Thanksgiving 2007

Beautiful table!

Jack carving the bird

Rebecca tests the wine

Sitting down to the feast!

McKenna kissing Andrea

We had Thanksgiving dinner with our friends Jack and Rebecca. They invited us to their house, along with Rebecca's neighbor and our friend Jen, R's friend from CT Andrea, and our friends Rob and Aimee. Rebecca, Aimee and I knew each other mostly as we all had the same job as FRSAs. Anyway, we had a great time.

$1 will net you 65 euro cents.

Wow. And people wonder why we don't shop at the grocery store in our smalltown. Why we don't travel constantly or shop the Christmas markets coming soon. The thing is, everything looks about the same pricewise, and your mind sees one euro and says to itself Oh, one dollar. Not so.
Price tag says 10 euro? That's $15.38. You get 100 Euro out of the bank and it shows on your debit receipt $154. (plus any fee you might incur!)

When we got here it was 85 euro cents to the dollar. So our buying power has decreased by 20% since August 2006. Which also means all our bills (rent, phone, elec and gas) have increased 20% as we pay them in euro and we are paid in dollars.

This is not to say "send money now!" We are doing fine. I have a new job that pays significantly more than the last one and I think our COLA (cost of living allowance) may have gone up a tiny bit. I just wanted to try to explain the economics of the situation. The good news is that as long as we are shopping on post we don't pay tax! :)

Posted to the dream blog

and I'm going to TRY to keep it up!

Update

October 14 I posted that I was going to start eating more healthy, exercising and losing some weight. Well, I don't have numbers, but I know that some of my clothes are fitting better...or fitting! and a couple of people have told me that I look like I'm losing weight. I'm not visiting the gym as I had said, but we are going to try to remedy that situation soon!
The especially good thing is that I feel better. I take my lunch each day to work, eat whole grains, fruit, veggies, etc. I still love the salt and the red meat, but I'm okay with that!

So, there's my update!

Farewell 72nd

Today my old unit, the 72nd Signal Battalion held a Farewell Luncheon for me. It was SO great! FRG Leaders, FRSAs, Commanders and 1SGs, the Bn Commander and XO, the CSM and staff members came and we all had a great time!

And there's a pic of the snow!

SNOW!

Last "winter", it didn't snow until the second day of Spring. Yesterday, Nov 14, it snowed!!! Really and truly! It didn't stick on the ground, but then I guess it did it again last night because there was a thin layer on the truck and yard. COOL! I would post a picture, but its still on the camera and I'm too lazy to get it off right this minute! :)

Looking back

So, my friend Shauna pointed me in the direction of a website: http://www.blurb.com/. It's pretty neat, you can write and publish your own book there. It's cool for photo books, but you can also do wordy books and even import your blog. SO, I started one, importing the blog, but it looks like a LOT of work to edit and make perfect (which I would feel necessary) so I don't know if I'll ever do it. Plus all the pics were too low res to work, so I'd have to reupload all of them...ANYWAY, this "book" would have started with "ok, sometimes change is hard, but we are starting this new blog" or however it started when I switched from blogstream to blogspot. I went to check out the old blog, and ended up reading from before I got to Germany through April 07. It was pretty cool to go back and see where we were then.

Our first trip to Munich, mail being super slow (some things don't change!) Lil T was officiall adopted 11/16, I had just met my friend Marisa (who I was at that time referring to as IACS Marisa because that's where she worked) while I was volunteering as the Welcome Coordinator, and on into Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year we are going to go to Rebecca and Jack's for Thanksgiving afternoon, and at lunch SB may be serving at the Dining Facility.

It was neat to look back.

(This is a pic taken in our first few weeks here. We had gone driving around, got out to walk through Worms and got caught in the rain)

http://www.visitingeu.com/central-europe/czech-republic/2006/10/karlovy-vary-spa-wafers.html

http://www.visitingeu.com/central-europe/czech-republic/2006/10/karlovy-vary-spa-wafers.html

I found these wafers online. They are the EXACT ones! They are SO good!!! Vanilla nut and apple cinnamon are my favorite!

Czech it out!

This weekend, I went on a bus trip with my friend Marisa, her son Khameron and 40something other shopping crazy women! We drove about 5 hrs (including a 30 minute stop) to the Czech Republic to do some bargain shopping. It was a great time. The bus ride was murderous, much like the Venice one, but not quite as long or overnight. But that aside, it was fun to meet new people and do something different in a different place.

One really interesting thing: Remember that movie Last Holiday with Queen Latifah, and she thinks she is dying so she goes to a hotel in Europe to spend all her money having a great vacation before she dies? WELL, the Hotel Pupp is in the city of Karlovy Vary. Pronounced /kal-uh-vah-ry/. We parked right by it! We strolled around that town for a couple hours and then headed for the MADNESS of the Asian Market. It reminded me a lot of just across the border Mexico with the bargaining and people everywhere, etc.

This place had hot off the press wafer cookie thingys. They are SO good!

More pictures here:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?Uc=11pcpqol.799bhxep&Uy=73yqks&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0&mode=fromshare&conn_speed=1

Jim's meat was too small!

Quan, our not-so-brilliant waitress at dinner was having some trouble. Wrong appetizer, almost an hour after we ordered it, and then there was Jim's steak...It was over done for the first thing, but he sure wasn't going to send it back and have to wait another hour, so he said it was fine. Minutes later, here she comes again with another one. She seemed to want him to trade it out. He explained that it was fine and she finally got the message across that she wanted him to keep them both by saying, "no, because you meat, too small!!!" We all had a good laugh and then took many pictures of one another with her in the background trying to get a picture of her!