Ah, well :-(

We moved a while ago but there were still some boxes in my brother's cellar that we just never moved. They were somehow not top priority. Unfortunately.

Because now that we opened the boxes, the stuff inside was mouldy.

And that was a part of my puzzles. Luckily just a few, but still way too many :-(

My very first puzzle, the Sandmännchen. It says 1973, but I must have gotten it sometime around 1978.

And my very first thousender. A danish harbour from 1981.

And even one of the two-thousanders... Or should I say eight-thousanders ...

My heart is broken :-(

Reading

I managed to read quite a few books in the past few months. There is so much going on during the day that I need to relax my mind a bit before going to bed.

And reading is perfect for mind-relaxation.

So I've (re-)read:
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- Diamonds are Forever by Ian Fleming
- Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming
- The Green Archer by Edgar Wallace
- The Feathered Serpent by Edgar Wallace
- Ralph's Party by I-dont-remember-whom
- How to Be Good by Nick Hornby
- Funny Girl by Nick Hornby
- Ich bin dann mal weg by Hape Kerkeling

Most of them are quite enjoyable. Oddly enough, Funny girl seemed to be the least funny... 

And I've just learned that Hape's book was made into a film! 

Just like all the good books I read.

Baa Baa Sheepillow

What do you do when you meet someone who really likes sheep?

a) get to know her better, grow close and have lots of fun with her
b) accept the invitation and stay at her place
c) feel really bad for not writing to her for over a month
d) instead of writing an email, you make her a little present.

Well, I've done it all.

And this is the sheepillow I made for her:

I even managed to match the pattern around the zipper. Yay, me!

Now I just hope die Deutsche Post delivers it before she reads this post!

Old times

Maybe you remember my previous post on sorting old photographs. Well, now I've come to sorting old postcards and letters (among other things). These are two postcards sent to my great-grandmother in 1914 and 1915:



She also kept a postcard of this charming man, the German actor Alwin Neuss.

Peut-être we can ignore ziss Abwesenheit

I grew up in a country where people are used to watching films with subtitles. So I don't mind them - I actually quite like having them especially if you cannot turn up the volume due to a sleeping kid in the room next door.

However, the subtitles one finds in the Internet are often quite crappy. Painful to watch to the point where I decided they need to be improved. So I chose one of the films with the worst subtitle/film quality ratio and started correcting it.

Did you guess which film it was from the title of this post?
La Grande Vadrouille!
Aber natürlisch.



And yes, it is challenging to translate this tri-lingual film. Here some examples:

"Do you promise me que if I bring ici the Big Moustache, you partez avec lui ?"

- Qui êtes-vous ?
- Ich bin mari de la patronne, ich bin maître d’hôtel.
- Ah, comestible, gut, gut « guénéral »
- Non, non, non, je pas essen officier allemand.

The funny this is that after reading this melange of French, English and German, it takes me a few seconsd to realise which language I'm currently translating from. So confusing.

More reading

I guess I must have fallen in the summer-laziness mood. Instead of actually doing something, I admire things that were done by others. So I just finished reading "Die Leber wächst mit ihren Aufgaben" by Eckart von Hirschhausen (no joke, this is his real name) and quite liked it. I'll roughly translate and describe some of the ideas given in this book.



1) I've learned that Aspirin is of natural origin - the salicylic acid can be found for example in willow bark. I learned later from Wikipedia that in 1853, acetylsalicylic acid was synthesized, which was less irritating than the original acid and just as effective. The compound was patented in 1899 under the name Aspirin.

2) The monks live in average five years longer than men outside of monasteries, living actually just as long as women.

3) I love this one: The best entertainer in the world is our own cerebral cortex.

4) I have to agree with the author when he claims that in the good ol' days of snail mail, we checked the mailbox once a day - and were disappointed once a day for not getting anything we hoped for. Now we constantly check our email mailbox - and get to live in constant disappointment.

So, drop me a line, reader, and make me happier :-)