The skies have turned a different hue of blue a while ago. The first leaves started turning this year in August already. Starbucks and Co. have welcomed back customers for their pumpkin spice lattes. But fall, for me, somehow only begins when I see the first pumpkins paraded outside grocery stores. And everybody who knows […]
Across the Fence
Across the Fence: Mail
Last weekend was a 3-day-one for federal employees. Because Monday was a bank holiday. Yet it seems that this doesn’t go for everybody employed by the United States Postal Service (USPS). I saw several USPS vehicles in different parts of the region on Sunday. And my heart went out to their drivers because here I […]
Across the Fence: Desert
What comes to your mind when you think “desert”? And no, American cheesecake, which I wrote about last week, is a dessert with a double “s”, stressed on the second syllable. Is it a specific place? Or a geographical concept? An experience of your own, maybe? My go-to online look-up place, Wikipedia, gives a pretty […]
Bacon’s Double Take – Sky
You may have realized that my other half of the Double Touble, cherished columnist and friend Joe Boyle, and I decided on a short summer break recently, but now we are back with more takes on shared topics, which we call Double Take. Joe actually inspired us both with some photos of skies shortly after […]
Across the Fence: American Cheesecake
Recently, a Facebook friend of mine posted a marvelous photo of a slice of cheesecake that literally made me drool. Me, who is known not to be into sweet things really! So, I asked her for the recipe. Only to be utterly surprised. But I’ll return to this later. You wouldn’t believe how old the […]
Across the Fence: A German Voice in America
The first time I heard about The German Radio in San Francisco was about a year ago. The radio station was looking for German immigrant stories, and my Californian Facebook-friend Karen told them about me. The connection was made, and a few days later I had radio host Pamela Lenz Sommer on the phone. As […]
Across the Fence: Rain
As I’m writing this, it is Sunday afternoon. It feels like an early fall day already. It’s brown meadow season with bright blue skies, hardly a cloud, eye-popping flower colors, and a mellowness of air that betrays that the hottest days this year are over. My head feels dizzy, and I’m looking at Mt. Rainier […]
Across the Fence: All Tastes German
Have you ever tasted an authentic German meal – maybe at a German-American household or even over in Germany when you lived or vacationed there? Do you miss the experience? And is one of the bleakest thoughts you have these days that you can neither travel there nor experience as much as a German Oktoberfest […]
Across the Fence: A Flowering Mission
Have you ever found something that was approximately 50 million years old, thus just a bit younger than the last dinosaurs, and you were permitted to keep it? Exactly that happened to my husband and me very recently when we were exploring the quaint town of Republic, Washington. For it is the home of a […]