Back in the USA

Well, after nearly 9 months, I've made my first trip back to the US for the holidays. The trip home started off well with me waking up an hour later than planned because my alarm was set wrong. But, I made the flight without problem and made it home in one piece. Now I have about 3 weeks to load up on all the stuff I haven't been able to do, buy, or eat while away. The one thing I notice right away is how hard it is to drive so slow. That, and the potholes. And the iced tea, gallons and gallons of glorious iced tea.

Blog changes

I've decided that from here on the photo gallery will be done in Picasa. The older pictures will also get migrated over to Picasa as well. During the migration, I'll probably keep a link up to both the old and the new. Eventually, I'll probably just have a link to the new site.

Basically, google forced my hand on this. They elminated the way I had been uploading multiple pictures at a time (a function of the transition from blogger to the new blogger beta). As it is now, it would be very tedious to continue to post entire galleries in the blog. If this changes in the future, I may return to having the album covers and thumbnails here with links to main gallery.

As a consolation, you'll be getting full screen pictures instead of the resized ones I use here.

Don't worry, this in no way means the blog will be going away. It's not going anywhere and I will work to keep it full of pictures and hopefully better integrated with the new photo gallery.

Weihnachtsmarkt

This past weekend a few of us went across the border to Aachen to see the Weihnachtsmarkt there. It was so great. The Germans do Christmas right, there's nothing else you can say. I'd forgotten just how much I liked Christmas in Germany. Everything just feels special there this time of year. They really seem to go all out without making it feel commercialized. It really puts you in the Christmas mood. And, it was just what was needed for a break from Holland. There was so much food: giant bratwursts, flammkuchen, printen, potato pancakes with applesauce, gluhwein. Ah, it was so great. We all ate so much. The stalls were really good too; there were lots of handmade arts & crafts for sale and so I loaded up on a ton of stuff for gifts. I think people probably wondered what was wrong with me that I was buying so much stuff. But, I've pretty much been looking all year to find handmade or traditional things to get people for gifts (instead of mass produced junk), but after 8 months, these were the first I'd found. While you're in Aachen, you should definitely make a point of seeing the cathedral, Charlemagne is buried there after all and the decorations are amazing. Anyway, it was a great time and I hope we make it into an annual tradition.


And the photogallery can be found here.

Sinterklaas

Happy Sinterklaas everybody! For those who are unfamiliar, today is the day when Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaas) comes along and gives presents to all us good children. Here is what I got

And then his assistant Zwarte Piet comes along and takes the bad ones back to Spain with him. So far everyone I know is accounted for, so I guess that means we've all been good for another year.

Next on the agenda is Christmas and so tonight I put up my Christmas tree substitute

Snarl!

This week just hasn't been quite what it should be. First, one of the lightbulbs in the livingroom went out. This wasn't much of a problem because I could use other lights until I could go to the store and get more lightbulbs. Except that the next night a second bulb blew, leaving me in a dim livingroom. What made me forget this was the next morning when I tried to take a shower but found out there wasn't any hot water. Fortunately, someone from work was able to help me fix this. Apparently, the heating and waterheaters here are in an evil league together. When the water level in your radiator loop drops too far, your hot water switches off until you refill it. Why the system would be losing water, I don't know. Nor do I know what the heating and hot water would be so linked. But, now I do know why there was a garden hose sitting next to the central heating. Obviously, this meant the worst of the week was over. Except that this next morning when I went to take a shower, the pilot light had gone out. I didn't know that at first; I just noticed the water getting cooler. I just kept turning the water up warmer to compensate until there was a short blast of scalding hot water followed by nothing but cold. When I got home, I managed to figure out how to relight the pilot light, thanks to the wonders of babelfish and the heater manual. So, now I have hot water, but will I tomorrow?

On a positive note, some bubble wrap came today in the mail.