Jesus… twenty years.

Tomorrow is my twenty-year high school reunion, and I won’t be there.

This is, by now, no longer unexpected, but I will say that up until about four months ago, I’d had every intention of going. I should also say (because a friend of mine truly thought this to be the case) that my decision not to go was not because I somehow thought it wouldn’t be fun.

I know it will be. It’s going to be a blast, and I really looked forward to seeing my classmates. And for anyone under the impression that I was miserable in high school and that this somehow would have kept me from coming, well… no.

For the record, I was never miserable at high school. SHS was a pretty awesome place to be. I suspect most of us now realize what an extraordinary place it was and what extraordinary people were there. That other things in my life were bad was totally outside the realm of what went on with you guys during the day.

No, I’m not going because we just moved to Germany a year ago, and my husband, toddler and I really deserve to be able to take a vacation and have some quality time together after a very stressful few years. We couldn’t afford both, and sometimes you just have to take care of business at home first.

I hope I’ll see you all in another five or ten years, depending on what comes together.

Still, though… if I were there… well, let’s pretend I am, shall we?

First of all, you’re all going to be off drinking on a boat, so I’d be all blurry, like so:

I’m pretty sure I’d also actually become more blurry after a few drinks, so that’s pretty accurate.

I’d want to know what you’d been up to and how your lives have gone in the past couple of decades, and in fact, I still do. I’d love to have the chance to talk for longer than a short Facebook exchange would allow, to laugh about the ridiculous and amazing things we all experienced together, and to finally find out what the name of that damned song Paul and Jed and Greg and Sean (maybe? I don’t remember) played at Showcase senior year that still gets stuck in my head anytime I think about it is.

I’d love to see where life’s journey has taken us all, good and bad, because I’m pretty sure that for most of us, it’s a completely different place than any of us imagined when we left school.

And if you wanted to know what has happened to me, well, here’s what I’d tell you (and my pensive thoughts about this are really the reason for this post tonight – I hope you’ll forgive my self-indulgence):

I went off to New Orleans for college because it was a free ride, continued studying music for the first year, and realized my skin was too thin and switched to Spanish. And then poli sci. And then chemistry. And then… oh, good lord, who knows. The last spin on the wheel of majors was history, and I dropped out in my last semester because I spent too much time playing computer games and got engaged to someone who was definitely Mr. Wrong. I wasn’t there to learn anyway. I was there to do all the stupid crap I should have gotten out of my system in high school.

Almost ruined my life during said engagement, got bailed out by friends and family, moved back to Milwaukee, got my shit together, became an au pair in Holland, and went back to finish up my degree at UWM, which is an underrated and truly fine institution. Learned to love Milwaukee again. Went to California to work for a bit, then off to Purdue for grad school in computer science. Met evil German person whom I despised because he was 1) a smartass, and 2) a smartass. Yes, I know, the irony is killing you.

And then I didn’t despise him. At all.

Moved in with said evil German person. Got a masters and switched to linguistics. Married evil German person and moved to L.A. without degree so he could finish his last year of his PhD, and worked for The Man.

Moved to Denver when said evil German was done with PhD where he became a professor, and I went back to my linguistics doctoral program (remotely) before getting pregnant with our now two-and-a-half-year-old son, Torsten, who rocks. Dropped program because my priorities and life changed and was a stay-at-home-Mom for two years.

Then left Denver, which is still a very cool place, and moved to Germany with evil German, where we now live in suburban Munich and love our lives. Husband and I both work at the Technische Universität München (TU-Munich) in the computer science department – I’m back to being a humble doctoral student and researcher in information security, though I am making pretty good use of my linguistic background as well. I like what I do.

Life’s pretty good, and we like living in Bavaria.

Otherwise, all that’s really changed about me is that I have much more hair (though half of it got cut off last week, which I am not pleased about), I got fat (fact of life), and while I still talk too much, I am much more sanguine about life than I ever was in high school and have the usual set of scars life gives you and very few regrets along with them.

That’s twenty years in a nutshell, I guess. I’m sure I left out vastly important things, but, eh, remember… you’re on a boat, you’ve been drinking, I look all blurry. You wouldn’t remember any more than that anyway.

