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.

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 :)

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.