Summer...

...is finally here. At least I hope that's the case. The last two weeks have been full of rain and that really had some influence on my girls' mood. This has been a problem as my big girl starts projecting her bad mood onto each and everything she can get hold of. And unfortunately the first candidate for this is my wife. But Steffi won't stand still to receive the bad mood, she counteracts. This leads of course to some tears. So Angelina turns to an easier target and that is Luke, our dog (no, he is NOT named after that Skywalker guy. His original name is "Luc", which will make "Star Trek - Next generation"-Fans listen up. But even that is not by intention. The dog breeder where we bought him doesn't know one or the other...). Poor Luke is so goopy for her and she treats him like a slave at the moment. I really hope that the sun coming out will help distractingh her.

It is about time she gets to know some children from the neighborhood.

The weekend itself was a very busy on. My in-laws came to visit us. They brough my nice and so Angelina had a child to play with. They went to the Zugspitze, Germany highest mountain. They climbed, they went into the Eibsee (lake eib), they went to an adventure playground. A lof of fun for the kids on that day.

In the meantime I was four hundred kilometers away, celebrating the bachelor party I spoke of earlier. The party was good, as expected. The preparation was perfect, Marco - the groomsman - did a great job. We had good drinks, the food was awesome and we sat and talked until four in the morning. Ok, sounds a bit lame you think? What about the nudes? And the silly games?

First of all: We're not too old for this shit. We just feel it's not a necessity anymore;-)

The husband-to-be used to be the wildest one of our bunch. But now he's settled a lot. We stayed among ourselves and had a good time. We all dressed as roman senators. That was rather cool. But now I know why the roman empire perished. It takes two helpers to dress and the romans could never have made it into modern times because driving a car in those clothes is NOT recommended. Believe me...

Let's Party

So, now even my friends in palatinate will benefit from me being a "zu-g'reister" in bavaria. I'm going to buy a so called "cool keg" which is a self cooling beer barrel. My friend Marco found out which beer flavors offer theese and one of thzem is Ayinger, a beer brewed south of Munich. They have a list on their website where one can buy it. Funny thing is, two of those places are in Starnberg. One is in 14 Munich street, the other in 16 Munich street. You might find this interesting when you know that I work at 15, Munich street *grin*

One could call this "a sign"...

Tomorrow we're going to celebrate the bachelor party for Chris, one of my best friends. This is going to be a great thing. I won't tell anymore details before it. I don't think he'll find my blog (or identify it as mine) but prudence is the better part of valor.

This will be a hell of a weekend. Driving for at least four hours, help preparing the party, drink really a lot of beer and good wine (did I mention Chris is a wine connoisseur and we complied with that?), sleep - most probably in the car - help cleaning up and then drive home after my alcohol level is low enough. I will surely need the few remains of sunday to recover to be able to work again an monday. Phew...

Oh, by the way: My wife is a workaholic. She managed to unpack ALL the boxes from our moving. The only thing left to do is placing a few lamps (I finished like six of them yet, another three or four to go) and setting up my desk. This isn't needed at the moment and this weekend is planned otherwise, so we will see when I will have that finished.

Our TV is not working as inteded, but that is a known problem. The satellite dish and the signal distributor are both analogous and we have a digital receiver, so lots of programs are in a frequency range the dish won't deliver. It has been reported to our landlord and he is really a nice guy that always tries to have things done right away. So I think this will be solved quickly.

Sick me

Now that my girls are fit again I suffer badly. I am really the poorest one. No, just kidding...

I have a bad cough and a hell of a headache, but that'll pass. The really worst thing is that I am not really fit for helping Steffi. Since yesterday no boxes are left in the ground floor. Finally we can start to live here. The house starts making fun, now. Today I cooked in the kitchen. This was the first stime in weeks that I could prepare the meal for my family. That felt good.

And my sweet little Angelina ate a huge share. That made me proud. I must have done something right.

Yesterday we went to a big supermarket (and forgot to buy the most important things, fly flatters...). It is in Weilheim and called "REAL.-". Interestingly it was hard to find, even when having the address and a navigation system. We passed it two times on the back side (which is the official street address) without noticing it. They should do something about that.

After that we went to "Media Markt" (big electronics store) to look after a new bigger fridge. We searched for an american style, but after having seen them we might go for a "german" style model in the end. The ice cube creators won't account for all the "other little problems", like the quality, the energy usage or the partition that is just not very usefull at all. In the end Angelina behaved terribly, their selection was not very impressive so we went home quite early.

