There's no place like home, there's no place like home...

Here's what we woke up to this morning. Yeah, we get up before it's even light outside...
But that's not the point. This mass of white greeting us this morning was strangely reminiscent of a Michigan winter. Even my students and employer were joking with me this morning, "I bet you feel like you're home!" Haha, everyone. Snow is one thing I can live without.








































At the same time, I do find it really pretty. Maybe it's just relief that I don't even own a car, so I can't be tempted to drive anyplace in the snow (one of the things I hate most about winter: driving in it), maybe I'm just happy that the creepy gray, rainy fall is finished. But what's not to love about snow-covered Wilhelminian-style houses and our very fine Romanesque Martin Luther Church?
























The Christmas Market on the Hauptstrasse is in full swing, complete with a giant Christmas tree, blaring bad Christmas music and the gigantic rotating pyramid!



















And for whatever reason, a little part of me was thrilled when I saw the trucks putting up these Christmas lights on Louisenstr. last week. I'm not such a Christmas nut, but I do like the decorations.

On another note, I have sore toes after tramping through the snow the last couple of days to drop a certain someone off at preschool. It is a special kind of exercise pushing a stroller holding a one-year-old and dragging along a 4-year-old through that much snow.

Oh, and one final postscript: am I a horrible person for relishing the fact that someone else's kid threw themselves flat on the wet, slushy floor of the supermarket and pitched a huge tantrum? For once it wasn't one of my kids screaming and throwing themselves down. I think I'm allowed to be thrilled.

Duck Crossing

Careful! Duck crossing - take your foot off the gas!
I love it. Frog crossings, duck crossings, special bridges that are not paved but planted with grass and little trees so that animals can cross the highway -- these are all things you might see on the road in Germany.
However, I do know drivers upon whom this would have the exact opposite result: certain people who shall remain nameless would put the pedal to the metal if they see so much as a feather, let alone an actual moving target, approaching the street...

In other news I saw a nice sign yesterday on an Indian shop window: it should say "Wir unterstützen keine Kinderarbeit." (We don't support child labor) But someone scratched off the "k", so it said "Wir unterstützen eine Kinderarbeit." (We support a child labor - a sweatshop maybe?) Petty childish imbecile that I am, I cracked up right there in the middle of the icy cold sidewalk. It was more because I expected it to say something like "We support an orphanage" or something along those lines because it was in small print along the bottom of the window, and I saw "support" and "child" and then I read the whole thing...

As seen in Dresden-Friedrichstadt

Here are a few new gems from my daily jaunts about town. Above is not only the profile of a crazy cool balcony, but I also like these tired guy faces I see popping up everywhere. They look about how I feel lately.














Here's a neat wall that I don't really get, but it's neat all the same!



















And you can't beat the potato dealer! I didn't know there was such a thing.

A more non-urban look at Dresden

The Dresdner Heide! This is about 50 square kilometers of great forest and nice hiking, and lucky me, one way in is just around the corner from my house. We can go in by the Prießnitz, a little river that runs through the Heide and into the Elbe.











































































































These sculptures are right by where we enter the Heide. Unfortunately, I don't know the story behind them, but I do like them!



























































The high water this fall washed a whole bunch of sand all over the place!



















Here's the little sandy beach that stays amazingly cool on the hottest summer days. Instead of having air conditioning, I can just bring the kids out here to stay cool!








This past Sunday we had the crazy idea to use the beautiful weather to hoof it to the Prießnitz waterfall. We've always seen the hiking signs for this down by Bautzner Straße, and sort of wondered just what kind of a waterfall this is. Finally we didn't have any other plans, so we went in search of the water fall. It's about a 9 kilometer walk from our house, even doable by a four-year-old!

















































































We started at Alaunplatz, and from here it was just one more kilometer. Good thing you can pretty much find a waterfall by following the water, because this was the first marker we saw on the whole trip. But what is a trip into nature without a little adventure? We didn't even think to look at a map before we left.























