Meteor Shower?

This morning, just before 4am, I stopped next to a lake while walking into work and saw three bright meteors within 5-10 minutes. They were very large and left long tails hanging in the sky, and reflected in the lake. The odd thing was they seemed to originate in different parts of the sky (usually meteor showers appear to come from the same part of the sky). Also odd is that there doesn't seem to be any regular meteor shower on close to this date, Halloween. By the way, happy Halloween!

M's Birthday

Trip to Bielefeld

On Friday I was invited to give a presentation at a festival in Bielefeld. It was 4 1/2 hours away by train. I was up all night the night before getting my presentation ready (because my computer crashed and I lost my earlier presentation) and I was supposed to be sent a code to get my tickets at the train station, but it had not come. I called the secretary in Bielefeld Friday morning and finally got her on the phone and got my ticket number at 8:40 am. I ran to the train station and had some trouble printing the ticket, I had never printed my own train tickets from a code before, I pushed the "English" button for help but that section was all in German anyway. Finally I got the tickets printed out minutes before my train arrived at 9:15 am. The rest of the trip was (oddly enough for me) without incident. I didn't get thrown off for having the wrong tickets and I didn't end up in the wrong stops. I guess I am learning how to really use the German train system. There are sheets printed in yellow at the stations that have all the stops for each train and the times they arrive there. Timing when to get off really helps when I am in a new area, otherwise it is hard to know which stop to get off at in time to get off before the train moves on. After my presentation was done I collapsed for a long nap at the hotel. On Saturday I walked around Bielefeld a bit, but the city was not that remarkable. It is in the industrial area of Germany. I hopped the train back to Hannover. There are some famous gardens I would have liked to see in Hannover but they were a long way out of town and I didn't want to spend any extra money until payday this week so I continued on to Hamburg. In Hamburg I went for a walk and stumbled first upon an anti-American parade and then upon St. Nicolai church. The parade was protesting "Yankee imperialism" in central and south America. It was flanked by police cars and had a line of people waving flags and a car with loudspeakers chanting slogans. I followed it for a ways to see if anything happened. I was comfortable with the "Yankee" protests. Being from the south, we have been fighting and protesting "Yankee" imperialism for over a century--since the Civil War. Despite the police presence the protest was uneventful and I went on and happened upon a church (a cathedral by American standards) that was bombed in WWII and was left as ruins rather than being rebuilt. The main spire is still standing and some of the corner walls but the center is gone with a memorial below ground. It is a real contrast to the office buildings around it. Some of the columns and the rose window in the spire are blasted out and the stone has a dark burnt look to it. I walked on to the famous Reeperbahn, the "touristic red-light" section of Hamburg. Here there are risque shops right next to McDonalds and KFCs, the contrast is amusing. It reminded me a bit of Amsterdam, only without all the drugs for sale in the shop windows. I walked back by the famous Rathaus (courthouse) and then on back to Ploen. On Sunday I took the kids "deer hunting." We snuck through some woods and found deer tracks, trails and scrapes (where they rub there antlers near the base of small trees), but no deer. And then this (Monday) morning a sighting that deserves mention. I saw two mink-like animals apparently hunting around an overpass around 5 am.

Obama ahead

Obama is doing very well in the latest polls. The New York Times has an electoral map listing the solid and likely Obama and McCain states. It has a section where you can make your own maps so I made the map above, the states are placed into Obama (blue) and McCain (red) according to the latest poll results. Of course this is oversimplified and there is still more to go till the election (but not for me, my absentee ballot is finished); however, this result has Obama winning more 340 electoral votes to McCain's 174! I am amazed that NC and Colorado are now dead even in the latest polling.

Accepted!!!

We got the call from the alternative Montessori school last night. They met again and have now decided to accept T and M! We are very happy. We think this will be much better for them. Now for the pragmatic part. We need to finish getting driving licenses and need to buy a car! I had wanted to avoid getting a car until now, but on the bright side it will give us much more freedom to travel. There is a two week vacation coming up and the kids would probably start at the new school sometime in November.

On the down side our luck hasn't held completely. My work computer has crashed and refuses to start up now. Fortunately I have 99% of my critical files already backed up. Anyway, this is an easy trade (luck wise) for the kids to be in a better school situation.

(PS - V said when she was at the school the other day to pick up M all the teachers were "peaches and creme" to her. The pressure from the top seems to be filtering down.)

A good, busy day

Yesterday was a banner day for us. In the morning I went to the county building and met with the psychologist that observed T at school. She does not work for the school but is directly from the ministry of education and what we talked about was confidential. K went along to help with translating. I was curious how she did when talking with T since she didn't speak much English, but I was very impressed when she showed us her methods. One of them involved lining up toy animals from the one he liked the most to the one he liked the least to make a scale. Then she asked him where (which animal) different things (about school and living here and so on) rated on that scale as a way for him to communicate indirectly but relatively unambiguously. I have realized that this blog is starting to get some wider attention about this school issue (which is good), but I don't want to put anything too specific here that might get back to the people directly involved, so for now let me say that it was a very good meeting and we came to an understanding about what we felt the best course of action was, which reflects the course of action V and I wanted in the first place. It also turns out that the school can't block a transfer, contrary to what we have been told before (who knows what the law really is). I will continue to update our progress here and I can give more specific details off blog to people that know me personally. I am very hopeful that things can work out for T now regarding school. The next big event is hearing back about the alternative schools decision today after they meet.

