Finding the Funny

Thanks to all of you for your spirited opinions both here and on Facebook in the Drape Debate of '10.  Photos will be posted tomorrow.  The winner has been hung and is awaiting foofing (that swishy, pokey stuff you have to do to get it evenly spaced and fluffed.)  I have no ladder, and the chairs are not tall enough to reach the foof area, so I'm waiting for Sir to get home from work  and balance himself like the Thanksgiving elf on the windowsills again.  The man is nothing if not patient. 

In other news, I wish I was my mother.  She has such a gift for seeing the sunny side of life, and right now I'm having to look very hard for it.  I'll never again take for granted how easy it is for me to operate on a daily basis in the States.  Here, finding a lampshade is impossible.  Finding an English speaker to cut my hair is thus far impossible.  A mail-order throw rug for the hall looks really good in the picture, and arrives worse than ugly, but it's too late to do anything about it before the guests come Thursday.  If the commissary is out of an American grocery item, there are not five or six other options to run by and pick it up.  You just can't get it. 
Most of all, 99.9999% of the people I love are not going to be around my table this Thanksgiving, and I can't seem to stop my little tear ducts from overflowing about it.  Erp. 
Yesterday, we were in the middle of a five-hour bus ride back from a retreat Sir was helping with.  (Coach bus rides are the way to travel - they had the cutest little spotless bathroom, footrests, huge windows, and no stress of driving.)    I was gazing out at the corner of Austria we cut through on the way back to Heidelberg.  Huge, fluffy flakes of snow were falling, and all of the tall, elegant evergreen boughs were bending gracefully down under the weight of their white dollops of snow.  The contrast of rich green and pure white was everywhere.  The tops of the mountains are all bare -  jagged peaks of rock jutting impossibly high.  It was really breathtaking, and instead of sending prayers of thanks that God was allowing me the privilege of seeing this amazing show of His handiwork, I was fighting back tears that my Girl wasn't there to see it with me.

SO.  As you can see, I need some help finding the funny around here.  At some point, I'm sure I will laugh over the fact that it took me three months, four stores, two mail orders and five hours of hand sewing to put together a kitchen valance I could have done in a half hour total in the US.  I'll chuckle over the dragging of the boxes of stuff home from the post office and back to the post office to return to Penneys and Amazon and Chef's Catalog.  I'll giggle about recycling and composting every shred of everything instead of tossing it into my king-sized American trash can.  But not yet.  Right now it's a recipe for homesickness.  Meanwhile, I'm determined to find the funny.

Please note that the lower the content of fat in the milk, the skinnier the cow on the carton.  I may or may not have laughed so hard I had to run to the ladies' room very fast.