Minnesota is Heaven, But Virginia is Home

Of course, pictures are all messed around--Christmas Hanging out in Annika's new chair (thanks Chad & Heidi!) A little Grinch, decorating cookies (yes, I make them do it topless) Annika on Christmas morning New dishes! Now who could those be from? Two weeks ago, a statue on the Koenigstrasse, taken between bouts of screaming The Christmas pyramid, in our hotel room The Christmas tree, in our new apartment Donna, tell your boss that they can use this picture for advertisement! Eating messy cookies

It's been about a month since we've been without real, live, streaming internet at our residence. True, we had the internet cafe while we were in the hotel and I broke down a couple of times and paid the ridiculous 22 euro for 24 hours of connection in our room. Ah, those were good days. Then we moved onto the base and our only source of internet was at the library, where, apparently for security reasons, one is not allowed to view blogs. Don't ask what security is getting leaked from people looking at blogs...I haven't a clue. We were supposed to get this internet and phone thing done on Friday. I was counting down the days and planning on throwing a big party complete with shrimp and champagne to celebrate the return of the Internet. No dice. We waited all day long, paid two visits to the vendor in person and made several calls to their (not free) help line. Of course, we were told a different story every time we called. First, it was wait until 6:00 p.m., th...

I've shelled out another $25 to have the internet for a 24-hour period. It's totally worth it. I think I might pay $50 if they wanted it. However did we survive without the internet? It's such an addiction. My friends at J Crew, Gap and Gymboree were missing me...I don't want to think of all the great deals I missed out on while I wasn't connected. We had an OK weekend. Remember I said that we were going downtown to Stuttgart's shopping district, the Koenigstrasse? Oooooh, that was so not a good time. First of all, Hans and I were dumb enough to think that Josiah and Annika could do without a nap for one day. Silly, silly, silly us. We should have enough experience under our belts to know better than that. They were good on the train, but got crabbier and crabbier the longer we "shopped". They were probably feeling the stress of Mommy and Daddy, too, because duh--who goes shopping with a preschooler and a toddler two weeks before Christmas? Every stor...

I just finished reading Ian McEwan's Atonement and am on to a second book of his called A Child in Time . I'm sure many of you have heard of Atonement since it has been made into a recent film (one that is up for some Golden Globes, I see). I have to recommend it and very highly. Some of it is set in the British retreat from Dunkirk--the way that McEwan describes what the character is seeing and experiencing is absolutely riveting. I couldn't put it down. And there's a strange sort of twist at the end, something I've not encountered before that makes the reader really think and wonder what was real and what was fiction. Hopefully the movie will live up to the book. I am officially in love with all Haribo products. Haribo is a German company that makes gummi candy. It is soooooo good. And not overly sweet and hey--gummi candy doesn't have any fat! Whoo-hoo! I am currently washing a load of clothes in the very nice German washer. It takes about an hour to wash o...

The Rathaus in Tubingen Here are a couple of scenes from Tubingen. Not very good pictures, but you get the general idea. We definitely will need to invest in a better camera for this European adventure!

Josiah & Annika asleep at the hotel in Minneapolis "OK, I've put two pounds of sprinkles on this cookies, now how do I get it to my mouth ?" Josiah and his friend Logan at the Christmas beach party in Newport

Just one, because the computer in the room is ungodly slow and it will take about 22 minutes for one picture to upload. Here are Josiah and Annika in our suite, playing in a couple of the boxes that recently arrived from Newport. For some reason, Annika has a grouchy look on her face. Sometimes I think she doesn't like having her picture taken. Josiah, as usual, is working the camera like a chain-smoking, bulimic French model. Hope this sates the grandmothers...

See, the good part about the German keyboard is that I am not sitting here trying to figure out how to get an umlaut over letters. The u with umlaut is just part of the keyboard. I am having a hard time trying to figure out how to get an apotrophe, so bear with no contractions and a lot of I ams and do nots, OK? It is the best I can do right now... So, things are still going good. We have gotten cell phones...that was a big relief. I hate not feeling able to make phone calls or be connected to Hans when he's (oh, found the apostrophe) out and about, especially as we're trying to accomplish so much. The phones have already come in handy. Like when I was able to call Gen five or six times over the weekend. She never answered the phone. Not even, apparently, when I accidentally called her at 6 in the morning. Sorry about that, Badg. I think it was maybe a little closer to 7. I just wanted to hear her sweet little voice! Hmmm, what else? We passed a very pleasant weeke...