(I forgot to mention, we were able to get a doctors note on Monday to legally keep T out of school, based on his weight loss recently; he has been throwing up regularly at school now from anxiety and his weight loss is becoming serious, but he is gaining weight again outside of school.)

Also, V's laptop from the US arrived in Kiel last week and we needed to pick it up or they would start charging us for storage. So I ran to Kiel in the afternoon and checked at the auto club first to see if they had my driver license translation ready yet; they had just finished it. So I picked that up and went by the post office. Here I had to open the package and lay everything out in front of them to prove what was in it and that we owned it personally (it felt kind of like going through an airport in the US). There were also a couple pages of forms to fill out so it took some time, but finally I was back to the train station with V's laptop. When I arrived back home it turned out our absentee ballots had arrived for this November's elections!, so I am filling those out now.

Unification Day

Friday was a national holiday here in Germany. It represents the reunification of East and West Germany. The schools and banks were closed. We visited the H family who invited us over in the afternoon. They have similar aged kids so the kids all got to play together. Their kids speak German and have only learned a little English so one of the aims, other than getting the kids out of the house, is to help our kids learn German and their kids learn English by playing together. It rained starting out so we all ate cake and drank tea while the kids disappeared into the apartment somewhere, then the weather cleared up and we went for a nice walk with the kids by the lake. The kids got along really well; unfortunately they are enrolled at the other public school in town that our kids have been blocked from transferring to, so they can only see each other outside of school, at least for now.

Visit went well.

The home visit by the alternative school representative seemed to go well. I was in a meeting at work at the time, but she came by at 3pm and talked with V, M and T. They were working on some crafts and V said the kids were very well behaved and chatted with the representative. So, we are awaiting the final decision from the alternative school. Also, some people did some calling around for me 'from the top down' to put some pressure on the principal and teacher, and we found out some more information about the school systems here. It turns out that once they are enrolled in one elementary school that the school can indeed legally block transfers to another school within the same system; so their refusal to allow T to transfer to the other public school in town carries some weight. However, they cannot block transfers to a private school like the alternative school we have applied to. So their blocking the representative from observing T and M may have been their only recourse to prevent a transfer. Also, teachers here are appointed for life and there is no significant role for parents or parent groups in the school system (in stark contrast to the US), which of course leads to a different attitude that they do not have to answer to or consider parents descisions about child education. The main consideration on the teachers end is for promotion within the system, and a transfer of a student to a different school 'looks bad' in their hierarchy. A next step is a meeting next Tuesday with a psycologist that the school asked to talk to T to identify the 'problem'. According to the psycologist, whom I talked with over the phone to arrange the meeting, (and my best guess at our mixed German and English conversation) it is just us meeting with them, but we are expecting an ambush like last time with the director/teacher present. I wonder what the psycologist will say when I bring up how T's teacher tries to get his attention by slapping her hand on his desk and yelling, drawing X's on the back of his hand to punish him, and (I just found this out) taking money out of his wallet ... and how this might affect how the other kids in the class act toward T. There is a two week break coming up and we are pulling T out of school, legal or not, until then.

Visit Refused!!!

Today was the day that people from the alternative school were supposed to observe T and M at their current school. We called the school on Monday and told them they were coming. Late in the morning I got a call at work explaining that the principal stopped them at the front desk and refused to let them in the school to observe T and M; saying something about how it was not necessary because they were staying at their current school...? This was all very confusing to all of us. We got a hold of the alternative school on the phone and explained the situation, so they are planning to just visit us at home tomorrow to see T and M and circumvent the school. This is nuts! The current school is acting like they own our kids and that we have no right to make any decisions at all. I also got a call at work and had to go to the school today (the principal was not around at the time) because T was sick. The stress of this teacher and classroom is making him sick regularly now. We have held back until now and tried to be 'nice' to avoid accidentally creating a worse problem for the kids, but I'm pulled out the rest of the stops and had a chat with some influential people that I had avoided involving until now (which of course I am hesitant to name, even indirectly, here), who said they would look into this for me and see what they could do (and they have an interest in resolving this). This is ridiculous and has gone too far.

Driver's License, Part I

Tuesday I started the process to get a German driver's license. If the alternative school works out we will need to commute by car since it is not on any of the rail lines and too far to bike to every day. Also, since I have been here over six months it is illegal for me to drive with my US license. On the bright side, since we switched our residency to NC before moving, I don't need to take a driving test, just a written one, and a German license is for life; it never expires. I went to the county courthouse and started the process, and picked up some extra passport pictures in town for the license. Then I hopped the train to Kiel and left my license with the autoclub there for an official translation, which is required before I can take the test.