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Tired is a word to describe my condition after two days of unaccustomed manual labor. It doesn't seem to have the ring of vibrant description one's accustomed to in this journal (ha), but it'll do for now.
We didn't go to Nancy on Thursday afternoon, after all. We went to visit Virgilio for the weekend. There was much hurrying and worrying about missing the train we knew about, and then when we got to the ticket counter to actually buy it, it was a trial of my self-control not to break down. I asked, in German, for the next cheap train to Goeppingen for two people, there and back, and floundered in my own incompetent vocabulary. He took pity on me and asked the rest of his questions in English, but I couldn't help feeling it was a reflection on my major flaw; I'm so good at BSing that I do it even in classes that I intend to get something out of. My German would be much better if I'd worked harder, but I'm smart enough to just get by, and I know it, so I'm just getting by in life and it scares me that that may be all I ever do. In any case, it was a pretty traumatic buying of train tickets, but we mande the train on time and got a decent seat next to several men who look just like Trevor.
The train ride from Kaiserslautern to Goeppingen is three hours with four changes, and I was already a bit pensive. I didn't read at all, but watched the people and the scenery and listened to the last few letters of the alphabet left on my mp3 player: Wings, the Yardbirds, Yes, and the multitude of Zep that's stored under Z instead of L.
My eyes got tired from watching everything go by out the windows, so by the time we got to Goeppingen and looked for Virgilio, I wasn't much help. I couldn't even read the signs on the wall. But sure enough, up walked a towering bald man with a familiar face, and greeted us with huge enveloping hugs. He was surprised to see how big I was, but since I was ten years old the last time he saw me, it makes sense.
Having eaten nothing since far before leaving, mama and I were hungry enough to take up the offer of a Mexican restaurant across the town square. It was decent, but we ran up against the standard cultural differences; one doesn't try to make anything better in a restaurant. It's as though it's a trial for the waitstaff even to take an order, especially an unusual one. Nothing could be worse than informing them about our problems, either. Anyway, my quesadilla was a little Spanish for Mexico, but decent. We arrived at Virgilio's apartment complex with enough time to crash in their guest room (Gaestezimmer Ulm, as it turns out).
I woke on Friday morning feeling like I'd slept in till afternoon, but it was 10:00 when I checked. Virgilio was a Waldorf teacher, and, fittingly enough, he lived in an apartment complex built on Steiner principles with a Steiner church right across the yard from it, with the anthroposophic pastel painting and handcrafted wooden stair rails with pastel purple staining, gently curved hobbitlike architecture and natural, handcrafted decorations. It's a very comfortable and beautiful surrounding, but some of the assumptions behind it are not to my taste. Still, I can enjoy the environment.
We went down the hall to Virgilio's apartment once we'd both showered and such (the shower had no walls, the entire bathroom being tiled; it was kind of cool, but you had to squeegee the floor afterward). Their next-door neighbor, who we found out later is a policewoman and very into the German squaring of owed favors (you have to get her something every time you go to the grocery store) recognized us as the American visitors and opened the door for us in English, calling the inhabitants.
We were introduced to Virgilio's two very tall-for-their-age, skinny and beautiful little girls, who had apparently been told I was coming and were very excited about it. Sophie, his five-year-old, chattered incessantly in German and instantly decided I was one of the coolest people ever with the arbitrary affection of small children; Filia, the three-year-old, was a little more retiring and said less, but she warmed up to me pretty quickly, too. It's a novel experience for unrelated little kids to instantly like me, since I'm not a fan of little kids. But over the course of the weekend I was dragged outside to watch Sophie ride her bike and bother the old folks, into the kids' room to sort and play with little wooden Waldorf animals, people, cars, buildings, and trees, into the basement to see Sophie's various basement-dwelling toys, and generally all over the apartment. It was a balm to my soul after arriving to be addressed constantly in German as though I could understand it, and be able to answer in English. Virgilio speaks to the girls only in English, and their mother only in German, so they understand both equally but can't tell which one they're speaking, and it's only German unless someone's used an English word they can't think of in German. So my mom was the only one who couldn't understand most of what the kids were saying, but there was still lots of English spoken when we got there.
