24-25 May: Shop 'Til We Drop

Happy Birthday, Mom!

For variety we stopped at the Panera on Rochester Road for breakfast, then spent the morning shopping at Somerset mall in Troy. We had just enough time to buy John a new wardrobe of dress shirts at Macy’s and pick out some summer fashions for me at Eddie Bauer before we had to head back to Rochester for our dentist appointments. I had somehow managed to chip a tooth while eating a carrot a few weeks back, so I had that filed down. We picked up six months’ worth of prescriptions and contact lenses and then headed over to Rochester Mills again, where we had invited a bunch of our Michigander friends to join us for drinks and dinner. With my myriad medical tests out of the way, I rewarded myself with nachos and a buffalo burger washed down with a Rochester Red.

After yet another Panera breakfast and a quick stop at Home Depot to stock up on light bulbs, we spent virtually all day Thursday back at Somerset mall, completing our summer wardrobes. We had a late lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and then stopped at REI to buy me a heart rate monitor before heading back to Rochester. I had called the cardiologist this morning to ask about my test results and the woman who answered the phone was quite startled to hear that I was flying to Germany tomorrow and needed to know my results. She said the doctor would call me in a couple of hours, so I had to walk around with my cell phone in my pocket all day waiting for his call. He finally called when we were on our way to REI, but the connection was terrible – it sounded like the signal was traveling all the way to Germany and back. All I could make out was that my test results were fine and they wanted me to come in again when we get back from Germany. Well. That wasn’t exactly the informative discussion I was hoping for, but I will be going back to my doctor on Friday, so maybe she will be able to tell me more.

We bought four more bags of mulch (hoping it would help fight back the ever-advancing weeds over the summer), which I applied to the back beds in the sweltering late-afternoon sun. I was still frenetically digging up clumps of dandelions in the lawn when John finally told me to give it a rest. We walked to Sumo Sushi for dinner again and took some pictures of downtown Rochester to show to my friends back in Germany. After dinner I met my friend Nina for coffee; we relished the ability to walk up the street to Caribou and sit outside sipping iced lattes on this warm spring evening.

22 May: I, Lab Rat

I fueled up with apple juice and a spinach soufflé for breakfast at Panera and then we hung out for a while waiting for my stress test appointment. John had originally planned to leave me at the cardiology center for the 2+ hours it was estimated to take and go do some shopping, but thankfully he decided to wait with me, as I was more nervous than I had realized. I had not planned on engaging in any serious physical activity this week, so I cobbled together a sad excuse for a jogging outfit from the clothes I had bought at REI on Sunday. Fortunately I had brought a pair of lightweight sneakers with me for walking around town.

We arrived for my appointment a half-hour early, as requested on my instruction sheet, and I answered a bunch of questions, to which most of my answers were an emphatic “no” (do you smoke, are you diabetic, do you have shortness of breath, do you have chest pains, etc.). I was actually somewhat excited to hop on the treadmill and get a readout on my cardiovascular performance. What I was decidedly not prepared for was being injected with a radioactive isotope and lying completely still with my arms above my head for fifteen minutes while a scary-looking machine rotated around my torso taking images of my heart. One of the technicians put an I.V. port in my left arm and injected the first half of the isotope, then I had to go sit in the waiting room for a while as the lovely radioactive stuff coursed through my veins. This was the first time I’ve ever had an I.V. (my only “surgery” – knock on wood – having been getting my wisdom teeth removed as a teenager) and the darn thing hurt! I am not very good with needles and blood and it actually made me feel quite whoozy for a few minutes. I kept telling myself that my dad has probably had five hundred I.V.s stuck in him so I could certainly survive one without passing out. (It wasn’t until the next day that I realized the I.V. hadn’t been inserted very well; I ended up with a lovely bruise in the crook of my arm that lasted for a week, making me look like a drug addict.)

After the first round of imaging I lay down on a table and got hooked up to another EKG machine. This time there were even more snappy things stuck to my chest and I had to wear a velcro belt around my waist to keep all the wires together. To top it all off I got to wear a blood pressure cuff around one arm, and of course I still had that nasty I.V. port so they could shoot me up with the rest of the radioactive isotope while I was on the treadmill.

