Beans of Love

How do you know your husbunny really loves you?

When he comes home from his trip to another neighborhood bearing 8 bags of dried pinto beans, lololol. Cute! He stopped by a store there and ran across real pinto beans, not the Wachtelbohnen that are actually cranberry beans, so he emptied their shelf. The cashier gave him the strangest look. Hmmm. If she knew me she'd understand perfectly.

I love you, Husbunny! =:-X (Maybe even a bit more than refried beans. Maybe.)

Fussball, Fussball, Fussball

Germany made it to the final in the Euro thing (although around here the Germans still didn't make quite as much noise after that win as fans of Turkey, who they defeated, did a week earlier. The whole town was one continuous drawn out horn honk and scream for about an hour after that one, with aftershocks until about 2am.)

Anyway, so Sunday is the FINAL game (Germany v. Spain) and I'm so excited!

So excited that it will be OVER, lol! I'm so sick of watching soccer!!! =;-)

DVD-by-Mail companies?

Does anyone know a good (meaning: doesn't suck) Netflix equivalent 'round these parts?

I was a total Netflix addict back home. Such great service, nearly always got #1 on my queue, never had a prob. Here, however.... well. We signed up for one of the biggies here and I've had it! A great example is how I had Sex in the City, Season 3 (Discs 1 - 3) on the top (that's position 1, 2 & 3!) of my list for over a year and finally got them this month. Yes, over a year! I even have proof. I made a screenshot back in March of 2007 and there they were. They've been sitting there ever since. I think maybe 3 times in the 2 years we've had the service we've actually received something in our top 20. It's quite disappointing. We usually get whatever crappy 2 star movie is lower than number 50 on our list. It's one thing if it's an occasional disappointment, but it's nearly every time. Like the the Sex and the City example. Come ON! You mean to tell me that at no time in the previous 15 months were those discs available??? Is this business just a guy in his garage with 1 copy of each thing???

So, I'm all for defecting. Just not sure to where. 'LOVEFlLM' exists in Germany (I think Austria, too), Denmark, Sweden and the UK. That at least sounds promising. I see them advertise often on British TV. Anyone out there tried them for more than the introductory period?

Ground Rumbling, misc

Turkey won their game (hey, does soccer have "games" or "matches"?) in the Euro championship last night and boy was it a hot time in the old neighborhood last night. The whole ground rumbled, but one could scarcely hear it over the cacophany of horns honking. Can't imagine what would happen if they won the whole thing in the end. I guess parts of Duisburg will crumble to the ground. Better start packing. (Germany is playing tonight. Someone down the road has a German flag the size of a football stadium hanging from the roof of their house. They must've paid a fortune for it. Maybe they're compensating?)

Oh, the effing kitchen window screen is about history. It's come completely apart on top and let in a whole party of about 17 black flies by the time I woke up this morning. Joy. The sticky tape junk just doesn't stick enough. Gee, what a surprise. About to go duct tape on its a**. (But, alas, we seemingly have no duct tape and don't know where to buy it. Aghghgh! Probably someplace that's two buses and a streetcar from here...)

Buko brand flavored cream cheese might actually be yummier than Philadephia. Interesting.

I think that's it for now.

Screen failure issues

Dammit. Our flimsy wanna-be window screen started to pull away on one top edge 24 hour after installation. Bunny fixed it. The next the day the other corner began pulling away, letting the flies back in. Again he fixed it. Today I woke up to find the entire top of the screen has pulled away from the sticky wanna-be-holder stuff. AGHGHGHGHGH! I don't know if he'll be able to fix it and, if he does, how long it might hold. Still haven't done the back door yet, since it's been windy and rainy.

You know, you go your whole life taking screens for granted. Who would ever think that windows in houses wouldn't have something as basic as screens? I mean, maybe on some very old building in a small town somewhere in the middle of nowhere, but even there they'd probably have put screens on their windows by, oh, 1960.

=:*-(

Fly B Gone (window screens in Germany)

Hallelujah! No more Amityville Horror in the kitchen! The window has a screen! (For Germans & other Europeans: a window screen is something that exists on almost every openable window on other planets like Canada, the US, New Zealand and Australia. It's used to keep bugs, leaves and small critters out while letting air in. Imagine that! Quick! Go tell your friends!) Bunny put up our freaky Euro-screen (this stretchy, tightly woven mosquito net-like material that attaches around the inside of the window frame with sticky strips) yesterday. Man, I hope it holds! We're high up & directly over a busy sidewalk, so it couldn't be something with a frame that could possibly fall down and take someone out and we're not allowed to drill into the window frame or external brickwork, so sticky tape is our only hope.

Then there's the balcony door. We tried other screen schemes on the back door in 2006, but the wind just tore them right off. The door screens come in flimsy panels that slightly overlap, so you can still get in and out. The panels are stuck down to the top of the door frame or just above it outside and weighted by wimpy plastic clip things on the bottom. Well, they work great if there's no breeze. As soon as the wind picks up the panels fly all over, pulling apart (which kind of defeats the purpose) and within 15 minutes are torn down completely. I suppose they work better on the ground floor than up here at airplane level.

Now that the 17 million black flies and their nasty, germy, bacteria-ridden, regurgitating selves are mostly banned from the kitchen by our amazing screen contraption (please, God, let it hold up!), the next step is to try our just purchased, more expensive and slightly less flimsy screen system on the balcony door. It's too windy to try today, though.

