With a laughing and a crying eye

I came home recently. In some ways, I'm delighted to be back. Honestly, it was hard sometimes to have so little consistency - there were only one or two people that I was around longer than three weeks. It's given me a new appreciation for the relationships I've built here, which have had time to mature. But my 10 weeks overseas were filled with so many interesting events, opportunities for growth, and intriguing people that I think back wistfully on my experiences. I would be thrilled to return. My co-worker used the perfect idiom (seen here in the title) to describe how I'm leaving.

Like I learned after my semester in France last year, the language follows you long after your immersion in it ends. A few times, I've been irritated that I had to stick to English, because the perfect German phrase was on the tip of my tongue. I love that my family knows German, so I can get away with a lot of it. In case I slip up and use them by mistake, see if you can figure out these German compound words and expressions:

German expressions with literal English translations
1. der Ohrwurm (ear worm, earwig)
2. langsam auf die Socken gehen (go slowly onto the socks)
3. nicht alle Tassen im Schrank haben (to not have all the cups in the cupboard)
4. da liegt der Hase im Pfeffer (the rabbit lies in pepper there)
5. der Hammer (hammer)
6. durcheinander (through each other)
7. Urlaub in Balkonien machen (to make a vacation in Balconia)
8. Sauerstoff (sour stuff)

Figurative English meanings
a. that's the root of the problem
b. to get going, to head out
c. the limit, a doozie
d. oxygen
e. to be crazy
f. catchy song, song stuck in one's head
g. to stay at home
h. jumbled, mixed-up, chaotic

Answers
1.f 2.b 3.e 4.a 5.c 6.h 7.g 8.d