Weird

Well, this explains a lot.

Yes, I know, I have been absent from the internets, but that is due to problems with technology in my house and I was required to await the Comcast guy to come and fix it… and if he or should would step on it, I would really appreciate it.

In the meantime, I am just writing here in the house with no place to put this.

GAH!

Anywho, as my Grandma Miller would say, I shall get on with my tale.

Friday night was the beginning of the Royal Weekend. And truly the only place where there was a Royal connection.

It began with Fun Daddy and I getting completely lost on our way to the venue for the Grand-Duc’s of Luxembourg’s birthday and also Constitution Day. Why? Fun Daddy decided to wing it and left the invitation at the office. In his head he remembers Golf View. In my head I remember Glen View. Guess who wins the memory game?

Yeah, shocking.

We pull into the country club and crossed the bridge over the Northeast Branch of the Chicago River (or something like that) and I spy the evenings dark omen. The floating carcass of dead deer. YUCK. Naturally, Fun Daddy believes that I have hallucinated this and we continue on into the GLEN where we see the club.

We enter the club where we are met by the wife of the Honorary Consul/Cultural Attaché who greets us instructing me on the proper way to do it… apparently, I reek of hick. Most Europeans kiss on the cheek moving from one to the other (cheek, that is…). Luxembourgers, not to be undone, go back for a third bite at the apple (maybe in the hopes of catching a bit of tongue? I don’t really know). Ironically this woman is not Letzebuergish but Swiss by nationality. I would have thought that possessing a Germanic first, maiden and married name would have saved me some of that harassment, but apparently not.

We wandered about, doing the meets and greets with folks in the room and discovered something important. We are pretty much the youngest people at the event. Save for staff members of the various associations and one random Letze-Swiss-American grandchild… ugh.

Another thing catches my eye. All the guys between 40 (Fun Daddy) and 70 (after that they all pretty look generically falling apart) all look the same. Barrel chested, sturdy looking dudes with strong features. Weird. I had never noticed that before. But then, the most Luxembourgers I have ever seen in one place are all members of Fun Daddy’s family.

Then next thing I do is to start going through the literature around. News letters and such. There is the report on the new Luxembourg American Cultural Center. It is coming right along. Another on the Roots and Leaves program.. (I need to remember to scan and fax all of this to FIL. He will be pleased to see his name their.. and then will bitch at me for not sending the leaf stuff out yet. Sigh, more work for me.) A listing for a movie about the Grand-Duchesse Charlotte’s role during WWII including her radio broadcasts from exile in England, called Léif Lëtzebuerger. The Luxembourg News of America which is produced out of Skokie by a group that is mostly used to publishing mass bulletins for local Catholic parishes. I say this because it looks identical to the bulletins done at Perp and includes about 60% of the same advertisers. Which leads me to think that these folks go to Perp or the surrounding parishes. Weird.

Now most of the people look like generic old Catholic folks… the kind that make a fuss about going to mass every week, but there is one outlier in this group and it is an older gentlemen, that I began to refer to as Franz. See, he came to the party wearing his folk costume suit. He looked like he had popped out of the Ardennes, ham and all. All I could think was that the last time I saw someone wearing that suit, it was Christopher Plummer… in the sound of music just as he started on his quest to slip the family into Switzerland… weird. He seemed to know everyone. Except us of course but I had reached my limit of oddity for the evening and decided that we needed to scadoodle before I found out that Franz was my second cousin.

So, off Fun Daddy and I went… threw the glen over the river where Fun Daddy looked out of his window and said, “Hey! There is a deer carcass in the river!” Yup. Weird.