And please excuse any strange spelling mistakes as these German keyboards are different. Not overwhelmingly so, but the y and the z are in different places and that's enough to be very disconcerting...also, the apostrophe is in a strange place and there is only a shift key on one side. Well, I will make this short and sweet. I know that Hans e-mailed some of you. This is the first time I have been able to get down and use the computer. It is superexpensive to have internet in our room, so we come next door to this internet cafe. Travel went OK. Not great, but not horrible. The kids slept the majority of the flight from O'Hare to Heathrow. I think that the worst part was the wait at Heathrow with everyone feeling a bit punchy and just wanting to be done. It was a very quick flight from London to Stuttgart and our wonderful sponsor, Jen, was there waiting for us. She had rented us a car, a Mercedes station wagon, so we got everyone in and zoomed off to our hotel. Having...

I kind of love the word torpor. It's one of those whatchamacallit--words that sound like their meanings. Spellcheck is completely confused by my interpretation of that word, so if someone knows how to really spell "onamotapea", please let me know. I have to admit that that word kicks my butt. You all know I'm usually an excellent speller. Anyway, torpor. We spent the entire day today in our hotel room. Hans got out because the Vikings game wasn't being televised on any of the channels we get. Too bad, so sad. So he got to sit at the officer's club and drink beer and watch football. He's still watching football, seven hours later. I'm glad that the Vikings won, actually, that's good...keeps Hans in a decent mood. Ebullient, even. There, take that onamotapea!! Josiah, Annika and I had an excellent nap this afternoon. I know that I slept for at least an hour, the kids slept for closer to two. Tonight we'll try to get everyone to slee...

So I won't even try. I'm wondering if I have a whole host of new readers who "discovered" my blog while googling "huge sausages". Super. I have this fascinating way of putting my foot in my mouth, usually up past my knee. If I have a little, tiny, miniscule book listing the three times Hans has been wrong since I met him, Hans has a book the size of a thesaurus filled with all the awkward, bizarre and just plain stupid things I've said. I keep my pencil sharpened to write an entry in my book. He's on his third package of nicely sharpened #2s. Anyway. Our last Saturday in Newport. Annika is officially running a temperature today and threw up one more time this morning. The carseat has been painstakingly cleaned...seriously, it's a major undertaking to remove the cover from a carseat, untangle all the straps, wash it, clean all the gook and crud from the wells where stuff accumulates, then reassemble the whole thing, all the time praying t...

The title of this blog won't make sense to any of you and that's OK. We had supper tonight at 6:30 at a service plaza somewhere in the wastelands of Connecticut...we decided not to have McDonald's and instead braved the suspect Italian place. Hans got penne with sausage, I got ravioli with meatballs. I wasn't expecting much from a rest area Italian place, honestly, but at least we got a good laugh when Hans came over and revealed his penne with a huge, huge sausage on it. More like a bratwurst. He was expecting little bits of sausage in the sauce. I don't know why this was so damn funny, it just was... Maybe because we were exhausted from taking Frau Mathilde down to the port in New Jersey. The drive there was blessedly trauma-free. No terrifying tanker truck accients took place in front of us. We weren't stuck in horrific traffic on the George Washington Bridge in NYC, because we went a little further north and west to avoid it. We got to the vehicle processing...

I am a very bad wife, I'll admit it. I completely forgot about our five-year anniversary until a couple of days ago. While writing down the day's date I thought "Goodness, our annivesary is in two days!". Then I forgot about it again in the midst of getting a rental car for tomorrow's trip to New Jersey and running last minute errands around Newport. I don't have a good excuse, I just plain forgot. Hans and I tend to be a little lax in the area of celebrating these things. I don't know why that is. It's not because either one of us is un-romantic. On the contrary, I think my husband is very romantic and anyone who knows me knows that I read way too much Laverle Spencer growing up. Actually, that sort of reading really didn't do me any good because it totally skewed my perception of what romance is. I'm only just starting to learn what real romance is: the husband who changes the dirty diaper I pretend not to smell! For five years of...

