Mountain violation

My boss, who owns a degree in geography, calls it "mountain violation", I call it one of the best way to pass a winter day in Austria ;).
Today I had to get up early (7:00 AM) to get ready to drive to one of the closest skiing areas. This time we decided against Reit im Winkel because it's boring and has to many T-bar lifts *brrr*. Thus we went to Lofer in Austria a skiing area especially built for families. In general the slopes are manageable for beginners apart from some rather exhausting parts.
Here are some pictures from our snow event:

For tomorrow we have planed to watch Avatar in 3D. Unfortunately, we will have to go to Austria again because it's the closest cinema with 3D technology from Andrea's mother's home. This time we will drive to Braunau which was the birthplace of a rather unpopular German/Austrian celebrity. Well, at least the cinema is great.

The miracle of missing loved or handy objects

When we put together the new couch at my mothers house a few days ago I wanted to use an electrical screw driver to ease the effort. Unfortunately or as usual we didn’t find one in father’s well equipped “Werkstadt”. To enable us to put the couch together my mother bought a new one, and in memory of my father a good one of course.

I seriously know that we already own at least one good electrical screw driver but all of them seam to be on holiday at the moment.

Did you ever experience one of this situations? What I really would like to know is where is the stuff we are searching desperately for? I came up with this answers so far:

• gone, but nobody knows where
• well hidden
• a glitch in our brain we never had such a thing anyway
• happily living at a friends place because we lent it and forgot about it
• ran away in frustration because we didn’t used it
• somehow found the way in the trash can and was disposed

One might be an answer for the absence of one or two electrical screw drivers but for all of them? Apart from the screw driver I am missing my wool gismo and I am searching for it every time when I am at my mothers place. A wool gismo is a machine to make a wool ball and is very useful if you don’t want to do it by hand.

Until now (yes I tried it again also my mother told me that she hadn’t found it while cleaning the roof in summer) I haven’t found it.

The more I write the less I believe that this is normal, the house must be bewitched.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of the couch but I took some while we put the other furniture together. I love the fireplace my mother got installed ;)

Take care of your belongings ;) and pet them from time to time.

Christmas in Berlin :)

Ok here is my confession, I went shopping on December the 20th. That does not sound odd at the first glance but it was the last Sunday before Christmas and I shopped at Berlin's biggest mall. Apart from the people, the Christmas decoration, the prices and the need to find the last gifts it was great ;).

My mom even tried Burger King which really is rare ;). At the end of the day I finally had all my presents ;).

As usual the mall was decorated with lots of lights, and trees. I tried to take some pictures but they didn't turn out that good. Here are some of the less horrible ones:

Ratatoui

Here's the story behind the dinner. We ate "Michey & Co" pasta which I got from my sister.

The pasta was quite ok but the wrapping was even more interesting. Being produced in Italy the information text was translated and the result is rather shocking.

I would have photographed the English text as well but it was more or less ok thus this is just a German text joke :(.

Anyway the pasta itself looked great. The package contained different Disney figures but I didn't find all of them :(.

And here is the final meal:

An Angel for Mom

As I wrote before Christmastime is a very bad time for blogging creative results. Luckily I send some of my creative stuff to my family as small gifts in the Advent calender. Here are some:

An Angel for my mom

Some small hearts.

Today we will eat "Ratatoui" as an evening meal cooked by Rolf :). I'll hang out close to the kitchen to take some pictures because we will use special pasta today ;).

Stay connected.

:( I definitively need to get Swedish right

As I wrote before, languages are very fascinating, at least for me. I always want to understand the people wherever I am. Well, sometimes it's good not to understand ;) but apart from these moments I prefer to understand what's written or spoken. Today I took a look at a multilingual system and got hooked up again. This language is just adorable and short: "Lahajapaperililaus"
It's the only language that can state even complicated issues in one word.
Unfortunately I restricted myself regarding the amount of languages I learn to the current ones (English, Spanish, and Swedish). Once I'm good enough in Swedish I will pick up Finnish.
Working in an international driven company I probably should rather learn Polish or, Russian but I haven't developed interest in this languages yet. Some weeks ago a colleague mentioned that I should learn Rumanian instead of other languages because it's such a nice languages and so easy to learn etc. That's more interesting than Russian or Polish because I already know someone to talk to. Here's my language wish-list for 2010:

1.) Conserve my English
2.) Taking the next step to fluency in Spanish
3.) Finish the Swedish textbook (finally, I'm stucked in the middle)
4.) If there is time left (which probably isn't) start learning Finnish

I guess my annual goal planing session for 2010 will be complicated the world just offers too many fascinating topics to learn about. Once I'm done with the goal settings I'll let you know :)

Take care.