His (massively pregnant, since she was due last week, but very tall and otherwise thin) wife, Kristina, had already made lovely and wonderful lunch-like food when we came over, so we had lovely and authentically German food for the first time since our arrival in Germany. We hung around a bit in the manner of any visit to very old friends, trying to decide what to do and mostly just talking. The apartment building has a quiet period between 1 and 3 in the afternoon, because so many old people live there and take naps (they're the only ones of the original loan-builders who can afford to live in this amazing building), so our host family tends to go in for Mittagsschlafen too.
Except Sophie. I got to watch her outside while they all napped, and a kind Norwegian woman showed up to meet with some of the people in the church and waited near us. She asked me in German if she could wait there, and I asked Sophie and told her I didn't live here, and then she heard me talking to Sophie in English and struck up a conversation in English. The policewoman and her two kids, Laurenz (very toddly small blond boy) and her daughter whose name I never did catch, a stereotypically plump and blonde girl with a runny nose, came out and did laundry and played with Sophie on their own little plastic vehicles.
Eventually it was time to go back in, and everyone was awake enough. I ran into an old lady wit a walker in the hall, and she seemed satisfied with my uncharacteristically timid "Gruessgott," as Virgilio told me it was safe and proper to do in this very Southern place. We got all uncrumpled and then Virgilio took me and mama to Esslingen, the town two train stops away where he works at a Waldorf school.
He showed us around, and it was very familiar in quite a developmental way. He teaches shop, both wood and metal, so he showed us the final projects and what gets made on final tests of his wood-joining class, which were highly impressive for seventh-graders. And then, he showed us his metalworking room.
Hail Mary, Ye Gods, and Life to the Everlasting Cat. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. There were implements of metalworking all over every wall, in neatly organized stacks and rows, and there were tables with more metalworking implements, and six anvils, and there was a forge. It had four firepits, a hood over it for the smoke as is proper, automatic air controlled by levers under the table, fire pokers and hoes and shovels hanging off a special hook, a deep tray off the side with water in it for cooling the metal, buckets of coal, and teachings of metallic lore written in chalk on the hood as if it were a blackboard.
And then, guess what? Virgilio showed me the results of several beginning projects, picked one, and started me on it! He showed me the basics of taking care of a forge fire, how to shove the new coal underneath to let it sweat before it burns so that it will burn clean, how to judge what color the steel must be to do heavy working, detail work, and real bending, how to tell how hot the fire itself was and where the hot spot is to put the metal, which edge of the anvil to use for what purpose, how high to swing a 1000-gram round-square hammer, how to keep up the rhythm of striking the worked metal and the anvil in between so you can see what you're doing but still have momentum, how to keep a rod even by turning it between each strike, how to set a form in a vise and set a point of metal in the form to twist it into a spiral, how to cool only the parts of the piece that need it and leave the rest at working heat, and various other fascinating and arcane lore of blacksmithing.
I worked steadily for five hours, and had a spiral snake candle-holder at the end of it. I will be faster next time. I will build a forge, and find the fierce joy of metalwork in the fire again.
He'd told me to remind him before we left, and I did, so in addition to my sweet little snake, Virgilio gave me a chainmail vest he'd got from Kristina's family, who were butchers. They wore it in the slaughterhouse to keep from cutting themselves. There were also three fronts made of what seemed to be aluminum scale-and-ring mail, and they were cool eough that he wanted one for himself, so we picked one to take home and cut in half so we could each repair the holes in our own side.
It was quite late by the time we'd cleaned up the room and gone back to the apartment, and my feet and arms were beat from standing and swinging a two-pound hammer above my head all day, so we crashed soon after we got back. I listened to my beloved Bat Boy soundtrack the mp3 player having gone around the alphabet again, and fell into a happily exhausted sleep.