The technician told me that I would have to walk until I reached my target heartrate of 161 beats per minute. (Your estimated “maximum” heartrate is calculated by subtracting your age from 220, so my maximum heartrate is 189. Then you take 85% of that to get your target heartrate.) Every three minutes the treadmill would speed up and the incline would increase slightly. I was supposed to stay on the treadmill for at least one minute after reaching my target heartrate. After seven minutes I was up to 120 and starting to get warm. The technician kept asking me how I felt and I said I was fine. Around the ten minute point I reached my target heart rate and they injected me with the rest of the isotope. I kept going, walking faster and faster, and the technician asked me if I wanted to go up to the next level. I said sure – heck, I wasn’t even jogging yet! Finally I went up to the fifth level and actually had to start jogging at that point because my legs couldn’t keep up even at my fastest walk. The technician ended the test after 12 minutes and 38 seconds, at which point I was at my maximum heartrate. I had never really thought much about my heartrate before, but now I finally understand the point of keeping your heart at 85% output for maximum efficiency. This brings what I feel when I’m running into a whole new perspective! The technician showed me the EKG printout, noting that while the irregularity was quite obvious when I was lying down, it completely disappeared while I was exercising.

After the treadmill test I had to wait for my heartrate to come back down and then I had another round of images taken. It was a lot easier to lie still this time, after my little workout. Before I left they gave me a sheet of paper indicating that I had been injected with a radioactive substance, just in case I set off the radiation detector at the airport on Friday. (I was actually sort of hoping this would happen just to see how the people at the DaimlerChrysler terminal reacted, but sadly the radiation had apparently left my system by that time, as no alarms went off.) The two technicians assured me that the cardiologist would call me in the next day or two with my results, and sent me on my way. I wasn’t too much the worse for wear except for the sore spot from the I.V. and a pounding headache.

John treated me to Baja Fresh for a late lunch and we did a few errands at the Village of Rochester Hills mall before heading to Ann Arbor. My headache hadn’t subsided yet and, as we hit early rush hour traffic on I-275, I was questioning the soundness of our decision to go to Ann Arbor, but I really wanted to pick up a Michigan shirt for Oda and have dinner with my friend Elizabeth, so we kept going. We didn’t get to Ann Arbor until nearly 5:00, so I called Elizabeth to push our dinner back slightly. We found a Michigan volleyball T-shirt for Oda at Steve & Barry's and picked up a few more books at Border’s before meeting Elizabeth and her 3-year-old son at Zanzibar for a light dinner.

Back at home, lying awake in bed Tuesday night, I came to the startling realization that I could actually hear my heart beating irregularly. I woke John up and made him listen too, just in case I was hallucinating, but he could hear it distinctly as well. At this point I started to freak out. I had never given much thought to the functioning of my heart before. It’s always been there, steadily pumping away, sturdy and reliable, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Suddenly my faith in that lumpy mass of muscle that keeps me alive began to waver slightly. I couldn’t understand how there could possibly be something wrong with me – I spend nearly two hours a day walking or jogging for goodness’ sake, and have been doing so for nearly two years! Suffice it to say that I was anxiously awaiting the cardiologist’s call to reveal the nature of my abnormality.

21 May: A Slight Change in Plans

I had scheduled our annual physicals for Monday morning, thinking it would be nice to get them out of the way early in week. To my surprise, my doctor heard something funny in my chest and decided to run an EKG. I'd never had an EKG before, so I found it quite interesting to have these little plastic stickers with what looked like snap heads attached to them stuck onto my chest, arms, and ankles. It took several minutes to get all of my snaps wired up and half that time to get the actual reading. My doctor showed me the printout, which confirmed in very obvious form that I had an irregular heartbeat. She assured me that it was probably nothing, but seeing as how I was only in Michigan for the week, she thought we should run some tests just to be sure. With surprising efficiency, her staff set the wheels in the motion to schedule me for a heart sonogram and a stress test. Fortunately they had a cancellation that morning with the sonogram technician right in their office, so I went ahead and got that out of the way. This involved lying on my side while the technician applied gel to my chest and rubbed a hand-held transducer all around my heart. I obeyed her instructions to breathe, hold my breath, exhale, and stop breathing for a few seconds at a time. About halfway through, the machine started making these fascinating sloshing sounds which I suppose was the sound of blood pumping through my heart. By the time I was done, the receptionist had scheduled my appointment for a stress test at a cardiac center in Auburn Hills on Tuesday afternoon. Fortunately we didn’t have any specific plans for Tuesday other than going to Ann Arbor to do some shopping and visit friends.

