Yee-Haw

Amazing how quickly things can change on this great adventure of ours (said with just a bit of sarcasm). One day you think that you will be the chef for a bistro, the next you are again sitting wondering what the future will bring.

And yes, all of you who told me to go for the job interview may now tell me “I told you so!”

Well, nothing is concrete yet, but the people from the UK who wanted to rent the house seem to be backing out. They’ve dropped the price they want to pay up front from 10,000€ to 3,600€ and are just sort of making noises like if this who thing doesn’t come together quickly, it won’t at all.

Jess was just sobbing last night as we talked to the woman via IM. Now those of you who know Jess well also know that she can really push people too far. When we found out about the possibility of the deal going sour, she wanted to go with the family to Portugal so that she could be with their son. Well, this was too much for the woman who literally said she didn’t know us or our history and that she had to think of her family first and she felt she was being pushed into something…. Now in reality these are all valid statements, but it was the way she said it that came as a personal affront to us.

These were the people who blew in one day, stayed for four, made all these plans and sucked Jess and I into them, continued to be in contact with us and then who suddenly are really rude.

I’m sorry, but I still live in a state where I do trust people, and as you already know, am more than willing to take a leap of fate, but I have to tell you that yesterday my “glass is half full” optimism took a hard hit.

So I emailed the man who wanted to interview me for the job in Frankfurt and asked if the position was still available and if so, would he still be interested in talking to me. I also went back and put in some applications for civilian military jobs.

And now we sit and wait. To be honest, if they bought the place I wouldn’t be too happy staying here, though I would until I found a job, then adios.

Either way, Mark is saying to hang in there, a solution will come up, and to not worry. He may be really hard to listen to all the time, but he is nice, he has never questioned our “history”.

So we have two couples staying here for the next couple of days, and I decided to use an empty table in the former bar now lounge/TV area and put out coffee, tea, and some cookies for the guests. In the back of my mind I was thinking, if I wanted people to eat dinner here, I would start out giving them a reason to hang out, in order to smell food, see others eat etc. Maybe the first night they would g out, but the second stay in. I just wish I could take this place and run it myself, with all my own ideas. It is very hard butting heads with Mark. I would want to be able to just dig in and make my changes.

I don’t think I will plan on staying here if Mark stays, only because he wants to open the bar up again. I know it does make money, but I just hate living in a place where it is so disgustingly smoking and there are people coming in and out the door all night.

But who knows, planning does not seem to be my forte. LOL


In the meantime Jess moved into the small single room last night, and is still sleeping. I am surprised she didn’t come down to check her mail every second. I feel really badly for her.

Travelling with the Ortegas

Well, a bit more excitement our way.

Jodi was kind enough to send me the remainder of the money from the house (YEAH!) so I have been able to pay up the car payments, get Nick’s bank account back into the black. Not sure if I told that story, but basically they took his pay check to start to pay off Jess’ overdrawn account, so he ends up minus $500 after fees!!!!! AUUGGHH.

Note: NEVER, I repeat NEVER open up a bank account at US Bank. NEVER!!!!!!!!!!!!

So that got paid up, now all he needs to remember to do is get MY name off his account or they will probably take his pay check for my overdrawn account. But hey, I’m betting he forgets to. GRRR……..

Also,(GOD forbid I ever have money for me) it turns out somehow I had missed a car insurance payment, which I need to check out, because I am not sure I did, but nick was driving with NO insurance. AAUUGGHHHHHH…………


Looking bank through my bank account, I remember one month the State Farm statement being like $18, which I thought was cool, did not question, and I though I paid, but maybe something was wrong with online payment or something, but I do remember that, so…. Anyway, there went another $300 of my newfound money to get it back on, WHICH Nick is supposed to do this morning by going down and giving them a check, cross your fingers he does this.. (HUGE SIGH)

So yesterday Jess and I took a train to the nearest fairly big town to go shopping.
We get to the station in Herzberg, which is basically a little platform next to the train tracks. We get our tickets, board the train, and then notice that the train is going the total opposite direction. (Welcome to the Ortega world of travel)

Our only guide up to this point has been this laminated train schedule in German that Mark has hung up at the house. (THAT should have warned us right away) It’s really odd, you would think in a normal world that one side of the schedule would be times the trains come and the other side would be times the trains leave. Well, we never really figured the damn thing out, and then later in the evening coming back, Jess decided that it wasn’t even the right schedule for where we needed to go…… yeah….

