A normal week

Last weekend we went to a huge flea market downtown. It was pretty neat but the aisles were too close together and after an hour of people bouncing off of us. When we go to flea markets we like to look at each table and always pick the one thing we like the best - the thing we would buy if we had unlimited money and could collect stuff without it looking like clutter. Sometimes I like to say "I'd buy that and sell it on ebay" when there is some crazy neat stuff that we see. It would be fun to but stuff and sell it, but I don't know if we'd have any idea what kind of stuff could be sold at a profit. Plus the Euro being so strong would work against us too.

Not much happening this week, we are looking forward to next Wednesday when Fred and Janet come and visit us.

I'll be sure to post some stories and pictures from their visit soon. Plus Volksfest is going on (it's Octoberfest for Stuttgart). Speaking of Volksfest, Brad and I went downtown yesterday for our normal Saturday routine of markets and lunch, but we we ending up going home for lunch because it was crowded! I guess a lot of people come here for Volksfest. That'll have to be one of the first things we do with Fred and Janet!

Norfolk, VA

It was good to be in Norfolk, Virginia for a week.
- I was able to network and build relationships with the people I work with.
- I got to see old friends like Buddy, who lives there, and Fred, who was in town for a different conference.
- I was able to go shopping, especially book shopping :-).
- I was able to rack up another 11,000 miles on my Delta mileage - I'm about to become a Silver Medalion member (lol).
- I was able to work out in the mornings, since I woke up before 4:30 every day due to the time zone difference!
- I ate possibly the hottest Thai food I've ever had in my life -- Fred was laughing at me even while he shared it...it was oh, my god, hot. It was really good too! Plus I managed to snort some of the equally spicy soup up my nose and boy did it burn! I think I've never drunk so much water at one meal before.
- I got to eat at California Pizza Kitchen, Chick-fil-A, a Thai place, and Hooters (not my selection but the location where we had a "no host social" for the conference).
- I got to drink Starbucks Caramel Machiattos.

The only things that would have made it better (and it could have definitely used them) would have been Brad going with me, and meeting up with Kim. Maybe next time!

The Hell Hole Rant

Last week, I went to Norfolk to attend a conference at Joint Forces Command. My boss picked out the hotel and I learned one very valuable lesson. Never let him pick the hotel again!

He chose the Quality Inn, it's just across the street from JFCOM. The only "good" qualities were the location and the continental breakfast (even that wasn't spectacular).

The bad things:
1. my room smelled bad
2. there were ants everywhere in the room and in the parking lot - the actually got into the car at one point
3. we were paying the gov't room rate. I could have stayed at a $200 a night, really nice Westin or Marriott for the same price. Instead of a $65/night place where we were spending $94 a night.
4. The area of town is really crappy - I wanted to go running, but no way was I going alone along that road
5. There was no workout room
6. The doors opened onto the parking lot (safety again)
7. You had to let the phone ring 15-20 times before the front desk would answer it
8. The internet was out for the first night, thus to tell Brad I got there safely I had to call him, and was charged $30 for 2 minutes!!


If I'd been staying alone, instead of sharing a rental car with 2 other people, I would have bailed in an instant and gone and found another place! I could rant about how much it sucks to share a car between 3 people who aren't friends and have no common interests, but I'll save that for another day!

Really Cool Video

This video was taken on my last deployment. If you look at the water, you can see we were having swim call while this was taken - you can see the boat and the people splashing in the water. We were also having a steel beach picnic while the jets flew by. This is an awesome video!

American Airlines Rant

American Airlines - argh! First the tickets for the girls, bought 4 months out, cost over $400 each (without the additional unaccompanied minor fee we'll have to pay). Then there website times out - even though I was careful to not click anything else or twice. Then, not only do I not get an email from them or the itinerary showing up under the frequent flyer number. So I assumed that the computer had timed out and not taken my transaction. So, an hour later, I went back on and bought the girls tickets. Now, two weeks later, the second transaction posts and they've double booked the flight! Argh! So I called up and they told me, "I'm sorry ma'am, but it's your fault you bought two sets of tickets, we cannot refund your price, the best we can do is let you cancel the flight, with a $150/ticket charge and hold the remainder on credit.". Of course, I demanded to speak to a supervisor, and they told me they were transferrng me, only to hang up on me. So I call back, go through the whole thing again and amazingly they credited the fee - it should post sometime in the next MONTH! Idiots. Don't tell me they can't have a system that prevents this, especially when the tickets were for the exact same people, with the exact same frequent flyer number, on the exact same flight!!!!

