forms, books and tennis balls

still tuesday night

after uploading the blog from tuesday i was fiddling with the scanner a bit. all of a sudden i understood what happend: the printer software had installed the scanner software as well. thus it was in two versions on the system and was interefering with each other. i took the scanner software off and installed the printer anew, and voila, both printer and scanner worked. i scanned two of the floor plans of the assisted living place my mother and me had visited two weeks ago in leonberg. when i wanted to scan the third one, the scanner gave up. i sent those two floor plans by email to my brother-in-law and went to bed. after reading a couple of pages in two books each i called it a day, put my mobile to ring at tenin the morning and switched off the light. i couldn´t fall asleep though. my belly started to ache. turning around, taking a homeopatic tranquilizer and turning around again didn´t help. maybe my appendix? the deeper i breathed the more pain. i tried to breath low. not too successful either. i was thinking about to call an ambulance. eventually i must have fallen asleep.

wednesday

we have to make the the annual tax declaration of my father of the year 2006 until the end of this month. i tried to do it with a special software last days, but we are missing some paper. without some numbers on it that software won´t proceed. so my mother is trying to do it now on paper. she filled in the wrong numbers in the only form we have. thus i went to the finance office in the morning. i had to cycle about four times around a complex ofbuildings hosting the police, the unemployment office and that finance office until i found a way through all those buildings. i picked up all forms which might apply to my mother in at least ten copies each. my belly was doing better and while biking home i thought maybe this was now the punishment for the overdose of rhubarb i had in the last weeks. my mother already had prepared lunch. i had semolina pudding without rhubarb stew.

being a little exhausted by everything, i was reading that comic strip from yesterday on the balcony. having that comic strip almost finished i heared a familar voice. and looked through the balcony door inside the living room. there i saw my aunt, the older sister of my father. she just had arrived with her son who is a couple years older than me. after the obligatory greeting rituals i walk with my cousin up to his car to get some boxes for putting things in. on the parking lot we find another aunt, my fathers younger sister. she used to teach catholic religion in various schools before she was pensioned. she is obvously moved cause my father is not around anymore. back in the flat we are having tea and cake. fortunately my relatievs have brought some cake with them, fortunately for me since i am still avoiding rhubarb. my mother told them that my younger sister is arriving with the train in the late afternoon, my cousin is ready to pick her from the station.

afterwards we were having a look on my fathers books. some are really beautiful, some i was found of as child and now would consider being useless, my relatives are pretty found of. like huge books with huge photograps on history and science. and unpacked and newer books with novells on the order of the templars.

my cousin, my mother and me were keeping always an eye on the watch to be in time at the station. i assisted him to find the way there. we didn´t drive exactly the shortest or even fastest way, to be honest, rather than a straight line on the map the direction i gave to my cousin would look more like a couple of "Z". we were twenty minutes before the train was to arrive, my cousing was telling me about his life. being unemployed he engages himself in his town in the tenant assocition and a citizents´ organisation which is having every year a district festivity.

my aunts already had put the books they had sorted for themselfs in the boxes. we too them out to their cars. afterwards i showed them the two rooms of the basement. although with neighbours and other relatives we had already cleaned and sorted quite something they are still pretty shocked. while i was cleaning with my cousin out a bit more,my aunts found the children toys in the corridor. they threw about two hundred tennisballs in a garbage bag, found a couple of my old toy cars and more toys, they want to clean at home to give to the son of another cousin of mine. maybe i should draw a picture of my family for you. my cousin wants to take the books for children and adolescence for the citizens association when his is coming on saturday again.

gotta go to have lunch now,

greetings,

burkhard

two cups of coffee, volunteers and cafes

thanks to everybody who sent their thoughts or condolescences concerning my fathers death. i couldn´t imagine it before, but they helped.

