoli...

Graphical representation of the rise of obesity in the United States since 1990

Any comment I could make sounds like a conspiracy theory about corporate agribusiness or a slam on mainstream American culture, so I'll let the info speak for itself. I will, however, say that I have been overweight myself in the past and I am in no way hating on any individual with a higher-than-healthy BMI.

I will also say: I hit the gym pretty consistently and eat pretty healthy and am still pudgier than I was in Germany, where I never exercised and consumed mass quantities of beer and rich food, yet still effortlessly lost about 15 pounds.

One of these days, I'm going to overhaul my sad excuse for a "web presence" and it's going to be much easier to find all my best stories. Meanwhile, here's this one from Hamburg I pulled off a CD just now. I was reminded of it because I'm going to "Chi-cay-go" this weekend, I suspect.

***

So we were at this club one night (you know it's going to be a colorful story when it starts like that) and we were sitting on a couch people-watching. A very tipsy gentleman came by and started striking up a conversation in German. Now, I'd had six weeks of German lessons at that point, just enough to get by, but it doesn't help when they slur their words. I tell him (in German) that I don't understand him because I don't speak much German. It turns out he knows about 20 words of English, and manages to get across the following points:

-"My English is...stupid!"
-"I from EAST Germany."
-"I like Hamburg"

-He asks where we're from, I tell him America. "Oh! Amerika! New York, Chi-cay-go, Zan Franzisco, Los Angeles." They are cold, he tells us, except for Los Angeles. Los Angeles is warm and people speak Spanish there.

He also spilled his beer on me and didn't notice.

I tried to make other conversation, but he really seemed to like the established topics. Example:

Me (in German): So what town do you come from?
Him: EAST Germany! Hamburg...I like. Amerika! Chi-cay-go, New York...

Who says Germans aren't friendly?

Thanks to Andrea, Judy, leafyleaf and seniorsenior for the math teacher love. You have done a service.

All I have time to do this week is point you to a funny-cause-it's-true comic from last week:

What the Germans do better than we do

So I was in San Francisco last weekend, for a trip I might as well dub "How the other half stuffs itself" for all the money I dropped on food and drink. I've decided I need to stop going to SF on weekends tied to specific activities (homebrew event, marathon, etc) because what I really like is walking and lounging around the city without having to BE somewhere, ever.

Ready for another travel story? I thought not.

Friday: Cows and kooks

By far the best time to drive from LA to SF is 5am. Seriously. Then rush hour happens while you're on the 5 in the middle of nothing but a bunch of stinky-ass cows.

We stopped at a gas station up north and the hilarity began. I went to the bathroom area and tried the door: locked. So it's one of those single-toilet ones. BUT I'm hearing talking in there. "[unintelligible] this won't even be a rest stop in 20 years [unintelligible] her decomposing corpse [unintelligible]..." I wonder at first if it's a psychopath talking to herself, but then I hear a second voice. Occasional water running, but no toilet noises. By now, there are two other women waiting behind me. "How inconsiderate," tsks the older one at the end. A skinny, 40-ish biker dude with long hair, a beard, and cane approaches the men's room and says, "I never understood how women go in those together. Do you take turns? Both sit at once, one on top of the other?" I replied that most of us go one at a time, so I wasn't sure. By this time, I had started knocking on the door. Eventually, the two women emerged. One was wearing a Batgirl t-shirt and pajama bottoms. The bathroom was finally free. I turned to the women behind me and said, "Want to come in with me?" She looked alarmed until I said, "Just kidding."

Friday: Walking, corporate, sausage, and beer

We arrived, drove to our friend's neighborhood (remembering why it's unwise to voluntarily drive in San Francisco), found parking, and decided to walk to our next place, said friend's place of employment. Took about an hour but was scenic - lots of hills. I had Rick take a cell phone picture of a sign that said "Park at 90 degree angle" so I can show my future geometry classes how math is used in real life. Yes, I am a dork.