We rushed off to John’s dermatologist appointment, then John dropped me off at the house so he could go to Chrysler to meet with his bosses. While I was stuck at home trying to figure out what made me more anxious, my newfound heart problem or the outcome of John’s meeting, I got some chores done and called the lawn service again (we were playing phone tag).

John was inexplicably very late coming back from Chrysler, so I had to call Rochester Mills and convey a message to our friends Jon and Alison (of Paris trip fame) that we would be late for dinner. Jon offered to come pick me up and I was just leaving John a note explaining my whereabouts when they both pulled into the driveway simultaneously. As luck would have it, the guy from the lawn service stopped by just a few minutes later so we were able to make the arrangements for our lawn mowing on the spot.

We had a nice dinner at the brewery, although I was not allowed to drink alcohol because of my stress test, which sort of defeated the purpose of going to the brewery. After dinner John and I went over to Border’s while Jon and Alison put their girls to bed, then we went over to their house for chocolate cake and ice cream and our regular dose of Sebastian the Bernese Mountain Dog and Sophie the cat. Alison gave me a stack of books to take back to Germany, so I think I have enough reading material now to get me through another six months.

John explained that his big meeting was largely a non-event. The good news is that his bosses did not see any reason for him to rush back to Chrysler right away, and basically gave him the go-ahead to stay until the end of the year if he can live with the Mercedes politics. John has been having mixed feelings about staying at Mercedes ever since they announced the potential sale, so he is going to have to do some serious thinking over the next few weeks. John was excited to see some of the projects going on at Chrysler, so partly his decision will be based on whether he feels he could be doing more interesting work in Michigan rather than staying at a company that really has no vested interest in him anymore. (As we like to joke, not only is John “the foreigner,” now he’s "the foreigner from the company that was just sold off!")

19-20 May: Yard Work & Fast Cars

Our first priority on Saturday was to clean up our yard. After a quick stop at Starbuck’s for coffee and pastries (where, to John’s dismay, he discovered that you still have to pay for Wi-Fi), we headed over to Bordine’s Nursery and bought a dozen bags of mulch, which just about filled the back of the Subaru. We spent the next several hours giving the yard a makeover. John cleaned up the front yard and mowed in back while I mulched the flower beds, trimmed back the overgrown burning bushes lining our front walk, and made a vain attempt at pulling up the myriad dandelions populating our yard (most of which had already gone to seed, which means that our lawn will probably be more dandelions than grass by the end of the summer). We cut back the huge viburnums growing along our side fence and tied them up so they wouldn’t hang over the path. I looked around the backyard for my Michigan natives, which I have been slowly adding to the garden over the past few years. Most of them seem to be doing great without any help on my part – the wild geraniums and meadow rue in my shade garden were over 18 inches high, and my sprouting clump of Joe-pye weed is bigger than ever. I do have to admit that I miss my garden. We stopped for lunch midday – sub sandwiches and fries at Penn Station – and finished up around six o’clock. After dinner (I can’t for the life of me remember where we ate) we were feeling awake enough to go see Spiderman 3 at the AMC Theater in Sterling Heights, our first movie out in nearly a year. It was great, although we agreed that Spiderman 2 was better.

On Sunday we had breakfast at Panera (which has free Wi-Fi), where I ran into our former neighbor - the one who was supposed to be watching our house. She was very surprised to see me (she hadn't gotten my e-mail yet saying that we were coming for a visit) and explained that they had moved into a condo because her husband's health was declining. She apologized for not telling me that they had moved out and promised to drop off our house key this weekend.

After breakfast we headed up to Waterford Hills to check out the track event. As most of you who read my annual holiday letter are aware, John’s boss at Chrysler rents out the Waterford Hills road course for one day every year, and a few dozen select invitees get to go and satisfy our need for speed by driving around as fast as we can. In recent years the neighbors living around the track have upped their noise complaints, so there are severe restrictions on when you can drive and how loud your car can be. We figure that eventually the neighbors will complain so much that the track will be shut down, so we are taking advantage of it while we can. This year’s event just happened to be scheduled for while we were in Michigan (I swear this was only a lucky coincidence).

