Asparagus Time

It is asparagus time - white asparagus and Germany gets crazy over this every year.
Everybody except me and Jim loves asparagus.



They talk about asparagus in the news: how much - or I should say how "less" - the asparagus prickers earn, who won the asparagus peeling contest (the ladies from Great Britain had no chance, of course a Kraut won), an advertisment showing the asparagus queen, and little kids who can only stand eating asparagus if they have it with a great white sauce from one certain brand. But worse than that, we also get a lot of dinner invitations where asparagus is served.

Though it's usually fun to get dinner invitations, around this time we have to be very careful. My first reaction at this time of the year is usually "So, thank you, this is sooo nice of you. Do you have something special for dinner in mind?" You can be certain that the answer is "Uhh, I do have something really special in mind, ASPARAGUS!"

How do you tell people that their "special dinner" is a torture for you? Especially if your friends are only cooking dinner because they want to eat asparagus.

Well better times are coming - let me state it with the old country saying: Cherries red, asparagus dead! I swear: I love Cherries!

Explosive News from Hamburg

I. Several friends and family members were sending us emails regarding the question if it is true that there are toads exploding in an park in Hamburg. Well, it sounds unreal but it is not. There are Toads exploding and...funny it is almost no news are reaching us in Hamburg about it. It seems like there is more news in the States than here - well at least we do have more news about exploding human beings in Iraq. So, we did some research on this topic and we found an article stating that the exploding toads are actually have a simple answer: Murders of crows are attacking them, going for their liver, the toads those livers were lost but still alive are panicking and blow their lungs with air - they don't stop and explode. I will see if I find more confirmation about this and keep you posted.

But wait, there's more...

II. While I'm writing this they are trying to defuse a bomb from the WWII. They found it today on a construction side - actually on the construction side where the house in which Sandra and Mathias' new apartment is supposed to be built. The bomb 500 pound heavy and still live. This is only less than one mile away. It is really weird that we live in a city, 60 years after the war and they still find a bomb every half year and evacuate the neighborhood. Well, hopefully it will not explode.