Military moving

There are a few thing that I wish someone had told me before moving to Germany with the military:

1) HAVE THE MILITARY SHIP YOUR CAR (yes, I would even yell it at you if we were talking face to face) Yes, you can also buy a beater euro car when you get here if you want/need but it's so much nicer to have your car shipped and not have to hassle with buying a car that may have wacko issues with it. And the paperwork and work involved with getting your car over after you're already here is a headache.

2) If you have a pet you're even considering moving with you, BRING IT. If you do not bring your pet with you when you PCS then you will have to bring your pet over on a commercial flight because Space A will not accomodate your pet after you PCS. Heartbreaking and/or expensive.

3) (Depending on what base you go to) There is hardly any room on base to live. You will most likely have to live off base or live in a stairwell apartment on base with noisy neighbors. Pick living off base unless for some reason you are bound and determined to live on base and are willing to wait months to move into your apartment (or duplex if you are higher ranking or have a bunch of kids).

4) Even though living in the hotel is miserable, take time to look at at least 3 places to live before signing the contract. We like our apartment and we love our landlady but sometimes we see features in other peoples houses we wish we had. Take the time to look a little so you're happy. The military won't pay for you to move to another house (unless you move on to base)

General observations you should know:

1) Learn how to recycle. Seriously. There are days when you drive down the road on recycling morning and can obviously point out the Americans by their horrible job of recycling.

2) Learn to waste less. You only get so much garbage space in your trash can. And if you put your garbage in your neighbors garbage can they will start to feel homicidal (in a nice neighborly way, of course...)

3) Learn to pay much better attention to your driving and forget about your cell phone completely while driving. Driving here can be crazy, especially in the smaller villages with a manual car. Pay attention.

4) Even though your German neighbors may look crabby and stare at you, smile and wave as you drive or walk past. Most the time they will smile and wave back!

I have more on my list but that's it for today
Tschus!

Procrastination

I'm procrastinating the paper I'm supposed to be working on. I'll get back to it right after this... I'm to the point in procrastination where I have scrubbed every individual key on this keyboard with a clorox wipe. It's that bad people.

I love homesteading books. Any book packed full of fun do-it-yourself stuff can entertain me for hours. Raising goats, canning, building garden stuff, uprooting all grass in your yard and turning it in to space for a large garden. Yeah, that makes me happy.

So sometimes I dream about what the 'perfect' house/yard/etc would be. I'll tell you about it someday. I hope that someday in the future I can have some acreage and time and space to experiment. I think it'd be fun to retire and have a CSA with a little coffee/bakery. We'll see, in the meantime I'll keep dreaming.

Driving

The driving in Germany is a little scary. The roads are very narrow (often on the country roads there is no centre line drawn on the road), cars drive fast, and people park on the sidewalk or where ever else they feel like.

We bought a little used manual car a month after we arrived. I can drive a manual but it's been a long time since I've had to. The first time I drove a manual was helping my dad with fencing and I could barely see over the steering wheel of his truck. Anyway. So the first time here I had to drive the car I was a little nervous. After dropping Levi off at work I had to drive to a neighboring town to a dr.s appointment. I killed the car twice before even getting off base. Everyone drives so fast I just panicked and accidently put the car in 3rd gear instead of first (it sticks going into 1st sometimes) and killed it in a roundabout. Eventually I made it off base and to the hospital with not many other errors (except I drove about 40 km/h the whole way).

That was about 4 weeks ago. Today driving home I felt like I had been driving our little manual for forever. Sometimes you have to remember that there is a (re)learning curve to just about anything in life and it's okay to drive ridiculously slow or accidentally kill the car in a roundabout. These things happen.

Healthy snacking

Once we moved into our house Levi asked that we always have fresh fruit / veggies available for snacking. This seems like it should be pretty simple. We like to eat healthy and love fruit (and most veggies). But, for some reason, it has been a chore.  It really isn't that hard to wash berries and leave them in a bowl in the fridge, or peel and slice a cucumber. But I just can't remember to do it until it's asked for. I'm not sure if I need to set a reminder to do it or just keep working on making it a habit.

Classes

I'm feeling a little swamped by classes already and it's only week 2. There's just a lot of day to day things that have to be done that distract from the bigger projects that are due (and should be started on now) later in the semester. But I'm hoping this tech writing class I'm taking will improve my paper writing so that I can do well on my big research papers!

Also, I really don't like the time difference between here and home. I always want to text people but they're asleep and I don't want to wake them up. Oh well.

Twitter

So my husband decided today that he wanted to have a twitter account. I had signed up for one forever ago so I was like well maybe I should give it a shot too. So we're both playing around with twitter and this super creepy girl starts following him. Totally raunchy vulgar tweets. Seriously, how do these people think that it's okay?? It blows my mind that some people have no boundaries. He blocked her etc but really people, is that necessary??

No AC

The past week has been hot here. And it's supposed to stay hot until later in the week. Its been in the high 80s to high 90s every day. That temp doesn't sound terrible but there's no air conditioning here. Anywhere. So there's no escape from the heat. Luckily our house stays fairly cool. But riding in the car is the worst. No air conditioning and the window shield just makes the sun feel that much hotter. Really nasty. Sunday was in the high 90s, it might have even been over 100. We opted to hit a local indoor pool for the afternoon with some new friends. That was the best idea ever. The water was a little on the warm side but it still felt way better than being outside.

At the beginning of this nasty hot streak I had been doing some basic maintenance to my bikes. Cleaning chains and gears, tightening odds and ends, staring at my breaks wondering how I repair those (it can't be that hard, right?), etc... But it's been too hot for this girl to go out and bike. Hopefully when it cools down this weekend I'll go. I'm hoping we're getting into fall now and the weather will continue to cool down but someone said it can get pretty hot here in August and September.

I started up school again yesterday. I think this semester will be a little crazy with 3 classes but they look really interesting.