Breakfast in the morning was the pancake mix we'd bought on base for Virgilio, and he made the most amazing banana pancakes. There was fancy German apple syrup, too, and unhomogenized milk with the most amazing foam. The morning went by quickly, playing with the girls and trading backrubs with Virgilio, who has knots from twisty issues just as I do. There was naptime once again, though I didn't go in for it, and then it was time to go to the garden house.
It's a curious convention in Germany, the garden house. Maybe it's a Southern thing, another quaint Schwabian custom. I saw huge tracts of them on the train on the way, and assumed they were extremely well-kept slums. The houses are so tiny as to have no amenities whatsoever, and the plots are so thickly vegetated, that their sole purpose seems to be for weekend parties or solitary getaways. We took the hot dogs with us that we'd bought with Virgilio's pancakes as an American luxury, and cooked them with some fresh vegetables and foil trays of special German cheese over a little grill in a tripod in the workshed next to the garden house, since it was intermittently sprinkling.
It was a lovely time. At first there was a venturing out with the girls to see the horses in the barn down the road. Then I got pliers out of the toolbox Virgilio'd brought and took apart the scale mail vest so each of us could have half. By the time the rest of the guests had arrived and been introduced, the food was mostly done. There were a couple of Kristina's friends, one lady whose name I didn't catch but whose cherubic 15-month-old daughter's name was Salome (which mama and the rest of the guests discussed the appropriateness of when she left). Annette and her husband were both very sharply dressed for a little garden house party, and had to leave soon after the food. Marcus and his pregnant wife were the friendliest ones, and the ones more likely to give in and speak English. Marcus helped us with the grill and tripod, and ended up coming back to the apartment with us (I think Kristina brought them in her car anyway when she arrived after Virgilio and the girls and mama and me).
I had an accidental half-nap half-eavesdropping-in-German session when I climbed up into the tiny attic above the one room of the garden house and lay on the four tiny mattresses. Sophie and Filia had shown me up there before, and people were looking for me to go to the store meanwhile, but it's so much easier to feign sleep than to deal with interaction. I learned what the pregnant ladies thought of my name, and worked on my German passively. It's a hard thing to judge, manners with languages. I felt rude even just listening to everyone in German exclude my mom from comprehension of the conversation, but I also felt she was rude in addressing them in English, even though she had no choice. They all understood English to varying degrees, and Virgilio's family all understood English, but the language at the table kept shifting back and forth depending on whom the story interested or who asked a question. It was a taxing exercise.
The evening catches me by surprise in Germany. The latitude's high enough that twilight doesn't come till 9, and it's not really dark till 10. I was always tired waking up and what I thought was too early at night, but there was always something to do to distract from exhaustion. Back from the garden house, Marcus and mama and I helped Virgilio with the English and layout of his proposal for his Africa project, by which he hopes to move his family and become a teacher at a Waldorf school he's visited in Nairobi. It's been consuming his limited free time for several years, and it certainly absorbed mine till I gave up and went to bed. I did copy (there were some endearingly bilingual spelling mistakes) and left the layout to mama.
This morning once more, a relatively early (9:00) awakening felt like sleeping in. Sunday mornings in this apartment building are particularly sacred (ha) to the gods of silence. We tiptoed down the hall to the apartment and had a breakfast of very good leftover Spaetzel and Kaese with the family, before trading backrubs again and trying to decide what to do for the day. We'd talked last night of preparing the projects for Virgilio's school kids that they didn't have time for and should be done before Monday, but it seemed we needn't burn the midnight oil for it. So we'd do it today.
But today was the carnival time. Sophie and Filia had never been to a carnival, and there was one in town today, so Virgilio took us down to the basement and showed us what to do, and took the family to their first carnival. They were back in time for a nap, and by the end of nap time we were allowed to turn on machines, but before that, we did it all by hand.