ANYWAY, we are heading in the wrong direction, and Jess deciphers that the train will go the same way about a ½ hour, and then it would start back the opposite direction to where we came from, and THEN go the right way…. We started out at 10:30 in the morning, expecting to get there by 11:30…. Read on! LOLOL

So the ticket lady comes by, she looks at my ticket and says it is no good. (FUCK, I think, it’s bad enough it is going to cost us something like $40 to take this trip, she’s now going to fine me…) Luckily she must have seen this happen before, because she sort of laughs, shakes her head like “more American idiots” and goes on…. SHEW!)

Off we go, back and forth along the same route for another hour, and instead of getting to the city by 11:30, it’s now 12:30. We head out of the train station and look for a bus that says Zentrum, meaning center, which we figure will take us to the shopping district. (Need I say more?)

We hop on the bus, and within a few minutes we are going through the shopping district. BUT, being who we are, we decided that in order to make sure we get the right bus back, we need to make sure we get off at the stop that actually says Zentrum. After a bit we leave the shopping area.. Now somewhere deep down inside we KNOW we should immediately get off, but again, somewhere in our pea brains we think, or at last I think, (who KNOWS what Jess was thinking) I think ok, no stop that says Zentrum, maybe there is a BIGGER shopping area in the mystical place called Zentrum.

So we hang on, and drive and drive through the university area, the low income area, and the start heading out of town. Ok, by now we are saying hmmmmmm… should we have gotten off at the shopping area? Do we want to get off and walk all that way? Do these busses make a circle back? Are we in fact going to France?

Back out into the countryside, we sit frozen in our seats, and then we start to laugh. Oh what the hell, our journeys are always an adventure, relax and enjoy.

We pick up a bunch of little 8 year olds coming home from school. That is one thing we have noticed in both Italy and Germany, school kids take trains and local busses to get to and from school. There are no “school busses”

The kids all have their backpacks on, dolphins and undersea creatures seem to be the craze with them this year. After about 5 minutes of mass chaos, the bus driver takes off, using the brakes just a bit to put them off balance and into hysterical and VERY cute peals of laughter.

By now Jess and I have moved ourselves into the fat person seat at the very front. We figure this because it’s bigger than one person, but certainly not big enough for two. We know this because half of my left leg is hanging off the side of the seat. We fight for space for a few minutes, pushing each other back and forth until I give up and balance precariously off the edge. I hang onto a pole for dear life and hope the bus driver doesn’t notice and decide to be a smart ass and turn a sharp right to make me hit the floor.

After we are settled, we ask the driver if he speaks English and then ask about Zentrum and shopping and he laughs and basically says relax and enjoy the ride, it’s going to be another ½ hour before we get back to town.

We sit back and enjoy the outskirts of town, the clean German streets, houses, yards, and finally head back to the shopping center. Not once have we noticed the elusive ZENTRUM stop.

We decide to be smart and get off the bus.

Now the trip that should have taken us a little over an hour has now taken over 3 hours. This, we decide, is typical for us, so we hake our heads and then go off to shop!
We go first to our favourite German store – CandA. I LOVE the clothes there. I head for the jeans. FINALLY I will be able to get a pair that fit, since mine have been hanging off me for months now.

I get into the dressing room and joy oh joy! I look THINNER! The stomach is still there unfortunately, MUCH smaller, but I decide I really need to start doing sit-ups to help that. My legs and hips however look great!

I try on the jeans, they looks great! I then have to put the old pants on… MY GOD, I look like a skateboarder gone bad. The crotch hangs down LOW, very sad looking. After we pay for everything, I make sure I go to a WC as soon as possible to change pants. I FEEL HUMAN again!

I also finally get a coat!!!!!! It is brushed leather, a camel color, shortish, with a lining, collar and cuffs made out of what I can only describe as shorthaired curly caramel colored cocker spaniel ears. I LOVE it and it is WARM. Now I just need a scarf, mittens and hat.. It has turned cold here and the wind is deadly.

Jess now needs a heavier coat, but she did get jeans and a sweater.

