A.M. Offenwanger's Blog, page 3

Gaeli’s G’nomes

I just sent out a newsletter (are you subscribed yet? You can do so here), and I told everyone about Gaeli’s G’nomes. And then I thought, hey, I don’t think I’ve ever introduced them on the blog, either. So it’s time to remedy that situation.

Gaeli’s G’nomes, as I told my newsletter readers, are the family of gnomes who live on my living room cabinet—well, the ones who are still home. Several of them have moved out already, and all of these ones are perfectly willing to do so, too; give me a ...

#WordlessWednesday: Meeting Myself Coming and Going

Taking Fairy Tales Seriously

I’ve been having a bit of a hard time lately, for one reason or another. So I went on the internet to ARD Mediathek (Germany’s public broadcasters’ streaming service) and turned on some fairy tale movies. I needed them, needed that reassurance that the world is a place where things will work out and everything is okay in the end. German and Czech fairy tale films are fabulous in that regard—they come across as so real, the tales are so much part of that culture, you can sink into the story and c...

Bringing Breakfast

7:45 on an almost-spring morning in a small town in Southern Germany. It’s still chilly enough that I need my fingerless gloves, but the sun is rising in a clear sky, setting the golden stucco of the old bakery at the street corner aglow with the promise of a beautiful day. The upper two stories of the old building look hardly different from how they’ve been for the last century or so, the window shutters beneath the half-hipped red tile roof folded back against the wall to show net-curtain-...

Frazzled Friday, or: On the Road Again

Steve, my purse, and a Tim Horton’s coffee cup

And thus it begins – the first trip of the year. A short-notice-planned jaunt to Germany on family business, which on even shorter notice got rebooked for a few days early.

Steve and I got as far as the local airport, twenty minutes from home, where we found the first flight delayed by an hour, and then by another two. It’s fine as we originally had a seven-hour layover to the next leg of the flight, so now it’s four – still plenty of time. H...

Winter Morning (A Poem)

WINTER MORNING

slowly the candle flickers
in counterpoint to the ticking of the clock
the cat breathes in and out
and gently from the vents
warm air comes shushing out.

(5.2.2024)

Groundhog Day and Candlemas

Today is a cross-quarter day, one of the four days of the year that fall between the quarter days. The quarter days, of course, were (or still are, really) festivals roughly equating to the solstices and equinoxes: Lady Day on March 25, St. John’s on June 24th, Michaelmas on Sept. 29, and Christmas on Dec. 25th. Smack-dab in between those days, there are the cross-quarter days, the old Celtic quarter days: Imbolc, Beltaine, Lughnasadh, and Samhain, on February, May, August, and November 1st,...

#FridayFragment, 26.01.2024

“I’m not very good at that.”

“No,” said the expert, looking up from his close scrutiny of the issue. He raised the magnifying glass and peered through it at the spot on her chin. “No, you are not, are you.”

“On the other hand,” she said, trying not to feel like a lepidopterist’s specimen, “I’m also not very good at about a dozen other things. That ought to count for something, shouldn’t it?”

#WordlessWednesday: Mysterious Morning

Caught in the Stream

It’s a new year. Time for some new habits. As Michelle Lloyd of United Art Space says, time to decide what to shelf and what to delve (deeper into).

So, one of the things I decided it’s time to shelf is some of my online subscriptions. Not so long ago, I was subscribed to four different streaming services – count ‘em, four! Three of them movies, one audiobooks. Britbox, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Audible.

Now, I don’t know about you, but most of those I subscribed to “just for a while...