Wednesday, December 29, 2010

I am a geek


Just so no one thinks that it is all just endless coolness at our house - here was me the other day on the computer, eating breakfast, listening to headphones and doing my hair. Robin laughed and took a picture. I wasn't sure what was so funny until I looked at the picture on the camera a few days later. Wow - I am looking fab! (I think my breakfast looks like a taco... it's not, it is a roll with cheese)

White Christmas

I think there are many people in the world who dream of a white Christmas. Here in Europe we are the ones who won the "white Christmas" lottery this year. We got a LOT of snow. It started snowing Christmas eve day and didn't stop snowing until sometime Christmas morning. We spent Christmas eve at Robin's parent's house. We got home sometime around mid-night. About 12 hours later, we went to their house again. This is how I dressed up to go do battle with the snow.
Please take special notice of the pink rain boots. I hate to get my pants wet in the snow and we had about a foot of snow. The pink boots coved my pants enough that they didn't get wet. They didn't do too much for keeping my feet warm though.This is Robin looking for our car (ok, not really, but I thought the picture was funny).
This was how our car looked. It took several minutes to get the snow off of it enough to drive.Me, hard at work clearing the snow from our headlights.

Ice covered our license plate.... When we finally did get going, our car got stuck getting out of our parking spot. I got out to push (I don't drive well in snow). Luckily, there were 2 men in a car behind us that helped push us out of our spot. After that, we were on our way :)

Nativity

One night for Family Home Evening this month, Robin and I colored and cut out this nativity. I spent a while looking on the internet for nativity puppets and this was what I eventually found. We wanted to somehow use the puppets to act out the nativity, film the "play" and send it to people... well, that didn't all work out, but we had a fun time coloring it.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

A year ago today...

A year ago today, Robin and I got engaged... it all started on a bench at Mukilteo beach.
:)

Friday, December 24, 2010

Christmas Card


Merry Christmas to all

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Christmas Markets - Michaelstadt


I wanted to go to as many Christmas markets as I could this year. So far we have been to 6. Here we are at a Christmas market in the town of Michaelstadt. Michaelstadt is a cute little town about 20 minutes away from us. We took the train though, so it took almost 40 minutes to get there. This market is one of the most popular Christmas markets in the area. The town has a good atmosphere that lends itself nicely to the Christmas spirit. Here is a picture of the town hall:


Lucky for us, it snowed the WHOLE day that day so the town looked really cute with snow all over the fachwerk houses. It was cold too. We had a nice time though. Lots of little booths with all sorts of different things. Lots of tastey little treats too. We bought roasted almonds with a coconut flavor - one of my favorites.

Here is a picture that Robin took of a nice nativity they had at the market.

Now here is an interesting cultural thing - I don't think Santa Claus comes down the chimney in Germany.... You can find figures like this attached to the side of houses here - in this case, Santa is parachuting. Sometimes, it is Santa climbing a latter in to the house. I'm not sure I completely und why, but that is how Santa gets around there - parachuting, climbing in windows, or maybe just walking. Different. When I see one of these things, I usually have a good laugh.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Decking the Halls


We got our tree!

I wanted to get a fake tree, Robin went along with the idea. Call me Scrooge, but I just don't care much for having a real tree in the house... You have to water it (I am a plant-killer and most plants I have had died from lack of water). It drops it needles on the floor and you have to clean it up. I can also live without the "real" tree smell. So, fake tree it is.
Fake trees seem to be a new idea here, which is strange for two reasons. First, Germans are very environmentally friendly - I would think saving a tree and the chance to re-use it year after year would be right up their alley. Secondly, there are tons of fake trees in the stores - I seem to be the only one buying them though.
We brought our tree home on Saturday. I unpacked it and put it together. Robin put the lights on. I put on all the decorations I brought from the US and our tree was ready to go. I'm not sure these pictures do it justice - it looks pretty cute for our first Christmas tree. :)

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Once there was a snow man...


It snowed. I hate snow... but what can you do when life gives you snow? Make a snow man. We didn't have much snow on our balcony, so my snow man is mini-sized. I used matches for the arms, a piece of orange peel for the nose, and permanent marker to draw on eyes. Sadly, my snowman didn't last very long. He began to melt about 4 hours after I made him... he melted small, small, small....

Christmas Decorations



Time for Christmas decorations! I made these puff balls to hang in the window. In the top picture, you can see them hanging. Since taking that picture I have added a bigger one in the middle. The second picture is a close-up of the puff ball. I wanted multi-colored puff balls. It took some thought, but I figured out how to do it just the way I wanted. I think they look pretty good.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

A Christmas Wish List

Each year my mom likes us each to write a Christmas wish list. It isn't that we will get any of the things on our list, I think mostly she likes to know what we think we want at the stage of life we are in. This year, I don't expect I will be getting anything on my wish list - no matter how realistic the wishes are. So, I decided to go all out and post things I really want, but no one can afford to give me. I think some of the wishes are a good reflection of where I am at in my life right now. While I was going to the extreme with my wish list, I figured adding an additional step or two and making it into a youtube video was no big deal. Now the whole world can enjoy my wish list. Merry Christmas :)

Saturday, November 27, 2010

I like to swim

As I said in a previous post - Thanksgiving is not my favorite holiday. When I was in Hawaii my solution was usually to go to the beach. We found a similar solution here in Germany - an indoor waterpark. It was really fun! They had a few water slides, several different kinds of pools (some with chlorine some with salt, some with quartz crystals for wellness, one with a current, and a wave pool). We spent the whole day there playing in the water and having a good time. I didn't take any pictures, but I was able to grab a few from the park's website.