We got to the office of Big Famous Media, read and digitally signed an NDA, and were signed in and given badges. More serious security than the time I was at NASA, dude. I'm glad to no longer be a journalist, because that would have been a whole different NDA, and my walk-through would have been accompanied by a PR person. As it is, we got a relaxed tour and our pal took us to the absurdly outfitted corporate cafeteria, full of fresh, prepared-in-front-of-you, organic delights at reasonable prices. It's ironic that you have to have a cushy corporate job to get good food cheap, but that's America. I had a delicious artichoke pizza and -- holy East coast obscurity! -- Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda.

We caught the bus back to where the car was to confirm that we didn't have a parking ticket, and dumped our stuff in the apartment. Then, since we'd been in San Francisco several hours without a beer (gasp!) we caught happy hour at Magnolia, followed by a nice walk to our dinner destination, Suppenküche, where saurkraut and bratwurst made me way too happy. If I lived in SF, I swear I'd be there several times a month.

The liter of German beer means my memory of the rest of the night is slightly fuzzier :) We put a somewhat sober SF resident in charge and wandered around for a while, stopping at...wait for it...Citizen Cake (I was too full of bier und wurst to partake) and browsing in a used bookstore. Some of our group left, others joined us, and we were introduced to yet another cool local bar. Lucky 13 is a little darker and louder than I usually like my bars, but it was very unpretentious and ungentrified (always a worry in SF), the beer selection was great, and I had a lot of fun. I also misinterpreted a sign that said "BATHROOM --->" and walked in on a guy using the urinal. Oopsie!

And taking public transit back to your bed after a night of alcohol abuse never, ever gets old. Damn you LA!

Saturday: As long as we call it "carbing up," everything will be fine

The day began inauspiciously when I shifted positions on the air mattress and my right leg landed in something wet. I rationalized for a moment: well, the desk is right there, maybe someone was drinking some water while using the computer and the cat knocked it over. It was the cat's fault alright, but the substance wasn't water. Hey, cat, do I pee on you in the middle of the night?

The day improved quickly when I ventured out to get coffee and fell over an independent coffee house not two blocks fromt the apartment. We eventually got our act together and formed a party of four at the farmer's market, where I didn't buy anything because I didn't want to carry fruit around all day, but we had some good treats from the Japanese deli inside.

Rest of the afternoon: walking, Rogue ales, Italian-style ice cream served by Asians, free jazz, walking, fries and Belgian beers, extreme bloat.

Back at the apartment, welcoming our LA friend who'd just flown into Oakland (they lost his luggage - d'oh!), drinkin' wine, the air mattress seems to have dried out without any major cat pee stains...life is good. Dinner was a world of noodles, dipping sauce so good I ate it when there was nothing left to dip, and what I thought would be a small cup of sake that turned out to be a perilously full martini glass.

Sunday: Ow, quit it

Here's what you don't want to happen the morning of a half-marathon: you wake up at 4am, very thirsty because you drank a huge glass of sake the night before, with a horrible muscle pain in your shoulder, and already sore in the gluteous region from walking up and down hills for two days.

Despite all this, and running up and down hills so often I considered dropping out of the race as late as the final mile, and having to stop for a bathroom break(dammit!), I only took 4 minutes longer than I did on the flat, pleasant Long Beach half-marathon course last October. Still a crappy time for the SF marathon crowd, which is pretty hardcore compared to LA or Long Beach, but as I've been saying lately, "Not bad for a thirty-something schoolmarm."

Oh, and I have now run across the Golden Gate Bridge and back. That's cool.

We showered (awesome!), I napped (awesomer!), and we had some celebratory food and drinks, then packed up and got on the road eventually. We had to swing by a friend's place south of SF, and we wound up eating dinner at the incredibly cheap and delicious Silicon Valley Indian fast food institution Spice Hut. LA needs one of these. Actually, LA needs a dozen of these. Then we went back to the friend's house where she showed us the backyard lemon tree and gave us mutant lemons the size of a human head.

The drive home...well, don't get up at 4am, run 13 miles then try to drive after dark. We took 45-60 minute shifts and still had to spend some quality naptime in a gas station. But we made it home at 3am, and I was at work at 7:20 the next morning like a trooper.

Long Beach half marathon in October: Two and a half hours or bust!