Lost in undescribable emotionS

For some time already, I am selling stuff. At local flea markets, in the Internet at "ebay small ads" and "Shpock".
Sometimes you get a response as soon as the item is published - this happened e.g. with a 25 year old camera (not digital, not even SLR) - it was sold for 30 EURO within a blink.
Sometimes the ad is online for months and you already forgot about it, until your smartphone beeps... (will be continued later)

Live Encounters
As I am always looking for (english) books at flea markets myself, I thought it's a good idea to take sellable books to the next local flea market. 3 boxes with children's books, 4 boxes books from my shelves (mostly Stephen King, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz). The only book I sold was Stephen King's "It" - I guess only because the new movie started lately.
But: the boxes with children's books happened to be fast sellers - mainly for children under 5 and grandmas :-). One elderly woman just wanted to pick up the Pizzas she had ordered (the flea market takes place at a parking area of a supermarket and a pizzeria) - but then she spent 10 minutes rummaging around in the boxes with the children's books, buying 5 or 6.
Another granny asked me if I had old classics like "Struwwelpeter" or "Max und Moritz", as nowadays nobody reads the old stories and fairy-tales to the children any longer. Of course I had!
I sold lots of picture books for small kids. Some of them triggered a certain melancholy... Tiny Pixi-books, 50 years old, that I already owned. Books I loved like "Der dicke fette Pfannkuchen". outori: Do you remember the picture book about a dog's adventures - this story splits into 3 different versions? Sold it to a young mother with a 4 year old girl. *sighs*

Harry Potter (I-III) was on the display, too. A mother with two sons of about 10 and 14 years showed very much interest - the boys obviously did not. She wanted to talk the elder son into reading these books, he only complained about them having much too much pages. She sighed heavily and said to him: "one day, you're gonna have regrets you never read these books"
Nobody seems to read (printed) books any longer, especially the younger generation. What a pity!

On the other hand, I sold my Terry Pratchett collection via ebay to an Irish guy living in Augsburg :-)
On the Internet you even sell stuff you wouldn't think that somebody needs it! The collection of Baseball cards (a mother bought it for the Baseball-crazy son as a birthday present), a sheet with Lord of the Rings stickers, a 20 year old pocket calculator, old printers (even without cartridges), a CRT-TV, Granny's old oven (top heat defective).

Virtual Encounters
One of my long-term ads is a travel guide for Japan.
Yesterday my phone made "bling" and a conversation started:

J: Still available?
Me: Yes, of course
J: We take it!
Me: Great!
J: Our daughter will leave us next summer, heading to Tokyo. That's why.
Me: Wow, sounds familiar to me ... my daughter does Japanese studies and wanted to go to Japan for 1 or 2 terms, but unfortunately that didn't work out
Me: Does your daughter like Japanese Mangas? [I asked this because I'm trying to sell Noragami 1-7, too]
J: She's such a Japan-fan ... what kind of a question?
Me: :-) Likewise ... she even infected me with the Music ... J-Rock/Visual-Kei ...
J: ... btw ... Gazette and Mejibray is her everything. Especially Ruki
Me: NOOOO! With Gazette it all started with my daughter, and I do love Dir en Grey, Sadie, OZ, NEGA, Mejibray, too. I never was that much into Gazette, though. We tried to go to ANY live!
Me: My office looks like the room of a teenager:


J:




LOL
J: We didn't make it to Gazette. But last year we had a great experience in Cologne. Band was playing at the E-Werk, before that we went to a pub. Full of people, so we went downstairs, almost empty there. Suddenly ... veiled faces ... YES!! Bull's eye!! Tha band was sitting next to us!!!
Me: Wow, thumbs up!!
Me: In July 2016 we were at the Nocturnal Bloodlust live in Munich ... we even go to Cologne or Berlin for a live. Maybe we already met each other - the J-Rock community isn't that huge ...
J: Would be cool!!!
Me: Just watch out for the oldest person at the venue - that would be me :-)

Isn't that fucking cute????????? Finding somebody like that in that way? That similarities, that's awesome! Like a clone of your own life.
My heart made such a jump - this made my day, absatively.
I didn't only send them the travel guide but also a V-Kei magazine (with lots of Gazette in it) as f-o-c present :-)

I'll keep the contact data. 2018, Berlin, Dir en Grey, maybe??