A nice fire to warm up by... 0r to dry off

The pool with a current. Yes, it is outside. You get in the pool inside and swim outside. The water was warm. It was snowing outside while we were there.

Amethyst pool - some sort of wellness properties... I don't know....

The big slides. You walk up a spiral staircase to get to the top. One slide is steep, the other one goes round and round.

Another quartz pool. This one was rose quartz I think.

Thanksgiving Family Chat


Families in 6 locations talking together with video and voice. A time to be thankful for technology.

I made Apple Crisp

Thanksgiving has never been a favorite holiday of mine.... I guess the whole thing about me not liking turkey, stuffing, gravy, yams, and pretty much almost all other thanksgiving foods sort of ruins the holiday for me. I do like apple crisp though. I made some this week for our "thanksgiving".







Thursday, November 18, 2010

One good reason for winter

I don't like winter. It is dark, rainy, and cold. Some mornings you have to scrape frost off the car before you can leave. You have to wear big thick coats and lots of layers of clothing. Overall, not a nice experience. Here in Germany they have something that is nice about winter - winter flavors of tea, chocolate, and yogurt. Oh, yummy goodness. Here is an example that I had to bring home from the grocery store yesterday - a chocolate with vanilla cookie in the middle. The candy bar literally spoke to me as I walked past it in the store. I knew it wanted to get into my cart and follow me home. I told it no. The second time I walked by, I couldn't resist. I let the chocolate bar jump off the shelf and into my cart. I started eating it in the car on the way home. Oh, yum - thank you winter for bring us these wonderful winter flavors. Other flavors I want to try: marzipan-orange and spiced apple.... No doubt, they will be just as good.

Do you feel like a princess?


In Germany, it is sometimes easy to imagine that I am a princess. Look at the building I go to do official things like getting my driver's license or getting a visa to stay in the country... Almost a castle.... And this building isn't really anything special. It's pretty normal.

My Famous Husband

When Robin sees me taking pictures, he usually knows I am taking pictures for our blog. Sometimes, he asks if he gets to famous... we all know anyone who has their picture on the internet is famous. Here are some recent paparazzi photos of my famous husband.

Here he is being "Robin" as in "Batman & Robin" using his super powers to put together a giant shelf in our storage room.

Here is "Robin Hood" at dinner. He peeled a large tropical fruit (a nice rich fruit) and sharing it with the poor (me, the one without the fruit).

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Eingedeutscht

I got my German Drivers license today. Non-EU citizens are only allowed to drive for 6 months on their foreign drivers license. After that, they have to get a German one. In return for a German license, they took my American one. That is the policy. I want my American one back.... I just feel bare without it......
For non-german speakers: Eingedeutscht=Germanized.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Trip to Heidelberg

You might hear me talking about Heidelberg more than once. It is about an hour away from where we live and it is a cute, typical German town. The city wasn't distroyed during the war, so it has much of it's historical charm. There is a castle, a river, a nice looking bridge, places to hike, and way up in the hills there are ruins of an old monastery, and an amphitheatre used by the Nazis. In other words, this place has a lot of history.

Last weekend was our stake conference with the Saturday sessions in Heidelberg. That means we got to spend last Saturday wandering around this nice place. When I got there and started taking pictures, I realized my camera battery was almost dead. I was able to get a few pictures though... Here they are:

The gate on the bridge. There were about 50 other tourists on the bridge with me, so it was hard to get a good picture of it.
View from the bridge to the castle. The left tower of the castle is being renovated. It seems like they are always working on some part of the castle. They finish one section and move on to the other. I guess when a building is several hundred years old, it needs constant renovation.

A yummy ball of goodness only to be found in Heidelberg. I dream of these things - seriously. It is called Schlosskugel - or Castle ball. It is chocolate nugget, surrounded by a soft cake, surrounded by a thin layer of marzipan, dipped in chocolate. So yummy. We went to the bakery to get one and split it. A few hours later, I was still in the mood for more Schlosskugel, so we bought another one and split it again.

View from the castle to the river. On the left side of the river, you can see part of the bridge.


Robin and I at the castle.
This is the laundry I did this week - three loads all folded up and fit into one basket. The past two weeks, I have been struggling to get laundry done. I wash the loads on Monday (usually about 3 loads) but I can't quite seem to get them folded until Thursday or so. Robin doesn't mind if I take that long to do laundry. When he was single, he made sure he had all the clothes he needed to go at least two weeks without doing laundry (he never knew when he would have time to do it). I do have a problem however - I have enough clothes to go about a week and 3 days without doing laundry. That means, if I don't fold the laundry by Wednesday, Thursday morning I have nothing to wear. How annoying.....