I read about this organization, Cell Phones for Soldiers , in yesterday's USA Today. CPFS was started by two Massachusetts siblings in 2004 when they were 13 and 12. Hello, do I feel like a slacker? Ummm, just a little! You can read all about the background story on the CPFS website. Basically, CPFS accept donations of used cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs and all of their wires, chargers, etc., etc. CPFS gets paid a small amount from the recyclers for each item they turn in. Then, CPFS turns around and spends that money to purchase phone cards for soldiers and sailors in Iraq and Afghanistan. What a great time of the year to donate to this very worthy cause. And who doesn't have an old clunker cell phone or PDA gathering dust in a drawer? It's a way to help our servicemembers and recycle something that will just end up clogging the landfills! It won't cost you a dime, either, because you can download a prepaid shipping label. There is also a list by state of drop-off s...

Ahhhhh, it's back to life as we know it at the luxurious Navy Lodge, Newport, RI. I haven't written since Thanksgiving, so I'll do a quick recap: we had a marvelous time in Minnesota. It couldn't have been much better, honestly. We got to do enough sufficiently Christmasy things to make me really feel the holiday spirit. Maybe all this renewal of the warm joys of this time of year stems from having children old enough to truly delight in the festivities and get excited by Santa. I feel like it's allowable to have childish delight in the same way that it's now allowable for me to play with them on the monkey bars and go down the slide. And of course , I wanted to do a quick recap and I go off on a tangent. We had room service for breakfast every day. Thanksgiving was great--Gen cooked a great meal and Grandma T. played bowling on the Wii (that's a newsworthy event!). After dinner, we shot over to visit family in Rochester, then on down to Austin to spe...

We have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, namely that we survived our flights. Let's just say that one member of our party was not entirely happy to be confined to a plane. From Newark halfway to Minnesota, she screamed and fought me like a wild mustang under the lasso. Seriously, I felt like I could enter the calf-roping contest at a rodeo. The whole episode probably lasted about 10 minutes, but felt like eternity. Finally, she exhausted herself and fell into such a deep sleep that I had to keep checking to make sure she was still breathing. And, as always, the part that I appreciate the most about Annika's fit on the plane is the fact that people feel the need to turn around and stare . I mean, OK, have a quick glance at the demon-possessed child in the 19th row (and her red-faced, sweating mother), then for the love of God, just turn around and mind your own business the best you can. Hello. I realize that it's loud and grating and I'm doing my best...

We've been keeping our Coke bottle tops and 12-pack codes for a bit. It's a pretty good deal for Zero drinkers, because you can get a $1.00 off coupon every time you have 100 points in your account. And anyone who is as serious about consuming Coke products as these De Fors are can rack up 100 points quickly. Anyway. Christmas is coming up and the good folks at Coke are letting Coke Rewards users donate points to Toys for Tots. It's very simple and free to sign up, plus they'll send you a free liter bottle of Coke. Then, all you do is keep your codes and take a minute now and then to enter them in. It's really very simple. Coke's goal is to get a donation of 3,000,000 points. They were at 1.2 million last time I checked. It's just a very simple, very easy and pain-free way to donate to a good cause. Check it out at http://mycokerewards.com

Today was a very gray and chilly day in Newport. So gray. So chilly. So dismal. We ran a few errands this morning and got lunch at Wendy's, then headed back to the bunker to eat and take a nice, long nap. One of the things that I like about the bunker is the ability to pull the blackout shades and have it be dark as a cave in here. We're getting used to only seeing the sun after 9:00 a.m. We're living in the dark. Like vampires or fungus or Democrats. Anyway. I decided to take the kids to the park in the afternoon. We needed to get some exercise and try to clear the cobwebs of our sloth-like day. I bundled up the kids and headed down to the park to meet up with Josiah's newest and bestest buddy Logan. For awhile, everyone romped joyfully around the park. My only excitement was trying to keep Annika's hat on her head. Not to digress, but I got her the cutest hat and mittens at Old Navy and though they are adorable and make her look like a yummy little pi...

Post trick-or-treating Being "on" takes so much energy Pre-festivities, Miss Ladybug Annika's response to "We're going to get CANDY!!" Costume by Gymboree, antennae by Rachel Pre-festivities, Mr. Tiger, GRRRRRR! After trick-or-treating (note that their faces aren't smeared with chocolate) Sorry for the lack of pictures lately. Our connection is moody. One day it is very, very slow and the next day it is very fast. Obviously, it is a bipolar connection. Today was a mostly bad day, but suddenly in the afternoon, it perked up and so...here are some pictures for the starving grandmothers. You can also get a little view of the bunker. Hard to believe but Monday it will be two weeks since we "moved in"! Enjoying the Wii. I have played bowling a few times now. It's addicting, definitely. Plus, I don't have to wear those ugly shoes that 4,256 other people have worn. Or wait for the ball return. It's pretty sweet. Hans...

OK, duh...a Wii! I am super-excited though! We have been wanting one for a little while now (this is your fault, Peder and Sarah). They are pretty hard to come by around here. We would check periodically at Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy with no luck. But today the heavens parted, the sun shone its rays down, the heavenly trumpets sounded and lo and behold...a Wii was waiting for us at Wal-Mart. It was just like that. Maybe this is why Wal-Mart always had 780 skylights on their roofs... They had probably eight of them in the cabinet when I went by to check, and by the time we left 15 minutes later, all but two of them were sold. I was so flabbergasted to see a real actual Wii in the cabinet when I walked up that I didn't know what to do. I was afraid to walk away from the area because surely the Wiis would all disappear before I could get back. Luckily for me, someone else had spied them before me and had summoned the surly, put-upon electronics guy to unlock the cabinet. I...

Today is Hans' graduation day. As he was walking out the door this morning, he said "When I come back this afternoon, I'll have an M.A.". As if he's going over to the Stop & Shop to pick it up after school. If only it were that easy, I'd do it too! Anyway, he's a little bummed today because the college isn't putting on any sort of ceremony for them. Believe it or not, Hans is in the very first class to have no ceremony. No shaking of hands, no keg, nothing. They are mailing him his diploma. Which will probably join such various important documents as his commissioning certificate and his U of M diploma in the bottom of some dark drawer. Not that I should talk--my MSUM diploma is God knows where. This has been a very pleasant year. If only Navy life was always like this, I would want him to stay in forever. We have loved having him with us every single day. We have loved having short work days, days off, no deployments, no inspections,...

Yikes, it is super-windy and raining outside! I guess the tail end of Hurricane Noel is going past. I have been outside of our little room exactly once today...an ill-fated trip to Barnes & Noble. Silly me, to think that it might make my lodgebound children (one in particular) happy to go and play with the train table in the children's section. He was happy with it while there was one other little boy there. As soon as a couple more little guys showed up, he started throwing a fit, and throwing trains. Not at the other kids, at least! We had to beat a hasty retreat. I really hate it when Josiah behaves in this way, but the thing I hate the most are the "looks" from the other mothers there. I try to tell myself that their kids have all had their days. It's sorta hard to believe when it's yours who's acting up. I've definitely been there on days when Josiah is being an angel and the other little boy is stealing trains from him or throwing tan...

Yesterday was an(other) extremely long and stressful day. Here's how it was supposed to go: we would all get up, have a pleasant breakfast, get ready to go, get in the cars and have a pleasant and scenic trip to New Jersey with a nice stop for some lunch at McDonald's. It's a three hour trip down to Jersey, so I figured if we left by 9:00 a.m., we'd get Hans' car through the processing center, stop for lunch and be back on the road by 2:00 at the latest. Home to Newport by suppertime. We did have a nice breakfast, we did get on the road by 9:10 a.m. and our trip was pleasant and scenic until we reached East Lyme, Connecticut. Hans was following me on I-95. We were cruising along in the fast lane, when all of a sudden in front of me, at maybe a distance of two city blocks I saw a truck's tanker rise up in the air, fall to the ground and start to slide, long-wise across the freeway, towards us. It seemed so improbable that at first I just didn't understand. I...

OK folks, first of all I just want to let everyone know that we are alive and well. Second. We have the slowest internet , internet so slow that it makes free dial-up look speedy. Anything that requires a sign-in takes about ten minutes to load up. After the lightning fast speed of our DSL at the house, this is painful. It's supposedly high-speed wireless, but...obviously, not that high-speed. Such a rip off! What I'm saying is...don't expect a whole lot in the way of posts because it's so annoying to use this internet . Thanks for understanding. We are all done with the house on 2 nd Street. Our last moves went...OK. The storage move went pretty well. At least the guys were half-decent...friendly and non-surly. The guys that came for our Germany move on Monday were definitely on the surly side. Well, one of them was, the other was fairly friendly. I have nothing against these guys, truly. You all know that I worked with a bunch of roofers for nine year...

