weird kid thoughts

when i was little--maybe 5 or 6--and we lived in the house in town (the wetzel house, with a telephone in every room), i thought the local news people could see me. someone must have made a distinction in my presence between local and national news. it was this that caused me to think that the local news people could see me. so, if, for example, i was taking a bath upstairs and all of the clean clothes were downstairs by the dryer, i would sneak in behind dad's big gold chair, wrapped in a towel if there was any sign of les and gina harding on the screen. those were their names, right? if it was anyone else, i knew they couldn't see me from inside the t.v., but those local news people, you just never knew...

becoming a nachtigal author on this blog!!

hello nachtigals!

if you like what you're reading here and you are nachtigal or closely nachtigal-affiliated and it's making you burn with your own stories that you'd like to share, just email myself or monica - jknachti (at) gmail (dot) com or mqwest272 (at) gmail (dot) com. (replacing the words in parenthesis with @ and .) and we will send you an invitation to be an author.

when you receive that invitation, there will be a link in it that you should click on and follow the instructions. if you don't have a gmail account, it will make you create one. this is no big deal and will not generate a single piece of spam or other unwanted email, so there is no danger in it whatsoever.

if you mail me between thursday afternoon central european time and the following wednesday, i will be slow to respond, as i am in barcelona and then oslo. that's april 4-8. i'll be back within email range on april 9. i'd advise emailing monica during that time. she might be in so dak, but as you have noted, our parents' house is now a wifi hot spot!

"what's that clicking sound?"

i had a friend over today who is from ireland and who is a fantastic storyteller. somehow, we got on the subject of electric fences. and i was reminded of how we spent endless hours of fun during one summer of my childhood, baiting the dimick boys into touching the electric fence that we used to string up for the horses to eat the grass off in the ditch out front of the house. those red-haired dimick boys were living out on the "harm hippen" (sp?) place not far from our house--at least for that summer. what was completely amazing was that getting them to touch that fence worked REPEATEDLY, providing endless source of amusement, all summer long. they simply never learned.

red-haired dimick boy: "what's that clicking sound?"
me: "huh? i don't hear anything..."
red-haired dimick boy: "ouch!"

i wonder what ever happened to them....

all alone again

so, once again, i'm the only one posting here. but i shall soldier on...and hope you're all still reading.

i was flying into oslo on tuesday evening. very late tuesday evening (tho' it wasn't planned that way...thank GOD for the GOLD LOUNGE at Kastrup!!)

the pilot mentioned something about kristiansand soon after takeoff. and it reminded me of a story. that although it's not technically a nachtigal story, it's a story from my dear danish husband, jens-peter, who, after ten years with me has at least earned honorary nachtigal-hood.

a number of years ago when he was still in the danish army, he went to a "PFP" exercise (that's some kind of partnership for peace-thingie) in kristiansand. which is in norway. it seems that the italians were among those invited (being in favor of peace and all, as well as having a penchant for crooked, mafia-run governments).

it seems that in sweden there is a place called kristianstad. that looks quite a lot like kristiansand, if your english isn't so good. so, imagine the surprise of the swedes when a whole bunch of italians parachuted into kristianstad and said, "we're here!" now, bear in mind, the swedes have prided themselves on their neutrality in recent decades (including WWII and the Cold War). so, to have a bunch of italians parachuting in was, to say the least, a tad alarming.

but, the italians' shoes were immaculate. and they were a little late for the exercise in norway.

those scandinavians. they all look alike...

very good reading

i just sat in a hereford steakhouse in oslo (it was near my hotel and i was alone, so shoot me) eating dinner and doing what one does when one dines alone...reading. and what i read was this:

feature by gene weingarten from the washington post in which he watched all the political pundits and monitored all the political blogs for 24 hours on february 14.

very hilarious reading...not that great if you don't want to look like crazy laughing lady with no dinner companion, but worth it nonetheless...

enjoy. those of you who are democrats. any of you who can afford to be republicans (what we're all hoping to be as soon as we have that kind of cash), you probably won't like it, so you might not want to read it.

a note for my sister

...with whom i had a small disagreement about spelling "yeah" instead of the EXTREMELY colloquial "YAY"

from dictionary.com

yeah
adverb
not only so, but; "I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice" [syn: yea]

because i was, in fact, rejoicing...

and


yay
noun
a branch of the Tai languages


because i don't know any thai (if that's what they mean) and in fact, don't like thailand at all...

double yeah!

yeah #1: welcome nancy and alan! it's so cool that this is starting to happen!!!

yeah #2: i'm back online! new broadband up and running right here at my desk in my very own home! no more mooching off friends or driving around, looking for an unsecured wireless connection outside someone's house...

although i'm back online, i may be a bit absent this week, since i'll be working in oslo. but keep writing! the radisson has wireless and i want to read what you're writing!

Family Talent Shows

So there I was, watching "Dan in Real Life" with some friends. The fictional family met up at a cabin...aunts, uncles, grandparents, grandchilren...where suddenly the story had them all putting on a talent show for each other.

Everyone I was watching the movie with started ranting how no family would EVER do that. It was "too nice" and "too contrived" and "not realistic."

But we did this, right? Talent shows, making movies. Remember "Cousins from Outer Space?" So my memory limits these things to being at Dan and Nancy's, but how long ago did they start? Was it just crazy Gisel forcing us kids to be creative?

Good for Ralph!