Sick family

Now that we slowly start to live normal again my while familie is sick. The two small ones are coughing badly, my wife got fever yesterday evening. Tissues are everywhere, just to make sure...

And I have to go to work and leave a sick person to care for two sick children. Don't like the idea but can't help it at all.

But now for something completely different: Moving (and home improvement) is a lot about mood. The other day I had a terrible mood because nothing worked out as intended. Yesterday I tried again and everything went flawless. Sometimes it is the right thing to reboot and start over, not only with Windows ;-)

And a third subject for today: It's official. We're bavarians. Steffi went to the local authorities and got us registered here in Bernried. My ID has a neat little sticker on it with the new address.

Panorama

No, this is not going to be about my former job. It's about getting up in the morning and the first glance out the window is showing a panorama that many people only ever dream about. I can see the alps. There's even snow visible from here. While I'm sitting on my balcony waiting for the 30 degrees celsius (86 Fahrenheit) the weather man promised for today to happen.

Just kidding. No time for sitting around (other than the few minutes to write this blog entry). I still have to move around hundreds of boxes. But waking up in the new house really feels good. The last two days have been horribly full of work. My whole body aches. The two kids rooms are "usable" (Chrissi's one is ready, just missing a few pictures, Lina's room is at, say 80 percent). The kitchen ist taking progress, but the rest is still a mess. Boxes everywhere. Oh, I almost forgot the room with the washing machine. That is quite usable. A necessity with two children, believe me...

Maybe I'll manage to take some pictures later. I just haven't found the camera yet.

Oh, by the way: I am quite astonished that I'm online at all. The new phone line is not yet active. But nonetheless the router went online when I connected it... Strange things happen sometimes.

Sanks for travelling wis Deutsche Bahn

Yesterday I went "home" for the last time. I was using train instead of the car. When going to the train station in Maisach I was stuck in a mini traffic jam between a parked car in front of me, a bus to the left and a car crash behind me. Noone could go one until those stupid drivers behind me settled their accident. That took me so long that I missed my train. Waiting for the next one made me miss the ICE in Munich. I could see it leaving Pasing station when I arrived one train later. It was a special ticket, cheaper but bound to a train so I was now in Munich without a valid ticket to go home. Thanks alot, DB, for once leaving right on time...

Now I had to wait for half an hour in the line at the travel center to get a new ticket (that I had to pay for again of course). And then the last part from Mannheim to Kaiserslautern was in the must f#%cking slow train available with a lot of stops in between and the most uncomfortable seats to find in German trains at all.

So instead of getting home early travelling first class I had to pay twice, got home almost two hours later than planned and my back was aching again. "Sanks for travelling wis Deutsche Bahn!"

By the way: I still assume it is a necessity for ICE train drivers to NOT be able to speak a sufficient English in order to be hired. None of them seems to able to pronounce a "th" correctly.

Now let's see if I can get my money back from DB for the missed ride wich was not my fault. I was told there is a possibility for "fair dealing". There's even a special department for such events.

Other than that it will be more packing today. Tomorrow we will fit all our stuff into a large truck, take the dog and the children and head on to bavaria to finally become "zu-greiste", a very special bavarian word for - yes, for my blogs title. More to come...

Murphy's Law

As a "computer guy" I often stumble upon this life wisdom. I even had a professor that wrote his diisertation about it. Funny man. All student's loved his classes for he made good grading whatever the quality of the efford. Won't bring you forward in life but who cares anyway...
Back to the topic: Yesterday I did another round of painting. Again a room in pink for my older daughter. Bought a lot of stuff to make it better than the first room. I bought a drill machine and a paint mixer, more lightbulbs and a set of torx scredriver insets.

• The insets didn't match my variable screwdriver so I couldn't dismantle the fence to make life easier when carrying the furniture on saturday.
• The lightbulbs didn't match the lamp. Altough they were of the correct type (E27) in terms of the mount they didn't match because of the depth of the mount inside the lamp. Stupid thing.
• The perfectly mixed paint didn't last. With less than 2 squaremeters left I ran out of paint and had to mix a bit more. I'm almost sure the new mixture doesn't match the first one but I couldn't tell in the dim light.
• The paint seemed a bit too dark in the first room so I mixed it with more water. Therefore the paint did spray a lot more. Either way you do it, you're fucked...

So you see: I was better prepared than the day before but still it felt like a disaster afterwards. I still won't become a professional painter. Maybe that's better for the world...