Visiting the track was a bittersweet experience, since we had no car to drive. My Audi A4, which I had to sell before we moved to Germany, is now owned by some guy in Royal Oak who doesn’t know a stick shift from a broomstick, and John’s Mitsubishi Evolution is under wraps in our garage, resting on bald tires without a battery. So for the first time ever we were mere spectators, hoping nobody noticed the hideously ugly vehicle that we arrived in, watching jealously as various Chrysler and GM employees whizzed around the course. It was good for us to be there, because John got a chance to socialize with friends and colleagues. We brought our helmets just in case we could bum a ride or two, and I finally got to go for a ride in John's boss' Viper (that's me in the top photo). The Viper is a very fast car and John's boss is an experienced racecar driver, so this was, shall I say, a thrilling experience. I actually think he should consider offering it as a chiropractic service, as I definitely worked out a few neck kinks in the process. He found it quite amusing that they offer rides in a race-ready Viper on the Nürburgring for 250 Euro per lap – I suggested that he could make a pretty good living doing that if he ever wanted to give up designing cars. John went for a ride in the Viper too, but I caught him looking longingly at another guy's Mitsubishi Evo (bottom photo).

We ran some more errands in the afternoon and then walked over to Nina & Brian's house for an excellent hamburger dinner, with entertainment provided by 18-month-old Tommy.

18 May: Traveling in Style

I made it (just barely) to the Chick Flick on Thursday night and was glad I did; it turns out this was the last chance to see Rhoda, who is moving back to the U.S. for good on Sunday (after two years in Heidelberg and two years in Stuttgart). She was bleary-eyed from crying for the past few days, and I found it all too easy to picture myself in her shoes in a few short months. Coincidentally, she’s from Springfield, Virginia, where I lived (actually in the nearby suburb of Burke) for a couple of years as a kid. She even knew of my school, Ravenswood Elementary. We were joined at Emily’s by Shannon, Eliza, Brenda, Anne W., and an extremely pregnant woman named Sunny. What was really funny was that while last time we amassed a pretty good feast (veggies and dip, chips and salsa, chocolate cake, rice crispies treats), this time none of us had bothered to make anything (except Emily, who, being a dutiful host, had made chocolate cupcakes with red, white, and blue sprinkles). I thought I had a pretty good excuse, seeing as how I was leaving for Michigan in the morning and wasn’t even sure I was going to make it there. All of us had apparently made the same last-minute dash to the corner store and grabbed whatever caught our eye – which in my case was a package of cheese crisps and some cookies. No matter, we drank lots of wine and pigged out anyway.

My hopes of getting home at a reasonable hour (since I still had a tiny bit of packing to do) were dashed when we encountered technical difficulties with Emily’s overly complex stereo system. We couldn’t seem to get the volume turned up to the point that our gaggle of giggling girls could actually hear what was going on. After a good half-hour of futzing with the stereo, we retired to Emily’s bedroom to watch the final episode of Germany’s Next Top Model on her small but adequate television. Finally, when we were just about convinced that we were going have to watch the movie all squished together onto Emily’s bed, she got a hold of her husband on the phone and was able to devise a solution to our volume problem. Our film selection was The Holiday, which, despite featuring one of my least favorite actresses (Cameron Diaz), was quite a charming movie. Needless to say I didn’t get home until 11:30 and stayed up until almost 1 a.m. finishing up my packing.

We arrived at the airport early (for once), parked the E-Class in the garage, and lugged our four bags to the DaimlerChrysler terminal. (We decided to fill our two huge Micato safari duffels with winter clothing and shoes that we won’t need again, and leave it all in Michigan.) We waited for half an hour or so in the sleek black-and-silver waiting room (above right). Our flight left promptly at 10 a.m. with a grand total of eight passengers (on an Airbus that seats 48 – and would normally hold 120 as a commercial airliner). The photo at right is the actual DCX plane and the one below it is of the DCX terminal at the Stuttgart airport. The picture of me in the cushy seat is actually from our look-see trip in June 2005.

Only later did John hear rumors that they will stop running the DaimlerChrysler shuttle this summer. Thus our flight back to Germany could very well be the last time we will ever travel on the DaimlerChrysler corporate jet – or any corporate jet, for that matter. Interestingly, I noticed that they did not serve sparkling wine and orange juice as soon as we got to cruising altitude – apparently they are cutting costs already!