Christmas calenders the second

I forgot to show one of my other Christmas calenders but that's probably because I forgot that I have it too.
It's a calender that has one tea per day. I thought that it would be fun to have something to pimp breakfast with. During the past days I either found myself gulping down something in hurry or leaving home without breakfast at all. My guess is that I will put the tea into the shelf so that it is surrounded by all the other teas we have at home.

Christmas :)

The days around Christmas are always complicated. There are so many loved ones who deserve a small and nice present. Unfortunately, it's also the time of secrets and so most of the preparation cannot be topic of my blog :(.

Never the less I have something I can show you: my Christmas calenders which are numerous this year:

From my sister Marion:

From my sister Birgit:

From Steffi who swapped calenders with me:

Our community calender:

I wish all of you a great pre-christmas-time with lots of gingerbread and hot spiced wine.

About taking something for granted

Each beautiful day we take so many things for granted. Based upon our experience we walk around not noticing some the miracles, changes, and challenges life has to offer.
During the past weeks I faced more emotions than I did in my teenage years. I never thought I would feel so controversial emotions at the same time. There had been a lot of "what if" constructs in my mind most likely followed be "so what it's to late anyhow" ones.
I also think I haven't discusses all the "what if"s to come to a final conclusion but I have found some questions which sum up the aspects that are bothering my mind.

* What does it take to be a good human?
That one is very philosophical and can be split in two other ones.
* Shall a human be judged based upon his/her actions, or his/her intentions?
* Is the influence a person might have/had on my own live a valid option to judge on?

And then there is the illness, responsibility, manners, and kindness part:

* Is an illness an excuse for everything?
* Can an illness be used as an excuse for bad manners?
* In how far is it justified to give up one's own rights and emotions to nurse someone?
* Who is responsible for happiness, or the lack of it?

All in all these questions are tough to answer and I guess that everyone needs to find an own way to so.
As you read my mind is quite busy so I also need to do a lot of things to distract my mind from all those questions.
Someone once said that those dark days, filled with deepest sorrow, unleash an unbound creativity.
For me I figured out that it's true. To make my mind shut up I played piano, sewed Christmas presents, and did a whole lot of other creative activities.
As soon as possible (I don't want to spoil any presents yet) I'll post some pictures of the creative gifts :).

Take Care and don't take to many things as granted ;P.

Home Sweet Home

It's so good to be home again. I cannot say that the time in the hospital was really bad, no not at all, the personal had been friendly and caring but I just wasn't home.

Well, the new roommate I got was also quite challenging. She was either talking or she used to snore :(.

In the last post I explained the vegetarian chicken menu, for this post I have something special ;). Pictures! Yes, I photographed the last two menus I got, to share the beauty of dietary cooking with you.

The first one was supposed to be "broccoli soufflé" but I didn't find broccoli in it.

The second one was something with mushrooms in cream sauce.

It looks as if it tastes horrible but in reality it only looks this way. It actually tasted much better than the canteen at work ;).

I'll go to bed now, because I'm really tired. Tomorrow I have to manage some things (e.g. follow up appointments, buying funeral cloth etc.). Therefor I will drive into the city for an hour or two depending on how the pain meds will work, or not.

Take care :)

Welcome to the health resort

After the rather sad news I wrote about in the last post I want to amuse you with the experience I am making in the health resort which I am currently testing.

In general it's quite nice only the timetable for breakfast, lunch, and dinner is, well, not even close to what I would call nice. Thus the day starts off at 6:45 AM with meds followed by breakfast at 7:15AM. Once passed that hurdle there is some time to sleep again until 11:15 AM when the schedule is calling for lunch already. The afternoon is kind of free except for dinnertime 5:15PM.

I also learned a lot yesterday. Since I was originally scheduled for my tonsillectomy for 3:30 PM there was time to ask questions about all the funny equipment the doctors use to give anesthesia ;). Very interesting ;) one of the doctors/assistants, I don't know for sure anymore, explained why Profonol is such a good anesthesetic :). I think I understand why Michael Jackson liked it it makes a nice feeling before one totally passes out. After a while I woke up remembering the "dream" I had but I cannot recall it today, I only know that it wasn't the nicest one.