The dreaded big blue truck just pulled up and gave us our last oil fill. We haven't used the boiler since May (thank GOD for this nice, warm October). I ran out in my bare feet to tell the driver that the tank should be very full. For some reason, they have no method of figuring out how full the tank is...they just fill it until they see it coming up the fill pipe. That's why I wanted to tell him, so he wouldn't get sprayed. I'm nice that way. Besides, I didn't want him wasting an iota of fuel oil. Fuel oil all last winter = $100,521 (OK, I tend to exaggerate) Fuel oil for our last fill = $19 The feeling of being DONE heating this place = priceless

I'm trying to gradually wean myself off eBay...this is tougher than the switch from regular Coke to Coke Zero. I've just gotta keep taking deep, measured breaths. Gotta keep up the running regimen. Why would I need to stop using eBay you say? Because most folks selling things on eBay don't ship APO/FPO, meaning, they don't ship to overseas military addresses. The problem is not that it costs anything extra to send stuff APO/FPO, I think it's that the sender has to take time to fill out a customs form. It is kind of a pain in the butt...and I still can't figure out why we ever had to fill out customs forms when it is AMERICAN mail going from one AMERICAN point to another. Grrrrr. Don't get me started. I'll start ranting about the 2006 quest to get a double stroller sent to Japan. True, there are rare eBay sellers who will ship APO/FPO, but they're a little hard to weed out of the bunch. So, alas, I must start weaning myself of my drug of ch...

Dumptruck, by Josiah We're still working on the getting dressed thing...this is what happens when Josiah tries to get these PJs on...he ends up looking like a little member of Kiss! Mommy, by Josiah (I hope it's the camera angle that makes my hands look sooooooo long--hello freak show!) Mommy's Cutest Flower Shoes, by Josiah Tree, by Josiah

We're entering the last phases of the move. I spent part of the day spackling . OK, I guess it was actually about 22 minutes. We figured out pretty early on that the plaster walls in this place were impenetrable . I still managed to pound a couple of nails into the walls and hang pictures, but let me tell you, it was a lot of work. And knowing that we'd only be here for a year, I put most of our decorative stuff in the basement and we settled for pictures that didn't need to be hung. Long story short: there are approximately 20 areas that I had to spackle . A couple of the holes will require a second and possibly third spackling . Tomorrow's project will involve dragging all of the landlady's cans of paint up out of the dungeon and painting the spots. I don't know much else. I am in a state of...ennui or something. I was telling my dear mother-in-law last night that this confused time of nothingness reminds me of the days before our wedding. I am a ve...

...this from my son, who has been watching too much "Yo Gabba, Gabba!". I think that I blogged awhile ago and posted some video of this show. It is the latest and greatest show in our pseudo-home*. I am constantly being presented with nuggets of wisdom that Josiah learned on YGG. One of which has to do with the food segment that I described in my previous post. Hans and I have used this episode to great advantage in the Food Wars. If Josiah doesn't want to eat his beans (or any other member of the veggie family), we pull out our YGG and tell him that the beans want to join his other food at "the party in his tummy". Last night I was a little slow in getting around to eating my peas, which led Josiah to very seriously tell me "Mommy, your peas are crying! They want to go to the party in your tummy!" Seriously, these kids get funnier and funnier. They are such excellent comic relief that I think we're going to have to keep having them (or ado...

So...our very nice landlady very nicely had some nice men come over a couple of days ago and clean up the filthy koi pond. They made a great big mess, but they did create a very soothing little waterfall feature, so I guess the two cancel each other out. We are now able to listen to the calming tinkle of running water on a constant basis. Believe it or not, the koi (a she koi ) was still alive and thriving under all that scum and muck. Today we were heading out the door to have lunch at Chilis when we started smelling du odeour de skunk. No big deal. It's a regular occurence at our house. We have theorized that there is a family of skunks (in addition to the family of possums) that live underneath the house. When they spray, the scent is powerful. Besides which, as I have mentioned before, skunks just roam the streets of Newport. And have resided in our garage en masse . Luckily, Hans happened to peek out at the pond, and seeing that the pond is no longer covered by a thick ...