I stole the menu as a souvenir this time, so I can describe in detail the ridiculous amount of food we consumed on our 9-hour flight: For an appetizer - sliced chicken breast with thyme, olives, roasted cherry tomatoes, and fried ceps accompanied by potato salad with petso and black tiger shrimp. For the main course, we had a choice of beef with morel sauce, fried codfish with apple curry sauce, or chicken piccata with pasta. Dessert was an apple tart. Just in case that wasn’t enough to fill us up, we got a “snack” prior to landing – asparagus with endive salad, cheese and tomato ravioli with pesto butter, and mascarpone cream with berry sauce. The flight attendants (who are always women) came around during the meal service with baskets of warm bread, and later with cookies and chocolates, just in case we got hunger pains between meals. We watched two movies – Bandidas (everyman’s dream of Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz duking it out in a western) and Music and Lyrics, which I’d actually been wanting to see. The flight was so long that they showed a third movie, Rocky Balboa, which I tried to sleep through, rather unsuccessfully.

We had excellent views of northern Scotland and Canada (see photo) on this flight, but unfortunately Greenland was obscured by clouds. As we descended over the southern tip of Lake Huron and crossed central Macomb and Oakland counties, I was really struck – more so than usual – by the extent of suburban sprawl in southeast Michigan. The photo below is of Stony Creek Lake and surrounding development, just a mile or two north of our house. I found myself dreading the sight of endless cookie-cutter subdivisions and ugly strip malls. We landed at about 1:30 p.m. Michigan time and picked up our rental car, an atrociously ugly metallic gold Subaru Tribeca (John had requested a wagon or small SUV because we needed to be able to haul mulch for our yard). I really wonder who thought it would be a good idea to name a Subaru SUV after a neighborhood in New York City.

Driving through Pontiac on the way home further exacerbated what I can only describe as “sprawl shock.” I don’t know why it affected me more now than on previous visits home – probably because the end of our time in Germany is looming, perhaps sooner than I expected. I was relieved when we finally arrived in Rochester, with its quaint downtown shops and century-old neighborhoods. It comes as no surprise to us that the Germans who visit Chrysler from Mercedes all know Rochester, and describe it as their favorite town in Michigan.

Our elation at being back in Rochester was cut off abruptly when we pulled into our driveway. We had thought we could wait until we got home to set up our lawn service for the summer, but we were wrong. Apparently the recent rains followed by warm weather had sent our lawn – and its accompanying dandelions – into hyperdrive. There were also branches and leaves scattered all over our front walk and driveway, making the place look decidedly abandoned. We surveyed the damage, left an urgent message for the lawn service people, and set off to run some errands and satisfy our craving for raw seafood at Sumo Sushi.

Upon our return a couple of hours later, we were shocked to discover our lawn sheared to within an inch of its life. At first I wondered if the lawn service had gotten my call and come to our rescue already. That would have been fine, except that there were grass clippings scattered all over the driveway and sidewalk, making the place look almost worse than it had before. As soon as we got out of the car, the mystery was solved – our neighbor Greg across the street called out, “Hey, are you guys back? I mowed your lawn – it was starting to look like nobody lived there!” Which, of course, was indeed the case. He planned to come over and clean up the clippings as well, but just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. We thanked him profusely, as now we only had the overgrown backyard to contend with.

Inside, we found things to be in pretty good shape. All we had to do to “turn on” the house again was switch on the water, hot water heater, and furnace. We washed the antifreeze down all the drains, made up our bed, and plugged in the fridge.

I ran into Alexander, our nextdoor neighbor to the east, on Friday evening. His house is up for sale and it turns out he has already moved out but was just stopping by to pick up a few things. He informed me that our neighbors across the street to the west had moved out some time ago. This was a stunning piece of news because this couple had been watching our house religiously. (Over the winter, without our knowledge, Dawn had plugged in our garage door and was driving her car into our garage because she was afraid of coming into an empty house. My friend Alison encountered the tire tracks in the snow one day and got so freaked out that she was considering calling the police. Fortunately I figured out what must be happening and called Dawn at work to tell her not to use our garage anymore!) Dawn had promised to water our plants and put flowers out in the summer, so I couldn’t believe that they had moved away without telling us. To top it off, our neighbors across the street to the east also have their house up for sale, which means poor Greg is going to be surrounded by empty houses, for a while at least. Finally, Alexander told me that our neighbors directly to the west of us, who had their house up for sale in December, decided not to move after all. Now that we were all up to date on the state of the neighborhood, we fell into bed – leaving the mess of grass clippings and branches for tomorrow.