Home Decorating

It seems many of the women in my family have the gene that enables them to decorate their homes beautifuly. The only thing I got from this gene was the desire to have a lovely home... not the talent to make it so. In 3 months I have manage to "finish" one "room" - the entry way. I say "finish" because I will have to do some minor seasonal changes every month or two. The walls are white, there are pictures on the wall, a nice piece of furniture, and room for storage. Here it is - the "final" product.

This is a view of the entryway from the bathroom... it was the best place to take the photo from. Directly on the right (not in the photo) is the door out of our apartment. Directly to the left (also not in the picture) is our bedroom. The door on the left is the kitchen. The thing hanging on the was that looks like a giant slipper really is a giant slipper. It is where we put our hausschuhe (slippers). The door with the glass window is the entry to our living/dining room. The curtain on the right of the door is the curtain I made to hide stuff in the corner. The door seen on the right is our storage closet.


The project I finished this week is painting this rectangle on the wall. It took me a while to get the pictures printed and deciding how big the blue rectangle should be.... Anyways, it is finished - for now.

Friday, October 22, 2010

Banana Bread

No this is not a recipe... there are plenty of those out there. This post is just to say Robin loves banana bread. We are already on our 3rd loaf in about 2 weeks. I usually only eat one slice....
Here are two funny stories about banana bread.

- I made banana bread for the first time because our bananas were going bad. Robin tried it and really liked it. A few days later, I bought some bananas for his lunch. They sat on the counter for a few days. I told Robin he needed to eat the bananas or I would have to make bread again. I could see the wheels turning in his head, "So, if these bananas go bad, you will make banana bread again?(!!!!)"
-I was talking to Robin on the phone while he was at work. I told him I wanted to make cookies. He asked, "Do you think you could make some banana bread?" He wasn't feeling well so I gave in. Today he is home sick and all he had eaten is banana bread... good thing I made it.

Autumn

It’s autumntime. It’s autumntime.
The leaves are falling down.
It’s autumntime. It’s autumntime.
It’s all around the town.

It’s autumntime. It’s autumntime.
There’s yellow, red, and brown.
It’s autumntime. It’s autumntime.
Bright colors can be found.
~LDS Children's Songbook

View from our apartment

Decorations in our entry way


Tree by our Church building

Humidity

I don't have a problem with humidity. I like it. Or, I guess you could say I like it if it comes with sunny 80 degree weather, coconut trees, and nice beaches. When it comes with cold weather... I don't like it.

We have been having trouble with the humidity in our apartment. The weather outside today is 43F (6C), with 78% humidity (no rain). If we aren't careful, this weather can cause nice black spots to grow on our walls. These spots are commonly known as mold. Gross. So, to combat the humity, we open the windows for several minutes a day and also put out this container of salt. The salt seems to help with the humidity. Isn't it nice that we could find such and inexpensive dehumidifier?

Oops... I did it again!

This post from a few days ago pretty much sums up what happened here. You can just add to the end, that I repeated the performance again this week.

5 Minutes

A while ago I was reading some information on FlyLady.com about keeping up with house work. One of the suggestions I found was to set a timer for X amount of time and work on one area of the house for that long. It keeps you from getting distracted by other things and you know how long you will be working on that one thing. So, I decided to try it out. One night I told Robin I would work on the dishes for 5 minutes. Then, he could have his turn working for 5 minutes. The dishes got done fast and neither of us felt like it took too long. We have been doing this for a few weeks and it is working out great. Most nights, I don't even have to do my 5 minutes because Robin finished all the dishes during his turn.

I have found a few other activities that I use the timer for:
- The obvious - not burning food in the oven
- Brushing teeth (I get distracted when brushing my teeth... I walk all over the house with a toothbrush in my mouth not really brushing my teeth... the timer keeps me focused)
- Keeping my showers short to save water (or in other words, to save money.... Water is expensive here)(Oh, short is less than 10 minutes... so not really all that short)

I am glad I have a timer :)

Thursday, October 7, 2010

How much does 2 Euro buy?

I love living nextdoor to Holland - it means we get wonderful flowers inexpensively. I got this nice little bouquet at a flower shop the other day. I paid 2 Euro for this... I also got supplies for wrapping it. It was so nice and made just for me to fit exactly in the vase I brought. Only 2 Euro that would be US $2.79. I don't think I could ever get this sort of bouquet in the US.

Oops...

This is an egg. It fell off the counter. I was making something and set this egg on the counter for a minute while I did something else... While my back was turned the egg rolled off the counter. SPLAT! I turned around and looked at it. I wasn't really sure how I could clean a whole egg off the floor. So instead, I grabbed my camera. I did eventually get it off the floor, but I thought I would share the picture.