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!