Cheryl on the Web

My spare time this week was spent playing travel agent - that’s why there have been no blog updates! Most every evening I was computering away, looking for cheap hotels and looking up things to do. I don’t like to post to my blog the details of trips I plan before I take them - never know what kind of burglars like to read blogs - so you’ll have to wait until after we take the trips to hear what I’ve been busy planning :P

I’ve decided that playing travel agent is definitely a hobby I enjoy. At first I thought that the fun was related to the planning bit - no comments from the peanut gallery on my planning fetish, please - but in thinking more about it, I think what I like is the orientation bit. You all know I have no sense of direction or spatial orientation whatsoever. (I mean, how many people can have 3 concussions within 3 weeks?!) When I plan trips, the thing I like doing is seeing how the city or area is laid out, on which roads or trains or subways we’ll travel, and visualize how we will move through the place(s) we are going to visit. I like to first look up where all the things are I want to go to, and then look for a hotel in the right area, and figure out how we will get from the hotel to the other things - can we walk? Will it have to be subway? What’s the most convenient place for hotel? When can we best go where? It’s all about orienting myself in the space.

Somehow, doing all this in advance really pays off when I actually take a trip, and makes the city come alive - because I know in my head where I am spatially in the area we’re visiting. When I don’t do this kind of orientation planning in advance - and Tim plays navigator on the spot - I more easily forget the things we’ve done or exactly where we’ve been - because I never understood how we got there or left there in the first place! I’m really looking forward to our trips, I don’t think I even need the maps anymore!

This weekend is our housewarming party for all of our friends from Holland. All of the people we invited are probably coming, and that means around 19 people are come to visit our 85 sq meter apartment. Probably all but 2 will sleep here. Mom, you would be proud - on Saturday we are cooking dinner for 21 people!

The shower door definitely arrived just in time.

Yes, I know - it’s been a whole week since my last post! This last week my work tended to overwhelm my private life, unfortunately. That meant: no sleep and no blog posts :( We can always hope next week will be better!

Tim and I had some people come over this weekend, so before they came we cleaned, and after they came we cleaned. Has its advantages! I am enjoying relaxing on this Sunday in a super-clean house :D Also, the sun is shining, and when the sun shines into this house it adds so much to the livingroom/kitchen area.

Yesterday the coat rack in the hallway came out of the wall, as in, the 6cm screws we used to hang it up in 3 places were all sticking 1cm out of the wall and the coat rack was tilting forward, loose on the screws. We learned our lesson! Our 3-euro IKEA coat rack isn’t designed to have 30 kilo/50 pounds of jackets on it. I’m actually thankful - at all of our previous houses, a similar occurrence would have meant that half of the wall ended up laying in the hallway; here, the wall is super-strong, so Tim was actually able to use the same holes to re-hang the coat rack on new screws and plugs!

Tim and I have finally gotten .. somewhere .. with the house! Our first family visitors are here this weekend, Tim’s parents Paul and Els. All our work is paying off as we relax in the livingroom and hang on the bar in the kitchen. We’ve pretty much finished up the things we need to do on the house, less than 4 weeks since we moved in. That’s thanks to Tim, who finished off a huge load of home improvement chores in record time. What are we going to do now with all our free time?

We are still having a discussion about what to do with the 2 remaining moving boxes, hidden behind my office door. Guess what’s in them? Better question: what would be in your last 2 moving boxes that you hadn’t unpacked?? :) Well, in our boxes is a VCR and about 30 videos on VCR tapes. Tim doesn’t really want to part but I’ve never been one for sentiment. Votes, anyone?

Tonight the saga of the bar lamp continued. You might remember from my kitchen post that the lamp to be hung over the bar was broken. Well, it turned out not actually to be broken (ah-hem) … there was a loose wire in our creative extension wiring, and when we fixed that, the light suddenly worked! Go figure. Of course, once the light worked, I had one look at it and decided it was way too ugly to hang up.

So tonight we went light shopping again - traded the old bar lamp for a new one - only when we got home and started hanging up the light, it was metal on metal. Tim’s stone drill bit was ripped to shreds, so we discovered the hard way that at least one of the holes we need to drill to hang the new light up is positioned right on the metal beam that must run above the bar. Sigh. By then it was 10pm so we decided the neighbors would probably come blow us up if we continued trying to drill through the beam.

Tomorrow we are going to fill the holes from the first lamp, fill the hole that is positioned close to the beam, and drill a few new holes that hopefully won’t hit metal so quickly. Of course, first I’m going to go stock up on drill bits at the hardware store. Wish us luck! If it’s a success I’ll post pictures ;)

Plenty of common phrases today have roots in old truths, customs, and common oddities. This was re-emphasized to me today by the email forward my mom sent me. I don’t know the author of this forward, so if anyone knows please tell me so we can give credit where credit is due or observe any copyrights… that said, enjoy reading about why we have, among other things, phrases like “bring home the bacon”.
(more…)

Bet you non-Germany-dwellers wonder what the title of this post means! That’s the German word for Carnival, which culminates next week in Rose Monday, Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. The only things I know about this celebration is that it’s primarily Catholic and that on Wednesday we start the countdown to Easter. Can anyone else tell me more? What’s the big deal about “Fasching”?