This little hut by the waterfall is pretty neat, too bad somebody decided to burn it down.
























There it is, the Prießnitzwasserfall! Not to be a jaded, spoiled brat, but it was kind of anticlimactic finding it. I'd always had the idea of some great, mysterious hidden treasure in the Heide, but this is just a tiny little waterfall. Oh well, we made it and it was a nice walk!

Just some regular old every day stuff in Dresden

A view of the Dreikönigskirche was what I got to enjoy out the living room window of the place we stayed in for the weeks after our return to Dresden in July 2009.























My way to work used to involve biking through Johannstadt past the super cool ruin of the Trinitatiskirche. And it's not just an old broken down place, there's also a lot on offer there like concerts and other shows! It's a very cool venue, I saw a concert there a number of years ago.



















Here is Dresden's Altstadt, or old city center, illuminated in all its glory. Yet another sight from my bike ride on the way home from one of my evening courses.



















A lovely place to go for a walk that's not too far from my house (and super close to the Kindergarten) is along the banks of the Elbe River!



















Another view of the Elbe and old city center from last week.



















Another nice attraction along the Elbe is the rose garden, also walking distance from us. Even this time of year you can spot some gorgeous flowers!
























The rose garden in fall, not quite as lush as in the summer when everything is in full bloom, but still quite nice!


















The Gasometer, another architectural highlight from my weekly bike rides to work. These round buildings used to be used to store gas, the one on the left has been fixed up and it now houses the Panometer: artist Adagar Asisi has put up a 360 degree panorama of historic Dresden inside. It's breathtaking!


















One of the companies I teach at moved to a new building, which caused me some concern, because I thought the trip would be significantly longer. It still takes the same amount of time to get there, and my new route to work takes me through the Großer Garten, and I get to enjoy this view once a week!


















And on the way home, I get to see this view of the palace.

Now I hope my far away family and friends have a little taste of why I am so enamored of this place where I live!

Happy First Birthday, Baby!

This birthday I was inspired to cook up a hedgehog cake that turned out to be a bit more of a crooked porcupine, but oh well, the buttercream tasted great!

Die Russenlampe

We borrowed this lamp from someone after moving into our new place last year. The lender called it a "Russian lamp". But I saw a picture today that blew this right out of the water: a Russian faucet.

Scenes From Home

We visited Dow Gardens in Midland, and in the Children's Garden there are lots of
scarecrows that the kids have put together. I decided to have some fun with the panorama
function on my camera while we were there.



















I caught this slippery little friend at my parents' house and let him swim in some
rainwater for the kids to look at one evening. I'm still a stealthy frog catcher!


















Beans is a neat sign that I've often seen and liked from the highway passing Saginaw, I just never had the chance to take a picture of it. Now to just photograph it at night when it's even more fantastic...






















This old sign has been hanging around since I was little. It's on Beaverton Clare Road, right smack between Beaverton and Clare, go figure. It's outside an abandoned gas station, but the store itself actually looks more like an old house. Someone has put in a trailer on the property and seems to live there now, the old store is just getting more and more dilapidated. I was always sort of mesmerized by that dinosaur. I used to wonder why there had been a store out there in the middle of nowhere, why it had closed, and imagine going in that store to find a sort of wonderland of neat old stuff.
























The horse and buggy parking in Beaverton by the Chemical Bank. I like this, and I like the new sign even more. The horse parking is there for the Amish, they also have some spots at the grocery store where they can hitch their horses.
























This lady and her child were travelling with that buggy. As I continued on my walk to the Beaverton Dairy Bar, they were just exiting as we were entering! Amish eat ice cream too!












A horse and buggy on the road near Clare.








Here's a panorama of Ross Lake in Beaverton. As I was looking at the lake, I noticed that little sign in the middle. Have a closer look:
























I read it and just about started laughing out loud. What crackpot put that up? Well, for a closer look at the text and the people who put these up, go here or here. I'm certainly not making any value judgements on these people or their causes, but still I find the sign pretty funny.

