He's Got the Whole World In His Hands

Yes, it's a silly song, but we sang it in church today and I like it, although the Germans put this weird pause between "world" and "in" that made it hard for me to sing along properly.

So I'm getting bad at blogging daily- sorry. Yesterday I slept in until 10:30 and then Rosi and I did some yardwork- raking leaves, mulching flowerbeds, etc- Miri showed up to hang out and help, too, which is good because it took both of us to lift the bags of mulch at Obi. Also it is fun to go shopping with Miri, for example when we were trying to find the limburger cheese that Rosi wanted for Käsespäztle, except that neither Miri nor I could find the cheese, and then Miri sort of asked this great old man and then she found it herself anyway. And we bought About A Boy because it is an awesome movie and because there is apparently nowhere in Germany to rent movies, or maybe people just never use this service, or maybe I'm just dense, but in any case we bought it and Rosi and I watched it yesterday afternoon and Hugh Grant is very pretty and Badly Drawn Boy sings very pretty songs. Then last night I cooked a chicken! Well, chicken breast, but still! I made a marinade (!) all by myself (plus a phone call to the Mom for double-checking of ingredients and directions) with lemon juice and Oil of the Olive and spices and everything, and then I cooked the chicken all by myself in the oven, but I made Rosi make sure it was done because I'm not 100% certain how to tell not-quite-done chicken from done chicken. But man, it was some good chicken, and I don't think we got the bird flu from it, and I feel so proud of myself for having made it because I have never made chicken before.
And then I slept last night and Rosi and I almost overslept this morning but I got ready for church super-fast and took the train to Augsburg and Anja's parents picked me up at the train station and drove me to church, where I actually went to service, and there was a blessing of child, which is baptism minus the part with the water and the vows and all, because I guess the mom or someone didn't want to do a full baptism right now or something. But the youth group sang a little song about an umbrella and gave the cute little boy (he was like 2) an umbrella and it was adorable and church is so great. And there were cookies after church because Methodists know that cookies are important and I got to talk politics a bit with Ulrich, which made me so happy, and Iris took a picture of me and asked me to write up a bit about myself for the church newsletter, which is awesome. And Nadja's friend was visiting from out of town, and we made spaghetti and I made salad because I am awesome at making salad (do you know that Germany has these great little packets of spices for making your own salad dressing, and I'm getting addicted to them because I feel so skilled putting the spices and the oil and the water in a little bowl and mixing it up instead of just pouring dressing out of a bottle) and we went up to Romy's apartment because she has more space than Nadja and we ate and hung out until Romy realized that she had to go to work at 4 and she also had to practice piano and get some other stuff done, so the rest of us went off to See Augsburg, considering that only one of us (Anja) is actually from Augsburg. And we went to the Marionette Museum, which is called the Puppen Kiste, and it's really cool- they have so many awesome hand-made marionettes, many of which are apparently key figures from German childhood movies that I have never seen, but it made me dream of a Museum of Rudolph and Friends, featuring all those classic characters from all those Rankin & Bass movies, because those were great movies. But I seriously am (re)considering a future in direction of toy-based movies, even though 95% of such things are now computer-based, and the only 5% that remain are made by students without access to computer animation facitilies. But how awesome would it be to go to work and play with toys in front of a camera all day? The production photos surrounding the puppet displays filled me with as much childlike longing as the dolls themselves- man do I want some fancy marionette knights and princesses and dragons, because I am still secretly 8 years old. And after the museum we went back out onto the frozen (not literally- I think it was actually 3 today) streets of Augsburg and peeked into the courthouse, which has this awesome gold-covered room on the top floor, but we didn't want to pay 2€ to go in, so we just sort of huddled outside the door of the room and looked in. Then we went to the cathedral, which made me miss Köln's Dom, although Augsburg's Dom is very pretty and also is not in the middle of construction, except for this one little scaffolded area. This one has something like 50 billion trillion altars in it, and I don't know why, but I swear that every wall or column or corner or whatever had a giant painting and an altar and a bunch of candles- it was weird, weirder than giant old cathedrals are all by themselves. And then we went to get some hot chocolate at Romy's work because we were frozen, and we headed for the train station, where we chilled for half an hour until my train came for me to get home, where I found Miri chilling and watching tv with Rosi and we hung out a bit and I decided I absolutely had to make chocolate chip cookies, but they turned out kind of bad, although they taste okay- it is hard to explain, and I think I am blaming German butter and German ovens for being disinclined to produce delicious cookies.