after lunch i went shopping. nothing too dramatic there. only the wheather. air from africa which came in between a low and a high-pressure area up here. or something like that. it´s warmer here now than in southern europe. i went to the library. with sweat dripping from my entire self i gave a couple music CD´s back and got new ones and a comic strip. they have more space than the public library in belzig. they have novels, books for children and adolescence and about health. today the cafe downstairs was open. i had to check it out. in the entrance posters about events, like readings, brunch and the lecture on africa and globalisation in the third world shop on thursday. that smelled like a cafe run by volunteers. there were two ladies in their best age talking about health issues. i orderd a cappucino, the lady asked if i wanted some cake with it. i couldn´t say no. the other one explained to her how the cappuccino machine works. after finishing cake and coffee i was reading that comic strip for a while and enjoyed the atmosphere. the lady took the empty dishes and i asked her if i could pay, she said she wouldn´t mind me sitting here for longer. my mother was probably already waiting for me and i didn´t want to be unfriendly so i asked her about the cafe, she told me the whole thing is a communal centre with the library and the cafe. they have language classes and all sorts of things, i had a hard time listening, being happy that i was right. about 10 years ago some people from the part of town decided they wanted a cafe. and they started one. so, it´s about the same age as infocafe in belzig. i have to go there again and find out more about it. i went home through subtropic climate. i unpacked the stuff i had bought while my mother prepared another coffee for me. i told her about the football match later. the german team was to play the bijelo russian one. when my mother heard bijelo russian, she remembered that her father got killed there at the end of world war II. i wasn´t aware of that, as far as i remember she never mentioned before that it was bijelo russia he was killed in. the younger sister of my father phoned, she is coming with the older sister tommorrow afternoon for a visit. rhubarb cake and coffee again delicious, the match ended in a draw, which is a success for the bijelo russian team and a little disaster for the german one.

my mother made a list of things she wants to get rid off, i typed it into the computer (if anybody is interested, i´m happy to send it). when i wanted to print the list i figured that the printer wasn´t working. i installed the whole thing anew. that was about the fifth time, thus i have an idea now how to do that. at last. during the installation i realised that the scanning software is installed during the printer installation. which might be the reason why the scanner gave up it´s work.

i watched a bit the news on television. in germany the communes don´t have enough youth workers. they showed as example a district of berlin. the youth worker they interviewed feels more like a firefighter. berlin is for the last couple of years bankrupt. germany having one of the strongest economies in the world, but not enough youth workers. better - or should i say worse? - than the comedians after the news. they (those comedians) displayed a graph on their studio walls, which showed that the pharmaceutical industry in germany got increasing profits while decreasing turnover in the last couple of years.

while writin this my computer decided that an update was necessary. i allowed him to do one. but not to crash the internet browser when i am about to upload this blog. fortunately there is some other software which is quicker than that internet browsing thing to manage the blog upload.

strange world.

good night,

burkie

music, hair and even more music

last time i watched the eurovision song contest a swedish band won. seems like a russian singer won this year. and the german, british and polish songs together on the last place. i didn´t know that goran bregovic was playing with his band during the break. i read it only on a big german internet news service and search engine. they proposed a fraud. that some neighbouring countries gave points to each other. the funny thing is that they complain in the next sentence about the missing points from the neighbouring countries for the german song which was in english (which the majority of the songs were). in the following paragraphs they give about ten more reasons for the position of the german (or english?) song. wikipedia already has articles on this years contest in more than 30 languages. they are quick..

after lunch facebook was down again. i went shopping. my mother had ordered the hair dresser for a quarter past five. so i had some time. and this time no alarm. half a minute after i arrived back home the bell rang. the hair dresser. i opened the door and confronted him with the the time difference of fourty-five minutes he was early. he was sure he had agreed with my mother for half past four. that explained everything: a misunderstanding. while i was unpacking my bicycle bags he cut my mothers hair. she wants a decent hair cut when my niece will be baptized in two weeks. now she thinks it´s maybe a bit short. but within two weeks it should grow to a decent lenght. while cutting my hair, he gave me a couple of advices on how to cut my hair myselfand proposed to me to co-ordinate my stays in böblingen with my hair cuts. i guess my efforts in cutting my hair myself couple of months ago were not too successful.

in the evening i fiddled with the scanner. again without success. just checked facebook. i got a music clip about manchester united. the lyrics are...., let´s say special (snjezana! where did you get that from?). even more important, it shows that there is somebody else reading this blog. which makes altogether ..... three people!