There are lots of folks I didn’t know very well in high school that I should have gotten to know better, have gotten to know better through the power of social media, and I’d really have loved to have seen you tomorrow night. I still hope to have that chance. If you’re ever in Munich, you know what to do. And if not, well, there’s always 2015, or 2020, or for those of you still in Milwaukee, there’s whenever I can hop over the pond next. I hope it’s sooner rather than later.

Have a blast, guys – I expect to see lots of pictures and hear lots of stories

Also, do not fall off the boat.

No, seriously. The lake is still cold, I hear.

(And to get this off of my conscience: Meradith, I am still smacking myself for drinking too much beer at the 10-year-reunion such that I couldn’t figure out who you were. Deep cause of embarrassment. Sorry! And also for calling Jean Colleen. It was my first moment free of grad school and some rough family stuff and I was being just a little bit stupid

More later, really.

Why?

Because today, today is November 1st. I have something else to save my writing energies for, and as soon as Papa gets up to take the little guy, I’m off to the races

So I still haven’t gotten my slew of Mr. T pictures posted (I have posts nearly ready to go, but things keep getting in the way of me finishing…), and I haven’t written anything of substance here in months either.

Life has just kind of been like that of late. I just wrote the nth email unintentionally containing less-than-complete sentences (where n is greater than 2 and I am too tired to mourn that there’s no way to get those emails back), I lost my wallet on the bus the other day and had to cancel all of my credit and debit cards (though I’d like to shout a big thank you to the kind, anonymous person who dropped it into our mailbox yesterday completely intact), and I went to the doctor today forgetting I had neither debit nor credit cards and was  thus forced to have them bill my copay because I am one sleep-deprived dingbat. On top of that, some days I walk out of the house with my shirt on backwards (which is an improvement over my first three months of motherhood in which I more than once nearly answered the front door without pants), my clothes are usually coated in various Torsten-related substances anyway, and I’ve totally turned into the kind of person who says things like, “Damn you kids, get off my lawn!”^[1]. Well, ok, I say things like, “Guys, it’s 2 am, come on,” in my grumpy old mother voice, shouting out the window to the noisy new neighbors. Same diff. The point is that I’ve been out of it. Yeah, I win.

There are a lot of reasons for the lack of writing and the scattered brain – Torsten is huge and capable and implementing his world takeover scheme already, exhausting both Mama and Papa (And thank you, JoAnna, for warning us ahead of time about tall babies and doorknobs! Taking care of that early has been a lifesaver… we’ve been calling him Houdini since about birth, and he shows no sign of stopping with his evil mechanical escape tricks), I just got back from four days away taking a big-assed German exam in Chicago, the evil husband has been working his butt off and teaching a lot of hours, and there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for two people to get all of the work done (though Torsten, who’s almost 15 months old now, actually helped his Papa sweep the kitchen today, so that’s something .

It’s not all bad news, of course – we’re finally able to handle the above, even if we’re positively loopy some days. Having an older child means it’s becoming easier to start doing some things for grownup Krista as well as being Mama, and that’s a very happy thing indeed. There are some big things in the works, actually, but that’ll have to stay cryptic until I have some more information. In any event, in spite of me having Mommy Brain something awful, things have finally started to come back together on this end.

Of course, that’s no guarantee I’ll actually get pictures up soon, but it does mean I’ll try

Anyway, for those who just can’t live without their dose of Torstenosity, here are a few tidbits:

