Oh X-mas Pickle, You Warm My Cold German Heart

It’s The Most – Wonderful Time – of The Yearrrrrr! I realize hordes of people exclaim that they cannot wait for the holidays to be over  but I surely am not one of them! We’re in the midst of the Holidays and I’m loving it!

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite US holidays of the year: Great food, great company and remembering all the many reasons to be thankful for make for a wonderful day if you ask me. For a low stress version of the day I opted to forgo the wonderful and very elaborate feast at one of my best friend’s family’s house this year and instead do a low key dinner and relax at zee boyfriend’s home.

Arugula salad, a turkey breast, gravy, boxed cornbread stuffing, bacon brussel sprouts, frozen sweet potato souflee, cranberry chutney that I made the night before and store bought pecan pie with ice cream made for an easy but fantastic dinner! All recipes here. We all lit a candle and said what we are thankful for – which I thought was a sweet tradition to adopt from M’s family.

Freedom Tower Nov 2012Every year the day after Thanksgiving I have to travel to New York for a tradeshow. I really despise the schedule for that show but have started to look at it as “how lucky am I to travel to one of the coolest cities in the world when all the holiday decorations are up?!” It seems to work a little bit to get a positive attitude but still…. What always makes having that holiday weekend crushed to a one day weekend better is meeting up with old friends. This year the fabulous Maren showed me some of her favorite places around Washington Square and I chatted for hours with my college friends Katie and her published author hubby Dave about life, love and intercultural coupling. Wish we all lived closer! They also gave me the tip that the Met has a recommended admission fee so I snuck in there for an hour for $5 before flying home.

Macy'sRockefeller CenterEmpire State Bldg


Oh also, I ate grasshoppers. Did not enjoy their legs in my mouth but the flavor was decent. Only in New York…

Well I’m finally home and brought a nasty cold with me (fail).  Sickly, having a cold always makes me really excited about making chicken noodle soup (OMG it’s sooo good) so I giddily chopped potatoes and carrots with my love. Same wonderful guy came over and cooked a green minestrone for me last night. I feel so loved.

Christmas PickleAmidst all that my Christmas tree came out and it now even has its very own Christmas Pickle. This is supposedly a German tradition – except nobody in Germany hangs pickles in their trees. Oh America. Thank you for thinking labeling something German will make it a best seller. Alas, I do love my Christmas Pickle sooo!

Twenty more days until Christmas! I still have to make a handful of hand-made gifts and buy some but am about half way done with gift shopping. Got my hand on some German Christmas chocolates and cookies from Aldi (as well as GREAT tangerines! Most of the ones I find in the US have a yucky consistency and have seeds… *tangerine snob*). Hope y’all are embracing advent or which ever other holidays you are celebrating! If you are still looking for gifts, I’d much appreciate if you’d consider my hand-made jewelry. Thanks for reading y’all!

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Life’s in Fall Swing


“Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower” (Albert Camus)

As many north of here are dealing with horrific Hurricane Sandy (or post tropical cyclone as she’s now classified), fall is in full swing in Charlotte. Nature is sporting her beautiful dress of red, yellow, ochre and orange and I get to sport my cute fall outfits. Yay boots!

Pumpkins are everywhere! We’ve already carved pumpkins (and they’ve already rotted nicely and are decomposing somewhere on a landfill now). Zee boyfriend masterfully carved his college letter and I free-styled that pretty cute pumpkin face y’all can see on the left. After all that hard work we sure deserved that pumpkin ale! Prost!

Speaking of pumpkins, a handful of my girlfriends and Zee BF and I went to a local fall fest and got lost in walked through the corn maze and took a tractor ride to a pumpkin patch. Was a great backdrop for fall photos and we succeeded in protecting our tasty ciders from those evil yellow jackets. NASTY BEASTS!

So we had premature pumpkins and alas an early Halloween party seemed appropriate. I had received a very kind invitation to attend a swanky houseparty uptown. The decoration was awesome and appropriately creepy for a a horror movie producer. Babies in jars! Eeeeek! Giant spider chasing a cute caterpillar! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!!!!

My costume of choice this year was the Pretzel Wench, which I suggest to include in a future installment of 50 shades of grey (still haven’t read the 1st). Artsy-crafty jewelry maker that I am, I made the accessories myself. And here is how:

Easy-Peasy Edible Pretzel Jewelry Tutorial
Find a piece of string that is long enough to tie around your neck (Advanced: find string in a color that matches your outfit and is long enough).

Select an uneven number of pretzels that have not expired yet (Evil: use expired ones and feed them to someone you dislike. Muahaha) (don’t try this at home!). 5 are pretty but 3 work, too. Don’t use chocolate covered pretzels – they’ll melt!

OK now the secret to make it look awesome and not stupid: String the string through one loop of the pretzel and then out again through the other loop. Weave the other pretzels on in the same manner. Much prettier than stacking them (if you anticipate raging appetite at the end of the night you may want to go with the stupid stacked pretzel version for practicality).

