I have only 3.5 things to say and the first is that this video, it is for dorks. Dorks, or the kind of person that really enjoys adding frozen spinach to meals.

The second thing is that I found the most incredible spider the other day. It was like the boss in the final level of the video game of spiders that is life. The third thing is that koalas are awesome.

The .5 thing is that I

Last month I listened to this one singer with Erika and we both really disliked her. (You know, it was one of those "Hey, I've heard of this chick but never actually heard her stuff before, let's go check it out" moments.)

And then Rose made me watch that Marina and the Diamonds video and so here I am listening to the playlist that youtube has for Marina and the Diamonds -- by the way, I love doing this. Putting on youtube playlists of singers I don't know well, I mean. It usually turns up a bunch of music I end up loving, they're really good at it. Anyway, that same singer turned up on the list -- and it's even the same songs I listened to with Erika -- and somehow in this context I really like it. Which is weird, I think, as soon as I saw the name I expected to want to skip the song but then I got all into it.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Also, this worries me that maybe other songs I've heard and disliked could just have been blamed on the mood I was in or the people I was with and now I'm missing out on groovy tunes. :<

Also also, Rose, Bat For Lashes is on this playlist. :D

So there I am, very innocently biking away when I get engulfed by this cloud of black smoke. Like black black. I cough up a lung or two and peer out from the smog to see what could possibly be wheezing out such blackness. I'm thinking, like, a truck with coal in it. Or something. There's this giant truck, I don't know what they're called, the kind with things in them, and the top of it is the source of the smoke, and the part with the things in it is a soothing dark green with some nice trees painted on it and the slogan "The forest goes on forever."

I... yes.

No hints as to what was inside, by the way. The forest, maybe? Being burned alive? I don't know what this means.

Have backpack! Have suitable clothes for biking and working out! Have potential living place! Have recently drunk orange juice!

This would probably be a better Facebooktstatus update than LJ post, it occurs to me. Only Facebook didn't know about my wanting to buy a backpack, so. There is that. LJ, you are the lucky winner of my post-buying-things joy.

So I'm back from Germany, flew in on Saturday, which involved being stuck in a time warp at noon for about nine hours, so that was fun. Um, still a wee bit jetlagged, but I'm going to see about getting back to work today. The seeing, I mean, today, not the actual working.

Anyway, stuff that happened:
-- I went to London for a week with Beth. Which in itself was strained. Traveling with your ex, it turns out, is probably not the greatest idea, but we already had the tickets and everything and neither of us really wanted to cancel.  Anyway, and then this volcano in Iceland exploded and spewed ash into UK airspace, slowly spreading over all of Europe. This caused every European airport ever to shut down for about six days, leaving us stranded together in England. No planes were flying, and because of the path the ash cloud was taking, the UK and Germany were two of the countries that remained under the flight ban the longest. Then the ferries, trains, buses, what have you, chose to capitalize on thousands of travelers (did I mention this happened over Easter weekend?) stuck on either side of the channel and raised their ticket prices by lots. One week became two, we missed a few days of class, yada yada yada, it was all very exciting. Oh, and somewhere in there we both developed illnesses, just to make everything even more exciting. And that's more or less the last time I spent any time wih Beth. AND THEN LIKE A WEEK LATER I GOOGLED THE ASH CLOUD OUT OF CURIOSITY AND IT TURNS OUT IT WAS PROBABLY NEVER EVEN THERE.

-- I am so in love with public transportation in Europe. Every single goddamn town, no matter how tiny, has its very own train station, so no matter where you are, you are part of the Great Circle Of Life, or whatever.

