new housey!

I've been promising photos of the new housey, but just haven't delivered. Bad, bad blogger! I have to say that vacationing is taking a lot out of me (I know, you're shedding tears for poor me...tired out by travelling all over a beautiful country!) and the effort of keeping up with the blog has just been too much for me. Tonight is really not an exception. So I'll quell your thirst for photos, but that's about all I can do for you tonight. It may be a few more weeks before I can regularly update the blog and do some substantial writing, but the time will come again, I promise.

In the meantime, here are just a few of the photos of the new housey:

Our front door. I know it looks a little like robohouse with the metal window coverings. You may think it's some sort of crazy army armor for our home. But really, it's a German thing. Instead of blinds inside the house, there are blinds on the outside of the house that can be raised and lowered from inside, next to each window. While the house is empty and we don't have any curtains hung, we're keeping most of them down. Except for the one in the first floor bathroom, which is providing light to the plants that we've already brought to the new house. The structure of the house is basically a three-unit set of row houses, with ours being the end unit on the right.

This is the view from the entry way, looking at the huge (and currently very empty) dining area and living room.

Our new kitchen. Though you can't see it, the kitchen has a door. That can be closed and locked. It's a little strange.

This is one view of the huge bathroom on the second floor. Opposite the tub are two sinks, with separate medicine cabinets and storage cabinets beneath. To the left of the ginormous tub is a shower. Also on the second floor is a small bedroom that we'll be using as our guest bedroom (hint, hint....we would really like some visitors) and a large bedroom that we'll be using as an office/spare bedroom.

This is just one half of the master bedroom. It curves around the central staircase and has a bathroom attached, comlete with shower!

Our snazzy staircase, winding its way through the center of the house.

Finally, this is a view of the patio area at the back of the house, off of the living room. The photo is taken from our little patch of fenced-in yard, which Scooter will be christening tomorrow! Tomorrow we're heading up to the new house with a few friends from Schweinfurt. The four of us (and Scooter) will be spending the night in the new house (since the photos were taken, the army has delivered some loaner furniture until our furniture arrives) and the next day the four of us (without Scooter) will be taking a bus trip to Munich for Oktoberfest! We won't be returning to Schweinfurt until Friday, so I won't be writing any time before then. But I still have lots to update with the most recent Berlin trip and soon will have tales of Oktoberfest!

pooped....

I have so much to say, so much to share, so much to tell! But....I'm just too tired to do it now. The short version is that we've been to our new house and we vacationed in Berlin, after a last minute change of plans. The house is huge and we have way too little furniture to fill it! But it's new and beautiful and in many ways the house of my dreams (yay!). The trip to Berlin was great....clearly we love the city, having just returned from there a few days ago. I'll write more soon and will provide lots of photos of both the new place and the trip to Berlin!

pub crawlin' and sight seein'

We returned late last night from the first of our little trips throughout Germany. We spent Sunday and Monday in Berlin and are already looking forward to returning for a longer visit! Though we had planned on going to see Blue Man Group, we received a phone call last week telling us that the performance for which we had tickets didn't actually exist. There were no performances scheduled on the two days that we'd planned to be in town, so we weren't able to reschedule to see another performance. So we decided to partake in a pub crawl, instead of seeing blue mens!!

Each of these photos was taken at a different bar on Saturday night:

There were five stops on the pub crawl, but we didn't actually make it to the final stop. One of us hadn't really paced properly and wasn't really up for the fifth place. The night was a lot of fun, although it was freezing!! Our pub crawl guide told us that we were the smallest group that they'd had since last winter and our group was 37 strong! He said that the night before, they had had 200 people at the pub crawl!! When we return to Berlin, we hope to do another pub crawl and make it through the whole thing :-) In addition to drinking at mulitple establishments, the crawl included drinking en route underneath the S-Bahn tracks. Our guides passed out shotglasses and had bottles of vodka/orange juice shots to ensure complete intoxication:

On Monday, we slept in a little bit, recovering from our pub crawl evening the night before. After a tasty German breakfast (which always seems to include cold cuts) at the hotel, we set out to find Dunkin Donuts and to participate in a walking tour of the city. We were all over the place on the S-Bahn and U-Bahn (the above ground trains and underground trains), but finally reached the magical Dunkin Donuts, only having to rush like mad to get to the meeting point for our tour. And wouldn't you know it, but there was a Dunkin Donuts right there at the tour gathering point! At least we had a fun public transportation adventure!

The walking tour was amazing. We learned so much about the history of Berlin and saw amazing buildings and places. The tour, more than anything else, has made us feel like we really need to go back and have a more in-depth experience of Berlin. I took a lot of photos on the tour. And most are of buildings and places that you could easily find online (Bradenburg Gate, Reichstag, etc), so right now I'm going to show off some less well-known images or pictures that I just like. If any of you reading this want to see more, leave a comment or e-mail me and I can share the album with you.

