olay

I was at the store yesterday to buy some soap,
and I saw this (see picture on left) which reminded me of this (see picture on right): Why is it Olaz in Germany, and Olay in America?

Munich, again

By the way, I'm back in Munich again. I arrived late on Friday afternoon, without my luggage. I left Portland last Sunday, and stopped in Orange County for a few days to see my parents and Rob's parents. Then on Thursday I got back on the plane, to fly to San Francisco. Unfortunately, the plane departed almost 2 hours late. So I had only 15 minutes in SF to get from one gate to the other. Unfortunately, to complicate things, I accidentally left the secure area, so I had to go back thru the screening. I ran the whole way. I made my plane with about 2 minutes to spare. My seatmate was nice, she slept the whole way, because she was going to a Salsa dancing convention. So that was okay until 3 hours into the flight when I began losing my field of vision, and ultimately passed out. I came too, and began blacking out again. I tried to put my head between my knees, but there was no room with the seat in front of me. I knew I should call for help, but couldn't figure out how to with no vision, and I couldn't sit up straight enough to reach for the call button without blacking out again. My in and out of consciousness lasted for about 30 minutes, and things gradually improved. Needless to say, I was pretty spooked by the whole experience, and I have no idea why it happened. I was hydrated and nourished and fairly well rested. I hope it never happens again!

Ladders

Yesterday we went to OBI, where we bought paint and brushes and rollers and a ladder so that I can paint a couple walls. Only in Germany would a ladder come with an owner's manual in not just German but 9 other languages too. So I thought, being a responsible ladder owner, I better read the English part. The first part read, "Before using the ladder, from a health aspect, are you able to use the ladder?" and I stopped there.

Plate Update

I saw EEK, EEL and EEM this week

My weekend

went something like this:
pack, drive, paint, roll, paint, roll, paint, pull, pry, snow, pry, drive, rain, sun, snow, hail, rainbow, snow, hail, sun, rain, sun, long soaking bath.

Meg & Tacos

I used to think of Meg like this:














But now I picture her like this:

License Plates

I don't generally blog from home but here I am. Some of you know of my lasting infatuation with license plates. If you don't, here's the story. When I was in high school my parents bought a new car. My mom, the observant one, said, "I sure hope the license plate isn't a ZIT." I was confused, and wondered why the heck she would say that. Turns out, she knew the trick about license plates: In California, they are issued alphabetically, so the first one was 000 AAA 000. Then 001 AAA. And so on. So when they bought the car, the state was on license plates such as 000 ZIT and 001 ZIT etc. Turns out, mom didn't need to worry. Our license plate was xxx ZYT. Hmmmm. Maybe she should have worried a bit more, because how else would someone pronounce ZYT but "zit?" But things made sense then. We'd had an old station wagon: 535 EOL, and an old '68 dodge dart: ZST 196. My dad's dodge colt: 137 UJQ. Later we drove that colt to Texas, and then it was HCQ something. Texas followed the same license plate pattern. And so does Oregon.
It's fun when license plates spell things besides ZIT. I've seen vans that have the letters CAR, and cars that have the letters VAN and VCR. We're generally unfortunate in the plates we get, things like UJQ, HCQ, PGQ, VBB, VKZ, YCF, and XJZ. We gave our girls personalized plates for Christmas one year: BUN 1 and BUN 2. It's what they call each other. I don't know why. I hope to see a plate on a VW bug that says BUG (by accident, not by design). Right now the most recent plate I've seen is EDF. Soon there will be an EGG. Maybe it will be on a yellow car.