TQE | That Queer Expatriate

This morning I’m flying across the pond, so I’m going to leave you with these photos of the steps going up from the U6 at Stadtmitte.

It’s been awhile since I realized what the steps were advertising, and then it took me a long time to remember to take a photo when I had my camera with me. It all aligned this week and I took snaps.

There's a flower on the steps!

Yes, the advertising on the steps are for a semen bank.

I’ve been meaning to stop by and make a withdrawal.

Or is that a deposit?

Reading and drinking, while waiting.

I officially leave for vacation tomorrow morning – and so today, I got to work extra early, got an incredible amount done (seriously) and then left before 2. From work I went to the gym where I lifted weights, did cardio, and briefly steamed myself before heading home.

It’s sort of become a tradition that the night before I leave town, I got out to dinner – part of it is because I don’t want to leave dishes drying while I’m out of town, part of it is because I’ve eaten the fridge down and there’s nothing left to eat.

Normally I got to an Indian restaurant a few blocks from where I live, Yogi Haus – but two out of my last five trips have had distinct service failures – both times resulting in me leaving no tip, and after the most recent visit, I left with a great deal of ill-will toward the restaurant – which is a shame because they have an item on their menu that I genuinely adore.

This time I went to a different place: Lenzig – it too is a few blocks from where I live – and this time I ate the Schöneburger for dinner – it’s actually a play on the name of the neighborhood, Schöneberg. The prefix “Schöne” means “beautiful”, and so we have a beautiful hill for the neighborhood, and a beautiful burger at the restaurant.

After dinner, I returned home where I immediately did a flurry of small and large things: tossed my clothes in the washing machine, zipped up my suitcase, and made sure my carry-on had everything important in it.

Only then did I sit down to blog.

I leave on vacation later this week – and so tonight was the designated “packing night” and I have to say that I’m simultaneously happy and unhappy with the results of my effort.

Honestly my serious photography hobby has thrown a wrench into my plans and is, unfortunately, causing me to take my big suitcase instead of my small suitcase – and the principal wrench is actually my combination of destinations and plans.

The backpack behind the suitcase is my marvelous all-in-one camera and computer bag – not only can it carry my camera, lenses, and tripod head, it can carry my laptop computer and is perfect for carrying on – which is what I intend to do with it because I’m not going to check any of the aforementioned items.

However, on this trip I am going places where that bag will be too big to be carried in – so I need another bag to carry the camera on special days – and that’s now inside my big suitcase (currently stuffed with socks and underwear). I tried putting it in my regular small suitcase but realized that that inside my small suitcase left me room for… uh… nothing but a couple of shirts.

The big suitcase is, though, too big. It’s not full and I’m now concerned that things are going to roll around inside the suitcase and get damaged – but I don’t want to put too much into it because I plan on buying some blue jeans and shirts at Goodwill while I’m in the States.

I suppose, ultimately, that these are first world problems and that I’m kvetching about trivial things.

In retrospect, today’s photo was bound to happen, sometime – I just hadn’t quite expected it to be today.

The towels are about to come out and the dirty clothes to go in.

Basically I do clothing laundry roughly twice a week, usually right after every other trip to the gym, when I have two sets of disgusting workout clothing in the hamper – and today is one of those days. I also wash (and dry) my towels once a week – and the fate’s fickle finger pointed at today.

I picked up a new habit while my friends were visiting me over the holidays – and that is to come home before going to the gym and starting the towels.

Towels are the only thing that I regularly both wash and dry, and the machine takes just under four hours to accomplish this task, including 95 minutes of drying – the rest is washing and some 15 minutes of random drum turning once the machine has finished drying. This is perfect timing for trips to the gym, as I tend to get home shortly after the machine has finished its complete dance.

I might note that you should be grateful that this is actually the washing machine – had I been running even further behind, you could have gotten me in the gym locker room.

Today is my birthday – information I have purposely blocked from being public on Facebook, which resulted in me getting only (so far) one birthday greeting there.

At 18:00 CET I was at Barcomi’s, a coffee, cake, and bagel shop over on Bergmannstrasse. With me were Snooker in Berlin and Sweet No, back from their American Vacation – which was quite musical.

What you see above is the end of my meal – my Tuna Salad Bagel was delivered at 5:40 – too early for my 18:00 CET ± 15 minutes rule. Snooker and Sweet No put a candle on my bagel, lit it, and I made a wish.

The wish status has yet to be determined.

Meanwhile, I want to follow up on yesterday’s photo of the bookshelves – I should have known better.

After removing the stuff that had been occupying the previously empty (of books) shelf, I had to put the stuff somewhere, which, by the time the dominos stopped falling had resulted in me cleaning off another small shelf, sorting and reorganizing many of my binders.

Naturally I then had to shift over to the last bookcase – the one with the books piled in front of it, previously – and sort everything I had stored there.

By the time it was all done, I’d even filled a bag with papers to be recycled.

And it was 11 pm – 5 hours had passed.

My excitement for the evening is to shift books around my bookcases because… I have books that do not fit where they are supposed to go.

It’s the sad consequence of liking and buying books that books must be shifted if they are to be shelved in a logical manner. I’m fortunate enough that I have one empty shelf right now – but in an hour’s time, that will be filled, with the books below.

Following up on yesterday’s photo – the meatloaf was excellent – and I had leftovers for an early dinner tonight.

Looking into my kitchen!

When I woke up this morning I had no idea what I would be doing at 18:00 this afternoon.

My original plan post-work plan was to go shopping and pick up some goods for my upcoming trip, then hit up a grocery store, and then make my way home. But this plan was cut short due to issues in the apartment – and I really hope that my need to be home for things to be repaired is over – I’ve had to be home four times in the last week.

The previous three times were for a stupid, yet expensive, technical issue with one of my belongings.

