Thank you, Facebook.

Who knew?  Facebook got us back together after more than 30 years.

Drove 8 hours round trip yesterday to meet with a German Professor I hadn't seen since 1978.

Dagmar and Mohsin in the Streamliner diner.

She has hardly changed, and she has netted herself a handsome, funny Egyptian husband, named Mohsin. See if I'm wrong.  That fedora is from Chicago, where else?

We had a hugely fun time in the town of Bainbridge, on Bainbridge Island, in the Puget Sound.

Me and Dagmar on the Bainbridge Village waterfront pathway park.

Okay, so following our noses to a wonderful local café, blathering our heads off about ghosts and shouldn't teachers receive an Oscar as performance artists, just for starters, and walking along the waterfront trail, finding the magical Madrona grove,  and finally going back and having even MORE strong coffee may not sound like an exciting day of surfing or landing badly in wingsuits, but we enjoyed it.

Thankfully, people aren't carving initials on trees so much any more, but simply writing notes. Ours are very tiny, so you probably can't see them, but we know where they are.

Dagmar can still drop one eyelid without moving another muscle in her face.  It's still just as funny.

We really don't need much to sleep dry.

In the Bainbridge shoreline walking park we found a hut made of broken branches and big-leaf maple leaves.  After a day's rain, the inside of this little shelter was completely dry.

Thank you, Facebook. Even if we never meet up again, I'll remember this day forever.

The Great German Word Hunt

Hi, Mad Readers of Mine!

Dave Baxter, of Worst Writer and Kill The Grizzly is doing neat little prompt buttons for my WHOLE NEW Peach-based website (other books will come later, okay? We don't want to scare the new readers with the ENTIRE Midnight Library. It's like building a fire -- little bites first).

He had this cool idea - when you hover the pointer over a prompt button, it reads as the German word.

Now we all know how rich (and slightly warped) German idiom can be. I suspected the Germans were using English words, as the German Lush site.

But... you know we're always going to do something -- ahem -- "original" (with all that implies in English idiom). You native German speakers -- putting your heads into the era in which the Peach lived -- what word do you think the Peach would have used to say "Home," "contact," "register" on a webite? Perhaps even a military-flavored word? Get out your historical thinking cap and put your tongue FIRMLY in your cheek. And have fun! Driving very proper German professors out of their minds encouraged. Dialect encouraged! Private jokes encouraged!

The words we need so far are: About, Archive, Contact, Forum, Store, First, Home, Last, Home, Next, Previous, Subscription.

Dave, I'd like to give credit to anybody who helps out on this or whose word gets used. Maybe when the button opens up, we can add, "Vielen Dank to:!"

And I'll send those who get in a sketch of Udo using their word.

(And if you call me ANAL, Dave, them's a compliment to us Germans! And all the Freudian connotations THAT has). ;))

This is also part of a Facebook Comicon Event , which lists the deadlines.

The Smell Of Email In The Morning

The first order of business in the am is answering the email. Most of it is business, but then there's FXcuisine, which leads to my making comments like this, proving once again how full of anything about everything an author's mind is:

"Yum! "Magenbrot" literally means "stomach bread." We're always told to use herbs and spices as an aide to digestion -- and the Germanic countries turned them into goodies.

It's hilarious watching Americans socking down Jaegermeister as a cocktail, when it's really a digestive aide and cough syrup!

(The little poem on the bottle goes:

"Das ist des Jaegers Ehrenschild,
dass er beschuetzt und hegt sein Wild,
weidmannisch jagt, wie sich's gehoert,
den Schoepfer in Geschopfe ehrt."

"It is the hunter's shield of honor,
that he protects and cares for his game,
sportingly hunts, as is proper,
honoring the Creator in (His) creation.")"

I've been accused of "knowing everything" up here (not always a compliment in a rural area -- I grew up in one). A guy who lives on Eagle Point asked:

"Do you know where the motorcycle gangs came from?"
"The ones in the fifties? Those were those soldiers let loose after the war."
"Damn! You DO know everything!"

He told me one of the reasons the young men of his generation were so eager to go to world war two was because they'd been promised the women of Europe and America -- grateful -- and the women of Germany and Japan -- forced.

Me: "Hell, that explains that photo of the sailor and the nurse!"
"Yup," he said. "They said we could have all the women."

I guess since rape in war has been made a war crime, that kind of explains one of the reasons war ain't so popular any more.

Beware of learning to write. You end up with a head full of detritus.

Ask Mary Roach. I recently read her Spook, about the search for proof of the afterlife. She says she starts out knowing NOTHING about the subject she's chosen to write about, and all the way through points out her "d'uh!" moments. In a world where most writers are poor attempts to imitate Hemingway, or poets who think they are Karouac (SAVE me from the ticky-tacky poetry rhythm readings* about somebody's dead mother!), Roach's style is erudite, breezy, intense and hilarious. She's like John McPhee with a sense of humor.

Highly recommended, btw. I haven't yet read her Stiff or Bonk (oh, just guess what THOSE are about).

(*I once cleaned that weird, jerky reading style out of a poetry reading meeting by using it for the ingredients from a bottle of cat shampoo. Every single meeting people brought it up again.)