Saturday Painting

Today, Saturday, Brad and I woke up, had our coffee and headed off to the flea market. It was cold and dreary today, And raining on and off. I had my umbrella, but I learned that I need to get a littler one. Mine is big enough for two people, which also means it's so big that it gets in eveyone else's way!We drove downtown and found parking then went walking around.While there was a lot of cool stuff - though much less than normal due to the weather, I bought a small fan there that I can use at work, costing me a whomping 5 Euro - about 8 dollars. It works good - we checked it out when we got home.

Then we headed home. We were going to go out to lunch but instead decided to just get some bread & pretzels and then eat lunch at home. Next we stopped to pick up some paint. You are allowed to paint your walls here, the rule is they need to be able to cover it in one coat of white or you need to repaint it yourself. Brad decided this week that he was sick of the white walls and had them mix up some paint for us. Fortunately the paint and the painting supplies can all be picked up for free from the housing office. Brad was going to paint the front room later this week, while I'm gone - I'm headed out of town to Norfolk for a conference this week. But, since there was nothing on tv and it was a quiet afternoon, Brad started taping off the walls and we ended up painting everything today. At first we were really worried that it didn't come out right - it looked really splotchy, but we were both relieved as it all turned the same color when it dried. Two of these pictures are before shots - the first two are before shots with white walls, the next three are after shots. While these aren't pictures of the whole house, they are a couple of the shots I've been owing you! The only thing we didn't like it the color is a lot like some of our furniture and the drapes. I think I'm going to get a maroon ribbon to sew onto the curtains to give it some contrast.

Wine Festival (also known as Weindorf)

Two weekends ago Brad and I went to the Stuttgart Wine Festival. We went with both Adrian (who I work with) and Chris Santos. The Wine Festival is set up in downtown Stuttgart. They take a couple of the squares - the ones where they have the vegetable and plant markets on Saturday. Then they set up a bunch of tents and booth where they sever beer and wine. We got there at about 6 p.m. and it was already crowded. We walked around and looked at all the different foods offered and the different wine booths. We did stop and buy a bottle of wine (3 glasses worth). You would buy your glasses -- small glasses with the Weindorf picture on the side. This time, instead of putting a deposit down for the glasses, you instead purchase them outright - for .50 Euro each. Then you can reuse your glass with all the other wines you purchase.

Most of the food was traditional schwabian fare (Schwabian food is the food of the region we live in), everything from sausages to cooked dishes. Brad had a pork steak and baked potato dish. I had a pasta dish. Both of our dishes were good but the best part was hanging out with friends trying different wines. We had some people join us at our table, a married couple (she was British and he was Australian) and a german woman. They all live in Stuttgart and belong to a English club. Kinda interesting, but the German woman was both pushy and Booooring! She went into a half hour long story about getting pulled over for speeding when she was in America - the end of the story was she got a warning. Argh!

It was a beautiful night and the wine fest was really busy. By later in the evening it was so crowded that it was hard to walk to the bathroom - you had to work your way through a very big crowd. It was a good time, so good of a time that we went back on Sunday night. We ended up going back to the same place (I think our friend was sweet on the waitress). I had a fruit and cheese dish for supper and Brad repeated his meal from the night before. I don't know what kind of cheese it was, but it was really good! We walked around and checked out the other booths also, a lot less crowded on Sunday. Only problem with the place is it's pretty expensive, but we had fun. We took all these pictures Sunday night - we realized after we got there that we hadn't brought the camera on Saturday. It was another good reason to go back!

Ironically, Monday (Labor Day), we ended up eating lunch at the wine fest. Neither of us had intended to go back but we went downtown to go to the toy store, forgetting that it is on the mall that had the winefest in it! We were going to get something to eat at a place other than the wine fest, but ended up waiting too long. In the end we realized it was after 2:00, so we just got something at one of the stand up booths and ate it sitting in front of the Rathaus (this is their government building downtown). I had potato noodles with cheese, Brad had a sausage in a bun. It was really good.