Anyway, we did our shopping we each bought a couple of books in ENGLISH! We also stopped in the town square where everyone was drinking glasses of warm punch and hot chocolate. There was a kinder (child) and adult version of the drink. I thought it meant size, but soon found out it meant with or without alcohol! Jess had the hot chocolate which had like coconut liquor in it, I had the punch, which I personally though sucked, but I am not much of an alcohol person. We both understood why everyone there was in such a good mood and not complaining about the cold!

I have not been very impressed with German Christmas so far, very limited I think. I like the lack of commercialism, no huge Christmas displays in the stores, etc, but there is a lack of variety as far as cookies, etc…..

We ended up eating at the same Chinese place we ate at the last time we came into town. Well actually we got it to go and ate it at the train station. It was NOT as good as last time. Of course last time we felt like we had come from the ends of the world for a decent meal, and now that I have been cooking decent food, I think we just realized it was always so-so Chinese food. LOL

We knew that the last train left about 19:46, 7:46, so we made sure we got to the train station on time, even managed to catch the right bus! Even though train stations have an indoor area underneath the rails, there are open stairwells that go up to each track, so finding a warm place to eat our food was not easy. We finally decided to go up to the track early and were lucky enough to see our train was waiting, so we were able to go in ½ hour before it left.

On our adventures in the morning we found out that Herzberg actually has two train stations. The little one we were at and a big one. We had no idea where this big one was located with perspective to the main town we knew, so we had bought tickets back to the little station.

All was well, the train stopped at the main station first, and then we assumed at the small train station…. Uh-huh, you guess it, back off in some other direction we went. Not even to the same place as in the morning, some really unknown town we had never heard of. This was the last train of the night and we again were heading off to France or some other strange place.

After some discussion, I went and asked a young girl if she spoke English.

Note: This may have been made before, but is an important note: Ask young people first if they speak English, as they now have to take English classes in school.

She was very nice and told us we could get off at the next town (thank god we asked when we did) and then wait and there would be one last train coming back to the main Herzberg rail station. We did as she told us and decided we would like to get home some time, and took a taxi from the main station in town. I decided to look on the bright side of things….. I thought the train fare was too expensive, so we certainly got our money’s worth of ride!!

Once again, a 1 hour trip took twice as long. We had decided to go into town and use the internet café, since they had screaming fast computers compared to the dial up at Mark’s. I am not complaining, thank god he has access, but screaming fast internet was nice for a change.


Well, that was our big trip to the city.

We got about 2 or 3 inches of snow today, very pretty to see the snow on the pine trees up on the mountain.

I took the dog for a walk the other evening, about 10 pm. It was so quiet, really nice. Chilly, and as we walked down the street the mountain went straight up along one side of us, and on the other I could hear the stream that runs through town. The sidewalk was cobblestone and there weren’t many cars going past. We walked and walked, and I just breathed in the air, listened to the water, and admired the Bavarian style houses along the way.

I was trying to figure out what was different and I suddenly realized…. I was not spending any energy listening to hear if anyone was following me… in America if I would walk at night I would be nervous, and listening to make sure no one was walking behind me, etc.


Here I was simply walking and enjoying myself. It was a nice feeling. I liked it a lot…………

Counting down the time

Well, at least Jess is counting the days. I just know that in a little over a week the new owners will be coming here and another great change will happen in this adventure of ours.

Or not. I have beening talking online with Jan, and she is very nervous about how unorganized Mark is. She feels like he is not telling here everything and she doesn't want to sink 10,000€ into a place where he might want it back in a couple of months. I DON't see him doing that, he wants out badly, but I can't blame her for being VERY nervous about the whole thing. She told me not to worry, things will work out, they are moving ahead on the place in Portugal. Maybe they will let us come work there if this falls through. Let the chips fall where they may. We seem to have become permanent wards of whatever family will have us. :-)

In the meantime, I tried to get ingredients for some sort of Thanksgiving dinner here, NO GO. I think I would have to go out and grown my own sweet potatoes, plus we have no oven for turkey, etc. No problem. I am thinking Tacos, which here is just as good as turkey. We haven't had any sort of Mexican food since we were in the states. Taco shells here were a whopping 3.27€ which makes it around 3.75 dollars for a box of 8, probably old shells.LOL Oh well, worth a try.


The weather here is sunny but cold. About the same tempp as it has been in MN. I can see why there is such a large German population there. SAME weather up to this point, but I kknow that pretty soon MN will be WAY colder than here.