The German tickets for Cologne in June were sold out within only some hours. And guess what I found out:

There are professional dealers who bought whole bunches of tickets to now offer them at e-bay for the double price.

I’m so fucking pissed off.

We are a J-Rock community, we wouldn’t do this, and if we had a ticket for sale, we wouldn’t be interested in earning money!


If these guys would show up in Cologne, I would like to beat the shit out of them, be sure of that (one e-bay seller wrote he will be in Cologne …)

I know that there are lots of fans that missed the date of the official start of the ticket-sale, now they are forced into buying one from one of these e-bay-motherfucking-greedy-vultures.

@ outori

LOL

Yesterday I had the urgent feeling to start with X-Mas bakery, actually, to not fall in disgrace with a certain person ...

Well, once I started (9 a.m.) I couldn't stop ... and at 6 p.m. the kitchen looked like this:



Oh, stop, on Friday I already started to just bake a weekend-cake:

What do you expect that it tastes like? Chocolate? Hehe ... take a bite and it will surprise you ... it's a lemon cake, just in the shape of a chocolate cake

OK, on with x-mas cookies.

Notorious oat-meal-rum cookies.
Have a look from the other side - new ones:

"Hermit-cookies". Whoever gave these cookies this name - don't know what this person thought. They contain cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and raisins. Spicy ones.

Next ones, called "Bones" (Knöchli). Actually not as hard as bones, but crispy, containing roasted hazelnuts (granny shouldn't try these). By the way, the hazelnuts are from the hazelnut tree downstairs in the garden. So one hour nut-cracking before was necessary.


As these "Kokosgüpfli" are quite popular, of course I baked double quantity:


And another new recipe, yummy yummy, "Marzipan-Cherry-Cookies"


So this is the result of a hard day's work, 9 hours of standing in the kitchen with sticky fingers, dough under my fingernails, random cursing (when the dough was so damned sticky, when I lost one long fingernail, when I cut one finger whilst grating marzipan), but rather satisfied in the end *LOL*


The fever got me. I'm not yet finished, I guess.

Oh, and here is another random picture. outori knows what it's all about :-)


Addendum, Sunday:
As already promised I was not yet finished yesterday.
So see what we have here:


= self made Amarettini ... consisting nearly only of sweet almonds. Gosh, why do almonds get electrostatically loaded when you grind them? They stuck on your pullover and climb up the bowl ...

And last, but not least - I proudly present:

Amaretto-Cherry-Bites
Actually, these are made nearly only of Marzipan, with candied cherries in them. You can guess that this "dough" is like wallpaper paste. Bringing them into some kind of form was not easy. Well, you shouldn't have a "Sticky-fingers-Paranoia" LOL

Dear outori: All this is already on the way to you, right in this moment ... you will find it in a sweet tin can when you'll be home later. ENJOY!

There are some views that are impressive.
Impressive enough to post an entry LOL




Did you ever recognize that poppy mainly grows together with barley? You might find some poppy here and there, but some barley fields are spoiled with so much poppy ... more red than green ...I wonder for what purpose barley is mainly used: because it obviously contains lots of poppy (I don't think that there is somebody sorting out all the poppy??)

What a wonderful symbiosis, ne? Poppy & Barley seem to love each other ...



Yah, and yesterday I visited the strawberry field nearby. It's a great year for strawberries again, luckily. A gigantic thunderstorm was approaching ... silently crouching nearer and nearer ...



