the random story of how micky ate dicky.

yesterday was horrible. i don’t even know why but everything brought tears to my eyes and in the end i just ended properly crying for no good reason. i decided that i shouldn’t be amongst people so in the question of wine or yoga, wine with pasta and dvds won. though it may not have been the healthiest choice, it seemed to be what i needed as today i woke up with lots of energy and the drive to get things done.

after editing some stories for a travel blog that i would love to contribute for, i went through my pictures to select some to go with the stories. i stumbled upon some old ones that i haven’t shared here, so i thought i’d make a little picture post.

i give you random pictures that have nothing in common but make me happy:

 my wonderful friend marie and i at noordhoek beach. that’s what happens when the photographer tells you to make a scary face and jump. marie just had the most beautiful baby girl and named her anni, which of course i am totally claiming credit for. i cannot wait to meet her.

i was a hipster taking shoe pictures long before instagram. i may start a series. i have another one where my shoe is dangling over a volcano.

this was taken on my first real solo trip to the seychelles. since i like travelling on my own i have the unfortunate tendencies to take selfies, also pre iphone and screen turning options. here i luckily opted to ask someone. i have since realized it is actually nice to have a decent picture of myself in a place that i liked, touristy or not. have i mentioned i used to have baby turtles? micky and dicky were they names and within a week of getting them i already regretted it and wasn’t sad when micky eventually ate dicky and we returned him/her to the pet store (we returned micky only as they didn’t want to take half eaten turtle remains). the only surprise was that micky ate dicky as he/she was half the size of dicky (dick = fat in german). however the little one in the picture i liked lots.

my dad and i on christmas two years ago. we are both total suckers for christmas as you can see. and though he is not getting any younger - his words not mine - he has just booked a flight to come down again. i am beyond excited for family christmas and a trip to zanzibar with him!

drop your hip, annika! but besides this technicality i love this picture. yoga in the desert, pucci scarf in the hair, prada on the nose.

there is a guy who has a picture taken of him doing a split jump in front of famous buildings and sites all over the world. i think i want to do that too from now on, only with standing bow pose as i am much more a standing bow poser than a split jumper in general. first up is the reclining buddha and then angkor wat . till then find me at the yoga studio where i practise dropping my hip…

A walk in the park.

Literally, that was the black out for me last week. Taking things as they come these days, I was actually quite excited to be unable to work or be reached and went to Company Gardens. I don’t go there ever, which I realize is quite sad, because you could call it essentially my extended balcony. Like Bua, the Irish Bar on St. Marks Place, was our extended living room when we lived in the East Village. Proximity so close, it’s technically part of your flat.
So I went and I thought it a perfect idea to finally visit the library – yes, yes, I am a nerd. I liked the thought of going back to the roots i.e. books when technology failed. I quite underestimated how far this technology had crept into all part of our lives: The library was closed – due to no light and no security scans possible. What a bummer, but the forced walk in the park made up for it and I learned loads too:

White squirrels are exciting and novel in real, but really scary looking in pictures.
I don’t mind tourists so much when pretending to be one of them.
As much as I love taking self-portraits when walking around with my big shades, they just do not work. Just believe me, don’t expect proof.
You sometimes don’t notice a sprinkler till it is too late.
Marie is still right – macro shots rock!

 

Fieldtrip.

Luckily I have a job that not only allows but encourages me to leave the office. It’s called location scouting and brought me to Green Point today. I was happy to get myself out of the house and was hoping for an improvement of my mood by improving the scenery. It worked like a charm as I got to see the Green Point Park, which I had never seen before and it is stunning and a great mood improver especially with weather like this. Especially the little signs everywhere made me laugh. Perfect inspiration for parents with naughty children.

 



Macro shot for Marie.

So now I feel very inspired to write about coconuts, why women like Julia and me are still single even though Jennifer Aniston is not, and how I want to have a diamond cut named after me. Will tackle all of it tomorrow and just use this space to thank my wonderful godchild Eliza whom I just chatted with. She had to run and realized that I hadn’t told her much news yet and guess what she said when I said there was nothing exciting happening in my life right now. “I always like hearing unexciting things from you.” You made my day, girl!

We live here.

My recent work project which included coming up with a cool pop-up card for our next mailing introduced some much needed entertainment to my daily routine. It also reminded me last time I made a pop-up card for a friend of mine. Shamefully I must admit that the card was never sent as it became part of a too-big-to-finish project, which I frequently indulge in. It was a card showing the layout of our first apartment in New York which Gladys, Marie and I shared.

The grand tour:


Bottom left
The bathroom. If you need the fax machine explained, please contact Marie directly as it is all her fault and I won’t say no more.


Top left
Marie’s room. The clothes are a bit misleading as we all worked in fashion, but her fashion job rocked the most that’s why her room gets represented by clothes.
It was at Roy’s Hosiery and each Friday was called ‘Sock Friday’ as she would bring left over sample socks for us. I don’t think I have bought a single pair of socks since Marie left college. When she came to visit Cape Town she lived up to the true spirit of Sock Friday and brought me about 30 pairs and it wasn’t even Friday. I love visitors!


Top Middle
Gladys’ room. Yes it did have a pop-up wall for real. That’s how you convert a 2 bedroom to a 3 bedroom in New York and charge 50% more rent. It also had the only TV and Thursday was Friends night. Marie and Gladys would sit on her twin bed, I was crouched in the corner of the window sill and we would watch the new episodes of Friends together. Who needs a La-Z-Boy or even a living room?


Top Right
My room. I had an original red iMac and a liking for Internet dating. Also did I become a professional on how-to-make-the-most-of-a-4m2-room in this room.


