if anyone really has a clue what they're doing, or if we're all just pretenders.

This really isn't as cryptic as it might seem. I just wanted to post something.

I'm about to go to sleep for the fourth time in Hamburg, I'm posting sprawled on the wooden floor in my spacious room in the Bahrenfeld section of Hamburg, not far from the eponymous S-Bahn station.

I arrived without any luggage. British Airways had cancelled my connecting flight from London-Heathrow to Hamburg, so I'm charitably assuming that it's due to the fact that they rebooked me onto a Lufthansa flight that was leaving at the same time as my original itinerary, just a different terminal. Not due to gross incompetence in handling bags, which seems equally possible. I also got into Hamburg a few hours late because it was foggy in London. Um... aren't you guys used to that yet?

I have two roommates in the apartment, Hendric works with me at Jimdo and Daniel's got some six degrees going on with the company as well. They're both moving out at the end of the month and then I get to live with the two trainees, Martin & Sebastian.

I don't have any other furniture than the bed you see in the pictures above, but some is arriving from various sources this weekend, supposedly. There's no light in the kitchen, which makes late night snack runs difficult (not a bad thing, necessarily. Just saying). I think we may also have one small plate, one large plate, and one large pot. So far, combined with the lack of luggage, it's kind of been like camping inside an apartment.

Thankfully, one bag came on Monday (yesterday) and one came on Tuesday (today), so I've now got all my clothes, toiletries, and everything else I thought was necessary when packing last week. Matze had lent me some t-shirts and contact solution, so that helped me get through the weekend.

Work's been quite exciting, challenging, and a bit overwhelming all at once. The German aspect of it is sort of limping along. I suppose I'm not particularly articulate in English either, but I've always been acutely conscious of my deficiences in German. There's definitely that start-up atmosphere, with more projects cooking than I can hope to find out about, much less understand and keep track of, people laughing and having fun, coming early, working late, etc. I really want to jump in head first, but I keep forgetting how there's so much to just absorb in the first few weeks and months at a new place. I don't even know everyone's name yet!

I'm hoping I'll be able to work in some weekend trips over the next several weeks, over to Bremen to see folks like Malte, Thetje, Nadine, and Solveig (sorry if I forgot anyone...), down to Munich to see Philipp, Maria, and Gundula. It'd also be nice to visit Berlin for more than an afternoon... Sophia's there and maybe a few others I could visit.

Then again, it almost seems silly to be planning trips when I haven't even managed to walk around the neighborhood I'm living in!

I'll close with something weird and random I've had in my status message tonight:

My Golden Globes acceptance speech: I'd like to thank Hendric for his leftovers, Matze & Fridel for their one-sided wrestling match, Steffi for teaching me wiki-editing, Amélie for answering my stupid questions, and Amélie's dog (Virgule) for all the times I almost ran over her in my chair

I baked pumpkin bread today at around 11pm after Tom left to catch his train. I've had a box of Trader Joe's pumpkin bread mix (just add oil, water, and eggs) sitting around for a few weeks now. Instead of just using a pan, I used a bundt cake pan Cara picked up a few weeks ago. Since the recipe calls for a regular bread form, I had to watch it like a hawk to make sure nothing was over- or under-cooked (it took about 30 minutes instead of the 55-60 in the instructions).

I'm thinking about making a glaze, I have powdered sugar but no milk. Maybe if I melted some vanilla ice cream and slowly mixed extra sugar into that?

All the pumpkin bread photos in a slideshow

Last night we (my family) went to a potluck in Down River. It was old family friends back from when I attended CCC (a Saturday Chinese school) half-heartedly, maybe even just quarter-heartedly, during elementary, middle, and the beginning of high school.

It was nice to catch up with Alan, whose parents were hosting, and to see Sandy, whom I'm sure I haven't seen in at least 5 years. It's a little funny but also good to spend time with people who sort of grew up in the same context, even if we aren't really good friends and don't stay in close contact anymore. Alan's getting his MBA at Kellogg at Northwestern and Sandy's working in healthcare IT consulting in Kansas City (apparently some people call it "KC").

It makes me think about the very specific influences and experiences that result from growing up in the far-flung suburban Detroit Chinese-American (well, actually almost exclusively Taiwanese-American in the 90s) community. To give you an idea something I had no idea was going on when I was a kid, there was another Chinese school that met at the same day and time on the same community college campus (Schoolcraft). I never really understood why this was, it seemed a little silly at the time, but it was just the way things were. Now, if I've assembled the overheard bits and pieces correctly, the other school mostly had parents with different political inclinations. Not American politics, of course. Taiwanese political differences. These two schools have since merged, but only in the last 5 years, I think.

Just some other random memories -- there were annual speech contests, which I always lost, with an honorary "4th place". Everyone beyond 1st, 2nd, and 3rd got 4th place.

There was a fan dance / marital arts class... there would often be older folks in the hallways just doing tai chi. There were a few different annual banquets, one in the fall, one for chinese new year, not sure what else anymore.

There was always homework to do, characters to write, passages to memorize. I was not a very earnest student, so it generally got left until Saturday morning... not the best time to learn 20 new characters or an adapted story/fable from Chinese literature by heart.

I sometimes forget that this environment growing up was more unusual than normal... I mean, I did go to a 98% white high school in the middle-class suburbs. I took AP classes, worried about SAT (and ACT, this being the Midwest) scores, did many (in retrospect) ridiculous extracurricular activities. But on the other hand, it's interesting to think about how the nexus of the Big Three in the Detroit-area resulted in so many Taiwanese engineers and their families to this area. I don't know exactly how many Chinese schools there were in the area, but including Ann Arbor at least 2 or 3 more...

Certainly it was not the kind of subculture that would have produced anything like this

(12:09:30 AM) Obama Half Caste: Sorry to creep you out but I licked your vibrator clean I'm such a good boy I shit out so much poop Dipped in cum sauce