Week 2- Once upon a time...

Oh. My. God. So much flipping German. I don’t speak German. My family hasn’t been German for over three hundred years. I don’t know anyone who is German. I don’t even eat German food. Well, sauerkraut once a year for luck, but otherwise, not so much. My ochs are ok, but I keep mixing up my pflug and my alber and I don’t even know what’s going on with the roof. Hau on earth am I supposed to keep my zwerch separate from my zorn? And the krumphau sounds like something you eat, maybe second cousin to a cruller.  I’m pretty sure the fact that I can’t keep any of them straight is what makes me feel like scheitel right now. Bleh. I’m sure they’ll sink in eventually, but at the moment I’m just kind of watching the terms fly by and listening to the pretty sword-woosh they make when they whiz past.

And what kind of fool holds a plow up out of the ground anyway?

More practice with positions, and there’s a new set of directions- drill them, make them flow. "Tell a story," says Jake. Tell a story? Yes!! Something I have a chance at doing right! I’m a librarian; I do this stuff for a living. But can I be content with a nice, simple story that makes sense and accomplishes the goal of getting my movements to flow gracefully from one to the next? Of course not. Initially, sure… My ox pulls the plow for the fool all day long, just like a good little bovine should. But before long my drill story gets ridiculously complicated. The oxes get fed up, and start getting angry, ticking off fools all over the place, yanking them behind the plow, kicking them in the mittel whenever the fool gets close enough. I’ve got exposition, backstory for the ox, who lived unter a cork tree and was beaten ober the head when he was younger because he wouldn’t fight. It’s got convoluted plot twists with that fool Albert muscling the ochs up to the roof, then pushing them off as retribution for the kicking. The poor ochs horns go all crooked when they land, and they get all squinty eyed and start trampling the fool into the muck and running him over with the plow… it gets a little gory from there. I let some of the kids from school help me write it… I think those boys might have a few issues.