Hil, your grandfather's story is amazing (and go him for deciding Austria could go to hell).

As I know we've talked about before, my grandmother also came from Vienna during the war; the part of the family that survived split between NY, Australia, and Israel. Neither she nor her sister went back for decades after (I don't think my great-grandmother ever went back at all), but she went a couple of times, and I went with her on what turned out to be her last trip. It was easily the most fucked up trip of my life -- days of walking around the old neighborhood while she pointed at empty lots or new buildings and said "that's where (cousin I'd never heard of) lived, but of course the Americans bombed it during the war..." "that's where (other cousin I'd never heard of) lived, but of course the Germans bombed it during the war..." Mixed with the schmaltziest kind of Viennese tourist kitsch (SO MANY PALACES AND WALTZES) and, yes, Freud's house.

But you know? She dealt with it all the only way she could, and wanted me to see it.

Our wonderful doctor when I was a kid had completed medical school in Austria before fleeing to the U.S. He had no way to prove that, so he started over and repeated medical school.

ARGH!

So we are now 0-for-3 in closing after going under contract.

These fuckers managed to weasel out with their bank, which means I don't even get the satisfaction of keeping their earnest money. (They were at the point of making unrealistic requests for workorders--like, say, a $26k whole-house rewire with integrated smoke alarms, but hadn't filed the extension, so were actually obliged to go through with it or pull out and sacrifice their earnest money if they couldn't get the bank to pull the plug: I will note, we actually offered do do a lot of stuff.)

So we still have to do the stuff we were going to do, if they were buying it, so it can be addressed in the Form 17, and now that it's gone under contract three times and fallen through each time, I can only imagine it'll be avoided, and it's empty and just costing us a ridiculous amount each month, and damn it.

As I know we've talked about before, my grandmother also came from Vienna during the war; the part of the family that survived split between NY, Australia, and Israel.

Just on the wild chance that it might be, was the side that went to Australia named Sallmayer? (A Sallmayer family that went from Vienna to Australia is a kind of weird mystery branch of my family tree, so that just struck me as "might as well ask.")

Nope - Australian branch were Oppenheims and Singers. But it would be a heck of a coincidence.

I'm sorry PMM. That must be so frustrating

Yeah, and I should probably be off the intertubes for a while, because OMG, I JUST WANT TO CUT A BITCH.

Which I can't say on most of the Intertubes I am on, because misogyny and problematic and no no no. Well, fuck your specious-ass fucking arguments, Intertube Progressives. Imma bitch, Imma whine, Imma possibly even use blind faith in a sentence, except not where I hang, because ableist or something, and I'm too tired for arguments.

I did unfollow someone who had written things I like because I had my last straw moment with their warnings culture over the topness in relation to a story that the author had labelled choose not to warn. So, hey. My bad mood was good for something.

Nope - Australian branch were Oppenheims and Singers. But it would be a heck of a coincidence.

That wouldn't make you related to Peter Singer, the moral philosopher, would it?

I hate when able-bodied people try to earn cred by being more serious about language than me. I just wanna tell them "eat a muffin, whitey." But some conversations are complicated. Like, I am extremely in favor of a woman's right not to bear everything that gets in her body but at the same time, I just chided someone for calling babies with down's syndrome "children like that"

The 'unamerican credentials don't transfer well' thing still exists - a woman I know from high school did law school in the UK (she was married to a British man) and when she divorced and returned the the US found that she could not use her law degree. She's currently enrolled in a US law school (while working as a paralegal.)

I attended a performance of the Vienna Philharmonic in Tel Aviv in 1996, with a (non-Jewish) Austrian woman who was working on the dig with me. She remarked that is was very clear, I guess from listening to them talk, that a lot of members of the audience were originally from Vienna.