What the project was, was to make C-scale xylophones out of copper pipes. The calculations for length were all on a paper for us, and the tuner was quite functional and easy to use, but since we couldn't use the sander till after Mittagsschlafe, and mama was cutting pipe, I had to file the ends down to tune, by hand. With an industrial file of the sort I made into my copper-hilted blob dagger. The workbench I was using had two vises, each of wood soft enough told the pipe without squishing it, and with beautiful joining I can appreciate the work it must have taken Virgilio to make. Once again, though, with the standing all day. Eight hours, this time, rather than five.
It is an ancient-proven fact that hard work goes by faster with music, and indeed the filing went much faster after Virgilio got back and I got my mp3 player. I was still on the Bat Boy album, and I let Sophie listen to Show You a Thing Or Two several times, since she hardly has any electronics in her house and has never used headphones as anything but earmuffs before (she has a pair that are not connected to anything). She decided it was pretty cool.
By the time Virgilio came down and finished four more at our tuning direction on the sanding belt, we had three sets done, tuned by hand and taped together. I managed to cut myself five pipes for a pentatonic windchime before it was time to leave for the train.
It was a good and restful weekend, for the amount of hard physical work it involved, and I was sorry to say goodbye to my old first grade teacher and his beautiful German wife and kids, for who knows how lonmg before we see them again. But it was a much happier, if similarly introspective, train ride back. The first connection I had to crane my neck a little in order to ignore the disgusting PDAs of the teenaged couple in the seats across the aisle from us, but we switched at the next station and got some mild-mannered German kids instead. And I just wore my headphones on constant repeat of Comfort and Joy for the three hours, not worrying about what the Germans thought when I spoke to my mom in obviously American English. Being babbled at in German by a five-year-old for a weekend is a great linguistic confidence-booster.
Tony was driving when Gail came to pick us up from the station, and I'm glad he's back (he went to Florida for some reason on Wednesday). He appreciated properly all the stuff we brought back from Goeppingen, the chainmail, scale mail, the copper chimes, the snake candle holder. He even messed with the snake candle holder on the stove as he was cooking us steaks before bed, heating it to put a taper candle on the point as it should be. So now it sits in the living room with a green candle. It works! And I'm tired. My feet feel as though they've been glued on. I hope we don't walk anywhere tomorrow.
We didn't go to Nancy on Thursday afternoon, after all. We went to visit Virgilio for the weekend. There was much hurrying and worrying about missing the train we knew about, and then when we got to the ticket counter to actually buy it, it was a trial of my self-control not to break down. I asked, in German, for the next cheap train to Goeppingen for two people, there and back, and floundered in my own incompetent vocabulary. He took pity on me and asked the rest of his questions in English, but I couldn't help feeling it was a reflection on my major flaw; I'm so good at BSing that I do it even in classes that I intend to get something out of. My German would be much better if I'd worked harder, but I'm smart enough to just get by, and I know it, so I'm just getting by in life and it scares me that that may be all I ever do. In any case, it was a pretty traumatic buying of train tickets, but we mande the train on time and got a decent seat next to several men who look just like Trevor.
The train ride from Kaiserslautern to Goeppingen is three hours with four changes, and I was already a bit pensive. I didn't read at all, but watched the people and the scenery and listened to the last few letters of the alphabet left on my mp3 player: Wings, the Yardbirds, Yes, and the multitude of Zep that's stored under Z instead of L.
My eyes got tired from watching everything go by out the windows, so by the time we got to Goeppingen and looked for Virgilio, I wasn't much help. I couldn't even read the signs on the wall. But sure enough, up walked a towering bald man with a familiar face, and greeted us with huge enveloping hugs. He was surprised to see how big I was, but since I was ten years old the last time he saw me, it makes sense.
Having eaten nothing since far before leaving, mama and I were hungry enough to take up the offer of a Mexican restaurant across the town square. It was decent, but we ran up against the standard cultural differences; one doesn't try to make anything better in a restaurant. It's as though it's a trial for the waitstaff even to take an order, especially an unusual one. Nothing could be worse than informing them about our problems, either. Anyway, my quesadilla was a little Spanish for Mexico, but decent. We arrived at Virgilio's apartment complex with enough time to crash in their guest room (Gaestezimmer Ulm, as it turns out).
