German Words

I find it fascinating how German is constructed. Where English has modifier words (adjectives, for example) that remain separate words while applying to a noun, for some reason they seem to like to add them together into one new word in German. You see this all over the place and it makes it hard to understand German via a German-English dictionary, because sometimes you don’t know where to separate words to look up the parts. And some parts are just little “helper” word kinds of things that either aren’t in the dictionary or don’t really tell you anything. There’s an example of the word combining thing at the food court by the PX. The iced tea dispenser on the soda fountain, rather than saying “with lemon” says “Mit zintronengeschmacht” (with lemon flavor). When my mom was here she observed that real German words look and sound like words you would make up if you were pretending to speak German.

Yesterday Wee Laddie and I went to the craft store on base. It’s kind of surprising that it’s taken me this long. Although I’m not really a crafter (I knit, but don’t do stamping or scrapbooking or anything), I LOVE Michael’s and have always liked looking at different kinds of paper & stuff (long before Michael's I used to love to go look around a little local stationery shop). Weird, I know. Anyway, since our beloved Cheryl (who runs the Friday Little Troopers group) is leaving, we’re putting together a scrapbook, so I needed supplies for my page. They don’t have much stuff there at all, so I hope all of our pages don’t look exactly the same!

Today we were playing around on the floor and I was stretching my back (been having some issues lately). Wee Laddie asked me, “Rub your back?” (Sweetie.) So, of course, I took him up on it, partly just out of curiosity to see what he would do, partly ‘cause a backrub would be seriously awesome right about now. He did rub it for a minute, then climbed on it. Ah well… win some, lose some.

I finally talked to the hotel in München. When we stayed there with Grandma-Nana and Aunt Kaffee, we lost one of Wee Laddie’s sandals. Okay, it was me. Guitarman was putting Wee Laddie into his car seat and I tried to toss the shoes around him & into the car. I thought I heard one miss, but I didn’t mention it right then, and then promptly forgot. (And Guitarman didn’t spot it when he backed out.) When we got home, I realized it was missing and knew exactly what had happened. So a few days ago I got around to calling the hotel and they were going to check their Lost & Found. They found it!! They’ll mail it to us, and we just have to pay postage when it gets here. Yay!