Today was for something more important: my heating. I have five radiators in my apartment, and three of them worked, the one in my kitchen and the one in my bathroom, not. I thought that my problem was “air in the radiator”, and so, I borrowed a Heizungsentluftungschlüßel yesterday, and when I went to let the air out, I discovered that the radiators were completely full of water.

The end result was an appointment to get the radiators fixed – and because the heating expert’s weekend began promptly at 2:00, I had to be home by 1:30 in order for it to be fixed.

So I left work early, got home at 1:30, and then, 8 minutes later, the heat was flowing in the bathroom and kitchen. It wasn’t air in the radiator, but something behind the control knob, I asked what it was called, but I seem to recall it was something called ventilator-uh, but I don’t know any more.

This early work departure put me far from where I wanted to go shopping and in my Keiz, so I decided to go to the gym (for fun), where I did cardio. After that I headed to my neighborhood Turkish Supermarket, where I picked up a pound a half of seasoned ground beef in order to make meatloaf tonight.

I really like the flavoring and the recipe is a bastardized version of the Easy Meatloaf – first in that I buy seasoned ground beef, and also add a scorching hot pepper and a lot of fresh garlic.

I’d show you the after picture, but I’m posting this while the meatloaf is still in the oven.

As I sort of expected, I was at the gym at 18:00 CET today – I’d already lifted all the weights and so I was on to my cardio for the day, the Vario machine.

18:00 CET time came at roughly 45 minutes into my 50 minutes of cardio – I sort of had to pause, as you can see, to snap the photo – and I used my iPhone to take the photo.

The top line shows my heart rate, and the longer that I’ve been using the Vario, the harder it is for me to keep my heart rate between 115 and 130, which is what my trainer tells me is the optimal range.

The bottom block of information tells me what intensity my workout is going – yellow (hard to tell) indicates “Power Watts” – or what I think of as resistance. The blue line tells you my “speed” – the rate at which my feet go. It’s pretty clear when my music hit slow spots – that drop near the middle of the screen was a pretty slow moving Coldplay song – it’s going to be removed from the rotation pretty quickly.

For those of you curious as to what the Vario looks like, I took a picture of the machines before I got on (and when none of the ones in this set of three were being used) – I was on the one in the middle of this photo.

Below the fold is a video… if you are curious what the motion looks like.

Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago, I realized that I haven’t been playing with my camera enough and I decided to set myself a challenge of documenting my life every day in February – by taking a photograph at the same time, 18:00, Central European Time, every single day.

Picking the time was a bit tricky because I tend to do the same things at the same time most days – Five days out of seven, at 9:00 in the morning, I’m at my desk at the office – so I settled on early evening, 6 PM, even though there’s a pretty good chance that I will be at the gym every other day.

But it’s February and I’m taking a vacation – so while today at 18:00 CET, it is actually 18:00 for me, it won’t be 18:00 for me all month: on many days it will be 10:00, 11:00, or 12:00 local time – but still 18:00 CET.

My general rule is that I will take the photograph at 18:00 ± 15 minutes, CET. However, due to the circumstances around my vacation, I will not be able to post the photograph on the day it was taken – but I will post it when I can.

Today’s exciting start comes with my dry-cleaning—perhaps not the most exciting subject in the world. Truthfully I try to avoid buying clothing that requires dry-cleaning. It’s expensive, annoying, and inconvenient.

But I have a lovely woolen winter jacket, made by Joop!, that I bought about ten years ago. It’s perfect for cool weather that’s too cold for a sweatshirt or lightweight jacket, but too warm for the all-out heavy-duty jacket.

Needless to say, I’ve been wearing it most of January and I became acutely aware that it needed to be cleaned, and so when the temperatures started diving late last week, I switched to the heavier jacket and took the woolen one to the dry-cleaners.

This turned out to be a greater challenge than I had expected for several reasons, including an embarrassing one: you see, I’ve thought for a long time that there was one across the street from my gym – I’ve stared at it for over a year now while doing cardio – but it turns out it’s not a dry-cleaner, it’s a tailor’s shop. Fortunately I realized this before I actually walked in, but it’s still embarrassing that I hadn’t been observant enough to noticed that it wasn’t a dry cleaner.

The second challenge was, oddly enough, finding a dry cleaner – unlike in Weimar where there was one immediately next to my local tiny supermarket, there aren’t any in my immediate Berlin neighborhood (my Keiz!)—and so I had to resort to Google before I found one at the nearby Bayerischer Platz, Rein & Fein.

I dropped off my jacket last Friday morning and was told it would be ready today after five, and so, after finishing a work project at home, I headed out to pick it up – and let me say, tonight at 6pm, it was -6C (21F) – a bit cold to be playing with my tripod and exposed hands, but I did it.

And I picked up my jacket – and might I say, it’s also challenging to shoot something that has a plastic film over it.

A note on the February Photo A Day Meme that I recently learned about – I had my idea long before I learned about the meme, and, given that I had decided to not participate (intentionally) in any meme in the future, this threw a wrench into my plans. But ultimately I decided that I’m not going to ditch my plan. Besides, their thingy has a different theme each day and I have decided that my challenge is to take a photo around 18:00 CET, not try and fulfill an arbitrarily declared theme.

Yes, I will realize my good New Year’s resolutions.

Or, and this is my interpretation,
the dominatrix will use her whip on me.

• TQE | That Queer Expatriate

  Expatriate, not ex-patriot: I'm a progressive liberal and queer American in Berlin, Germany. My roots in include 18 years in Denver, 6 in Laramie, Wyoming, 6 in Bloomington, Indiana, and 6 in Weimar, Germany. Sense a pattern? Don't want to leave a comment on this blog? Email scintillatingme at gmail.com, username "elmadaeu"

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