That's it for today I'll try to find a less boring afternoon activity. Maybe I'll take a short walk somewhere were they sell food because my vegetarian lunch contained chicken :(. I'll never understand why so many people strongly believe that "chicken" and "lamb" are not animals as well.

Welcome to the magic world of a dietary cook.

Take care.

P.S.: The average blog post per day ratio last month was 0.45 :).

The day of the dead

Writing blog entries is both a blessing and a curse. Let's start with the blessing part. I particularly like the fact that I have put all my thoughts into phrases that helps me to structure them and to come to an conclusion. It's also positive to have all the brilliant, exiting, interesting, boring, and mundane ideas in a safe and cozy place. So that's the upside of blogging but there are issues that are neither good nor bad and one part is about sharing all the ideas. Whatever I write in here is read from my friends and family therefore I don't want to write about certain topics, my mind is focusing on a lot, to avoid hurting someone's feelings or at least to avoid endless discussions. Opening a door into my life by publishing what I do, like, buy, hate, fear also showed me that it has an impact on other people. After being diagnosed with SHL (sudden hearing loss) I didn't feel that sharing ideas would be wise and stopped writing posts. I never expected my mother to start worrying because of missing post in my blog but I'm very thankful for all the support I got.
When I wrote most of the lines in advance I never expected this post to end like this. I intended to write a half humanistic and half ironic post to let all of you know that I thought I found a way to rebalance my life. Unfortunately life itself doesn't seem to be balanced at all. Throughout the passed years there had been better times and worser ones. Today will be one of the worser ones. I've never been good in giving up or letting things go but there is one particular event in life were you have no other chance than to accept what happened. Death. I've often thought about death, the meaning of live and why all living things need to die sooner or later, but I never thought that I would loose my father so soon. I rather saw us fighting about ridiculous topics like conventional versus ecological farming. Coincidently, I talked about death a lot today because of the upcoming festival of the dead which is celebrated in Mexico. It's a fair like holiday where all people commemorate the loved ones who passed away.
I'm not even close to a neutral feeling right now. Thus if you don't find any further post in here I just didn't find anything nice enough to write about......

Rest in peace father.

My Hopper :)

I'm really hooked up I want to be part of the next hopper event. Thus I created my own hopper at hopperinvasion.com

Hopperinvasion

Browsing the web I found an exhilarating video. Thus if you experience a week the just plainly su***, I recommend watching it. Enjoy all the colours, dream of the fun they might had creating the clip.

I'm in love

Thank god that Apple was created. Thus I never ever run out of ideas what to do with my money :). Here is a new object of desire:
Yes it's a mouse and no it cannot cook coffee or do anything else than being a mouse. Unfortunately it's beautiful white and understands gestures..... I really want to have it.
Unfortunately it's from Apple and I'm too penurious to pay the price for it (at the moment).
Speaking about Apple I saw a great Simpsons' episode last year in which they deal with the hype around Apple. Here is a part of it, enjoy:


Take care.

Instruction Manual

Nearly everyone had had this moments when he/she needed to put something together or gain knowledge from a manual and failed completely. What was supposed to be a cupboard turned out to be a mass of flake boards that will collapse instantly. In contrast to the cupboard experience many people are holding great manuals in their hands every day e.g. when they are using an air plane to get somewhere. I'm talking about this 3 pages of safety instructions which are demonstrating where to find what in an emergency and how to get out of the plane if necessary.
Recently I received a "safety instruction" card for the internet. Well, not that I really need one but I liked the way it communicate information. It's in German but you'll know what's meant with a little fantasy :)

Take care while shopping via the internet ;).

Office Art

Working in an office on a 9 to 5 base can be challenging. There have been and there will be times in which I rather want to be a carpenter and actually see my work shaping up in a less literally meaning.

Nice coworkers are essential for surviving in such moments. I'm lucky because I work in a great team. Here is a drawing one of my coworkers made for me:

It reminds me that I should take life easier although I can be tough sometimes.

hyvää päivää

Something I really want to learn sometime is Finnish. It has so many ä, ö and ü in its words. Plainly beautiful. I am considering to start learning it after I finished the Swedish course I hardly work on :). So I might start learning Finnish in 5 years or more :(.
As far as I know it sounds challenging to learn the language they do have a weird word order:

For instance the sentence from the picture "Pysäköinti vain paikan varanneille!" literally means (The) parking only a place for people who own reserverd.
Sounds like fun doesn't it?

Greetings.