• T has grasped the concept of binarity and can say (and understand) up and down, off and on, open and shut (which, amusingly, does not sound like “shut”), in and out (where “in” is usually the occupied bathroom, and “out” is where he’s supposed to be), etc. This means lots of flipped lightswitches and slammed cupboard doors, but it’s neat to see that he gets it.
• He has become Mr. Climbing Monkey, and he is totally silent when doing things he probably shouldn’t be. This led to Boudreaux’s Butt Paste being smeared all over our very high dining room table and the things on it, and us not noticing when he did it. He’s good.
• Torsten is still the most awesome kid ever, and has learned how to give big smacking lovey kisses to Mama of his own accord
• He now plays lots of clapping games, and he hasn’t tried to beat Mama for singing “If you’re happy and you know it” yet. Yet. This is a major feat for a baby who loves music.
• He’s not a real fan of eating. Unless it’s something we are eating. As I tell Christian when I steal his chocolate, “stolen tastes twice as good,” and apparently T agrees.
• While I was away, he actually bitched me out on the phone before bursting into tears because I was gone. You haven’t lived until you’ve been told off at length on the phone by a 15-month-old.
• It’s official – he now repeats the worst things Mama says, especially when driving. Mama will have to finally clean up her act. Boo.
• He’s still the biggest flirt ever. Ladies everywhere are no match for the Toothy Grin of Torsten ™
• He’s very tricky when playing games, sometimes legitimately tricking us. We’re in so much trouble when he can talk…
• He has a bunch of teeth, all the better to eat you with!
• He is still the nicest baby in the world. Really. He loves to snuggle and kiss and giggle.
• Mr. T loves books. This makes me incredibly happy.
• He has finally sold Mama on Elmo, because he loves Elmo so very much. This is as far as I am willing to go – there will be no trading up to Barney, the Abominable Purple Dinosaur.
• He can climb up and go down the big kids’ slide at the park by himself. Of course, we’re always standing nearby to catch him, but it’s cool.
• He’s about the size of a two-year-old, which makes squirming at diaper-changing-time not fun.

These random tidbits of Torstenmation have been brought to you by the letter T and the number 0.  I make no claim that anything in this post has made any sense whatsoever.

Anyhow, Saturday is tentatively looking like a good day for me to work on Torsten-stuff, so I may get more posted then. But don’t hold your breath – Mommy Brain is insidious and might cause me to spend the day snoozing instead

^{[1] Does anyone know where that phrase is from anyway? I see it everywhere and have no conclusive answer. (And if you say “Gran Torino”, you are too young to answer this question.)}

And that, Mr. President, is this:

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Classy, I know, but what can I say – it’s from the heart.

And then… it happened.

Christian and I both got the Evil Death Cold of Doom ™. And when I say “evil” and “death”, I’m so not kidding.

It sucked.

It continues to suck for Christian, anyway – I’m much better now. I can only hope the baby doesn’t get it, because that would be horrid.

In any event, the point of all of that whining is that I’ve had no time at all to get pictures up, and I’m not promising anything right now, either. I have a huuuuge German test to study for that takes place next month, and until that’s over, I’m totally slacking on everything else except for the care and feeding of a baby Torsten.

I have so much cuteness to post – low-quality video of snuggly toddler waddling around in snowsuit, birthday pictures, etc, but it’ll just have to wait. Sorry grandparents and stalkers… them’s the breaks.

I’m still crazy busy, so the Torsten pics and post have been pushed out, but maybe I’ll get to it tonight and you can all worship him in his snuggly glory.

In fact, I think I’ll just post a sneak preview here, for friends, family and stalkers who haven’t seen it elsewhere…

Torsten's Christmas Picture

I’m afraid he doesn’t look like a baby anymore (well, ok, he looks 2, but that’s another story and is all my fault for marrying a giant), but he is supercute if I say so myself!

And of course, he is still the Super Awesome Mr. T

Back to the grind, but have a good new year out there, everyone!

Those monthly Torsten letters? Um, yeah. Turned out that with a bunch of stuff that’s been going on plus an active 10-12 month old, that’s not particularly easy or high-priority either. C’est la vie.

However, I will get a one-year-old first-birthday update post up soon, complete with pictures of all of the things Super Baby has been up to, because he’s pretty darned awesome.

First, though, I have more real life to attend to. Sorry, but the Mr. T Show will have to wait another week or so

(I get songs stuck in my head all the time, but this is particularly insidious…)

May I present to you: Capital I

P.S.: Don’t scold me, you anti-television fascists – I am very sick at the moment and feel no shame for deciding Sesame Street was about the most active thing I could do while I was hacking out my lungs. So bite me.)