The lyf so short

And it's a REAL relief that I don't have to invest (much? any?) time into that particularly delightful pastime because today I got the news that one of the other English teachers is on extended sick leave and I'll have to take over half his lessons (grade 8).
So it's seriously good to have one less thing on my plate in my so-called spare time. I'm hearing bad things about this particular grade 8...

This night I dreamt of someone coming into the English institute asking for help on his research on the etymology of the name "Cthulhu", and how they would have pronounced it in Middle English.
(Don't ask me. I have NO idea. I don't even want to know what it means.)

Then I wake up and there's a veldfire outside (far enough away, no danger for us, don't panic): The sky's dark with smoke, it's raining soot and ash (but sloooowly, not the way it does in Pompeii documentaries), and the sun, shining through the clouds/smoke, is a bloody red. It looks like the Eye of Sauron, or something.
*twitch*

Just because I'm not at home doesn't mean nothing's happening there.

You may remember that when we started restoring the roof, we found all kinds of funky things, such as a mummified cat, a mummified rat, a bird skeleton, a ROUS skeleton, an egg and a box of old photos. Also, Jörg noted that there were some wires sticking out of a disused chimney.
In joke, he said something like, "Probably they chucked their WWII memorabilia in there".

Now apparently the renovation came into the vicinity of said chimney, and out of curiosity, the wires were pulled.

Which brought this to light.

Now I don't know how you'd feel about that, but I was sitting some thousand kilometers away and ellipsing. A lot.

This is what the contents of that bag looked like.
According to the boyfriend (whose father was in the police force, and who was taught to handle weapons with said police force and during his military service) this was a Walther P38, the official Wehrmacht handgun (it had a Wehrmacht registration stamp, too) which remained in use with the police and the military until the 1980s or so. With ammunition. And, most likely, in full working order. (No, he did not try that. The holes in the boards were there already. For serious.)

Now of course when something like this happens you have two options: The legal way and the illegal way.
The illegal way is don't say anything, keep it or sell it, and hope nobody who's not supposed to find out ever finds out.
The legal way is take it to the police and turn it in.

Since my boyfriend is, on the whole, a reasonable man who has too many projects on his hands to go to jail for two years or more in case anything who's not supposed to find out does find out, he turned it in. (Remember, this is not America: Obtaining the permission to own a gun is a lot harder and a lot more regulated.)
Turns out they're not just going to disarm it and give it to a museum or something.
It's going to be destroyed.

That makes me strangely unhappy. It's a dangerous thing, no question about that, but it's still a kind of historic artefact. I mean, it's even aesthetic in a kind of lethal way. Look at that design. I'm all for disarming it, but the legal situation is that it's going to be put into a compactor and turned into a blob of junk. Which I think is a shame.

You could have it disarmed at your own cost (which would be at least 200€ for something that could technically be done by anyone with a Dremel and a working knowledge of physics), which would allow you to keep it. Hah.

Accordingly, the police officer who filed the whole thing said something along the lines of "As a police officer I have to congratulate you on having done the right thing. Anything else would have been illegal and would have led to a lot of trouble. ... As a pal, however, I can only facepalm. Why the hell did you do that? You could have sold that one for 700€ at the very least. A gun that's no longer produced, with unknown ammunition, unregistered - that's the perfect murder weapon. There's a real market for that kind of thing."

Yeah. That a real invitation to be a good lawful citizen, isn't it.

Actually I think 700€ not worth the knowledge that I might have abetted murder, but I imagine many people would be tempted, or rather are tempted.
And while I'm glad not to have the thing in my house, because no matter how well it might be hidden some child is going to dig it out in ten, fifteen years time. I wouldn't want some teenager in his emo phase to find a gun. I couldn't sleep easy with something like that in my house. But I have to admit that a piece of history being turned into a block of matte metal makes me rather unhappy nonetheless.


And this, my friends, is a true story. Rabbit Hole Day is only on the 27th after all.

- - -

( Sowas passiert doch nicht in echt. )

After the swelling went down a bit over night, they could take another look at Ingrid's ankle and put her through the CT and all that to see whether the broken ankle is really the full extent of the damage.

Turns out that the joint isn't even broken. It was dislocated, but the paramedics set it right when they came in (... after they had finally found our house); the ligaments are torn, but nothing's broken. She's black and blue everywhere, of course, and got a bump on the back of her head, but, wow. Considering that right after it happened, Jörg and the medics expected all kinds of horrors from basal skull fracture to paraplegia, and considering that a free uncontrolled fall of 3 meters isn't exactly the healthiest occupation for a woman of 66 years, this comes close to a miracle.

What likely helped to prevent worse injuries was that Ingrid does a lot of sports; she teaches several gymnastics and aerobics groups and practices Tai Chi, so she's got quite firm and reliable muscles, and apparently they managed to keep things in place.

There you go, kids, when your mom says you ought to do some sports, she knows what she's talking about ;)