Der Mischmasch is German for “hodgepodge” and since today I have a mix of small topics to talk about, that seemed like a good word to use for an alliterative title for the post.

First, I want to thank everyone for all the comments over the last week or so. I always love getting comments, and I’m really sorry I haven’t had a chance to respond. So, let me add a few comments/answers to questions now:

Re Trip to the Library:  Mom, I don’t know what the people in the picture were doing with the pants. That’s my problem – I need words with my pictures. 😉 Although, I can come up with 1000 words to describe each picture (if a picture is really worth that much, those 1000 are never the right set of words according to the answer key the teacher has! But the main takeaway from that post was the fact that we made the trip to the library. Forget the part about the pants. 😉

Re 1500: Thanks for all the kind words – glad everyone like the photos and has been enjoying the periodic reports on the OAD project.  Mom, I hadn’t seen the “crocodiles” in that photo before you pointed it out – very interesting to notice that. The boats are those punting boats. Kathy, I also like that spider web one – in fact, it was a hard choice to figure out which one to choose for the OAD that day!  Grazie mille, Nat, per il tuo comment!

Re Colors of Autumn: Again, thanks for all the kinds words – glad everyone enjoyed this look at Autumn here. Stuart, when you buy that vacation home, let me know, we’ll move in with you (it looks big enough!). Ashley, I’m just showing my age, talking about things “writing to disk”, I guess. Although I like your thought of it being a retro-modern technology.  😉

Re Another Schwabian Monte Cristo: Thanks for the comments. Stan, that restaurant is right down the street, it’s definitely become our favorite place.  In fact, Chris and I went back again several days ago and ordered a Schwabian Monte Cristo (we’d only tasted a bite of the one our friend ordered). I’d say it was good, and very much reminded me of Monte Cristo sandwich, with the huge slab of melted cheese on top of the slice of ham, which was all on top of the maultaschen. However, the dish with the slices of maultaschen in the omelett – that’s the one I could eat over and over again.

Re Spotting our House: Cute comments, all.

Furniture update, and follow-up to Furniture and a Fountain: First, to answer the question, yes, I meant stuff had to be hung in the armoire, we didn’t have to put anything more together ourselves. I still haven’t gotten a good photo of the bedroom furniture, since it’s still in a bit of disarray as we unpacked. The problem is now that we have large suitcases in the bedroom waiting to go into our storage area. They can’t go in there at the moment, since we have 11 huge bags of styrofoam peanuts (huge as in huge leaf-size trash bags) stashed in the storage area. We can’t put them out for recycling until later this month. If anyone has craft ideas with what to do with 11 huge bags of styrofoam peanuts, I will ship a box (or more ) filled with them to you.  Don’t both sending me the ideas; while I consider myself a woman of many talents, doing crafty things with styrofoam peanuts is not one of them. 😉

Anyway, speaking of the boxes, we also had to rearrange those boxes in the living room, so that we could make space for two new things that got delivered today:  the TV, and  … drum roll, please … the sofa.

Yes, the sofa came 3 weeks earlier than predicted – whoohoo! We have a place to sit in the living room. Of course, we still need a table to put the TV on, plus some lamps, plus … well, at least we have a place to sit down while we contemplate that. I’ll try to get some furniture photos up before the week is out, I promise.

Anyway, that’s der Mischmasch of topics for today.

BTW, Mischmasch has been used by some German-speaking friends to describe the current state of my speaking. I regularly try to speak in either Italian, German or English. Inevitably, what comes out most of the time is a mixture of at least two of the three, and sometimes all three in the same sentence. And sometimes more – the very occasionally random French or Spanish word creeps in there on the sly. Odd. But I guess der Mischmasch does accurately describe my mixture of languages as I navigate through learning foreign languages.

However, I also noticed that the an online German dictionary I usually use, der Mischmasch  can also be translated “farrago“. That sounded more exotic, until I looked it up, and it turns out just to mean “a confused mixture”.

Hmm.  Come to think of it, that description probably is the best definition of my current problems speaking in just one language at a time.