Not much else going on, just hanging out, trying not to die from boredom. I think we are going to have to scare the sit out of Mark today and make him see that if he doesn't get on the ball with this, the deal will fall through, he will have NO money and will end up losing the house altogether. Oh joy.

I WANT MY MONEY FROM ITALY SO JESS AND I CAN GO TO FRANKFURT FOR AN ENGLISH MONVIE MARATHON!

ME, the person who loved movies, looked at the listings in the Blaine area yesterday and didn't even recognize the names of half the movies playing! Amazing. Starting to feel like a European.

Well, I am going to go now. Later!

SAFE? We don't need no freaking safe!

Well, most people said to take the job in Frankfurt... That means I went ahead and emailed not to call me about the job, I had found another. LOL

Most replies were about it being safer to take the job, except for Eric, who knows me sooo well. LOL He said he chose number 1 for me, but HE would take 2.....

EXACTLY! Staying here is not safe at all, much more risky, but hey, risk is why I came here! I would rather put "Chef in a German restaurant on my resume" than "Helpdesk in Germany" any day.

Plus, it was just a man wanting to talk to me about the job, I was not being offered it. This is really where I want to be for now.

So Eric wins the prize of the day.......

Not to make anyone mad, because I did want peoples' opinion.... I was surprised how many times the word safe came up in the replies.

Anyway.. I was desparite(sp) for dessert tonight, so made a cake, oil and eggs, flour and baking soda and pineapple juice, made this stuff that I bought a while ago, hoping it was cornstartch, but is some sort of cake filling mix, which cooked turned out sort of like custard.

The cake once again didn't cook in the middle because I did it in the toaster oven, but I scooped out the middle part where it was raw, then filled it with canned pineapple, and then poured the custardy stuff all over the cake and pineapple.... NOT BAD!

Anway, not much else new here...... Thank you very much for the replies on what to do!!!! Later!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

It snowed last night and this morning, it was NICE to see snow when I didn’t have to drive to work in it. The mountains are beautiful, and did I mention that I don't have to drive in it? ;-)



Well, I KNEW this was going to happen. As soon as it looks like I could be settled here, I get a couple of calls and then an email asking me to contact a man abut a helpdesk job in Frankfurt that I applied to. GRRR… I received two calls from England on my cell phone that I missed, and since I have no credit left on it, I can’t even get into my voicemail to see who the messages were from. Then I get an email today from a gentleman with that number, asking me to contact him about the job in Frankfurt.


Ok people, here is where I could REALLY use your advice. There might be 2 options if this man is going to offer me a job. Tell me what you think about both, which you think I should do (this could obviously change if I don’t get offered the job, etc)

I also would like to know who might like a Christmas card from Germany, should my money come in, in time to send them out.
After reading this, please send me an email at synch390@yahoo.com with your opinion and
Whether or not you would like an xmas card (send me your snail mail address)

Here are the possible two scenarios:

#1
Stay where I am.
Help set up menus
Learn to cook things
No need to find place to stay
No income until kitchen is up and running
No guarantee of income should kitchen not make money
Kick back atmosphere
Lots of nice people around for support
SMALL town atmosphere, but will have car to use to get around (they are bringing one down from England for us to have (use)
Chance to fly back and forth to Portugal to help in the kitchen when they are busy

#2
Accept job (if offered)
Make way more money guaranteed, even if pay is not huge
Get apartment of our own in large city
Will have to FIND apartment in city
Privacy, but no one around for support
Live in larger town, be nearer to stores, transportation
More time to ourselves


Ok, this is dumb, even I can see option number 1 is better, it just the no money thing gets old after a while, though I know they will take care of us, etc.

UGH.

I made some sort of funny potato thingies with dinner tonight, they are sort of like mashed potato buds in little plastic bags with holes in them. You boil them and the water goes through and constitutes them, though they tasted stale and starchy to me. Maybe old, and maybe better with gravy. I made them with frikkadel(sp) pork of course, every damn thing that is meat here, is made out of pork. If I start making piggy noises….slap me.

Well, that is enough… I think I will just email the gentleman back and say that I am no longer looking for a job. I can’t believe I will be doing that. God I hate having to be an adult again to do this. It has been so nice not being responsible.

Either way, email me with your address if you would like a Christmas card.

Love to you all!!

One hospital per country!

Wow, another blog entry from me! Spent the majority of the day at the local hospital seeing if I had a sinus infection. I thought it was too early in the lifespan of it, to go in, but figured why wait until I got really sick before I went in.