good night folks!
burkhard

slides, a phone bill and a missing car

my father got hundreds of slides. today i found the slide projector. most slides are from travels to the place where my father was born, north of poznan in poland. until the wall came down and communism collapsed in east europe my father was not allowed to go there because he worked for the german army. since then he and my mother travelled every year there. since a couple of years he even organised bus trips with up to fifty people. i found about three files from my father on his birthplace. since i am here i added 2 or three more. only about the area where my father was born. with newspaper articles and photograps from before and during world war II, stories and some historical texts. all about this area. lists of names of the people joining those trips, letters from those people to my father, photographs from those trips, historical and current maps, newsletters, newspapers, songs from and about the area (some written by my father). from most of those papers two, three or even more copies.

i opened that suitcase. no, i didn´t figure that number. i went up to 999. but the thing wouldn´t open. only with a little help from a screwdriver the suitcase did open. there i found medical bills, two playing cards, invitations to events, correspondence, a phone bill from freiburg. to me. from 1994. then i already lived in pakrac! seems my good old flatmates hadn´t paid the phone bill and the telecommunication company sent it to me. to me addressed here in böblingen. my father seems to have cleared the situation with a letter to the telecom. i hope my flat mates have paid that bill in the mean time. in another correspondance to the head of a military base my father complained that his car was taken away. he had joined some seminar in that military base, the guys responsible for that seminar had obviously forgotten to arrange parking space for the participants, the guards had let my father into that military base (although they should have stopped him), my father parked his car, somebody figured that the car didn´t belong there and they moved it. i can imagine my father was quite upset. i can´t remember him telling us about that incident though.

we are running out of bread again. for the late afternoon my mother has ordered the hair dresser for her and myself. a guy i remember vaguely as little child when i went to school. i guess i will go shopping before letting my hair being shortened tommorrow.

good night everybody,
burkhard

second round; rhubarb, photos, football.

somewhere last week we run out of rhubarb cake. so i entered round two of picking. i left about half for the neighbours who are coming back from holidays tommorrow. and i put a bucket full of flower soil next to the remaining plants. i didn´t understand completely why, but my mother got quite some flower soil on the balcony. it has something to do with a broken fish tank. i can´t re-call now the connection between that fish tank and the soil. i´ll have to start further investigations. my mother started with making another rhubarb cake.

in the afternoon i was watching frankfurter ffc playing umea ik in the uefa cup finals. the women section. while watching i sorted more papers of my father. and found a cigar box full of photographs. on one photo showing two young guys the year 1919 and something indeciperable was written on the back side. the time the other photos were taken was more noticeable on their front side. soldiers in nazi uniform, in military deployment, officers in the field, bombed out houses and typical nazi architecture. i found more birthday greeting cards and different identity cards of my father. catholic youth, parachuters, military driving license and amateur boxing association. my father started boxing when he was 14 years old. i have to say for the parachuters defense, the birthday card which was always the same was from the entire fellowship of parachuters.

frankfurter ffc won the uefa cup. again a close match, umea ik hit the cross bar twice. at the end the same picture like on wednesday: the members of one team celebrating, the others devestated. uefa vice-chairman gerhart meyer-vorfelder handed over the medals and the cup to the players. with the players of the team of umea ik he shook hands, with the ones from frankfurt he shook hands and gave kisses as well. he obviously wasn´t sure how many kisses were allowed, he started with two for each player, but reduced them to one each. meyer-vorfelder was minister of sports and culture of the state of baden-württemberg when i went to school. i wasn´t into politics much then and didn´t understand much of the critisism towards him. neither i understood why we couldn´t choose german and history as main courses in the last two school years. my older sister explained to me, the government was worried students might get too critical. obviously now, one decision meyer-vorfelder was responsible for. for tea time my mother served rhubarb cake. this time straight from the ofen.

the scanner still doesn´t work. there seems to be a bug involved. the suitcase is still locked. i am now at number 600. that hardening left my neck completely now.

good night,
burkhard

troubles moving

today in the morning i had a hardening in the neck muscles. couldn´t move my head to the right side. i tried to get rid of that with some breath exercise and tiger balm.

i had thought i had payed all my bills, but still some manage to accumulate from somewhere. seems i have forgotten again to ask for exemption of the telly and radio fees for being unemployed, i need to pay a couple of homepages i host with an aquaintance, my bank account is empty and i still have to pay my mobile. i was happy when my mother told me she would lend some money to me.