Middle Bottom
Kitchen/Living Room/Dining Room/Foyer/Gladys’ walk-in closet. Equally inhabited by Coronas, Enchiladas or other Mexican treats and mice.
The mice became a bit of a problem. In an attempt to be PETA friendly I not only decided to go Vegan for a week (I stopped after trying to eat soy parmesan cheese), but also asked them for a mice friendly way to dispose of mice. The answer is simple: One buys a little cage (preferably with handle), puts bait inside (preferably of the soy kind) and waits for the mouse to run inside (hoping the mouse unlike you will like soy cheese). The cage should be one where the mouse runs in, but can’t run out yet remains unharmed. Then you have a cage with a mouse and you can take the mouse to Central Park and release it. Someone explained that to me while keeping a straight face. To my question why I would do such a thing and surely the mouse would manage to run the 4 blocks back to my street and up the stairs into the apartment and how this would defy the whole purpose, I just got blank stares.
I am not proud to admit that we then decided on the least humane way: glue traps. Bad idea for both parties involved. For the mice for obvious reasons and for us as we underestimated how much a mouse can wiggle when glued to a trap. She can wiggle herself from her discreet trap hiding spot under the stove into the middle of the kitchen with the trap. By doing this it will cause the first person getting up in the morning to shriek loudly and the other two to wake up and know immediately that we caught one.
I will spare you the details of how we got rid of any mouse on trap, but it usually involved our trash shoot and the Yellow Pages.


Far Right
The zebra van which you already know.


Top Far Right
The address we would give the cabbies and then shout in unison: “We live here.”
Go figure, Mr. Cab Driver.

Confessions of a Pastaholic IV*

Chapter 3: Pasta in the making. - * For Oliver, who really believes he is a bigger pastaholic than me. Yah, right.

Sorry, only back on the pasta now. I have been having a sneaky affair with some pizzas...

Thanks to my Dad and his ravioli with morels, I realized early that home-made pasta is the perfect food for special occasions and is great to impress potential boyfriends (that I figured out by myself though). It is also quite easy; that is, if you have the proper tools...

I remember one pasta making event when I lived in Hamburg. I had the tiniest furnished flat ever with a fancy pull out couch, a less fancy fold out table and no kitchen space whatsoever. I had invited a guy from my office for dinner and it had to be good – I had a major crush on him. In hindsight he should have taken me out for dinner first and proven worthy of my homemade pasta, which of course it turned out shortly after that he wasn’t. But I was 20, crazy about him and already knew that the love to a man’s heart goes through his stomach. Therefore fresh pasta was on the menu. I went to the store spending my entire internship money on fresh zucchini, pine nuts whose price tag still brings tears to my eyes thinking about it now, and a bottle of white wine I had decided on after discussing options on my cell for ten minutes with my brother.

I wish I had a picture of what was to follow – imagine a 20-year old version of me, balancing on the side of the fancy pull out couch (folded together), rolling dough frantically with the bottle of wine (to be drunk at a later stage) on half of the fold out table (as there was no space to fold it out all the way). Fifteen minutes later I was sweating. Believe me pasta dough can be a tricky little bugger to roll especially in above described scenario.

Was it worth it? The pasta was, the boy wasn’t. Happy there is no picture of that. I learned my lesson and over the years I chose more carefully who to make pasta for. Only the crème de la crème of my friends got so lucky. For them I would roll up my sleeve and work up a sweat, using many different wine bottles, sitting on many different more or less comfortable seating arrangements.

The wine bottles went back to their original purpose when one year my NY friends gave me my first (!) pasta maker. You can see what a happy day it was:

For Marie as well:

I titled this picture “Marie Air Pasta”. I think she is singing in anticipation of the treats to follow.

This beloved machine actually made it back with me to Germany, but when I moved to Cape Town with only 1.5 suitcases it wouldn’t fit. Fancy that, because it seems my Cape Town friends appreciate my pasta just as much and gave me my second (!) pasta maker for my birthday last year.

If you are hungry now and feel the need to cook and eat yourself into home-made pasta food coma, this is how it’s done:

http://domesticgoddesses-sa.blogspot.com/2011/02/is-life-to-short-to-make-home-made.html

Pasta history was made that day.

Priceless.

When I was in college I was slightly obsessed with the concept of the Mastercard “Priceless” commercials. I think it started when I had to write a paper, comparing advertising and marketing campaigns of leading credit card companies. Afterwards I simply had to come up with a few priceless stories myself. I wrote my favourite after we moved out of the dorms into our first NY apartment.

Marie had organized a man with a van to help us move. Waiting in front of the dorm we saw a very ancient truck in zebra print turning into our street. The conversation after we saw it went kind of like this - Me:  Haha, look that is our van! Haha. - Marie: Haha. Ja, right. - Van driver, stopping and getting out in front of us: So, who is Marie? - Me: Oh, no. - Marie (with a very small voice): Me.

We overcame our initial embarrassment of being fetched by such an uncool van in front of the entire school quite quickly though. Zebra man turned out to be great! We even had him fetch us from IKEA. Sitting in the loading area wecould spot his distinguished stripes from miles away on the highway - hurray, our van was here!

After the move was completed and all the furniture built I came up with the following:

Zebra van rental for the move: $300

IKEA glass table for the new kitchen: $160

Take-out dinner for three: $65

Not having to sneak the empty Corona bottles out the next morning*: Priceless

*We lived in a dorm with a strict no alcohol, no drugs rule. For some reason we battled more with secretly getting the empty bottles out than the full ones in.