I found a couple more photos taken in 1971, one of the clock tower in Kleber Kaserne in Kaiserslautern, and the other at Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin.

I lived in the building where the tower is. There was a passageway at street level, under the tower. The unmarried NCOs lived in singles rooms in the section north of the passageway. South of the passageway, the rest of us lived in rooms with up to three other people. We had a separate entrance to our part of the building at the south end.

The building was comfortable if a bit derelict. The West German government paid for remodelling and repainting the place while I lived there, and it started to look fairly decent. The thing I remember most was the endless hot water for showers! I doubt most Europeans would approve of the wanton use of water and energy to heat our shower water, but no one ever commented on our excess.

I feel ashamed now to think of how many long, steamy showers I took before I lived at the apartment on Beethovenstrasse and hearned a bit about the economics of bath taking in Germany. You may recall, we had to plug ten pfennig coins into a gas meter to heat a small amount of water for bathing.

I started out using 50 pfennigs worth (more or less 80 US cents at the time), but learned how I could have a good bath for 10 pfennigs worth if I wetted myself down, soaped myself up, then used the hand shower to finish the bath. When I returned to the barracks at Kleber Kaserne, I did take shorter showers, using the “wet down-soap up-shower down” method. Somebody was paying for all that wasted water and energy used to heat the water…!

There was a museum next to Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall. I must have taken this photo from there. That’s the guardhouse at Checkpoint Charlie on the left. In the background, in front of the wall, there’s a gallows-looking viewing perch so visitors to this famous crossing into East Berlin could look over the wall into the mess that was the DDR, East Germany.

I noticed one of the illustrations in the article in the Berlin Wall link showed a copy of the orders US troops used when crossing from West Germany into West Berlin. I had an old one but couldn’t find it. The thing oddest about travelling to West Berlin was we travelled by night in train cars marked with on the sides with “US Army Transportation Corps”, pulled by East German locomotives. The switch happened at the border when the West German locomotive was replaced with the East German locomotive.

There were US and Soviet officers on the train to verify the travel orders were correct and matched up with the people on board. We were instructed not to get off the train until we got to West Berlin or to take any photos from the train. When the train stopped for any reason, there was a security fence on both sides of the train, and armed East German guards with dogs patrolled the area till the train left.

I remember looking inside windows when the train passed close to apartments, thinking how dull and colorless everything looked.

Berlin and the eastern part of Germany have changed immensely since I was over there. Their current Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is a former citizen of East Germany! Berlin’s been revitalized. The Wall mostly is gone except for remnants, souvenirs I suppose of a nasty time in history. The Reichstag, a burnt-out shell in a weedy field when I saw it, is the seat of government of the new unified Germany, remodelled, revitalized, with a lovely glass dome.

I liked my old header. It showed Dougy as a kitty, and was he a cutie! Nothing wrong with that, and it served its purpose for over a year’s worth of posts.

On the other hand, the theme of this blog is “surviving retirement with two cats”. For those fans of Andy, the old header was one kitty short, and the new one takes care of that. Andy’s the kitty on the left, leaving Dougy on the right, of course

The new header shows the boys at just about three months four days of age, and is a screen print taken from the video I posted yesterday, “kitten wars IV“. I think it is charming, shows the boys in the process of rough housing on the settee, and came at that one moment when both stopped playing long enough to look up and see me making the video.

The photo quality isn’t the best, but what can I say? The settee didn’t move, but the boys were wiggly kittens. I can live with it.

the old header…

🙂

The digital note on my desktop told me something else that’s on top for today: I “get” to catch the boys to put on flea-tick-etc. medicine. I’ll take care of Andy when I have him captured for his regular medication, which now is chicken flavored. We’ll see if chicken flavor makes it more acceptable to the patient!

Less stressful, it’s time to rotate a new fountain into place. That’s simple enough, if messy. The current one in use still looks pretty good, so I can give it an extra day or two of use if I have too much drama medicating the cats!

🙂

Since I had to make a correction on the boys’ age in “kitten wars IV” and the new header, I may as well update you on my to do list: DONE! The boys have clean water and I had no problem medicating both, though I think Andy may have barfed it up somewhere I’ll find later — with my bare feet, no doubt! He had a bit of barf hanging on his chin when I put the newly cleaned water fountain out.

Katzenworld blog challenged its followers to submit photos of their kitties. Though they don’t have to be tummy photos, Andy is a natural for this specific challenge: He loves to sleep on his back, and I have a long file of photos of him exposing his tummy.

The Andy photos range from when he was a kitten to more recently, and they show him in full light or dark, which means his tummy appears to be anything from black to a lovely silver, depending on how the light strikes it. There’s even one after he got a summer haircut. Ha! He looks a bit “plucked” in it, but hair grows back.

Let the photos begin!

Andy shows his tummy.

Here are a couple of videos featuring Andy’s tummy…why not?!

Or this classic of Andy and Dougy in play when they were wee kittens. Yeah, there is a tummy focus to it, eventually, as in “got your tummy”, a game I played with Andy and came to regret. 🙂

Here’s the photo required for the submission of one’s kitty tummy photos:

Family photos are fun to look through. You never know what they will reveal, what pets you never knew, how your older siblings ever were smaller than you!

I don’t know the puppy’s name — Topsie, maybe? — other than it died young — distemper? — but not before it tried to eat my oldest sister’s cracker.

Dad was Chief of Police here, and this is my brother wearing Dad’s police hat while perched on the police motorcycle. I don’t remember the motorcycle, but I remember watching crews pave that section of Missouri Avenue, which means it was a dirt road till the late 1940s, perhaps as late as the early 1950s.

My brother, the younger of my two sisters, and me (in the carriage) pose in our Grandma’s backyard. That’s good old Laddie (Gram’s dog), the dog I grew up with. He was very possessive and protective of me, I understand. He was a good boy!

Dad and Mom built the home where they raised their family. I think we moved up there in 1951. I remember each of us kids carrying a dresser drawer down the alley when we moved from Gram’s house to our new home. That’s about it. (We must have looked really cute, like a parade of ducklings!)

Dad was a perfectionist and very skilled in construction work, a legacy of his short “career” on the railroad. Those cinder block walls deviated only one-quarter inch from one corner to the next, something the city engineer found remarkable. He’d never found that level of precision in any construction site inspection he’d made in his career.

Mom, Dad, and another couple bought a surplus WWII warehouse from the city. It was on the former US Army airbase. They tore it down, and built the house on Mississippi with that well-aged, high quality former government wood.

That’s a very young me standing by Mom, being very helpful, I’m sure!

One of the family legends has Mom hanging upside down with a cinder block in her hands. She’d slipped, somehow managed to hang onto the scaffolding with her feet (!), but refused to drop the block because “it cost 25 cents, and I don’t want to break it”. Mom finally listened to Dad, I guess, and let it fall, but I can believe the story. Both Mom and Dad were tight with money because money was tight.

I told you I helped! Yeah, before there was Bob the Builder, there was Dougy the Digger. Notice my shovel-handling skills.

All this happened once upon a time.