Cheryl on the Web

Signs I am integrating into German culture, that is.

1. Can tell you about the most ridiculous contestants on the German Idols (Deutschland Sucht den Superstar) TV-show from last week.
2. Didn’t break out in tears of culture-shock frustration on Sunday even though the stores were closed and we desperately needed light bulbs for our new lamp.
3. Know more about the status of the Hessen provincial elections than the US primaries.
4. Decided to watch Tim play Wii Chess but secretly missed watching my Monday-night CSI show in German.
5. Expect to get my new German drivers license this week, which will mean relinquishing my only piece of Dutch legal identity.
6. Can no longer touch type on a US keyboard because the keys aren’t in the same place as the German keyboard at the office.
7. Can get a Milchhörnchen (”milk horn” croissant) from the baker without having to re-pronounce the word at least three times.
8. Took a walk after lunch two workdays in a row without feeling guilty.
9. No longer start sweating at the sight of all my favorite software on my work computer being entirely in German.
10. Have bought and eaten 3 loaves of German bread in the last week, the authenticity of which was proven by the weight: 1000g (2.2lb) per loaf.

Those were Tim’s somewhat aggravated words to me tonight, as we both sat on the couch and he was surfing the net on the Toshiba Vista laptop - or trying to, until when the Doctor entered the scene. Though the suspect Doctor application turned out to be from Toshiba and not Windows, it is symbolic of the mass of minor annoyances that Vista can cause at first for experienced XP techies. We’ve gotten to the point now with Vista that every new window that pops up brings out a sigh of, “not the User Account Control again” or “what now?”. Of course, there are those rare times when Vista doesn’t say enough: you’d think, for instance, Vista would have said something to me about the wireless network connection being disabled while I was trying for ages to search for available wireless networks?

p.s. Yes, of course I know I can turn off the User Account Control - but in the Business-as-Usual state, that’s a feature I want. It’s just not a practical feature for the first 24 hours of using Vista, when everything you want to configure involves that control feature popping up at least twice in the process.

It’s almost like I woke up today and someone said to me, Cheryl, wake up, it’s 2008! And I’d go, really, are you serious? When did that happen? Hold on a moment… I remember having a great Christmas with the US family and celebrating the year change in Toronto with Tim and two special friends .. but after that everything is a blur.

Ah, wait, it’s coming back to me: After returning to Germany at the end of the first week in January, it took a record 4 days to recover from the jet lag. Then I spent the next two weeks traveling on business, with a couple days in the weekend in between to do wash and grocery shopping. Then, on my way back from England at the end of the second week, I must have managed to contract the notorious London flu that’s going around up there, because exactly 12 hours later: wham, I’m laying down sick. As I write this two days later, I’m still laying down sick. And that concludes the first 5.5% of the year 2008!

I have to say, I had other plans for 2008 that will have to be realised in the remaining 94.5% of the time. (If only I could get rid of this flu and actually get something done; I hate laying around doing nothing, and I’m not ever usually sick this long so it is driving me crazy.) Tim and I want to do some interior re-organising, converting the old office into a bedroom and making a hobby room out of the bedroom. I’ve got to press ahead learning German, and then we’ve got great ambitions to exercise, submit our tax returns, and vacation to Italy. Not to mention I really want to stay in touch more with friends and family and try out some new recipes. And I have got to learn how to drive our manual shift car better when starting on an incline, sigh. We are also working to get ourselves better organised on the technology front; we recently managed to get ourselves set up on IMAP e-mail on the old XP computer, my Mac, and a traveling Vista laptop - that was a quite satisfying achievement. And I managed to export my Mac address book to the Vista laptop using Bluetooth (a file export didn’t work because the format wasn’t Windows-compatible), which was quite exciting.

So yeah, perhaps not the most ambitious resolutions for 2008 - but even so, the clock is already ticking and the progress meter is still at 1%…

My pumpkin pie yesterday - the first one I ever made - turned out perfectly! (win) In addition to my traditional cooking chaos, I forgot to halve the salt when I halved the crust recipe for the pie, but luckily I tasted the dough and realized my mistake in time .. and started over on the crust! Then, after I’d put the (revised) pie crust and the pumpkin filling in the pie form and into the oven, I watched in dismay as the crust started to fall down from the sides of the pan into the filling! Just as I was beginning to think I would end up with something that amounted to a pumpkin pie (soup) dough bowl, the crust started to stiffen and I carefully pushed it all back up against the sides of the pan. (This is a perfect example of why American pie pans have sloped, not vertical, sides.) To accompany the pie at our Thanksgiving dinner, (more…)

What a great time of year, Thanksgiving. In two short days one can enjoy some of the best American pasttimes: extravagant Thanksgiving Day dinners, back-to-back American football games, and non-stop shopping outings. Of course, the reason that these pasttimes are so enjoyable is because they’re all done together with family.