When we went to the toy store (our destination downtown), we were actually looking to buy a jigsaw puzzle for me. I did get one, it's pretty cool, it's a jan Van Haasteren puzzle, the scene is of a circus. It's like a Where's Waldo picture in a jigsaw puzzle. One of the things I liked about it, was instead of just looking for the place the piece went in the puzzle by color and shape, instead I'd take the piece and spend time trying to find it on the picture on the box - so each piece became a bit of a challenge to locate it. This artist has created a bunch of puzzles, click here to check out some of them.

Exercise...exercise...exercise

This weekend I did a lot of EXERCISE. Of course, while I wish this meant I worked out a lot, in reality it means I worked a lot. We were going through an exercise at work, and they decided to start the thing on Saturday. Of course, my involvement is during the planning part, which all happens at the start of the exercise, so Brad waved 'bye to me and off I went.

Completely disrupted my Saturday morning routine too! Dang it!

The side note, is we didn't do anything cool this weekend :-(
(though I still need to tell you about the WineFest last weekend -- I'll do that later)

What is he kicking?!?

Brad and I were out walking the dogs on this hill behind our house. Brad had gone out just before me so he was over at the bottom of the hill when I was still at the stop. Looking over at him, I saw he was kicking something around on the ground and Cruiser was standing there looking at him. He said, "You need to come and look at this" (of course, it most likely was "lookit this" :-) )

He's still rolling this thing around on the ground. It was like a fuzzy ball. I thought, heck maybe it's a toy, but Cruiser wasn't getting excited so I knew that wasn't the case. Well I got closer and looked, it was a ball with all these inch long spikes poking up. Turns out it's a hedgehog and Brad keeps kicking it onto it's back because he's trying to get a look at it's stomach. when I touched it, it felt like one of those hard wicker boot brushes. Crazy feeling, but pretty neat :-)

Friday Night in the Dark...a Bar, 2 Bikes and 4 Bridges

Friday night Brad and I met up with some of my coworkers for a beer at an Irish Pub (O'Donovan's). We had done the same the week before and then were really disappointed that we had to leave to catch the last train so this time...

We headed out early, took our bikes. The bar is, according to Google Maps, 6 miles from our house. We'll we didn't want to be all sweaty when we got there so we rode our bikes to the train, took the train to Sinnigen and then rode the last little bit to the bar. After 6 hours of talking, drinking beer, eating pizza, playing darts, and listening to the d.j., Brad and I headed home. I should add here that Brad had had a few beers...

We knew how to get home from Panzer, so we just needed to go about 1 to 1-1/2 miles to get there. Adrian gave us directions and off we went. The directions were to go up a really big hill 'till we saw the base, then turn left and we could go on the route we'd been on before. (I bet you can tell where this story is heading ;-) ) Adrian also said the bad part of the hill was just 4-5 blocks. Anyhow off we went, up the hill, stopping, up the hill, stopping, up the hill, after going about 6-7 blocks Brad started debating that we should have turned left already since we'd exceeded the 4-5 blocks. I argued that the 4-5 blocks was just the really steep part but we needed to go farther. Well we went a little farther and I was getting swayed over by Brad's arguments, so we back tracked and...yes....got a little lost. Actually, I wouldn't say lost, I knew where we were, but we ended up going back the mile we'd gone and then taking a different route, with a couple stops for breathers along the way, and a fun time coasting down that really big hill.

When we reached Panzer, we took the "Tank Road" home. This road is the actual cobblestone road the tanks would use between Panzer (another base) and Patch (where we live). It goes through forest so it's real quiet and away from everyone. The road is surprisingly smooth, and also not accessible to cars so it was perfect for us. Plus, it's uphill from where we live so most of the ride would be downhill. There were a couple really cool parts of this trip. We stopped on a bridge that goes over a couple train tracks. The bridge was still fairly warm so we were laying on our backs looking at the stars. There is nothing at all around there, and the only thing that indicates you're not in the middle of nowhere is the horizon is brighter. Sitting there for 10 minutes I saw 3 - yes 3!! - shooting stars. Two of them were the kind where they are burning out in the the atmosphere directly above you and paint a wide swath across the whole sky. It was really neat.

After the bridge there is the big hill - going down - it was really surreal since you can't see any further than the ike lights, which only illuminate about 50 feet ahead of us, and we just kept going and going. The hill is about 2 miles long, and you need to ride your brakes going down or you'll be going 60 mph or faster. Right after the hill ends is the other base, so we were finally home. We didn't get home until 3 a.m., and the ride took a lot longer than we thought it would, but overall it was pretty neat.