Though the Berlin Wall has come down, the city is permanently marked by its presence. In some places sections of the wall still stand. In others, it's marked by a narrow path of cobblestones along the ground. Here you can see the line where the wall once stood, as it zig-zags across a busy street near the Brandenburg Gate:

Once of the most impressive sights on the tour was the new Holocaust Memorial, officially the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. And before you get all up in arms about the fact that Jews were not the only people murdered, there are plans for another memorial across the street to remember all of the people who suffered during the Holocaust. I don't think that I have words to adequately describe the memorial, never mind how it made me feel. The memorial is made up of 2,711 slabs of concrete. Though they are all the same length and width, their heights vary. They are set up in a grid and the cobblestone paths descend into the center of the grid and then ascend as the slabs get smaller and you exit on the other side. Here's a view from one end of the memorial:

Here is Jerry, standing in the middle of the memorial, where the slabs tower above us:

Another memorial that I found extremely interesting was the Book Burning Memorial in Bebelplatz. The piece memorializes the infamous bookburning, where 20,000 offensive (anti-Nazi) books were burned by students and supporters of the Nazi party. This piece is set into the ground. A plexiglass viewing panel is set in the middle of the square, where viewers can peer into a doorless room with walls of empty bookshelves. As you can see in the photo, there's a pretty neat effect of seeing the viewers' reflections as they peer into the empty room:

This is just a neat-o lamp post near Gendarmenmarkt:

As I said, I have a lot more photos! But I don't want to bore you to death with all of them!

Overall, it was a great trip. Though it definitely was too short! We can't wait to get back to see more and learn more! Here's something that may (but probably doesn't) interest you. While driving to Berlin, we went through many long tunnels. We think that we went through the longest one that either one of us had even been through...it was almost 8,000 meters long!!

Tomorrow we will be getting keys to our new house!! I hope to have some pictures to post tomorrow night, but we'll also be busy preparing for our trip to Stuttgart and the Black Forest, for which we'll be leaving on Thursday morning. With all that's going on, my posts will probably be less frequent, but I hope to catch you up on all of our travels and moving details soon!

we got mail!

Friday, we checked our mailbox and found a yellow slip inside. Yellow slip days are the best because they mean that we got something too big to fit in the box...a package! We knew that we didn't order anything, so we were pretty excited about the possibilities. We weren't disappointed. It turned out to be a small package from my mother-in-law for Jerry. Not only did she send him something, but it was something she made:

It's a littl difficult to tell from the picture, but inside is a photograph of Jerry, one of a series that Elizabeth photographed and developed several years ago. What a sweet and thoughtful gifty!

Speaking of my mother-in-law....today's Barbara's birthday! It's a big birthday weekend! Today is also my sister's birthday. I can't believe that she's turning 18!! And just in time to exercise her right to vote!! Yesterday was my Grandma Marian's birthday. Happy birthday to all of you!! Jerry and I (and Scooter too!) wish all the best to all of you on your birthdays and throughout the year!

You may have already guessed that the absence of posts this week has had to do with the fact that I've been busy spending time with my husband! You were right! Jerry arrived home on Tuesday afternoon and was given the rest of the week off from work. So we've been spending lots of time together, which has been a nice change for both of us. We haven't really been doing a whole lot, but we figure we'll be doing a lot when our real vacation starts next weekend. We did walk downtown a few days ago and I was able to take Jerry to the booze and oil store, which he enjoyed as much as I thought he would! We purchased some delicious amaretto and even deliciouser (that's right, deliciouser) sour cherry vodka....we're planning on returning for more of that! We also went to our favorite Eis Cafe, which I hadn't visited since he left over a month ago. I've been excited to try an ice coffee and finally had an opportunity. You may wonder why I would be so interested in an ice coffee, especially those of you who know that I don't even like coffee (but love coffee ice cream)! Well, in Germany, ice coffee is cold coffee poured over scoops of vanilla ice cream. It was one of the most delicious treats I've ever had! I look forward to future (occasional) ice coffee treats!

As I'd said in a previous post, I didn't lose as much weight as I'd hoped to while Jerry was away. But I found that I've made some pretty significant changes to my body. Shortly before Jerry returned, I purchased a new pair of jeans that was a size smaller than the last pair I purchased. Not only were they a smaller size, they were pretty roomy. The last pair had been a bigger size and tighter when I bought them. My workouts have gotten more intense and I'm finding myself getting stronger and stronger with the weight training....all great things. But let me bitch for just a moment: I love my husband, but sometimes I just hate him!! During the month he was gone, he lost ten pounds without really trying! That's just a few pounds shy of what I lost! Granted, he had long hours and did PT almost every day. And he wasn't allowed to drink alcohol. But other than that, he had lots of snack foods....candies and crunchy things. Meanwhile, I was at home, watching every morsel that went into my mouth and exercising multiple times a day and barely seeing change! Sometimes that's so frustrating and gets me a little down about my own progress (or lack of progress). But Jerry looks amazing, not just trim but muscular. I'm really proud of him and hope that I can continue on this good, but slow, path that I started while he was away.

Tomorrow Jerry goes back to work, which will help me get back into my regular routine. Since his two-week vacation starts next Saturday and we expect to be moving almost as soon as that ends, I'll also be spending much of this week getting everything ready to move (taking things down from the walls, filling in holes, organizing our stuff). Between packing,traveling and moving, I have a feeling that September is just going to fly by!

first day of school!

Last Tuesday, Elyssa started school. Check out our favorite 7th grader (and her supercute short hair!) on her first day: