this is what brought us back to blogging

more graph humor and song chart memes

belated friday catblogging: honorary birthday edition

since oscar was originally a stray on the mean streets of chicago before he found his way to us, we have no way of knowing exactly how old he is. the first time we took him to the vet, they estimated his age at about six months, which put his birthday around april 15, 2001. and we've been celebrating his birthday on april 15 ever since, but frankly, income taxes and birthday fun* do not mix! so this year we decided to change his birthday to may 1. here he is basking contentedly in some birthday sunshine!
*in the past we've tried to do communal meals for all three of us -- one time p fried up some eggs to go around, but amazingly oscar didn't eat his! (this from a cat who loves broccoli, squash, bread....) we thought about all sharing some poached eggs this time around, but oscar just ended up stealing some pizza dough prior to our grilling adventure -- and he seemed plenty happy with that!

meatless grillers*!

oh my god way back in the fall p and i bought a charcoal grill cheap off ebay and yesterday we finally broke it in and oh how wonderful! just look at those eggplants!(never mind the one in the coals.) what a world of new culinary delights has now opened before us! i have to say, it's been perfect spring weather here of late, and the thought of enjoying it outside on the balconies with some beer and the grill over the next three months sounds really good.

*referring to my high school friends' band, not the morningstar farms product.

friday catblogging: stick play edition

we've had warm weather and an active oscar of late!

Where I've Been

Big apologies for the blog silence! More or less this is what I've been up to lately: traveling, making plans for our remaining three months here, and starting to think about what comes next (viz., the Toronto book glinting in the stack). I've also been trying to figure out why out of the blue I've been feeling worse the last week - I had been doing really well! I'd been improving even through the flurry of my parents' visit. B and I had even been considering going for a hike! But that doesn't seem so realistic at the moment. As my Dad says, the human body is a strange machine. I'm about to head off to tune up the machine - on doctor's orders, I go swimming in warm mineral waters at a Roman bath in nearby Bad Breisig. Gotta love German medicine!

friday catblogging: hunting rabbits edition

so why was the little bugger so happy last week? check out the carcass.that's what was left of a chocolate bunny he savaged last thursday. we thought we had it safely stowed away up on the shelves in our bedroom, but sadly, it was no match for oscar's potent combination of shelf-scaling and knocking-things-off skills. hrmph.

an der mosel

hard to believe it, but it's gotten to be more than a month since the end of kate's visit -- and now we'll finally finish blogging about it! our last big event was a day trip to the mosel river (or moselle, as i guess most americans spell it) to taste wine. the mosel is one of the best places in the world to grow riesling, our favorite grape. but more on that later.

the mosel flows into the rhine at koblenz, about a 45-minute train ride upstream (= south) from bonn. from there we switched trains and traveled about an hour up the mosel to the village of cochem, where we spent the day. the scenery was so gorgeous that it was worth the trip alone -- beautiful dramatic steep hills cut out by the river everywhere you look. here's a random little video p shot from the train which sort of gives you the idea.

we arrived in cochem to find this little cafe at the train station (though sadly it was closed). harry potter fans probably don't need a translation!
this was the view from the riverbank as we walked into the center of town from the station. maybe i'm just hard up for beauty after having been in chicago for so long, but i feel like i could gush about those lovely hills all day!
and here's a shot of cochem taken from the bridge spanning the river in the previous picture. the "castle" on the little hill in the left of the photo is actually not that old -- as our trusty lonely planet guide somewhat derisively puts it, it's "actually a neo-gothic pastiche built in 1877, making it a full 78 years older than disneyland".

ok, now for the important part -- the wine. it was lunchtime when we arrived, and, after asking lonely planet to find us a restaurant, we started with a glass each.after lunch we headed to our first winery of the day. there were a number of them right in town, all within walking distance of each other.we really liked the wine at this place! we've tasted a fair amount of riesling from the finger lakes region in upstate ny, but never anything like this before. delicious mineraly-peachy flavors, mmm mmm mmm. we got to chatting with the winemaker a bit (no one else was there), and afterwards he let us see his "cellar", which was a little cave in the hillside.we hit three more wineries afterwards. it was really amazing how much variety there was between the various wines (we kept our tasting focus trained solidly on dry rieslings) -- so far as we know, the vineyards for all of them are located close by, just right outside town. we especially liked the place in the picture below -- they had one of the best icewines we've ever tried!
from what we'd read beforehand, cochem was supposed to be a bit of a tourist trap, but that wasn't our experience at all (maybe because we went before the tourist season really started). it was actually quite the charming little village! and we ended up with a fine haul of wine to boot!

Friday Catblogging: Wigging Out Edition

To see why this cat is so stimulated, stay tuned for next week's catblogging.

they're on to us

check it out.

poechenellekelder

finally, the end of brussels blogging! our last main stop there (well, apart from dashing into pierre marcolini's right before we left) was a visit to the bar poechenellekelder our last night in town. it's the brick building on the right in the picture below -- right around the corner from brussels' famous manneken pis fountain (click on the photo to make it bigger; and while you're at it, i strongly recommend clicking on the link too. and to make this even more of a tangent, i gotta say, i guess the manneken pis is not just famous, but famous for being underwhelming, and that was right on -- it's so small and kinda cheap looking, in my opinion -- you get there and you're just like, huh? on the other hand, it was very enjoyable watching other tourists go nuts over it). aside from a lovely beer selection, the shtick at poechenellekelder is that, as a decorating motif, it's crammed full of all manner of puppetry and marionettes. for example, this upstanding gentleman joined us at our table.i guess we were pretty tired by that point, so we didn't take many more pictures. but it really was great (and our beers were terrrific!).afterwards the three of us went out for frites (= fries). i guess brussels is famous for them (i think because they typically double- or triple-fry them), but they were, you know, just fries, only we got them with tartar sauce or mayo or something like that. still, nothing like a little grease to top off the alcohol!

whoa

friday catblogging: self-cleaning napkin edition

lately oscar's been taking to coming up on the lap during dinner (we think he has a snuggle deficit since we've been traveling so much lately). although he has a hard time restraining himself from going after our food at times, at least there are a few perks for us!

backlog

good god, we have quite a serious backlog on our hands! we're still not done with the brussels blogging, and then there's our trip to the mosel with kate on her last full day visiting us, and then there's our trip to oxford to see teru and samantha a couple weekends ago, and then there's p's folks visiting us right now, highlighted by p and them (but sadly not me) visiting prague last weekend, and now the four of us are in rome, and while i'm at it, the three of them are off to london this weekend too! hoo! maybe someday we'll get caught up, but i'm getting worked to the bone with mathy stuff, and p's been mad busy with trip planning and getting healthy and all that stuff, so who knows. what's going on with everyone else?

your daily dose of vitamin m

it's been slim pickings here in rome, but here's a beaut who stumbled across our way today at the vatican. big props to rae for helping track him down.

waiting at the airport this afternoon

sometimes they line up the shot for you!