after lunch i managed to move my head at least in something like the right direction. since i don´t need to look to the right that much while biking, i went first to the bank, then to one of those big supermarkets. at the cash the alarm went off. the woman at the desk asked to go once more backward. i was puzzled about the bleeping noise and thought she had addressed the family in front of me. after realising that she was talking to me i stepped backward through this bleeping thing. i didn´t steel anything, honestly. i went forward again and nothing happened. the woman said everything was alright. after paying that alarm went off again. a little kidding, a little annoyed, i held my hands up. the woman told me again everything was alright. no idea what was triggering that thing. who knows, maybe my mobile radiated a bit too much. i could hardly fit everything i had bought into my bicycle bags. fortunately i had cancelled the potatoes. since the main library is closed for putting a new carpet i had to go to a branch of the library in a part of town i had never been before to get some new music. i went straight up hill. at least 2 kilometres. the houses must have been built in the last couple of years. arriving at the top i am exhausted. the building of the library branch looks from the inside much more attractive than from the outside. downstairs is a little cafe. which is unfortunately closed until sunday. upstairs, in the first floor is the actual library, bigger than the only library in belzig, with a big terrace and chairs to sit. i found a couple CDs and went home passing by my former secondary school. the students still have school vacations, so the school was closed. arriving at home i am even more exhausted.

yesterday i had opened a suitcase of my father. in it i found another suitcase. locked by two combinations of numbers. i could figure the first one, but not the second. so i started trying from 000 onwards. i managed up to the number 250.

update on the scanner: the computer finds it sometimes. but still it won´t scan. i am able to look to the right again, that hardening seems to be gone.

good night,
burkhard

missing papers, small photos and 50 deutsch mark

dear friends!
last night putting up the blog took at least half an hour (for not-so-computer-literates: that should take not more than two minutes). the connection from facebook to blogger.com somehow didn´t work. i couldn´t remember my username on blogger.com and so on. i was almost falling from my chair when i was finally finished. not by overjoy, but by falling asleep.

most of today i felt pretty useless. my mother and me have to make the joint return of my father and my mother. from the year 2006. my father always wanted to do it but couldn´t find one paper. seems like he didn´t need it. in replacement there is another paper from my father we need now, which we can´t find. thus we were today sorting thru piles of paper again. my mother in the eating room, me in my former sleeping room where we have the computer now. i thought i had emptied the room from paper (not completely of course), but i came across more sources of paper. underneath the second desk. and inside the desk. at the bottom in one of the drawers i found a photo album from my fathers family. with little, squarrish black and white photos not bigger than huge stamps. from the architecture, the fashion and the moustaches of the men i would say the photos were taken around the beginning to the middle, some maybe at the end of the thirties. when i see pictures from this period of time i am always curious about the historical context. questions like "were the nazis already in power?", "had the war already started?", "how was life in the thirties?" went through my head. in my family hitler and the nazis were never an issue of discussion. only in the last couple of years i started to understand that my father was not quite sure about his standpoint. one of our basis of communication in recent years was watching movies together. his favourite were wild-west movies, but we could agree on any kind of action movie - martial arts, historical, crime, whatever. except movies about the nazi era. i guess a reason was a mixture of guilt, embarrassment and a couple of other feelings. my grandmother was pretty fond of hitler - at least she was pretending. i remember once in my childhood when i stayed with my grandparents she was defending hitler. in the mean time i figured that she was at least half polish, probably hundred percent. my grandmother had a polish maiden name. and she spoke german with some very hard accent. which was normal for me. it has been always like this. only recently, after having lived in former yugoslavia and worked with refugees, i came behind these little secrets. like the serbs in croatia who are 150% croatian, but more for their own security and well-being than for ideological or nationalsit reasons (another question is: "what does it mean do be of some nationality?" i leave that for the left-over-pile-of-things-to-talk-about). my father was member of the hitler youth, but at the end of the war never old enough to have been in charge of something or a child soldier. i do not know the role of his family, i only guess that my father was a victim of his own projections. at least in this case. i also found birthday greeting cards to my father, always the same for each birthday from one of his fellow parachuters. and fifty german marks. my mother wants me to ask tommorrow at the bank if they still would exchange it. i doubt that. but i found that we could sell it on ebay;-)

nite everybody,
burkhard