I woke on Friday morning feeling like I'd slept in till afternoon, but it was 10:00 when I checked. Virgilio was a Waldorf teacher, and, fittingly enough, he lived in an apartment complex built on Steiner principles with a Steiner church right across the yard from it, with the anthroposophic pastel painting and handcrafted wooden stair rails with pastel purple staining, gently curved hobbitlike architecture and natural, handcrafted decorations. It's a very comfortable and beautiful surrounding, but some of the assumptions behind it are not to my taste. Still, I can enjoy the environment.
We went down the hall to Virgilio's apartment once we'd both showered and such (the shower had no walls, the entire bathroom being tiled; it was kind of cool, but you had to squeegee the floor afterward). Their next-door neighbor, who we found out later is a policewoman and very into the German squaring of owed favors (you have to get her something every time you go to the grocery store) recognized us as the American visitors and opened the door for us in English, calling the inhabitants.
We were introduced to Virgilio's two very tall-for-their-age, skinny and beautiful little girls, who had apparently been told I was coming and were very excited about it. Sophie, his five-year-old, chattered incessantly in German and instantly decided I was one of the coolest people ever with the arbitrary affection of small children; Filia, the three-year-old, was a little more retiring and said less, but she warmed up to me pretty quickly, too. It's a novel experience for unrelated little kids to instantly like me, since I'm not a fan of little kids. But over the course of the weekend I was dragged outside to watch Sophie ride her bike and bother the old folks, into the kids' room to sort and play with little wooden Waldorf animals, people, cars, buildings, and trees, into the basement to see Sophie's various basement-dwelling toys, and generally all over the apartment. It was a balm to my soul after arriving to be addressed constantly in German as though I could understand it, and be able to answer in English. Virgilio speaks to the girls only in English, and their mother only in German, so they understand both equally but can't tell which one they're speaking, and it's only German unless someone's used an English word they can't think of in German. So my mom was the only one who couldn't understand most of what the kids were saying, but there was still lots of English spoken when we got there.
His (massively pregnant, since she was due last week, but very tall and otherwise thin) wife, Kristina, had already made lovely and wonderful lunch-like food when we came over, so we had lovely and authentically German food for the first time since our arrival in Germany. We hung around a bit in the manner of any visit to very old friends, trying to decide what to do and mostly just talking. The apartment building has a quiet period between 1 and 3 in the afternoon, because so many old people live there and take naps (they're the only ones of the original loan-builders who can afford to live in this amazing building), so our host family tends to go in for Mittagsschlafen too.
Except Sophie. I got to watch her outside while they all napped, and a kind Norwegian woman showed up to meet with some of the people in the church and waited near us. She asked me in German if she could wait there, and I asked Sophie and told her I didn't live here, and then she heard me talking to Sophie in English and struck up a conversation in English. The policewoman and her two kids, Laurenz (very toddly small blond boy) and her daughter whose name I never did catch, a stereotypically plump and blonde girl with a runny nose, came out and did laundry and played with Sophie on their own little plastic vehicles.
Eventually it was time to go back in, and everyone was awake enough. I ran into an old lady wit a walker in the hall, and she seemed satisfied with my uncharacteristically timid "Gruessgott," as Virgilio told me it was safe and proper to do in this very Southern place. We got all uncrumpled and then Virgilio took me and mama to Esslingen, the town two train stops away where he works at a Waldorf school.
He showed us around, and it was very familiar in quite a developmental way. He teaches shop, both wood and metal, so he showed us the final projects and what gets made on final tests of his wood-joining class, which were highly impressive for seventh-graders. And then, he showed us his metalworking room.
Hail Mary, Ye Gods, and Life to the Everlasting Cat. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. There were implements of metalworking all over every wall, in neatly organized stacks and rows, and there were tables with more metalworking implements, and six anvils, and there was a forge. It had four firepits, a hood over it for the smoke as is proper, automatic air controlled by levers under the table, fire pokers and hoes and shovels hanging off a special hook, a deep tray off the side with water in it for cooling the metal, buckets of coal, and teachings of metallic lore written in chalk on the hood as if it were a blackboard.
