Anyway...

This is going to be my new Friday Fictioneers blog.  I have been wanting to participate for a couple weeks, but I never felt inspired enough.  Then this week the opening lines just popped into my head, and I knew I had to jump in.  Once I wrote it, I felt good about myself for completing a story that was exactly one hundred words long that was kind of coherent.  I have trouble being succinct, and I am going to challenge myself to stick to the 100-word parameter - exactly - every week.  It may mean forcing myself to edit over and over, which I also have problems doing.

I don't work at Starbucks anymore, but I like the header for this blog, so I'm going to keep it.  It'll be my alter ego writer-girl identity.

A lot of cool and interesting things are happening, or potentially happening, in my life right now, and I'm invigorated, but I'll save that for later when I'm sure these things will, indeed, come to fruition.

Now it's time to reflect.  I'm hesitant to share my time in Europe with others, because I'm afraid they'll feel I'm being pretentious.  But it's such a huge part of my life that I can't not share it.  That would be the equivalent of chopping a couple years out of my life.  So I want to talk about that.

Here is a list of the best food experiences I've had in Europe:

1.  Dark berry mocha Frappucino in London.  I just happened to be in the UK when this drink, exclusive to the UK, came out.  I don't even drink Frappucinos, but I had to try this one because I knew my former Starbucks coworkers would be impressed.  And it was delicious.

2.  Langosz in Hungary.  Some of the best food I've eaten.  It's heavenly fried dough topped with anything you like - in my case, mushrooms.

3.  My complete obsession with marzipan, which started in the marzipan capital of the world, Lubeck, Germany.  I spent more Euros in the marzipan factory than I did anywhere else in the country.  I brought home chocolate-covered marzipan lighthouses, marzipan fruit, and just plain marzipan, and ate it for weeks straight.  Now it's far too sweet for my taste, but at the time I was a kid in a ... marzipan shop.

4.  Dunkelrestaurant in Berlin, Germany.  Two friends and I went and had the best dining experience ever.  All the servers are legally blind and you dine with no light whatsoever, so you can't see your plate.  They don't even tell you what you're eating; you have to figure it out.  Or, sometimes, not.  The host was also super nice in letting us in without a reservation, which we were supposed to have made ahead of time.

5.  Æbleskiver!  The best Danish food ever.  Just look it up.  You have to taste it to believe it.

6.  Mornay sauce.  Okay, yeah, this is a basic bechemel sauce, but I've never seen it prepackaged anywhere except in European supermarkets.  And seeing as I suck at making a good roux, this was very helpful.  Your lasagna will turn into crack cocaine with this stuff.

That's it for now.  I'm sure I can come up with more in time.  I don't know if it's worth mentioning that 7-Eleven makes really good cinnamon rolls and raspberry muffins, but they do.  Or that the chocolate milk Cocio is pronounced cock-ee-oh.  Or that I once paid the equivalent of $7 for a tall white mocha because it was the first one I had had in six months.

Friday Fictioneers

There is no attic in the house.  There is no attic in the house!  How can a twenty-year-old skeleton appear in a new home's closet?

Dust swirled cobweb arms through the air, coating my face.  I waved my arms in front of me.  The air was so stale, I choked. The floorboards groaned and bounced as if made of rubber.

He told me he built this house just for us.  A new start.  A new life.  Forget about the past.

Why, then, was I staring at his ex-wife's corpse, an engagement ring identical to mine dangling from her yellowed knuckle?