German Afflictions

Oddly, after the trip to Germany my weight is down and has stayed down for the week. While we've been joking about "meat poisoning" at the office since the trip it's more like "meat exhaustion". Since coming back I've been thinking "Ugh, something that used to have legs. Where are the vegetables?"

Unfortunately my eyes have also been itchy since I got back, which I finally remembered today could be a recurrence of my super-attractive occasional affliction of eyebrow dandruff. I can't see it, and the last time my eyes were super itchy the doctor couldn't see anything either, but exfoliating the heck out of them was the cure. I remembered at the time my grandfather mentioning he had eyebrow dandruff once, though his doctor recommended something complicated that involved baby oil and a toothbrush. Apricot scrub works better for me. Since I'm a girl and already exfoliate, I guess.

Today Nathan and I intended to put a vegetable garden in the back yard. While we had disagreed on the amount of soil amendments a vegetable garden would need it turned out to be moot. I had thought the area where the play set used to be would be a great place for a garden. Already walled off, ready to go. Just have to push back the redwood bark and pull back the liner underneath right? Well, the section nearest the house had concrete under the redwood bark, so we moved toward the fence. Concrete under that too. Okay, concrete under the whole play structure. That's weird. Oh well. I thought it would be fine to sacrifice the patch of grass west of the shed. But, strangest of all, there was concrete under the grass! Near as we can figure from Nathan pushing the shovel in the ground all over, most of the backyard and part of the front yard is over concrete!

I'm trying to imagine the sequence of building in the backyard but I just can't do it. I can understand putting a play structure over concrete (the presence of concrete also explains why the redwood chips are so deep). I can understand putting in the RV pad on the other side of the yard, since obviously they had an RV. But grass over concrete? The grass itself might make more sense too if there wasn't a shed smack in the middle of it. What came first - the grass or the shed?

Mysteries.

Meat Poisoning

Back from Germany and don't need to eat meat for a long time.

Before I went to Germany the first time I read descriptions of the cuisine as "hearty" and "homey", but there wasn't quite an adequate emphasis on how much pork would be involved. The last time I went I was on my own and eventually starting eating mostly Italian, but this trip was with a sizable contigent and we went to Bavarian restaurants almost every night, where meat was the name of the game.

I think I had pork three nights in a row. Schnitzel the first night. Pork medallions the second. Pork in a pepper cream sauce the third. The fourth night some of the men from my office had already left so the remaining three of us went to an Indian restaurant so the one vegetarian could eat something other than potato-based side dishes.

The meeting itself was successful, but I learned an important lesson about setting agendas: include breaks! The first day I made the mistake of sitting on the far side of the conference table, where it was impossible to get out without asking two other people to move. I have rarely regretted two cups of coffee more. If we had had the foresight to put on the agenda "10 to 10:15 - break" everything would have been much more enjoyable. For me. Maybe no one else cared.

Saturday morning my boss's boss and I stopped in downtown Munich on the way to the airport. I had seen it several times when I stayed there for a month last time, so I knew my way around pretty well. We went into three churches and climbed to the top of Peterskirche for the view. Here is the quintessential view of the Munich skyline with Frauenkirche on the left and the Neues Rathaus on the right.

Since I had a 7 am meeting the day we left, and an 8 am experiment commitment 36 hours after we got back I am slightly worn out. While I bounced to either time zone fine not having a good day to sleep in for a while is messing up my internal clock. Yesterday afternoon at work I could tell I wasn't perfectly coherent, so I stopped doing email and solely did data analysis, which is hard to mess up with the tools we have.

Also in Munich I saw pointy cabbages. Weird!