Geocaching

Finally I have some time left to post the pictures from the trip to France where we did geocaching. Geocaching is hiking for the web 2.0 crowd. To make hiking more interesting to people who rather look at forests via google earth, the hiking part is woven into a game. The aim of it is to find the caches (little plastic boxes with small and more or less useful gifts). Caches are listed in an internet portal with their coordinates. To find one of them a forrest navigation system (GPS receiver), hiking shoes, good weather, and a strong will to find that plastic box is needed.

Here are some pictures of our high-tech hide and seek trip:

After I tried this type of hiking I'm still not convinced that hiking will be my favorite free time activity in future. I fear that the impression of hiking being a useless used timeperiod in which people practice an antiquated way of traveling, will stay imprinted into my brain for a while. Nonetheless I have to commit that it was fun.

What the....

This post is dedicated to my sister Birgit.
I know I'm stubborn so I refused to put more action in getting rid of my tinnitus by seeing yet another doctor. Coincidently it got worse so I went to my GP and he sent me to the physiotherapist which I did this morning. The session itself was quite short but it hurts like hell.
This therapists probably have a special class on how to make the patient feel their malpositon in only 10 minutes.
To be honest thank you Birgit for you advice and patience also I hurts I am convinced that it will finally help :).


P.S.: I'll post pictures I made yesterday as soon as I'm home but that will take a little bit longer than usual because I'll go to a juggling club tonight to practice juggling without risking to hit the beamer in the living room.

Stay connected. Me.

Bye bye nice and sunny weather

Hej!

I spent the last weekend showing Karlsruhe to my cousin and his girlfriend. Although it rained most of the time it was funny. Unfortunatly the weather will not be much better in the upcomming days:


On Wednesday I will do geochasing in France and I hope it will not rain all the time. By the end of the week the weather here will adapt itself to Swedish standarts (e.g. Malmö).

Take care :)

Tell me who I am...

Time is passing by so fast at the moment that I forgot to show you what I discovered on Tuesday. When I was riding from my piano lessons to work I followed a particular car. The car was somehow interesting because it was really ugly and someone had even put duct tape on it....


Thus if you are a Porsche fan an you know which new model or test car I spotted. Let me know ;).

Malsch a town with People

Astonishing but true, there can be life in Malsch. Yesterday was a federal holiday in Germany and many people used the Friday to go shopping and to create a catastrophe like environment in every supermarket. Thus shopping was a big issue at work at Friday too. My boss told me that she stood up earlier than usual to hit the supermarket before all the other people could do so.In general one should assume that according to the behavior most people should have enough to eat at home after a power shopping trip.

The town I live in declared some Sundays as shopping ones. Today was one of these. They advertised it as a fair but it's just not comparable to real fairs. We went to town to eat one of our favorite turkish dishes which are only offered when there is a fair. So we saw many people, normally you don't spot many people in the streets. I took a photo to show you how crowded it was but my quick internet research told me that it illegal to publish

such pictures. I'll ask my favorite lawyer tomorrow whether this is right or not. Until I found an adequate answer to this question I'll show you the elk I made but it's still work in progress.

Andreas calls it "Radar Elk" because of it's antlers been sewn on the opposite side of the head. Once I finished "Radar Elk" I'll take another picture.

I hope you had a great weekend too and enjoy the evening. :)

Early morning

Good morning everyone.

Today I woke up at 5:30 and could not fall back to sleep. Since then I listened to music and took an early morning walk to the cash-machine and the bakery to buy rolls and bread. To make it a bit more interesting I took my camera with my and tried to make pictures with the night shot function. Most of them turned out horrible but one was not that horrible.

Today I will do some office work bur I really have to find a motivator otherwise I will either end up playing Bejeweled Blitz the whole day or sitting in front of my sewing machine busily creating Tilda elks. :)

A new Month

Today is October the first and I like to take the opportunity to start over this month. Last month was the most interesting and frightening one for a long time. Although it had some great downs I also got rewarded with some nice ups too.

Not only has my average blogpost per day ratio fallen to 0.4 I also figured out that I didn't feel comfortable with the goal of 1 post per day. I therefor decided to lower it to one post every two days. I strongly believe that this is a great ratio and I'll give my best to fulfill it.

Staring a new quarter of a year is alway quite interesting. Normally it is because I resume my quarterly goals and step forward to the next ones. This time I'm a bit behind my goals but that's okay for the moment. I started this quarter rushing to work to be on time for my English lesson which were great even though we started at 8:00 in the morning.

Apart from that the weather changed to more autumn like temperatures today and I could finally try out my Swedish boots:

Before you start asking me via multiple communication channels, yes they are pink comfortable and I'm not kidding on you. :)

See you soon.

