7 QT, volume 20: Christmas!

--- 1 ---

It's Christmas! Christmas is my favorite holiday. I realize, of course, the theological reasons in favor of Easter, but let's be realistic here. Spring dresses, or velvet? Eggs or presents?

--- 2 ---

Presents does tend to be a sore spot with me, though. I am good at giving them, but not at wrapping them. Presents I wrap tend to turn out crumpled, bumpy, and occasionally torn. While the rest of my family makes nice neat corners and artistic little tags, I do things like this:

I actually can write, I just blurred our the recipient's name!

--- 3 ---

That present actually has a leg up on a few of the others, though. At some point I ran out of clear packing tape and switched to green reindeer packing tape.

--- 4 ---

As soon as I have my own family, I am making reusable drawstring bags out of cloth. These will be used instead of wrapping. They will be labeled by having tags attached to them, probably with safety pins. These tags will also be reusable.

--- 5 ---

Here is our Christmas tree in all its sentimental glory. Over the years, we have accumulated some ornaments which are not really ornaments. They're things we could not bear to throw away, but didn't really want to look at all year, such as a coloring page of the empty tomb. Also, we have real candles.

--- 6 ---

In the interests of an accurate depiction of our family life, I did not straighten the tree skirt. Actually, that's completely made up. I took this photo to test light conditions in the living room.

--- 7 ---

As you can see, they weren't very good. Nevertheless, we did eventually get a reasonably good family photo. I don't want it going out into the free unrestricted internet, so here's a Christmas tree ornament which is actually an ornament.

Merry Christmas, from my whole family to yours!

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Ooops

So, it turns out Thanksgiving is next week. I thought it was two weeks away. This has thrown a monkey wrench into my planned paper-writing schedule. I have created a whole new schedule, which is rather hardcore, but it doesn't leave me a lot of free time. So expect things to be light on the blogging front! I may pop in from time to time to post a picture or something trivial, but don't expect anything that takes a lot of work until all my papers are turned in (last one is due the evening of Dec 2).

Medieval Mindset Excursion

Twice this semester, we have gone on an excursion for our Medieval Mindset class. This basically works in the following way: Get up extremely early. Ride around in a bus all day looking at old things. So far, something has gone wrong each time. The first time, someone got sick and threw up. The second time, the time this post is about, it poured all day. With that said, we did get to sleep in a bit because of that!

 This is Burg Rotteln.

 This is a church in France. We tried to hide from the rain in it. Unfortunately, someone had already scheduled a funeral and didn't tell us. When, to our surprise and shock, they brought in the coffin, we hightailed it out of there.

 A stork! We saw at least four different storks. I love them so much. I just wish the weather had been better so the pictures would have been better.

 This is the most adorable tiny castle ever.

 We also took a tour of the city of Staufen. Due to an accident while drilling for some sort of geochemical energy, something cracked and now the tectonic plates under the city are shifting and the buildings are being destroyed.

 See the way this house leans forward? That was done on purpose to maximize the living space while minimizing the amount of property you had to pay taxes on. It also made it easier to haul things up into the top floor without scraping the walls.

 So many cracks! :(

 Kalte Sophie! My patron saint! I want to go back there and buy some ice cream.

 We finished up our day with a lovely classy wine tasting.

7 quick takes, volume 6

~1~

I think I am doing the numbers right. Based on the fact that every blog I read is on a different volume number, I'm assuming that the volume number is based on how many times I have participated. Which would be 6 now.

~2~

Today is one of those days where I realize how out of touch I am with the US. Basically all the blogs I read are American, and almost everybody has said something about military people and families in the last few days. There was also apparently a military-themed Google doodle (which of course I didn't see because stupid Chrome insists on redirecting me to Google.de, and then offering to translate the page into English). What a coincidence, I thought. Or maybe a soldier died overseas and I just missed it.

~3~

I finally figured it out, though. Where I am (historically Catholic state), Pentecost vacation is coming to an end. Where everyone else is (in heathen Protestant America), Memorial Day Weekend is starting. Hence the focus on the military.

~4~

I could never be an expat. And I'm just kidding about the heathen Protestant thing.