As for the earrings I used looped earring wire that I have from my jewelry making projects. However, if you have any kind of loop earrings they should work just fine. Plop a pretzel on each and bam, you’ve made yourself some pretzel earrings! Now wasn’t that fun?!

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Viva Las Charlotte

Last night I got to experience another piece of American culture: The Strip Club.
In honor of my friend Luca’s birthday, we partied the night away starting with tapas at Arpa, drinks at Tilt, then some more drinks and some dancing at HoM (I love that place for playing something else than just hiphop/rap) before heading to The Men’s Club. We were a nice group of 3 drunk guys and 2 drunk girls so we had fun. Apparently you go there to have breakfast not to see the girls. Sure….
I have to say I was curious about the place. Rumors had it the breakfast buffet is the best in town. So we’re here in the south and the lady at the cash register perfectly fit the category Southern Belle. Blonde, maybe in her 40s, long hair and she called me Sweetie. Haha! Very nice. So we get seated and get some drinks (water for me at that point….). It was a very classy setting. Totally reminded me of the hotels in Las Vegas. Comfy chairs, nice lightning, nice bar. Around us, the employees were jiggling their behinds and breasts in middle aged gentlemen’s faces and did some artistic stretching exercises. Interesting outfits, too, ranging from strings to weird body coverings and then of course the obligatory stripper shoes. Ha! The plateau soles made their high heeled shoes not that high heeled anymore, like max. 4cm! That’s nothing! Explains why they can still dance on them… haha! Not to mention that I bet they make great self defense weapons.
So we grabbed our plates and headed to the buffet after deciding that strippers don’t have any other bodies than we do – like they’re not all with gigantic breasts and some of their abs are not that great either. So we figured we might as well stuff ourselves with a high calorie breakfast seeing that we were drunk anyway. Nice selection of eggs, bacon, eggs benedict (the best I’ve ever had!!), pancakes fruits etc etc and even custom made omelettes! Soooooo good! I think I’ll totally go back there just to eat that breakfast again. It’s a shame they close at 5am, they should totally stay open until 10am so you could eat a real breakfast and not just some filling for the drunk stomach. Oh well. I guess I couldn’t stomach all the almost naked women around me when not impaired so maybe it’s good that they’re not open during the day…. Although it felt so professional, that you really didn’t mind the nakedness around you. Kind of like at the gynecologist, it’s just professionalism, not anything sexual. I think the middle aged balding men were more disgusting than the ladies…
And what a nice ending, we left and the valet parking guy called a town car for us. Ah yeah so classy. 😉

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Golfie in da Ghetto

So my nice day on Tuesday turned kind of nasty later on. I was at my friend Vanessa’s house for a dinner party / skin care party (think tupperware), which was fun and she had so much yummy food!
I walk back out to the parking lot and uhm well, it was empty! No car in sight! =-o. Ahhhhhh! So I lost my car. Well, worse, so I lost my company’s car! Ahhhhhhhhhhh! And what do you do at 10pm to find your car?! OK so granted I hadn’t parked in a real parking spot (cause that neighborhood doesn’t have any) but it wasn’t a completely illegal spot either. I would call it gray parking area but it sure was the most legal spot anywhere around there and I wasn’t blocking anybody or fire trucks throughway or whatnots). After a bit of frantic worrying and visuals of me sitting on the street and getting the rage of an Italian boss cursing at me, thankfully Vanessa’s roommate told us where to find the towing company’s phone number and that they tow like crazy in that neighborhood because some miserable punk calls the towing company all the time. Awww shucks!
I called the towing company and yes, they had in fact towed a silver Golf that night and no I could not get it back that night (whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!) but would have to come in the morning and no he wouldn’t give me directions either but I should bring a ransom of 120$ to get the car back sound and alive. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!
Vanessa drove me home and then David came over (and it was after 11 already then) so I was very lucky. Through some investigation (thank you google) I found the towing yard’s address and it wasn’t that far away at all.
At the crack of dawn (ok so more like at 8) David and I set out to rescue Golfie. We drove through some sketchy streets and thanks to my impeccable sense of direction (or was it a car mommy’s instincts?!) we found the place, knocked on their dingy door, handed over the ransom, and rescued Golfie from the sketchy impound yard. That poor thing was so cold, its windshield was covered with dew. I was overjoyed to have it back and got to work only 20 minutes late. Not too bad and the boss wasn’t there yet so it’ll remain our little secret (not that I think he cares, he would probably laugh since I got the car back but it saved me from some embarrassment. Well, plus I let him eat my chocolate so he can’t say anything anyway. I knew a little food bribery here and there can’t hurt. ;-)).
So yeah, all is well in the end but I was a little freaked out to say the least ;-). Thank God for guys that drive 30 minutes to comfort you and protect you when you bail out your car from the ghetto.

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