Congratulations to Ralph for being courageous enough to begin his new computer adventure! Glen only plays Solitaire on the computer, although recently he expressed a mild interest in e-mailing. Maybe Ralph posting a renewed "From the Bottom of the Barrel" will motivate Glen to explore the computer further. Doreen prints out the e-mails for Dad to read. She had for years been using a dinosaur that Norm Natvig had the nerve to sell her when he upgraded. And she refused to pay for high speed service ("what do I need that for? I have nothing to do but wait...") Jane once reported that it took 12 minutes for her to open a single photo attachment that I sent to Mom. Finally just before Thanksgiving she bent to our pressure (we grew tired of getting a busy signal on the phone line while she was using the computer). She called the phone company to order high speed but they reported that Norm's old p.c. was not compatible. So despite her protests we forced the new computer on her at Christmas. The high-speed installation was a bit of a fiasco but all systems are smooth now.

yeah! you’re getting started!

i’m pleased to see that in my week-long lack-of-internet imposed silence, there are now other nachtigals starting to post! yeah! i realize that it helped that moneek sent out a clearer set of instructions (using capital letters and such). i think that perhaps my years of working for microsoft caused me to assume that all were equally computer savvy. but, people have lives and those lives are (thankfully) not necessarily lived in front of a computer. but hey, now some of you are posting and others are (hopefully) reading.

march 21--strong (strange) memory

here's the second of the postings i wrote over my past few internetless days...

i don’t know how old i was, but i have a strong memory. i went somewhere (i don’t remember where—that’s not part of the memory) with mom and aunt pearl. we had car trouble (or was it a snowstorm?) on the way home and ended up hitching a ride in a semi. i remember that i was boosted up into the sleeper compartment of this semi. i had a brown paper bag of old dolls—naked and with frizzed hair—from wherever it was we went—could it have been an auction or antique stores? there was a snow storm. i have a distinct memory of a dead bee up in that sleeping compartment of the semi. i spent a long time examining that bee, convincing myself that it was indeed dead. i never touched it, just in case it wasn’t. but i have a very, very clear picture of it in my head—that and the snow are the clearest aspects of this memory. somehow that paper bag of naked dolls got thrown out and i remember going back with my mom and looking in a snowy ditch (ala that scene in fargo where steve buscemi is looking for the money along the row of fence posts) for them. as i remember, we did actually find the bag, but that memory might be more wishful thinking than truth. memory is that way sometimes.

ASIDE: after writing this, i talked to mom to confirm. she has more to the story...we were shopping for curtains with pearl in various good will stores—starting in mitchell, then apparently on to sioux falls and sioux city—tho’ i have no recollection of the “where” of this story. mom says i was 3. this must be one of my earliest memories. she did confirm that there was indeed a really bad snowstorm and that we did indeed find the lost bag of toys.

let’s hear some early memories from some of the other authorized bloggers here on TLN..and if you have a story you’d like to share, but aren’t yet an author on this blog, send me an email: jknachti (at) gmail (dot) com to be added. big thank you to monica for sending out proper instructions to the group.

march 20

in my internetless state, i've still been writing blog entries anyway. in word. and now that i'm online (momentarily, still no 'net at home), i thought i'd use the opportunity to post them.

this one is from march 20--

it’s the easter holiday in denmark. that’s a lot of days off here. it starts on maunday thursday, everything’s closed on good friday. saturday, things are open again and there is a rush on the grocery store and the danes begin to “hamster” (as it’s called in danish) all of the yeast and milk and bread, since nothing will be open again ‘til tuesday. there are times when i feel this country is insufficiently capitalist. easter is one of those times. it’s four whole days of closed stores..thursday, friday, sunday and monday. of course, it’s nice that one doesn’t have to work those days, but the least they could do was keep my newspaper coming, especially since i can’t get online at the moment. and the bakery, that should be open too.

but, with all this time off and what with not being distracted by the ‘net otherwise, since i have no access at the moment (i’m writing in Word with the idea of posting later when i get back online), it’s reminding me of other stories.

as i mentioned in a previous posting, i’ve been reading siri hustvedt. now i’m on her book of essays, “a plea for eros,” in which she talks a lot about her family and about growing up in a small town of scandinavian heritage in minnesota. now she’s lived in new york city for years and years, but she still feels it was a good place to grow up. which is much what i feel about platte, despite having lived more of my life away from it now than i did there.

i’m really happy to have grown up there. in a small school, everyone has to try and do everything, because there aren’t enough kids for there to be the band kids, the sports kids, the theatre kids, the choir kids—we all had do it all in order to make the school function. i remember my classmate who was the quarterback of the football team joining us and marching with the band at halftime during the football games. that was cool and no doubt wouldn’t have happened in a larger school. it meant that there was less being labeled as a certain type just because one was in plays or one was a cheerleader—because everyone did it all. i think i came out of it a more rounded person than i would have otherwise, even tho’ all of my sports performances were a disappointment to my father. i was pretty good with those horses, tho’. just because we had to try it all, didn’t mean we couldn’t and didn’t choose an area of specialization.

what i regret about attending platte high school was that i wasn’t made enough aware of the university opportunities outside of south dakota. i probably ended up at iowa thanks to mr. hirt’s waxing philosophical about the greatness of the hawkeyes during those long history classes, but iowa city was the extent of my higher education horizon. even as i later applied to the university of chicago, i didn’t really know that it was the UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. not until i had a full scholarship and actually got there did it hit me what it was. and i was in my late 20s by then. i suppose i’d have been eaten alive had i gone fresh out of PHS. just a little rube from the sticks.