Drunken ramblings where one thought leads to another a bit faster than I can type at 80 wpm...
I really shouldn't be blogging right now. I'm extremely sleep deprived and the only reason I'm still awake is because I have been drinking beer. Unlike many people, I do not get sleepy when I drink beer unless I only drink a few. Each beer past number three gets me more and more "wired" and if I get past a twelve pack then I'll be up all night. Right now I'm at number nine so it may be a long night unless I force myself into bed at some point. My ability to consume beer in large quantities made me somewhat legendary in my youth, at least in the crowd that I hung around with. Only one person ever outdrank me during a beer for beer match up (and there were many of these.) I conceded my title after my competitor and I had consumed a bit over a case each and he was willing to fix the hot dogs for everyone's dinner. I had decided that being around a big pot of boiling water on a stove was a bad idea after drinking a case of beer in the course of an afternoon. He decided to go for it so I declared him the winner for his bravery (foolishness) and we stopped keeping track of who drank how much after that. Who knows, I might have actually won that match when all was said and done, but I didn't mind relinquishing my title. The "I can drink more than you" thing was more important to the guys than it ever was to me because I really didn't give a shit about it. Now mind you, it's only BEER that I can tolerate in such massive quantities. Give me tequila or whiskey and I'll pass out in a reasonable amount of time like a normal person. Maybe it's my German genes though there might be a smidgen of French in the mix.

There's a rumor in my family that some great-great-great grandmother on my father's side might have really been French instead of German which in that generation would have been quite the family scandal. Hell, even my parent's generation were not supposed to marry "Amerikaners". Never mind they had all been born in America and therefore were technically "Amerikaners". Many of my aunts and uncles married outside the German community, but my folks didn't and I actually spoke German (as spoken by Texan immigrants) as a child. When I was in kindergarten, my teacher told me I should not speak German anymore because I wouldn't learn English well. Unfortunately I listened to that stupid woman and I can no longer speak German of any sort even though I did take one semester in college. I made an A, though I couldn't practice with my parents because the pronunciation was far too different from what they spoke, and I dreamed in German for about a year after that. However, that knowledge is long gone now. Learning German again is one of those "do it before I die" goals for me because I really want to go to Germany and visit where my ancestors are from in Wiesbaden and Alsace-Lorraine which I think is part of France now.

The fact that I don't know what country that region now belongs to is one of the bad things about being an American. I really have very little knowledge of the rest of the world. The news around here never devotes more than 2 seconds to world events unless our government happens to be mucking about in some other country and then you don't ever really learn anything about the country or it's culture. I'm pretty sure all the countries in Africa have changed since I had geography in high school. I have to wonder what was the point of learning all those country locations and names without learning anything else about them? I once learned a lot about India during a voluntary summer school program back in elementary school, but I can't say I was ever taught anything about any other country during normal schooling.

Now I do happen to know a bit about Mexico just by virtue of living in Texas plus there was a wonderful childhood camping trip with my extended family where we stayed by some lake in the interior for a month. No one around us spoke a word of English, my family was busy jabbering to each other in German that I could no longer understand and by the time it was all said and done, I think I ended up knowing more Spanish than German simply because the only people my age were the Spanish speakers.

I also know a bit about Canada because I used to go to a conference there every year and seriously considered immigrating at one point except that I didn't have enough "points" to qualify. I also don't like cold and snow much, and all those tower housing complexes in Toronto freak me out. But Sleeman's Brown Ale is a good beer, Lindsay is a nice little town and the countryside around there reminds me of "home" which, BTW, is not Austin even though I was born in Austin and have lived here all my life. No, "home" to me is the Texas Hill Country around Fredericksburg where my parents grew up and where I spent most of my childhood summers with relatives. I was a city girl during the winter and a country girl during the summer and if I were given a choice between the two today then I'd choose the country any day of the week. There doesn't ever seem to be a whole lot of jobs in the country, but these days there isn't a whole lot of jobs in the city either.

Rob and I have talked a lot about moving to various places in the USA as well as various countries, but I don't know if I could ever actually move away from Central Texas. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and England sound intriguing, but we don't qualify for immigration and even if we did, it would cost us a fortune to move there. Rob's got relatives in England (his mum was English), but I doubt they'd sponsor us. His dad's parents were from Nova Scotia, but we've got no ties there that we know of. I figure I must have long lost relatives in Germany since I once got a letter from Germany offering to repatriate me (back before the Berlin wall fell), but damned if I know how the German government found me in the first place. That's one of the few "what if" events from my past that I still wonder about. But if I had run off to Germany, I would have never met and later married Rob and would have missed some of the best times of my life so those "what if" moments never last very long.

Well, I think I've rambled enough here and I hope I don't wake up in the morning and regret any of this posting.