On my way home, I was literally driving away from this thunderstorm, it chased me ... in the very moment when I entered the door, it started raining like hell ... accompanied by growling and lightning ... no trace of Miro, of course, haha, he's such a pussy (pun intended) ... it already was his usual feeding-time, and usually he's very impatient about his food - this time he was NOT. XDDD

Oh how I love Nature.
Oh how I love the power of the sun - without enough sun, there are no such strawberries like this year, right? They taste like sun and life and seduction and so much more ...

Accidentally, I stumbled over the AM² (Anime, manga, music production) Convention in Anaheim, California, 01. - 03. July, 2011.

I'm not into Anime and Manga, but I DO LOVE Sadie ... and Sadie are GOH (Guest of Honour) at this Convention, they will perform there for free. Yes: FOR FREE.
It's not the "for free" that interested me the most, but that Sadie probably will never come to Europe, I will never go to Japan, so probably I will never see them live.



And: There's a business trip to the US yet to come, so why not kill two birds with one stone??

So my fantasies galloped away with me, and I just imagined ... why not ask my US boss to prepone the training that is planned for October? So I would be in the States anyway ... and a flight from Washington (the training would be there) to Los Angeles (Anaheim) and back would only cost some $ 300!!!! Yeah. If you fly from Munich to LA and back it would cost you around € 2000. TWOTHOUSAND!

I shared my wild fantasies with my (German) boss, just for fun.
That's what he said: "Go ahead, and write a mail to Julie that you would like to have your training already in July. Write this email AT ONCE. DO IT!!!"

Well, my slight objection was like that: "You know, it's not guaranteed that I will have entry to this live, because it's for free, you can't buy tickets but you have to queue - and this won't guarantee admittance. And maybe they will only perform for 30 minutes or so - and there is nothing else on this Convention that would interest me ... and first, you have to register for a pass anyway and it might be already sold out generally."

Boss: "So you write an email to this Convention, telling them that you come over from far Germany especially for this event, especially for Sadie, you being the most crazy fan, and - look at your age - the eldest fan anyway --- and you DO WRITE THIS MAIL NOW, too"

Me: *looking very obedient "because he's my boss"* and actually feeling the urge to hug and kiss him (means: I was speechless)

Me: (regaining the ability to speak) - erm, well, *cough* let me sleep over it, ok?

Next day:
First thing in the morning, my boss asked me: "What about Anaheim?" (Isn't he sweeter than sweet?)

You can imagine, I thought about doing this really crazy thing.
But. Yeah, always a 'but':
There is really nothing there that would interest me besides Sadie. And if I would go there and then would NOT see Sadie, I would be terribly devastated.
And: If I couldn't take a certain 24-year old person with me, probably this person would murder me or, to put it in other words: I could never enjoy it without her. Seriously.

And that's the point: This certain person is not available beginning of July. JLPT is on 3rd of July ... (lame excuse, ne?? In fact, I couldn't afford a 'normal' flight ticket MUC-LA-MUC for her, so I guess it's kismet or prevision that WE shouldn't be in Anaheim)

So I told my boss (still wanting to hug & kiss him) that I decided to not go, because that would be far too crazy. He just smiled and said "Sometimes you should do crazy things ..."

Yepp. He's right.
But this really would beat anything what I would call 'crazy'.
I guess, at times I'm crazy enough ... and I'm happy with that already ...

Let's face it: I love my boss, I love my job. Absatively the best I ever had!!

Well, I do not intend to write a live report - but what I really found very amusing:

In front of the location parked a small, white, old bus. Usually, this sort of busses are used for transportation of goods - but not of men ... it took me some time to realize that this actually was D's tour-bus. Hmmm
My brains seemed to work very very slow, coz it took me some more time to realize that the print on this bus actually showed the tattoo on my right foot - GEKIDO ...



Nobody was interested in this bus - but me. In the back there was a guitar case. A varnish guitar case, hehe ...

The back sitting row showed what the guys obviously enjoyed to eat: German Funny Frisch potatoe chips and German Prinzenrolle cookies. Unclesallys magazine?? WTF??



