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Operation Cake. Chocolate. Cake.
Normally when I’m presented with a problem I most likely go into engineering mode. Only after I have assessed the urgency of the problem do I analyze the psychology of the situation. I’m a little slow when someone needs some hand holding because I’m too absorbed in making the problem go away. I think Mrs. F needed a bit of both. Lucky my friend, Lisa, suggested that baking a cake is the next best thing to saying, “There, there. I’m sorry you’re a crab apple.” Well. I can do cake.
The balcony fiasco of the summer ended Tuesday between Mrs. F and I. It wasn’t easy. I took several tries at her door on different occasions before she peered out and let out another heave of horror, “It’s happened to me AGAIN!!” Of course by again she meant dirt and this time I admittedly was the direct cause. The previous rainy Saturday I scrubbed the balcony floor with all the domestic tools I could find: mop, cloth, even a spent toothbrush.
The balcony was indeed filthy with pollen and other fine particles that come with living in the city. By the time I was done the tiles were shining and grime free. It made sense that she would encounter a speck or two on her level. I can’t stop gravity. I told her that I also freed the rain gutter. Things should get better. Let’s all be happy and have cake.
She almost didn’t want to take my peace offering. She had to tell Alex and I about the good ol’ days when this stuff never happened to her. She invented stories of all the things we were doing wrong, each one we negated. She suggested we invite the owner of the building to have a look. Fine with us. We asked her to cut us some slack but she wasn’t budging. She finally puffed that it is forbidden to have plants on the window sill, Alex looked at her sternly and said, “Show us where that is written then we’ll take them down.”
All of this in my mind was totally reasonable to listen to from an old woman. But it would have been murder if she refused my chocolate cake. That has to be against old lady code. Already being a foreigner in Bavaria, I was way out of my territory. She needed to play along, dog so help me.
Luckily it didn’t come to this. Two days later she returned our plate and told me that my cake was gegönnt. I later learned that she meant it was a treat. She also did her own investigation during a rain storm. The rain gutter to our balcony system is the only one flowing. Who knew she had an engineering mode too. I think she believes me now.
So my chocolate cake recipe is gleaned from Seattle Bon Vivant. I’m feeling extraordinarily lazy so my version is the photograph above. Feel free to use it to ward off spirited old ladies.
in my city balcony garden
I’m not sure how other Müncheners are doing with their balcony gardens but mine has been a bit stressed with the crazy weather we’ve been having. The biggest snafu happened when a big gust of wind blew the petunias out of my petunias.
One of the plastic pots that hung over the railing shattered to the ground. The other bombed the corner of a flower box the floor below. The disadvantage of working/studying from home is witnessing your 20-year widowed neighborlein blow a blue hair fuse at your front door. I knew this day would come. It feels like being jettisoned to the front line against the German Hausfrau force with your pants down.
Now that several weeks have passed, I was recently invited to inspect the condition of her balcony, perhaps to revive our neighborly jive. If she had asked me to eat cookies with her from the balcony tile floor I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. That’s when she hit me with the latest laundry list of offensives: I’m now being blamed for every speck of dirty that dries on her immaculate balcony, especially the water stains on the metal frame above. Apparently where she lives it does not rain bus loads of water making the balcony a temporary water park.
I’m also blamed for spiders. (yes, spiders. I almost laughed. Instead I opted for ‘what’s wrong with god’s creatures?’ bit.) What she didn’t seem to mind was the remnants of my long dark hair caught on a high corner near the rain gutter. Even I thought, ew.
I’m told I must bake a cake to appease Mrs. F. This is doable but knowing me I’ll probably botch this gesture with a heza-ism. Best to quickly register with the Mieteverein in case things get too out of hand.
All the while my roma tomatoes are not fairing well this season. I don’t have too much time to research the cause of what I call tomato scurvy and tomato buggy rot. But maybe some green thumb out there could give me a hint how to prevent this for next years crop.
Foto Friday
Couldn’t resist a stroll in my neighborhood after consecutive days of rain. Here’s what I saw yesterday.
Nestlé Quik Surfing
Wittelsbacherbrücke
submerged – Weideninsel
abridged Reflections – Wittelsbacherbrücke
Heizkraft Reflections of Thalkirchen
a bit of Sog
The deluge continues over Germany, throughout Bavaria, in Munich along with the cold that won’t quit. I’ll be making a doctor’s visit soon if the nose draining and donkey cough persist through the weekend. Another thing that gets to me is the way weather folk talk about rain:
“Am Flughafen fielen in den letzten 48 Stunden rund 61 Liter pro Quadratmeter, in Oberhaching 78 – gut 17 Liter mehr” -Abendzeitung
Did you get that? 61 liters of rain per cubic meter in 48 hours! It sounds like a mouthful but if you keep in mind that a liter per cubic meter is just a fancy way of saying 1 mm of rainfall, it’s not so intimidating.
Still I like to keep it real and get back to my convoluted English-unit roots. That means our balcony garden probably got somewhere around 2.7 inches of rain in the last two days. Whew. I can rest well knowing that these measurements are totally heavy but still okay compared to the bath tub ranges some are reporting in Austria.
Speaking of balcony garden here’s a collage to document the green thumbs Alex and I are developing.
Who would have thought. Not I because I honestly don’t know what I’m doing. That one purple petunia developed into a gazillion little flower minions in just a couple of weeks. Yes, I put the whole mystery mix package into 5 flower pots and then couldn’t decide which seedlings would experience the ‘pluck and chuck’. Hopefully the flowers survive all this rain for a real photo shoot.
