The Spoon

Hi hi hi. We're back. After 2.5 weeks romping around America, we have returned to Berlin to watch the football and eat the sausage.

The holiday was great. Friends and family were visited. Sushi was consumed. And sunglasses were purchased. The only real bummer was that wicked insomnia was the name of the game for much of the trip. But don't worry blog friends! In a classic lemon -> lemonade situation, I took advantage of the many sleepless hours to rethink my approach to the whole blog posting situation. Or lack thereof, as you may have noticed.

So here's the new plan - for the remainder of the season, every time the Cleveland Indians win a game, I will write a blog post. As you may have guessed, they won last night (check here), so here's your post. I wouldn't get too excited - the way those pack of fools play, I seriously doubt that the frequency of random Stool bursts will increase that dramatically.

While there are numerous stories to relate, and many fun pictures to caption, I think I'm going to keep a promise to a certain Chop Brother (hi dougie!!) and talk about a spoon (pictured above).

The background here is that my Dad has really gotten into woodworking the past few years (to the extent that we bought him a hunk of super-duper Australian wood for Christmas). He makes, among other things, spoons. We have a lot of his spoons. And use them all of the time.

This past Thanksgiving, we had people over for the traditional turkey feast. Among the guests were our friend Paul and his daughter Lotte (if you can't figure out who is who, then you have problems). Lotte became quite enamored with one of my dad's spoons. To the extent that we decided to give it to her. Like I said, we have a lot of handmade spoons. And who wouldn't want to make a small child happy? As part of the gift though, we explained that my dad made the spoon, and that it was very special.

Later in the evening, Paul asked Lotte if he could this spoon to make pancakes the next morning. Lotte replies very firmly - "No. Because Jeff's Dad made this spoon for me."

As it turns out, Lotte's affection for this spoon has not cooled off - the latest report is that she sleeps with it at night, and still won't let Paul use it for pancakes.

And that is the story of the spoon.