New Gears

After one year of failure, directly followed by a year full of pain, and a couple of years of fun, I developed a passion for snowboarding. Today I’ll pick up our boards from being prepared and repaired for the upcoming holidays, and recreational days in the Black Forest. So I thought I let you know a bit about the gears I recently bought:

I wanted to have a new binding for a while and waited desperately until the old one looked bad enough to be exchanged. This time I bought a K2 Cassette binding. Until today I didn’t regret the choice.

Another piece that I wanted to buy for a while is a protector vest. Mine is black but the picture was way better in white ;). 

At the moment I’m fully equipped for the season and I’m longing to go. Please let it snow!!!

Christina

Happy New Year

Jippiii a new year. From the depth of my heard I wish that this year will be your year, so that you will accomplish everything you want to. The first days of the year passed by so fast and had been awesome!
Last weekend Andreas and I visited our NLP Practitioner course and learned a lot about motivation. Although I never would have thought that I'll be verbalizing this, starting to learn NLP was the best decision I took in the past year.
Unfortunately, NLP skills cannot be demonstrated in a blog post. To compensate for that I like to invite you to take a look at some pictures I took in Berlin:

Take care!

Christina

Christmas time...

... always flies by so fast. We spend the past days at Andreas' mother's home and yesterday we arrived at my mother's home to spend a couple of days too. Christmas has been awesome so far. Due to the wonderful and snowy weather it really feels like winter these days.
Among all the beautiful presents I got was a new camera. Thus we took a short walk through the center of Neuötting to take some pictures of the scenery:

On the second day of Christmas we went ice skating which was fun. Andreas gave his new noise reducing headphones a chance and is quite sure that he will use them.

Although I love early hours I have to admit that I finally feel tired :). So I'll write about all the other things that happened (e.g. trying out a new gear at Reit im Winkel), and some thoughts I had, after breakfast which will be rather later than sooner.

Take care

Christina

Winter here we come

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Childhood memories

Do you remember all the special sweets and plates you just loved as a kid? I do and once in a while I like to just try some of them. Unfortunately, somehow our tast changes a lot and the good old things aren't so good anymore. The strawberries above are really interesting. I used to love them but to be honest they are gross. The tast is awfully artifical and they are not really sweet. Either the manufacturer changed the recipe or all the deliciouse healthy food I ate changed my internal "like-list".

How to receive a gift!

This time I'll talk a bit about receiving because I figured out that it's often an issue of discomfort. Just remember the time when you were a kid. Every-time when you got a present your parents probably said that you should say "thank you". Quite easy isn't it. The reason why children tend to forget to say thank you is because they are either thrilled by the gift itself and want to try it out now, or because they are overwhelmed from all the impressions around them.
As kids we don't question peoples' intentions we just assume that there is someone who likes to give something to us and we just receive it. Once grown up the world is different. We learned how to play the game. We know the rules of society. Really?
I read a lot about cultural development and personal development during the past weeks and I observed how people act. Think about your loved ones and the not so loved ones. Why do you like one part of your family and why not the others? Maybe it's because the first ones honor and respect your ideas and make you feel comfortable whereas the other don't believe in you or trust you? How did you figured out who's on which side? Normally people don't say specifically that they don't value you as a person but there are ways to convey that message. One for example is to spoil the process of receiving presents. The best place to try that one out is Christmas! Here are idiot prove phrases that will make sure nobody is ever going to prepare something special for you:

1. That really wouldn't have been necessary.
2. You really shouldn't have spent so much money for a present.
3. For Christ's sake are you mad making me such a gift?

 Perfect! You can be sure that you will receive a bunch of crap as birthday presents because nobody will be in the mood to do something special for you.
Receiving a gift is easy isn't it? What most people forget is that making a gift is only a way of communication. Since communication never is a one way channel you should think about your response! Someone makes a gift to someone to show love, gratitude, or respect and the last thing that person wants to hear is that is was not necessary to do so. Thus to make both sides happy practice to receive gifts. Sometimes old parental guidelines are not the worst way to react :). When I heard about this strategy I was quit irritated but I practiced receiving for a week by just saying "thank you" for every complement or gift no matter how big or small it was and now it feels great.

Try it, there is still enough time left (43 days) until Christmas.
Cheers Christina

Relaxation

Guess what :) I had a fabulous weekend. Although we took a course in communication, and had not been home much I am relaxed, and motivated. I even got most of the stuff for the university done but that's less important than the fact that I nearly finished my sisters' christmas calendars.
Do you want to have a preview? Here's a picture:

I'll post some more as soon as I am ready with both calendars. I started wrapping the gifts this morning at 6:30 AM, or something like that. As I already stated a very productive weekend. There is something else I finished today:

I was caught by Andreas when I filled the beanbags and he asked who is supposed to leave the company this time, which reminded me that I'm crafting too many farewell gifts. These beanbags are not really a farewell gift because I am sure that I will spend a lot of time with the one who will receive them.

Greetings from Christina, 

who cannot wait any longer to finally go snowboarding again.