nichtszusagen

• No time last weekend, so I'm catching up on two weeks here.

• On Sunday the 30th, we went to the Auto-Technik Museum in Speyer, our last chance, as our Jahreskarte (season ticket) expired at the end of the year, and if we're moving out of the country in the summer, it wouldn't be worthwhile to renew it. We'd have preferred to go to the one in Sinsheim The outdoor ones didn't turn out--it was too dark. (the tickets are good for both), but it's a bit farther, and true to our family tradition, we got a late start. A few pix from the exhibits:

• New Year's Eve, we followed our tradition of 3 years and invited Carl's mom and Manfred for hoagies (I call them submarine sandwiches, but Carl calls them hoagies from his years at Penn State, and so does his mom, so I've been linguistically outvoted.) and fireworks. The kids got dressed up (Camden's shirt & tie finally arrived): and here are the grownups... okay, the older two generations: I suppose Dagny can be considered a grownup at 22, even if she did have to sit at the kids' table at Christmas.

  Instead of Monopoly, this year we played Apples to Apples with Carl's mom. I was a little concerned that she might have trouble with some of the words, but the only one she stumbled on was "rappers." I think she enjoyed it, and I had the rare experience of watching Dagny and Curran collaborate and giggle together, which made my day.
  

  Fireworks here on New Year's aren't like they were back in San Antonio, where the city does the fireworks, and a handful of people set off a handful of fireworks outside the city limits. Here, everybody sets off fireworks in their backyards or on the street, and it goes on for a good half hour at least. In good weather, our backyard is ideal for this: we're at the edge of a greenbelt, and on the other side is another small town. You can see fireworks everywhere you look. At least this year, it wasn't raining, as it has been the past two years, but it was foggy, and between that and the fireworks smoke, pictures of rockets didn't turn out at all. Here's one of a volcano: Regardless, we had a great time setting off our two buckets full of assorted fireworks. Here's Curran and the buckets: it's not blurry--that's the fog and the fireworks smoke.

• In the morning, we had our traditional breakfast tacos. That became a tradition the first time Carl's mom and Manfred stayed for New Year's--I'd wanted to make them something for breakfast that would be unusual for them, and they loved it, and every year they ask to make sure I'm making it again.

• Later on New Year's Day, Dagny wanted to do more sightseeing, so the four of them went to Saarbrücken , while I stayed home and snoozed.

• Wednesday and Thursday were blurs of shopping, as Dagny tried to find presents to take back for her friends (jewelry from Idar-Oberstein), and to spend her Christmas money (on, among other things, some really cute shoes--I wish I'd taken a picture of them--they're adorable). We played more games, including Stock Market, a favorite from my childhood, and watched a lot of Third Rock From the Sun season 2 (a Santa gift) episodes.

• Friday, Carl had to work, and Dagny spent the day packing.

• Saturday we went back to Carl's mom's in Bad König so Dagny could say good-bye. It also occurred to us that we hadn't taken any family pictures this visit, so we took a few in the backyard. At least this time we remembered to use the anti-red-eye setting: You may notice we're all freezing.

  Later we were going to take Dagny out for ice cream, but all the ice cream parlors were closed, so we wandered around Michelstadt for a while, then ended up back in at the Pferdestall.

• Sunday we took Dagny to the airport and said goodbye. For a change, we got there early enough to relax and have breakfast at McDonald's before she had to go through security, despite the fact that the most rested of us had had about 4 hours of sleep. It's always painful, because she leaves just at the point when we're all used to having her here.

  We'd foolishly promised Carl's mom to go visit them after dropping Dagny off, adding an extra 2 hours to our 3-hour round trip, so we got there and vegetated on her sofa, watching ski jumping, for a couple of hours, then she made us spaghetti for lunch and we left.

  But not to go home... there was a model train exchange going on in Darmstadt, so we stopped there first. I stayed in the car and dozed and read for the two hours the lunatics model train enthusiasts were in there.

  And we still didn't go home--we went to the commissary, which was excruciating. After which, we realized we were too darn tired to make dinner, so we went to Burger King.

• Monday morning, school started again, back to the 5:30 a.m. alarm. At least the exhaustion from Sunday made it easy for us to get to sleep Sunday night--something that's always a problem after a school break.

• It was a pretty uneventful week. I've managed to exercise every day, even if it's only 10 minutes (got to start slow), so I'm happy about that. There's a ton of laundry--I don't know how that happened, since Dagny'd been keeping it done. Mostly, I was just tired.

• We had to take Diva to the vet for a bare spot in her fur, and she ended up getting two shots and having her anal gland cleaned. It's taken her three days to forgive us.

• Thursday night we went to see National Treasure Book of Secrets. I'll write about it eventually, but we all loved it.

• Last night Carl and I went out to dinner at the Orchidee, our favorite Thai-Vietnamese restaurant in Landstuhl. It was a nice relaxing evening...once we finished explaining ourselves to each other, anyway.
  

• Today, Carl's brother Mike and his family were going to come here to visit, but they remembered a previous commitment, so we're going to their place tomorrow. Yay! I don't have to clean. Although the boys did dust and vacuum and clean the bathrooms. It appears to have become a habit. Yippee.
  

Labels: about me, weekend update

// posted by Darla @ 1/12/2008 12:55:00 PM