Pi Day Pie

Sunday Night:

#3 just came running in to remind me that we need a pie for tomorrow. A few weeks ago she gave me a sheet from her math class. It was about Pi Day (March 14) celebrations, and they were asking for, among other things, some pies.

Last year I saw a picture of the most badass Pi Day pie ever made. I just searched Google images and can’t find it, which can only mean that I must know the person who made it and saw the picture on Facebook. It was homemade, crust and all, with the symbol Pi cut out of pie crust and placed on top in the center, and then the numbers cut out of pie crust, placed all around the edges of the pie. This was the first I’d ever heard of celebrating Pi Day. I was an instant believer.

I am a geek at heart and that pie thrilled me. This memory is what welled up in me when #3 handed me her math sheet, and it was what took over and compelled me to yes, volunteer a pie. I was going to make her a homemade pie, crust and all, and decorate it with as many decimal places of Pi that I could fit around the circumference.

Then I went to Berlin and we had some crises at home and I forgot all about it until she just now came to me, and I am jetlagged and cranky and the last thing I want to do is leave the house and make a goddamn pie happen.

This is what happens when I try to be a better parent.

But.

I said I would.

I am now off to the store to see how I can remedy this with a half-assed solution without totally crushing my geek spirit, or completely letting down #3 and her math class.

I asked CC for input. (Foodies, you can stop reading here). He suggested frozen pie crusts and canned filling. Hot damn!

*********

Back from the store. I assemble the pie parts and then proceed to use an additional pie crust and cut out numbers freestyle with a blade. I am way too into this. The kids keep coming by and looking, and they comment on how cool it is and how unlike me it is. It takes a long time. I do not read #5 and #4 stories tonight like I usually do on Sundays. I do not even tuck them into bed. I am Baking a Pie. Leave me alone.

I signed up to give a pie to try and be a better parent. I end up being a worse parent with a nifty pie.

Nifty, except it had an accident in the baking process. The color is uneven. And it ripped, and now it looks like it’s bleeding.

Doesn’t it rock?

I had hoped that some superior mom would be envious of my pie and erroneously attribute me mad parenting skills. That was before my Pi pie turned into sweet vampire protection.

When Being a Rude American Paid Off

Okay, so most of my trip to Berlin I felt guilty about not learning Germish and not getting past page twenty-three in my guide book. The thing is that nearly everyone there speaks English and you can totally get away with it. They don’t even make you feel bad for it; the guilt is all self-induced.

Tuesday night we had an amazing meal at an authentic Deutsche küche. They had this really awesome candle holder in the middle of the table.

A chicken made out of various bits of metal, some identifiable, some not. I like his feet.

We decided to walk back to the hotel a different way. We kept passing these graffiti-covered entrances to alleys and staircases.

Not normally a place I would wander into in New York. Or Berlin, for that matter. One of my more adventurous companions walked down an alley and found a quiet, grafitti-covered room. No bar. No music. Faint smell of pot smoke wafting out. And, inexplicably, some guys playing a very quiet and very serious game of ping pong.

We skipped the one pictured above with the staircase. It was really intimidating, and several stories high.

The next one we came to was an open air courtyard, with makeshift rooms built out of the walls of sea crates and cinderblocks and corrugated metal. It turned out to be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. A bunch of artists in makeshift rooms. It was the place they made the candle holder.

Picture if you will a dim, grafitti-covered room, cold, and heated only by a fire going in a giant head that looks eerily similar to those big rocks on Easter Island. It’s worth clicking on this picture for a closer look.

They’re working. Making art. Metal sculptures, from tiny to ginormous, out of various bits of random hardware- drill bits, ammo casings, gears, chains, screws, metal shavings. There is music: the original cast recording of Annie mixed down with a techno beat. If I were at a different time in my life I would have signed up to apprentice right there. Instead, I just took some pictures.

I love this one. He turned around at the last second.

Little ones:

Big ones:

(Somebody please give me props from refraining from the obvious here.)

I am reminded of that Heywood Banks song:

I’ve felt like this before:

Okay, here’s why it paid off to be a rude American. This experience was made so much better by not having any idea what the hell I was walking into. When we met up with the rest of our group and told them what we saw, one of them had been inside the staircase part.

I went back on Thursday by myself.

The highlight for me was Alexander Rodin’s Global Warming exhibition. I was completely blown away.

Most of his works are canvases larger than I have ever seen in my life, three and four wide, all the way to the high ceiling. The painting that you see from across the room is impressive enough, but when you step close to it, you’re left standing, head craned up, mouth open, marveling at the detail that he puts into every square centimeter (see that? I can be metric when I want). It’s a whole different painting up close.

He had several works in progress. It was fascinating to see how he goes in stages with them, because my brain simply couldn’t wrap around how the finished work ever began.

There were other studios in the space that I visited too.

In every one were petitions to sign saying “I support Tacheles” except the rest was in Germish and I couldn’t read it.

It was only upon returning home that I had a chance to Wiki it. Former Jewish department store turned Nazi prison (hence my original impression of it being intimidating) turned artist collective. Holy crap.

The place was amazing. I don’t think I would have had the same experience knowing what I was walking into. I have decided that just maybe, in the future when I visit other countries, maybe I will continue to not read past page twenty-three in my guide book and trust my instincts on where I go.

Continuing with the theme from previous Berlin posts, here’s a different kind of angel, Tacheles-style:

Pay Toilets and Snake-Wrestling Babies

This must be discussed: What is the deal with the public restrooms here? Today I stopped in at the restroom at the subway station and the same scary attendants were there, just like at the Berliner Dom. Same uniform, only this time no sign was posted about how much it was to pee. They just had the little dish out (for money, you pee in the toilets, just to clarify). At least I had Euros this time. Is it a union? Is it an outsourced service? A government job? I keep thinking about it. Probably, somewhere past page twenty-three in my guide book, it explains all of that. And if I’d bothered to learn Germish, I would know.

I woke late to the phone ringing, my traveling companions graciously allowing me some extra time because I overslept. Three of us went to Potsdam and toured the Palace Sanssouci (means Without Worries).

It was the summer place of Frederick the Great.

I know nothing about German history but learned a little today about the very interesting Frederick the Great (aka Frederick II). Namely that his dad was a dick and abused him horribly-including forcing him to watch his best friend executed (decapitation-style) when they tried to run away together; that he never wanted to marry his wife and they never had children; that he hung out with Volatire and wrote a shitload of flute music; and that he was a Badass Military Dude, the real man behind German independence. Consensus from the three of us? Gay. Though that part wasn’t mentioned in the tour.

I’m not a tour person, but this was pretty cool. You got a little audio device and though you stayed with the group, you didn’t actually have to interact with anyone or suffer thorough any stupid questions from people who didn’t read their guide books or bother to learn the language.

What The Palace Did Best: Floors and Ceilings. Who knew?

This is the Library. It was awesome. You could only peek in through the window “for reasons of conservation”. I took sort of a long turn at peeking through the window because not only did I love the floor, but I wanted to move in there. So quiet! All those books!

This is the ceiling in the. . . Some Other room. It’s my favorite. That’s a gold spider web in the upper right hand corner. Here’s a closer view:

Frederick the Great also had a fondness and a talent for cultivating fruits and flowers. If I ever get the chance, I will come back to Berlin in the summer, because the grounds are vast and I can only imagine how beautiful they must be in bloom. Meanwhile, there was this room:

Please remember that the queen did not reside in Sanssouci. He gave her a whole other palace in a whole other part of Berlin and only saw her once a year.