-- Leah and I spent an extended weekend in Brussels. Belgium, by the way, gets my vote for having the best beer of all the places. Anyway, so the last day we were at this touristy-type Mini Europe thing, and so distracted were we that we sort of missed our train, and decided to just pick a train headed for Germany and hop on. Look, there's a train to Essen! Essen is a large city in Germany and even if we get stuck there it'll be cool! Because on the way to Brussels we got kicked off a train for not having a reservation and were forced to wander around Aachen for a couple hours and it was seriously awesome, we found these castles and cathedrals and towers and shit. Anyway, Essen, we're going to Essen! And... Essen is only an hour away? Essen has a tiny grimy train station the size of a dorm room? Essen has signs in French and Dutch but no German? Shit, there isn't an Essen in Belgium, is there? There is. Fuck. We ask the lone guy in the station where the hell we are and he points to the very northernmost edge of Belgium, perched practically on the sea, not anywhere near the direction of Germany. And laughs. And tells us the only trains leaving Essen for the rest of forever are going straight back to Brussels. And laughs. People in Belgium are really unhelpful, it turns out, some guy in Liege told us we couldn't back to Marburg until 6 the next morning, and it was only by riding the escalator up and down for fun (look, we had nothing better to do) about eight times that we discovered the Truth. Long story short, that was a long day. So when we finally got home we watched Buffy all night instead of sleeping and doing, y'know, homework.

-- We found out the awkward way that in Europe, "gay" means "gay male." If you go into an event or bar that describes itself as "gay," you will not find women in there, and in fact, all the men will be rather taken aback. And, in fact, gay men do not hang out with gay women. Many different people gave me different reasons for this, but my favorite one was, "Well, we tried to work together, but the lesbians all wanted to get involved with politics, and the men just wanted to party all the time."

-- I turned 21! This was rather anticlimactic.

There are little things, too. Like the alley near Oxford St filled with nothing but used bookstores, each one catering to a specific genre, like one for sci fi, one for fairy tales. Like Leah introduced me to geocaching and we had to climb a mountain and at the top was a monument to some Marburg princess from the 1400's. There's a museum in Frankfurt dedicated to the Struwwelpeter, and a museum of Handbag History in Amsterdam. Those were the two best museums I visited. There are always ducks and swans on the river, and sometimes the swans will attack small children. One night I was sitting on the train station steps, and a dog brought me a rumpled coffee cup and waited for me to throw it and we played fetch for twenty minutes. There was a kitty who lived in the tree next to my building, and if you tsked she would come down and rub on your ankles. Fasching is the biggest festival ever, but if you ask anyone what it's all about, they have no idea. Everything is closed on Sundays. Make sure you have food before then, or you will starve to death. I found out on May 12th that there is such a thing as a free glass of water, weeks before coming back.

Good stuff: The food is wonderful, there was a parade all through the city yesterday, the transportation system is vastly superior, I have classes with people from all over the world who are also learning German and therefore meeting tons of different people, there are some excellent clubs with excellent music, I bought pink sparkly soap, there was a Nazi protest in Dresden on Saturday, I tried absinthe and it's much fun. Also my German is improving vastly. And today is the first day of a week-long break. I think we're going to spend a couple days in Bavaria, or somewhere.

Less good stuff: I live on the middle of the woods on the side of an ice-covered mountain with barbed wire strung along all the handrails, aka the path I must use every day is a death trap, Beth broke up with me almost as soon as we got here, I currently seem to be suffering from some kind of puking-related disease, and the Germans' idea of safe milk storage does not include putting it in the refrigerated section of the grocery, and it took me a month to work up the courage to buy room-temperature milk.

But in general, it's all very awesome.

My parents got another kitty! She's ten weeks old, her name is Tulip, and Zoey hates the living daylights out of her. It was very tricky to get some pictures of her, because she still has that young kitty energy and simply does not stop moving. Also when I opened up Asimov she skittered around on the keyboard and started licking the keys enthusiastically. So these are a tad blurry. BUT CUTE. m AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Speaking 噢发Tulip，他哈他瓦斯 阿 么洒洒各方romherand Ithinkmycompute 日死脑瓜Chinese nowsoletmegofix他哈他。

So I was riding with my family today, and we saw this house that had intensely blue-violet lights on the small trees outside.

They were really, really blurry. It was giving me a headache. I figured my contacts needed immediate changing, but I looked at a nearby sign and the sign looked perfectly normal. And we kept getting closer, but the lights were still blurry, and everyone else was gasping over how BLURRY those goddamned lights were and augh it made my head hurt.

So. Has anyone seen anything like this? Light strings that appear blurry, even from close up? Or heard of? Anything? I demand an explanation. And when I get it, I would also like to know WHY this characteristic might be considered desirable.