Connecting the dots backwards

When it comes to the topic of public speaking there are some quite famous speakers who are always named. I am neither one of them but I love to listen and learn from the best. A particular speech I really like is a commencement speech from Steve Jobs. He is sharing his experiences with the students in an emotional but convenient way. If you don't know the video you can watch it right now:



So why am I showing you this video? In general because it captures a lot of the why, I'm doing so much (e.g. work, music, language, teaching, art, etc.). I don't know why I invest time in some of my hobbies(e.g. learning languages and studying psychology) apart from the fact that I like to do so but I do believe I it will work out some day.
In other areas I think I found a part of the answer. Music for instance is something I always loved. My aunt used to play piano for me and thus I associated music with peace, love, wealth and knowledge. In other words with everything I wanted to achieve. Unfortunately my two bigger sisters imprinted the idea of "we are not talented in music and don't want to have music lessons" deeply into the brains of my parents. As time passed I ended up finishing school without any noteworthy music skills.
Today I practice piano, play violin and sing and I really love to do all of it. Connecting the dots backwards not being able to learn an instrument (apart from trumpet- yes I really was despaired enough to do so) in my childhood equipped me with a strong will to change and learn. I also don't associate music in the way I did before ;).
The world is filled with many fascinating, interesting and remarkable things. It would be a shame not to investigate them, wouldn't it?

Steve Jobs summed it up in with conclusion of the commencement speech:
"Stay hungry stay foolish."

It's Christmas

Yup I'm not kidding it's Christmas. And now I will give you a short introduction why. First because it's not summer anymore it was quite cold some days ago. That's a criteria but I fear that I didn't convince you with this one. That's good because I have another one: I started learning english again and it's paid by my employer. :) Let's combine both criteria together. First it's not summer and second I got a gift.

Ok, maybe your right, that could also be something like divine intervention or pure coincidence. Here is the third criteria I like to add. I bought gingerbread in the supermarket two days ago :). That one is a good one, isn't it? And I have still one left. I received my new car too. To sum it up: not summer anymore, cool english lessons, brand new car, and gingerbread does sound like Christmas :).

There is one downside, I need to fetch up on the correct usage of the past tenses in English. The fabulous teacher spotted my grammar flaw in no time. Today I'll just finish the homework. It's about easily confused words like peace and piece. One of my followed blog's author has trouble to differentiate these words which let to an interesting statement about Michael Jackson's death. So maybe I'll take a look at the past tenses tomorrow.

I'll also post some articles I've prepared to answer some open questions and give you an overview of my past days.

I really hope that you don't have anything resting in pieces :P. (I think my old car will do so soon).

Take care.

The world seems to need NLP

Since I started reading a book about NLP (neurolinguistic programming) I figured out that many people in my office are learning and practising it already. Until now it's a very interesting area. I'll give you a summary about the book once I finished it.
Until then you can watch a video of Derren Brown a magician from UK who uses NLP and hypnosis to acheive very interesting results.

Stay tuned ;)

Junta „Republica de las Bananas“

Good morning everyone ;)

Don't worry I'm not up again, I'm still awake but I will go to bed soon. Today I went to a birthday party of a friend and we played Singstar. I really don't like games like that but as usual after trying out I realize, that I am not going to die playing it. Thank you for this valuable experience.

Speaking of valuable experiences Thursday night we played a game called "Junta" and I learned that I would be a horrible politician if I were trying to be one. The aim of the game is to collect money and put it away in your secret bank account while being a high ranking politician of the banana's republic. The Here are some pictures:

The rules of the game are a bit odd because they explicitly ask you to cheat on the other players. Weird, confusing and mean but maybe it's just like live can be sometimes.

Good night everyone and take care.

Guess what ...

I visited my gym today. Surprisingly it was exactly where I left it the last time :). It nearly didn't change at all apart from the team they are "new" again. Since the weather is beginning to get worse or less friendly for outdoor exercise I will be there more often. The rest of the day had been filled with relaxing, crafting and taking photos. Here are some but the weather wasn't as nice as it was the days before:

I nearly forgot to tell you that we tried something new as our dinner. It's called Seitan and it's some sort of meat substitute for vegans. It's not hard to prepare and it can taste delicious. The next time we eat Seitan I will take a picture and show it to you. Are you convinced to try something new? Great you will find much information on the web page of the vegetarian resource group.

Take care and have a nice Sunday evening.