I was also very lucky to have been made to buy insurance in Italy, because they let me use it here. Sooner or later I am going to be forced to come up with some sort of insurance. UGH…..

The German hospital was so much better than the Italian one, we only ended up waiting for about 15 minutes versus the 2 hours in Italy. In the waiting room I had been translating everything I could think of and putting it on this little teeny bit of paper I had in my billfold. It was about 1 inch by 3 inches and had someone’s email address written on it.

I wrote down the German words for “headache”, “stomach ache”, no fever, “I have chronic asthma”, “today asthma OK”, “but” no antibiotics, “possible” pneumonia.

I didn’t know if the Dr would speak English, so right away I handed him this tiny scrap of paper, and all the words were in different places on it, so I had to point out one, then the next, make him turn the paper over, show him the next. He was laughing and when he was done looking at it, began speaking in English .LOLOL. Hey, I wanted to make sure everything was understood!

It turns out they have a blood test (only in Germany? I had never heard of this) that checks for a certain protein that will tell them if you have a sinus infection. I didn’t have it, so that was good, but he still wrote out a prescription for me that I could get filled if I got worse. He said wait until I needed it, because it is about 45 €, but was good. So I am hanging on to that.

Not much time online tonight, so will just let you know that I FINALLY managed to get through the whole Lord of the Rings Triligy. Ok, I do admit to fast forwarding through some of the war scenes.. *YAWN* Anyway, I will keep this short, and will write tomorrow. Night!

THE UK INVADES!!!!

Ok, way better news going on here. A lovely family from England converged upon us this last Saturday and is taking over this place. Jan, the mom is originally from Scotland, she’s 45, her son Rob is 19, and her husband, Frank is a police officer. They brought along Jay, who has a 4 month old baby with Jan’s daughter. Jay is the chef of the family, though both Frank and Rob like to cook…. BUT, since they are also buying a restaurant in Portugal, Jay will be helping me come up with a menu for here, as well as refining my cooking skills, etc.

In short, Jess and I can stay living here, and I have been hired on as the main chef! I will also be going to and from Portugal to help out in the kitchen there when it gets busy! Oh yeah! That to me is amazing, I get to fly back and forth to Portugal, to their place which is right on the ocean, and help cook there! THIS is the type of thing I was looking for when I planned to come to Europe. I don’t mind staying in one spot at all, because there is so much within a short flying
distance!




Everyone left this morning to go back and sort things out in England, and then in 2 weeks everyone will converge on us again, Mark, the current owner will be gone by then. Rob will be living here permanently. Jan’s parents will also be coming in two weeks, and it looks like everyone will be staying through Christmas. Frank is a police officer in England, so he will not be here the whole time.

They are also bringing down one of their cars so that we’ll have transportation, since Mark either didn’t want to sell his car, or was asking too much, etc. So this means that I will be driving a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side!!! How fun will that be! It can also be training for when I visit England.

Everything happened so fast, and everyone in this family is so fantastic, but I sort of had a mini breakdown last night. I ended up calling my mom and bawling my eyes out. I feel so guilty that we will have all these people here and my mom and Nick will be alone for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The family said they are welcome here any time, but I don’t get paid until the restaurant is up and running in a month, so money is still going to be tight until then. PLUS both my mom and Nick still need to get their visas.

Jess and I still have the second half of our plane tickets from the original trip to Italy. We could pick up the flight in Amsterdam and fly back Dec 1st to the states to visit, but I have no money for a return flight to Germany. I am praying the house sells or I get another payment from Jodi, but then I should be paying the car payments for Nick, they are now two months behind. Anyone know how long you can get away without making car payments before they come to repossess it?? AUGH. So all troubles are certainly not over, but we are sure now that we will be staying in Germany long term. That is kind of a relief, now in December sometime we can apply for the extension of our permits here, and then we will be able to take free German language classes that the government offers. They do this to encourage assimilation, which works for me, I WANT to be able to speak the language.

Sooooo… that is the latest…. Much more exciting and upbeat than the last few blogs have been. I should have a lot more to say now, and should be updating the blog more often. We just need to be able to get through the next two weeks living with Mark. Things will be much harder now, I think, to be able to lend and ear to listen to him for long periods of time unfortunately.

