Pirate Talk

I've been way behind on posts in the last month (i.e. very busy at work) and have been getting some requests to update things. So let's start back up with yesterday. Yesterday (Sep. 19) was the international talk like a pirate day (link). Somehow M found out about this (I suspect V) and was very excited. She made pirate day presents for each of us and gave us all bandannas to wear. She even made up pirate names for each of us and wrote them on little slips of paper at our places at the table. I was "Dread Pirate Flint" and V was "Mad Bess Flint." We had a pirate breakfast including authentic lobscouse (link). We drew slips of paper to see which one had the black spot on it (that person had to clear the table) but I drew it and said it was more like guidelines really.

In other news. The kids are doing well in the new school year. I've been getting more driving practice in exploring the area around here and have noticed that Germans in general are very impatient drivers (like NE cities in the US, they beep if you don't pull out fast enough and commonly tailgate very close) and there is some strange custom of parking in the middle of the road. In one extreme example, a group of three motorcycles parked in the lane on a country road and were standing around talking, they could have easily pulled off the road but didn't seem inclined to. I saw them on the way out and about 20 minutes later coming back in the same spot, where several people had to cross lanes to pass around them. Also, it has been very dry lately. The lake water levels have been dropping and on one, the Schoehsee, there are new islands appearing where it is shallow.

(P.S. - To be fair to German drivers, everything is relative. Here they complain about French and Italian drivers (sorry guys) and so on. Coming from the opposite end, after a couple weeks of Cairo and Addis Ababa traffic, Rome seemed to contain the politest drivers ever... )