~5~

Theoretically I am writing a paper right now. I'm roughly halfway done with it. Luckily it's a first draft, because I am starting to get the feeling it's turning into a combination of three things: structural hot mess, grammatical nightmare, and a bunch of BS where content is concerned. I feel bad for the poor teacher who has to grade these papers.

~6~

The closer I get to time to go home, the more I worry about packing. I think I have accumulated a lot of stuff here that I want to bring home as souvenirs. On the other hand, since I brought so few clothes, the ones I brought are beginning to look rather the worse for wear, so maybe I can just throw a lot of them out before I go, freeing up some space for souvenirs. We shall see. I am open to the possibility that I will have to pay for an extra bag on the way back, although I am hoping to avoid it.

~7~

As these takes get more and more scattered, I can feel my blood sugar dropping. Forget about my lack of coherence in this post, and go read the other takes while I go eat some breakfast. Thanks!

Pretty, happy, funny, real

I've never done this before! I almost never have enough photos that would work. However, today I do, so here we go! The idea, which was created by the lovely ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter, is to post four (or more) photos, one each for each of the words pretty, happy, funny, and real.

{pretty}

It's finally getting warmer here. These flowering bushes are on the way to the streetcar, and they are so pretty! Anyone know what kind of flower this is?

 {happy}

I do know what this is--it's a gray heron. I took advantage of a few rain-less hours to do some birdwatching, and this is the first bird that Kevin and I saw! It stood there forever, so I could photograph it as well as identify it.

{funny}

I mean, really, if you're going to graffiti a dorm, it *should* be in Latin. The highlighter wasn't a good choice, though. It's hard to read, and the transmission of your message is hindered.

{real}

This week, I have two reals:

I missed my brother's Confirmation because I was in Germany. So I made him a cake and celebrated anyway. Flourless chocolate cake, with strawberries to look like tongues of fire. It didn't occur to me until after it had already been decorated that a chocolate cake with white icing is maybe a bit more Lutheran of a metaphor than I was going for. Oh well.

My desk has the dubious honor of being my other {real}. Can you tell I'm trying to write a research paper? I did clean it up, but it already looks this bad again!

Photo issues?

I can't upload any pictures any more! If anyone knows what might be wrong, let me know. The pictures just refuse to load into the upload window.

Well.

I have an explanation for my coffee maker.

It wasn't mine.

My new roommate has the same coffee maker, just waaaaay older.

I am appropriately ashamed and almost feel like I should apologize to her for having yelled at her in my head. Although, seriously, I can't imagine how that conversation would go.

"Hi, I wanted to say sorry for having been mad because you destroyed your coffee maker, because I thought it was my coffee maker, and I can hardly drink the coffee that comes out of your coffee maker, and no, you never knew I was mad, but I'm sorry anyway..."

Or not.

So, lesson of the day: if you think something has been destroyed, first look on top of the kitchen cabinets to make sure that it wasn't an identical copy that was destroyed.

Food fail

So, the other day, I was thinking about how I was so hungry and had been eating all day and was still hungry. My first inclination was to tell myself to be quiet, because I figured it was some sort of withdrawal something. Then I thought that maybe I actually was hungry. So I logged into My Fitness Pal and plugged in everything I had eaten.

Too few calories, but too much sugar. Hmmph. Will have to work on that. The next day, I found myself out in the city without lunch. So I ran over to Aldi and bought a small can of peanuts. Well, turns out that a small amount of nuts has a large amount of calories!

That wasn't really what I was going for either! This is a bit of a balancing game, I think. I have been tracking my food ever since then, and I am coming up with consistent results--about 300 or 400 calories short, but with too much sugar. Days when I have nutella are shot (that has a TON of sugar), but there's also not much you can put in a sandwich when meat is out because it's Friday, cheese is out because it's a dairy product, and peanut butter is out because you live in Germany!

This is going to be tricky. I have several friends who are gluten free who reassure me that it does get easier, and I'm glad to hear that. Once I get back from Prague (yes, I am attempting to go traveling to a country whose language I do not speak and stay glutenfree throughout the trip) I think I can spend Easter break trying to figure out how to make more nutritionally balanced yet packable lunches.

And on the last glutenfree note of the day, I am going to do a test tomorrow, and deliberately eat a substantial (although not ridiculous) amount of gluten tomorrow to test that it was, in fact, causing my stomach aches. Wish me luck...