But the most interesting of all was the co-driver's seat. There was a print-out of the route from Lyon/France to Munich (800km!!!) - and it revealed the end destination: the Hotel where they stayed ... actually they chose the A&O "Hotel" for accommodation. Well, this is not what I would call "Hotel", it's more sort of a Hostel ...

If I were that special kind of very dedicated fan-girl, then I surely would have been waiting there after the live ...



Strange that none of the fan-girls recognized this and none of them showed interest in the bus and its contents.

I wondered if D really have so little money that they have to travel with such an uncomfortable bus from city to city, only eating sort of junk food, sleeping in hostels (imagine them in bunk beds!!??).
And imagine, you would stay in such a hostel by chance, being quite amused that there are 5 nice Japanese guys, and only finding out later that this actually were the members of D???? Hahaha, I guess you would bite your own ass, right?

Once again nature caught me ...



This sun rising in flames ...




... and the trees frozen, as if covered with sweet sugar icing ... actually it was minus 12C° ...




In such moments, brain, spine and skin is flooded with emotions.

Awe - Fear - Love - Sadness

What a pity that I couldn't catch the moments of Christmas night's drive home. Everything was so white, I mean, EVERYTHING, even the streets, because it snowed all day. Trees covered with snow, hardly other cars on the road, two times owls crossing our way on silent powerful wings ... it felt like in a dream, not like a 'usual way home', felt like in some kind of oblivious wilderness, safe, but at the same time threatening to devour you, this was not just a landscape, but an entity --

I've been seduced, and as I am a decent girl, I'm thinking about the 'why'.

Well, yesterday I randomly switched through programmes on TV, and on MTV my interest was caught by a live performance of 30 seconds to Mars. They performed Hurricane and something about that song made me listen. It's different to other songs from 30stM I already knew before. Made me think about this other songs I already know, and pictures of their really amazing videos came into my head.

So this morning my fingers automatically opened Amazon and I couldn't stop them ordering all three albums of 30stM. Strange thing, this.

Of course, their newest album This is War caught my attention in a rather special way: The cover shows a hissing tiger ... and I do hope so much that they will send me THIS cover and not another (because the album is sold with lots of different covers, and you can't choose which one you like)

And as I am a girl that likes things being fairly in an order, I had to order the other two albums, too ...

And that reminded me that I didn't yet order Inception, and that's definitely a must-have. Added to shopping cart ...

Then I looked out of the window and I guess my facial expression changed to a big OOOO ... I can't remember when I saw such huge (and I mean HUGE) snowflakes before.



(You can see them very good in front of the garage doors)



So this masses of snow hinder me again to do what I regularly do on weekends: go running. Even though these days I run along a street - when there is new snow, I can forget about that, too. Each step makes you slide back half a step, you only skid, and that's no fun at all.
F***. Tiger hisses.


Oh, this tree is besides my balcony. It's sort of a rubber plant, it's huge, it never looses its leaves, and it shouldn't grow here in this latitude (usually, this kind of tree never sees snow or has to endure freezing)
Strange thing about some trees here in this garden. There's also a tree that's native in Texas as sort of cattle fence. It's called 'Osagedorn' and botanical encyclopaedias tell me about this tree that it only grows in hot and dry climate and can't stand frost. But here, in this garden, it perfectly stands frost and snow.
Is this garden magic??

Well, my way to work sort of seems to be very interesting these days, I'm sorry for that ...
To be honest, I'm rather fed up with winter because I have this 44km ride, and it's hard when there is too much snow on the streets - I get used to long travel times, but I really would prefer dry streets and snow only beside the streets ...
So I maybe could enjoy winter ...

However, what's fascinating these days is nature.
Today it was the sun.
I don't know if my mobile-phone-camera caught the image so you can see what I saw.

The sun was sort of burning.



There was this certain glow, it really looked strange, and eerie, and somehow scary



At least it was great to see the sun again. It didn't appear for the last 7 or 8 days, maybe today it just burnt its way through clouds and snow ...



I really badly need the sun to feel alive.