Lot’s more to tell. Where to start.
Weeelllll… Jess and Rob hit it off right away and after only 3 days consider themselves boyfriend and girlfriend. OH,OH! The first night everyone was here, Jay and Rob stayed up with us and Mark, and were drinking. Jess and I went to bed, and sometime in the early morning we hear Mark outside our door asking if Missy, his dog was in our room. She was and the door was open, which is weird because we keep it closed because of the cats. (which, by the way are going to be allowed to have run of the house, in fact Jan has two dogs but is only bringing one for the month of December because of the cats, which to me says it is fine to let them out. They also have a Persian cat at home, and they are always worried about it getting out, so we should be safe in making sure our cats don’t get out here.)

Anyway, Missy was in our room. Jess gets up to close the door and go to the bathroom. When she comes out, she sees a strange shoe on the floor at the end of my bed. (My side of the bed is the farthest from the door.) When Jess looks closer she notices that the shoe is actually a foot! She goes up and looks, and Rob is sleeping on the floor along my side of the bed!

We laughed so hard. We think he drank too much and didn’t know what room was his, which could make sense but we were amazed that he could make it to the far side of our room in the dark to lay on the floor, without making any noise to wake us up! We made sure he was breathing, threw a blanket on him and a pillow under his head. I could not stop laughing. Later when we were talking about how we were surprised that he didn’t just trying to crawl into bed first, jess said if he has, she would have just shifted to the middle. LOL. That is how comfortable we both feel with all of this family right away.

The next morning I told Jan that if she was wondering what happened to her son, he was asleep on the floor of her room. She was so apologetic, we just said not to worry about it, no big deal. Then after we found out that Rob and Jess slept together last night (JUST SLEPT) Jan was so cool. She just says “I apologize for my son’s behaviour.” I just cracked up and said “And I apologize for my DAUGHTER’S behaviour” and then Jay just said “And a truce has been formed”

But make no mistake about it, these are NICE people, not one sleazy person in the bunch. They have manners, respect each other and genuinely LIKE each other. Very nice.

Last night, when my stomach was so upset due to stress I now think, Jan brought down something for me to take called “Andrews salts”

The closest thing I can compare it to is alka seltzer, but it is nothing like it. You put it in water, stir it up, it fizzes like crazy and you are supposed to drink it down fast. I then let out one small burp, then one HUGE one! That is part of what it does, like lassoes all the air in your stomach and kicks it out in one burp. NICE stuff.

So now the house is all quiet, and we are waiting for Mark to get up so we can get cat food and litter. Now it is VERY uncomfortable asking him for money for cat food and litter, we are worried he is going to make a huge deal out of it, pretty sure he will make a bigger deal about it than before. I feel bad, but they have to eat.

Well, I am stopping here for now. Will update later as I remember more about what went on. MOM; DAMN IT GET YOUR PASSPORT SO YOU CAN COME OVER HERE! You too Nick, so you can visit! I love you both!!!!

OK, let's just rethink my goals

I need to be out of here, this place just doesn't have a good feel to it anymore. It was lovely having a bit of a rest, but now I NEED TO GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE! Here, meaning the place we are staying.I am applying like mad at Amry, Navy and Air Forces bases everywhere in Europe. Span is the new one I am now trying for. There is also a new type of job I never knew how to look for until the other day, and through this I found an IT job opening at a school technology lab on the base in Heidelberg. The city we originally wanted to live in. The opening closes next week already, so everyons CROSS THOSE FINGER AND DO THE LITTLE RITUALS YOU DO; DEPENDING ON RELIGION:Hi Susan, thanks for the comment, I'm glad you are reading this. I am going to again make an effort to start posting a bit every day, since things may be changing soon, I hope.This place just has too much cigarrette smoke, drinking, problems associated with it. i could handle it at first, but now I feel like one big cig smell, and am hacking from asthma, etc. I want out. But I also feel like changes are coming, sooooo that would be nice.OK, going to go out on a limb here and post a couple of personal pics. The pants one, while is quite true about how much weight I lost, I think they were also stretch jeans and with too many washings, also stretched out a BIT..

Big Pants!

Longer Hair


ok, I haven't been able to get any more pictures on here tonight, something is weird, ok, I am letting you go, will try to get the upload to work tomorrow. BYE!!

Good grief, will this ever end??? AAUUGGHHHH

Time still flying by, but certainly boredom is the norm now.

