Dudelsack.

My last day in Berlin I walked past a record store.

A real record store, with vinyl.

By myself, on my thirty-ninth birthday. I can’t begin to express exactly how much this thrilled me.

I flipped through nearly all the vinyl they had outside. For no good reason, I picked up a couple 45’s: Alice Cooper’s Elected and The Four Seasons’ Beggin’ (or, as we like to call it, Bacon). I also picked this up for CC:

A German/English sound effects record, including background children’s noises for “Children-Scenes”, apparently recorded by a lovely young lady with quite a stereo pair. Because I couldn’t have made any of that up.

They also had CD’s. I went in, and by this time I had given up pretending that I was ever going to speak their language and asked the lady behind the counter in English, “What’s the best German band I’ve never heard of?” She asked me what type of music. She then gave me two CD’s, with a smile that held the universal excitement of turning someone on to music they’ve never heard before, and a very German “You MUST get these!” She let me listen to them but I was already sold.

Can.

From the liner notes for Ege Bamyasi: “Guitarist the late Michael Karoli later complained that the sessions were frustrated by keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and vocalist Damo Suzuki’s playing chess obsessively day in, day out.” As my friend Drew says: It’s like Meddle Pink Floyd did the nasty with Parliament Funkadelic.

In Extremo.

Their liner notes are all in Germish. Here’s all you need to know: Metal, with multiple bagpipe players. Described elsewhere as “Folk/Medieval Metal” (that website also listed Carmina Burana as a lyrical theme. Which is also true.). They have been around since 1995 and I can’t believe something this awesome has existed for so long and it took me sixteen years and a trip out of the country to find it.

I’ve been playing that disc nonstop this week. This is our conversation in the van:

#2: Is this your weird Germish band again?

Me: Yes.

(repeat four more times with the other kids).

This link will take you to view the video on You Tube. I am pretty sure he raises someone from the dead in it. Plus they’re on a boat. And the dude playing the cittern or whatever the hell it is Robert Trujillo-style: brilliant. Again, I say to you: Germans are badass.

$13 Salvation

My sub at work has been out of town for nearly two weeks. Normally that’s not a big deal. It means I do all the shows just like most stagehands have to do. But the week before he left was a brand new circle of hell for me.

It included a trip to the vet, major infractions committed by #5 and #3 that warranted well-thought-out responses (read: punishments), a trip to the emergency room in an ambulance from school for #1 & dealing with the fallout from that, and an ice storm resulting in three solid inches of ice over everything, including my sloped driveway, in my town where everyone is sold out of ice melt and rock salt.

Then I got the flu.

Then I got bronchitis.

Then my sub went out of town.

Did I mention CC is in production on a new show? For the uninitiated, that means that if he does come home, he’s home for exactly six hours before he has to leave again, but more often he’s staying in the city. Yeah, like that. As #1-3 would say, FML.

I haven’t been this sick in four years, since the first summer we had the kids and I got bronchitis. Four weeks. Cough for six months. I am not making this up. That was also the time that #3, our resident drama queen and hypochondriac was complaining of a cough. I thought she was faking, or at least being dramatic. When I finally took her in to the doctor, she had pneumonia. I am not making that up, either. But that’s another post, and I digress.

Six pounds down. Five prescriptions. Two bags of cough drops. I slept every possible moment because each morning I had to get up with the kids to get them to school and each night I had to go into the city and do my show, and mostly I just wanted to die. I’m honestly not sure what they ate. Or wore.

All this led up to Saturday night, aka The Day My Sub Came Back. I took Saturday night’s show off.

I was feeling much better and decided to wait for CC to finish tech at midnight and went to see a movie. By myself. How amazingly awesome is that? I can’t adequately express it. I saw The King’s Speech on 42nd street and paid $13 for my ticket, which seemed like kind of a lot. I got a small popcorn, a bottle of water, and a bag of sour patch kids, none of which I had to share, or buy ahead of time and smuggle inside in a large handbag.

It was the first movie I’ve seen since we got the kids that did not contain a single talking animal, light saber, vampire, or wizard. By that virtue alone, I feel it should sweep the Oscars.

Seriously, a really great flick. I highly recommend it. Don’t get used to me talking about movies on here. It’s a rarity.

Yak Shaving By Number

To keep it simple, I number the kids. When I was a kid, my parents constantly called my sister and I by each other’s names. Every parent does this- goes through all the kids before they hit the right name to yell at. When you have lots of kids, that’s a bunch of names. By the time you hit the right one, you look like an idiot. By that point, the kid is going, “You don’t even know my name. Why shouldn’t I sit on top of the dogs’ cage and dent it in while swinging the door back and forth, squeakily, over and over until your last two brain cells resonate sympathetically and drive you to jump off a cliff and fall to your doom?”

Here’s a reference to shaving a yak. The term refers to the absurd series of seemingly unrelated tasks you find yourself embroiled in before you can actually tackle the thing you’re after. I’ve been shaving a yak for like six months, at least.

It all started with #4’s camping trip last June 3. She went with her youth group and took my camera. Meanwhile I downloaded two seasons of Dexter and True Blood onto my laptop, completely oblivious to how much space a season of a TV show takes up on one’s hard drive, particularly an old, smallish hard drive packed full of music. In addition to this, several times before I got hip and password-protected my machine, #1 used it to upload her own photos to then post on Facebook. I wasn’t allowed to see her profile, because she wouldn’t re-friend me. Apparently I’m a stalker. But the pics were on my hard drive. Go figure.

Eventually every time I tried to use my camera, I got the message that it was full. I would go to drop the pictures onto my computer, and I would get a similar message. I needed to free up some space.

My husband’s boss gave us Time Capsule, but we hadn’t pulled it out of the box yet. It was a Scary Unknown Variable.

Somewhere in the garage were two external hard drives. Somewhere in the boxes stacked six feet tall, still left over from when we moved in two years ago.

Commence yak shaving.

Today I was able to get the pictures off the camera. It took all afternoon. There were pics from last year’s second grade wax museum in which #5 played Ben Franklin, pics from the first day of school this year, Halloween, Christmas, and, of course, 276 pictures of the camping trip. The rest of the space was filled up with videos. A four minute video of a campfire. Followed by a three minute video of the same campfire. Followed by a two minute video of walking away from the campfire. Etc.

So I took the liberty of editing #4’s pictures. Never once has she asked me where her camping pictures are, so I didn’t feel bad about it. This is the same kid who at age ten still spells her own name wrong sometimes. Granted, it’s a long name that most people spell wrong, but still. Maybe she should just start going by her number.

In amongst the campfire videos, the pictures of her food, and the pictures of her friends taking pictures of her, I found a few gems. Here they are.