And then, guess what? Virgilio showed me the results of several beginning projects, picked one, and started me on it! He showed me the basics of taking care of a forge fire, how to shove the new coal underneath to let it sweat before it burns so that it will burn clean, how to judge what color the steel must be to do heavy working, detail work, and real bending, how to tell how hot the fire itself was and where the hot spot is to put the metal, which edge of the anvil to use for what purpose, how high to swing a 1000-gram round-square hammer, how to keep up the rhythm of striking the worked metal and the anvil in between so you can see what you're doing but still have momentum, how to keep a rod even by turning it between each strike, how to set a form in a vise and set a point of metal in the form to twist it into a spiral, how to cool only the parts of the piece that need it and leave the rest at working heat, and various other fascinating and arcane lore of blacksmithing.
I worked steadily for five hours, and had a spiral snake candle-holder at the end of it. I will be faster next time. I will build a forge, and find the fierce joy of metalwork in the fire again.
He'd told me to remind him before we left, and I did, so in addition to my sweet little snake, Virgilio gave me a chainmail vest he'd got from Kristina's family, who were butchers. They wore it in the slaughterhouse to keep from cutting themselves. There were also three fronts made of what seemed to be aluminum scale-and-ring mail, and they were cool eough that he wanted one for himself, so we picked one to take home and cut in half so we could each repair the holes in our own side.
It was quite late by the time we'd cleaned up the room and gone back to the apartment, and my feet and arms were beat from standing and swinging a two-pound hammer above my head all day, so we crashed soon after we got back. I listened to my beloved Bat Boy soundtrack the mp3 player having gone around the alphabet again, and fell into a happily exhausted sleep.
Breakfast in the morning was the pancake mix we'd bought on base for Virgilio, and he made the most amazing banana pancakes. There was fancy German apple syrup, too, and unhomogenized milk with the most amazing foam. The morning went by quickly, playing with the girls and trading backrubs with Virgilio, who has knots from twisty issues just as I do. There was naptime once again, though I didn't go in for it, and then it was time to go to the garden house.
It's a curious convention in Germany, the garden house. Maybe it's a Southern thing, another quaint Schwabian custom. I saw huge tracts of them on the train on the way, and assumed they were extremely well-kept slums. The houses are so tiny as to have no amenities whatsoever, and the plots are so thickly vegetated, that their sole purpose seems to be for weekend parties or solitary getaways. We took the hot dogs with us that we'd bought with Virgilio's pancakes as an American luxury, and cooked them with some fresh vegetables and foil trays of special German cheese over a little grill in a tripod in the workshed next to the garden house, since it was intermittently sprinkling.
It was a lovely time. At first there was a venturing out with the girls to see the horses in the barn down the road. Then I got pliers out of the toolbox Virgilio'd brought and took apart the scale mail vest so each of us could have half. By the time the rest of the guests had arrived and been introduced, the food was mostly done. There were a couple of Kristina's friends, one lady whose name I didn't catch but whose cherubic 15-month-old daughter's name was Salome (which mama and the rest of the guests discussed the appropriateness of when she left). Annette and her husband were both very sharply dressed for a little garden house party, and had to leave soon after the food. Marcus and his pregnant wife were the friendliest ones, and the ones more likely to give in and speak English. Marcus helped us with the grill and tripod, and ended up coming back to the apartment with us (I think Kristina brought them in her car anyway when she arrived after Virgilio and the girls and mama and me).
I had an accidental half-nap half-eavesdropping-in-German session when I climbed up into the tiny attic above the one room of the garden house and lay on the four tiny mattresses. Sophie and Filia had shown me up there before, and people were looking for me to go to the store meanwhile, but it's so much easier to feign sleep than to deal with interaction. I learned what the pregnant ladies thought of my name, and worked on my German passively. It's a hard thing to judge, manners with languages. I felt rude even just listening to everyone in German exclude my mom from comprehension of the conversation, but I also felt she was rude in addressing them in English, even though she had no choice. They all understood English to varying degrees, and Virgilio's family all understood English, but the language at the table kept shifting back and forth depending on whom the story interested or who asked a question. It was a taxing exercise.
