The overconfidence of youth.

But first, a party with the Germans. Had a nice time partaking in a German tradition of burning alcohol to carmelize sugar to sweeten a fruity drink. The cone of sugar comes prepackaged in just the right shape. The metal tray with the slit in the bottom nicely supports the flaming sugar cone while letting the melted bits of carmelized sugar slip down into the cauldron below. You gotta love the German emphasis on process. It was all very well managed and coordinated and the final product did taste quite good (except it was mostly a non-alchoholic drink by the end as all the alcohol had been burned up to melt the sugar.) I think in America, we would have just poured everything in a jug and added ice cubes and told the women they could drink for free but the men would have to pay double. American life can be pretty straight forward sometimes when you don't have thousands of years of history to respect.
Be sure not to miss the Bulgarian in the background with the bottle of Rum in her hands. I've learned to never try to separate a Bulgarian from their alcohol. Or for that matter from someone else's alcohol that they have decided should be theirs. Or frankly from your alcohol that they are beginning to take a keen interest in. Better to just let it go.





So I’m not exactly sure how we got on the topic, but at some point I thought it was necessary to tell my kids how funny the movie ‘the full monty’ was. For those of you who are not familiar, this is a British b-movie where a group of out of work guys are struggling to find work and decide to take up dancing as strippers for the locals to make ends meet. After struggling along through the movie to find purpose and dignity in their existence they decide in the end to make a statement by not doing the usual dance routine but rather go for the ‘full monty’. Hence the name of the movie. It’s quite funny if you get a chance to see it.

Now Nathan had to ask some follow up questions about why they would do that and did they really make enough money to pay their bills, and, and, and. In the end he seemed to accept it all but was still looking a bit contemplative. Dee told him he didn’t need to worry about it because this wasn’t something he should think about doing even if he was short on money. He agreed and said he couldn’t imagine ever actually doing that. “But”, he said with a completely straight face, “I would make a lot of money”. I think at that moment I knew he was my son. Even as an 11 year old, he’s already disproportionately confident in his abilities. He didn’t understand why his parents both started laughing immediately at the table.