Emulating these traditions here in Europe is never the most straightforward of endeavors, and this year my dedication to celebrating Thanksgiving was even less commendable than most years. In general, I try to take Thursday and Friday off work to cook and call the family and just enjoy the Thanksgiving spirit, but this year I was traveling for work until Thursday night so I just never made it into the right Thanksgiving mood. I haven’t even made the pumpkin pie yet that was planned for this year :( I’ve had the precious can of pumpkin sitting in the pantry since March when Mom and Dad brought it over here (can’t buy the stuff in Germany or Holland), and as an American married to a non-American, it’s my duty to instill in my husband the stubborn expectation he should have, that I will make him pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. When he gets out of bed, I will remind him of his duty to nag me for pie.

I watched re-runs of a couple of the college football games that took place on Thanksgiving Friday, Nebraska v. Colorado and LSU v. Arkansas. Those were good games! The announcers did a nice job of incorporating Thanksgiving references into their commentary, which was especially nice for me, sitting all the way over here in Germany.

Tim tells me that Thanksgiving Friday is called “Black Friday” .. and I have to admit, I can’t remember ever having heard that or why that is. I imagine it has to do with everyone and their children going shopping on Friday? Did any of you dare brave the crowds?

Today the hard drive of my work laptop got sick and died. At least that’s how I picture it. It wasn’t an immediate death, no shot to the head or head-on collision; but it went relatively fast, considering that everything seemed fine on Friday. I guess it was more like a viral infection that came up this morning and quickly lead to a high and fatal fever.

I must admit with some pride that every single laptop I have ever used has suffered hard drive failure. My very first laptop was a Sony Vaio ultra-thin 12.1″, the first of its kind on the market back in ‘99; of all the laptops I have ever had, it was by far of the best quality. It took a good 3 years before I managed to run that hard drive into the ground, and if I would have de-frag’d a bit less often, I think it would have lasted even longer; I learned my lesson. After that I picked up another Sony but sold it within a year; the hard drive on that died on the next owner but I’m sure I contributed to its demise. Then I bought an Acer and - you know the quality we can expect from them - it was in the first 120 days that the hard drive on it succumbed. Two years later, the replacement hard drive I had gotten under warranty also went under. Less than a year ago, the work laptop I had gotten second-hand for work started having issues after about 2 years of use, and the particular laptop that died today was only 6 months old so it doesn’t speak much for the quality of this particular brand.

To the credit of these laptop manufacturers: they are not built for serious hard drive endangerment. And that is definitely what I put them through. On Friday my paging file was over 1.5 GB large because the thing simply doesn’t have enough memory for all the apps I run for my work. Add on top of that all the recompilations I do when programming, and the hard drives probably get 300-500% more use than on average.

Anyway, it just goes to show: they’re hard drives, not hard core.

I’ve decided that having a German place of residence doesn’t mean that I really live in Germany, and no amount of German class is going to change that. I mean, apart from the address on my mail, it would be hard to know exactly what country I’m in. You know, saying “Good evening”, “Bye”, and “Can I have a plastic sack with that?” in German in the supermarket on a weekly basis is not enough to convince me that I live in Germany. Even the lack of fresh vegetables in the supermarket, the crazy number of holidays, the mandatory recycling of plastic, and the lack of speed limit on the highway don’t really give me the German feeling. I mean, all these things can be found in various other countries as well, and I can’t really identify any of them with Germany.

That’s the crux of the problem: I can’t identify anything with Germany. And it’s not because I’m a recluse (at least not by choice), it’s just because I have no familiarity with anyone or anything German, with the significant exception of my lovely neighbor who - for good or for bad - speaks better “American” than I do and therefore does not count. At least not at the moment. For the rest, there are no Germans in my department at work; the neighbors above us are also not German; most of the people we socialize with through Tim’s work either aren’t German or the conversation and interaction is always in that multi-culti English mode because of the work connection.

I would find it really handy to speak German 100% fluently (which is really the only reason I’m taking the course) but I admit that I am beginning to feel a sense of futility, because language and integration go hand in hand - it’s hard to get one going without the other. I will learn a lot in my German class, but as with most things: practice makes perfect, and without practice .. well, you know :)