The evening catches me by surprise in Germany. The latitude's high enough that twilight doesn't come till 9, and it's not really dark till 10. I was always tired waking up and what I thought was too early at night, but there was always something to do to distract from exhaustion. Back from the garden house, Marcus and mama and I helped Virgilio with the English and layout of his proposal for his Africa project, by which he hopes to move his family and become a teacher at a Waldorf school he's visited in Nairobi. It's been consuming his limited free time for several years, and it certainly absorbed mine till I gave up and went to bed. I did copy (there were some endearingly bilingual spelling mistakes) and left the layout to mama.
This morning once more, a relatively early (9:00) awakening felt like sleeping in. Sunday mornings in this apartment building are particularly sacred (ha) to the gods of silence. We tiptoed down the hall to the apartment and had a breakfast of very good leftover Spaetzel and Kaese with the family, before trading backrubs again and trying to decide what to do for the day. We'd talked last night of preparing the projects for Virgilio's school kids that they didn't have time for and should be done before Monday, but it seemed we needn't burn the midnight oil for it. So we'd do it today.
But today was the carnival time. Sophie and Filia had never been to a carnival, and there was one in town today, so Virgilio took us down to the basement and showed us what to do, and took the family to their first carnival. They were back in time for a nap, and by the end of nap time we were allowed to turn on machines, but before that, we did it all by hand.
What the project was, was to make C-scale xylophones out of copper pipes. The calculations for length were all on a paper for us, and the tuner was quite functional and easy to use, but since we couldn't use the sander till after Mittagsschlafe, and mama was cutting pipe, I had to file the ends down to tune, by hand. With an industrial file of the sort I made into my copper-hilted blob dagger. The workbench I was using had two vises, each of wood soft enough told the pipe without squishing it, and with beautiful joining I can appreciate the work it must have taken Virgilio to make. Once again, though, with the standing all day. Eight hours, this time, rather than five.
It is an ancient-proven fact that hard work goes by faster with music, and indeed the filing went much faster after Virgilio got back and I got my mp3 player. I was still on the Bat Boy album, and I let Sophie listen to Show You a Thing Or Two several times, since she hardly has any electronics in her house and has never used headphones as anything but earmuffs before (she has a pair that are not connected to anything). She decided it was pretty cool.
By the time Virgilio came down and finished four more at our tuning direction on the sanding belt, we had three sets done, tuned by hand and taped together. I managed to cut myself five pipes for a pentatonic windchime before it was time to leave for the train.
It was a good and restful weekend, for the amount of hard physical work it involved, and I was sorry to say goodbye to my old first grade teacher and his beautiful German wife and kids, for who knows how lonmg before we see them again. But it was a much happier, if similarly introspective, train ride back. The first connection I had to crane my neck a little in order to ignore the disgusting PDAs of the teenaged couple in the seats across the aisle from us, but we switched at the next station and got some mild-mannered German kids instead. And I just wore my headphones on constant repeat of Comfort and Joy for the three hours, not worrying about what the Germans thought when I spoke to my mom in obviously American English. Being babbled at in German by a five-year-old for a weekend is a great linguistic confidence-booster.
Tony was driving when Gail came to pick us up from the station, and I'm glad he's back (he went to Florida for some reason on Wednesday). He appreciated properly all the stuff we brought back from Goeppingen, the chainmail, scale mail, the copper chimes, the snake candle holder. He even messed with the snake candle holder on the stove as he was cooking us steaks before bed, heating it to put a taper candle on the point as it should be. So now it sits in the living room with a green candle. It works! And I'm tired. My feet feel as though they've been glued on. I hope we don't walk anywhere tomorrow.