I wonder if all of Germany is overridden (or over-flied?) with houseflies or if it's just in the city. I guess when you have grocery stores, apartment buildings and restaurants all crammed into tight quarters, that's a lot of dumpsters per capita and therefore fly paradise. Well, they can stay OUTSIDE and leave me the heck alone!

What is it with Europe and the lack of screens, really? The windows here do not come with screens at all. They sell a whole mess of after-market ones (mainly non-metallic fly-away crap) at the home improvement stores, but I never see them in use anywhere! The ability to stick your head out the window is trumped by the lack of insects indoors. Really, it is. I just can't tolerate the bugs anymore and will never understand the casual attitude of "eh, so what?" to letting mosquitoes and black flies the size of SUVs buzz around the living room and land on everything (& everyone).

For anyone interested in why, besides the big annoyance, it's best for your family to keep the hoards of meandering flies out of your home, here's a small sampling of online information about that very topic. Enjoy! :

Carriage of Disease by the House Fly (book, 2006)
when it crawls over infected material it readily becomes loaded with germs....bacteria are voided, not only in the excrement of the fly, but also in small droplets of regurgitated matter which have been called "vomit spots."

Housefly (Wikipedia)
it is a pest that carries and transmits serious diseases.... parasitic diseases: Cysts of protozoa e.g. E, Histolytica, G. Lamblia and eggs of helminths e.g.:Ascaris Lumbricoides, Trichuros Trichura, Haemenolypes Nana, Enterobius Vermicularis.bacterial diseases: Typhoid, cholera, dysentery, pyogenic cocci...etc. Viruses: Enteroviruses: Poliomyelitis, infective hepatitis (a & e)..etc

Flies in the Home (U of Nebraska)
The best way to prevent fly problems in a home is to exclude them by screening (windows & doors).
Because animal excrement and garbage are excellent breeding media, certain flies, especially house flies, can transmit disease pathogens. For example, it has been shown that each house fly can easily carry over one million bacteria on its body.

House Flies Fact Sheet (U of Rhode Island)
they visit dumps, sewers and garbage heaps, feeding on fecal matter, discharges from wounds and sores, sputum, and all sorts of moist, decaying matter such as spoiled fish, eggs and meat. Flies regurgitate and excrete wherever they come to rest and thereby are ideally suited to mechanically transmit disease organisms. House flies are suspected of transmitting at least 65 diseases to humans.

The House Fly & Other Filth Flies (IL Dept of Health)
Filth flies often feed and lay eggs on garbage, manure and carrion before contaminating human foods and food preparation surfaces by landing on them. They also may contaminate food and surfaces by defecating on them.

Mucosa domestica - The Common House Fly (Pied Piper, UK)
The control of Musca domestica is vital to human health and comfort in many areas of the world.
The most important damage related with this insect is the annoyance and the indirect damage
produced by the potential transmission of more than 100 pathogens associated with this fly

hookers, huh?

I love looking at traffic reports for my websites. Someone found my blog earlier today by searching Google for "Duisburg hooker". Funny. Even funnier is that the next time someone searches for "Duisburg hooker" they'll be even more likely to find my blog because now I've written "Duisburg hooker" three times in one post...

P.S. I don't know where any Duisburg hookers are. You should try somewhere else.

(Make that 4 times.)

Sh*t... apparently Bunny knows where to get Duisburg hookers. On Vulkanstrasse. (Should I be really worried now???!)

Football, uh oh

The European Football Championship thingy starts this weekend. (You know... the sport the whole rest of the world cares about.) I'm glad that Bunny is NOT a sports nut, but even he will be hollering (or probably more like grunting with an occasional muttered word, since he's a little more reserved =;-) at the television for the rest of the month. Our neighbors in the area and the guys down at the nearby bar, though, will no doubt make enough noise for us all. (We'll see if they can resist playing the forbidden verse of Germany's national anthem ... you know... "über alles".... at rock concert volume like they did for the World Cup in 2006, tsk tsk.) I'll probably watch some of it too, only because the alternative will be to do something productive like clean the kitchen. Plus, it means 90 minutes together instead of one of us always on the computer.

I find it hard to concentrate on sports for longer than 60 seconds, however, because, well, I just don't care. I might be "watching" it, but I'll quickly block it out and somehow miss all the "important" stuff. The one thing about soccer I can say is that at least it doesn't go on and on for hours. They generally play for 90 minutes with a short break at halftime and that's that, unless there's a tie at the end. They can't call a freakin' time out every two minutes and drag the stupid game out all afternoon, as in another form of "football" we know (which, when you think about it is a really dumb name for a game in which one HOLDS the ball for 90% of it, huh? I think I have to go with the rest of the world on this and say that soccer is the real "football".)

One weird thing was a couple of weeks ago Bunny and I both had dreams (not on the same night, but apparently in the same week) about riots. He dreamt he was in someplace like Austria, a sports stadium was nearby and everything was torn up and trashed. I didn't know where I was, just that the signs were in German. There was broken glass everywhere, elevators (like in outdoor shopping areas) were even shattered. Signs were bent, trash cans tipped over. Just a big mess. Well, if the hooligans tear up Vienna, Salzburg, Klagenfurt or Innsbruck, you heard it here first. (But rest assured we haven't left Duisburg, so don't blame us!)