I spend my days online as much as possible, applying for as many Army jobs in Germany as I can, Jess sleeps a lot, we both end up staying up all night watching movies.
OH yes! People here put out so many interesting things for the trash men to pick up. The other night as we were driving back to the house, Jess saw a television sitting with the trash. She and Mark went back to look at it and ended up bringing it back. Jess and I now have a GREAT TV, something like a 25 inch, with the remote and everything!

Unfortunately this means we stay up all night watching our videos o the DVD player from Italy that we hacked to play region one videos! (from the states)

Somehow we seemed to have left all the good videos back in the US. When I brought all the ones that were my favourites, I never thought that they would be the ones I did not want to watch, now I just want to watch the ones that I had only seen once before.

Note – If you move to another country and can only bring a certain amount of your videos with you, don’t bring your favourites, bring the ones you’ve only seen once or twice before!

Jessica seems to have brought the second disk of every movie she had, that had a second disk! She swears she made sure she had the first disk, but obviously she was on crack or something when she packed. Yeah……… hmmmmm….

We are still waiting for the deposit money from the apt in Italy to be deposited in my bank so that I can get jeans (remember the 30 pounds I lost? (Me too!!)) and a winter coat, and then I willalso have the money to apply for the UK visa (though something else may be in the works as far as a solution, but nothing I can talk about now.)

Rain, rain, rain, every day here, just waiting for it to turn into snow. NOOOOO…..
In the meantime we are sort of suspended in time. I lose one day a week, by Thursday I usually think it is Wednesday.

This is part of the reason that I have not been blogging, pure boredom.

One other thing I have been trying to do, is bake. Believe it or not, this house has no oven! Just a little toaster oven, and with the weather turning cooler, a person just feels the need to cook and bake. I have been able to make my homemade chicken noodle soup and chilli, but not being able to bake anything has been driving me crazy.

Not to mention that the usual baking ingredients that I am used to, simply are not in the stores that I’ve visited. Simple things like baking powder, Crisco, vanilla extract, baking soda. I have not even been able to find CHOCOLATE CHIPS for God’s sake, what kind of country IS this??

They have lots of candied fruit, which in itself is extremely scary. They seem to be really big on ODORS of things. I have found vanilla (real stuff) but it has been too expensive for me to buy on my budget right now, but they have odors of everything, which I find extremely amusing. Do they add it to a pot of water when they bake, because their baking smells so badly? Why would I add the odor of something to what I bake, when the taste of it is what makes it better. Should I be adding odor of butter rum to my chicken noodle soup, just to be crazy? For the life of me I cannot figure out why a person would need these!

I finally found baking soda the other day in a store, just because there was a glass of bubbling water on the front, and by the wording on the box, I thought it was a pretty safe choice. Baking POWDER however, has managed to elude me. I bought what I thought might be it, but it turned out to be something to make I THINK some kind of cream for inside cakes. It might be cornstarch and something else, but I am not sure.

Simply translating here doesn’t seem to work when it comes to baking, at least not so far. I finally managed to find oatmeal at a bigger store, and that I did find by looking up the word oat, but baking powder doesn’t seem to be in the dictionary I have.

I did however find out what exactly baking powder IS when I went online to look for a substitution. It turns out to be baking soda, cream of tarter and cornstarch. Now all I have to do is figure out what the hell cream of tarter is in German, then I can make my own.

Thank heaven they at least have unsweetened baking chocolate, which I prefer to use for baking. Unfortunately I forgot to tell Mark what it is, which was a REALLY dumb move, because he has a real sweet tooth and one night after Jess and I went to bed, he tried to put about 2 oz of it into a cup of coffee. BAD move. Just about ¾ of it was still in a lump on the bottom of his coffee cup the next morning. At first I was really pissed he’d wasted it, but then it hit me as pretty funny. If any of you have used unsweetened baking chocolate, you KNOW just how bitter it is. YUCK!

So the two things I baked in the toaster oven were passable, but the problem I have it that they want to brown on the outside WAY before the inside is baked, so I end up turning the heat down and baking them WAY too long, and the just ended up dry. Edible, both nothing even close to if they had been baked in an oven. How the hell does a place that has a dining room NOT have an oven? GRRRRR…


Ok, well I am off for now.

HEY ERIC; WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU? PLEASE WRITE TO ME; I MISS TALKING TO YOU!