Creature Comforts

I just adore returning to Michigan to go out and find the same old creatures I used to find when I was a kid. For example the snakes that I don't see anywhere but at home always make me feel, well, at home. This little guy reminds me of the baby snake I caught one fall when I was in high school and kept inside through the winter, feeding worms that we dug up and heating him with a warm lamp. I released him in the spring to watch him slither off in the grass toward the pond.


















Maybe I just never noticed the red dragonflies, but I was enthused to see this pretty one by the pond a couple days ago.
















Here's a very hungry caterpillar, spotted on the milkweeds behind my parents' house. He's working hard to get very fat, then...
























he'll hang himself somewhere, like on a plant outside, or at the top of a jar if you catch him and take him into your house in a jar with nice airholes in the lid and delicious leaves to eat...




















...and then he will emerge like so! This picture is a bit shaky since this Monarch was spotted by my parents' garden on a windy, rainy day in a white pine tree.
























This one, however, emerged in the house in a jar, and then flew out of the jar and made a beeline for those flowers. Shortly thereafter the butterfly was herded out of the house and into the great big world.
























I'm glad I didn't notice that crocodile waiting to eat me in the background while I was photographing this little flower, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten such a nice picture! I'm always scared that we'll run into a bear when we go into the woods, but I guess we should be more worried about the crocodiles! Are those pesky retirees who go to Florida in the winter bringing back these large, deadly reptiles with them as stowaways?

Vacation Reading

A father speaking to his son:

"...What would you do, Lukey, if I turned into a woman?"

He looked unsure. "I would...still love you?"

"Would you?" I said.

He thought it over. "Sure," he said. "You'd still be you, wouldn't you?"

"Uh-huh." We sat together on the couch for a while.

"Have you noticed that I've been looking more and more like a girl over the last year?" I said.

"Some of my friends think you are a girl," he said.

"That must be hard for you," I said.

"Not really. I just tell them, 'That's my daddy.'"

"Lukey, I need to talk to you about something. I have a condition, it's like when a person's sick, that makes me feel like a girl on the inside, even though I'm a boy on the outside. Does that make any sense to you, that a person's insides and outsides wouldn't match?"

"Sure," he said. "I know what that's like."

"So I'm taking some medicine that is slowly making my outsides more and more like a girl. After a while, I'm going to totally be a girl. I know that might make you sad, but it's what I need to do."

Luke gave me a big hug. "I won't be sad. You said you'd still be you."

A passage from She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan. I hadn't planned on reading this book, but it sort of crashed into my reading list like a freight train. It is a moving account of one man's transition into womanhood and is giving me a look into what kind of identity struggles and difficulties one can have with gender issues. If you're interested in or somehow touched by this topic, I think this book is a good one to read. The above passage made me tear up, and I really, really hope it's true.

And now on to my original vacation reading list!

The Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne. I love the Talking Heads, so what's not to love about the frontman's accounts of travels with his bicycle and urban cycling? I can't wait to pick this up, or have it delivered by Amazon, I haven't decided which. Amazon is probably the more convenient and affordable choice, even though I love perusing the shelves of bookstores. But I have to say, that is not much fun with 2 kids.

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison. Autism is a topic that has fascinated me since I was art director at a summer camp for kids with special needs. This book is Augusten Burrough's brother's account of his experiences with Asperger's since childhood. The neat thing about Asperger’s is that the people who have it are high functioning, so they know they are processing the world in a way that is different from how most people do and can describe what’s going on in their minds.

Fixing my Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions by Sue Barry. This is a personal account from a scientist who had crossed eyes her whole life, and at 48 went through vision therapy and learned to see using both eyes in stereo, therefore learning to see in 3D, which you can’t when your eyes are crossed. This may not seem so fascinating, but when your kid has crossed eyes, believe me, it is thrilling.