A day in Upstate NY...

Forecast for Today

Updated: Jan 3, 6:45pm EST

Right Now -6°F FEELS LIKE -6° Clear, Bitterly cold.

Earlier Today 4° HIGH AT 2:05 PM Sunny

Earlier Today 4° HIGH AT 2:05 PM Sunny

Tonight -12° LOW Clear

Past 48 Hours Snow: 12.0 in (est.)

Fall in North Rhine Westphalia

Our Spring and Summer in Germany apparently came in April and May so now that we are in July, we are in Fall (almost winter).
Last week T1 told me that it wasn't summer and asked for her long pants back and this week T2 is out gathering apples from my parents-in-law's front garden tree (yes, we ate them).
It's hard to imagine what blue skies and warm weather might be like...

The Holiday Whirl: Will it never end? December 22-31

Sledding at Oma and Opa's House

After getting back from the UK (and counting our blessings that the weather did not interfere with our plans in any substantive way) we came back to a full schedule.

We got back Tuesday afternoon and sent the in-laws on their way with effusive thanks: we offered entertainment but they wanted to get back to prepare for the holidays (and every day my mother-in-law is not there is a day that someone needs to substitute for her on the organ and at the retirement home).

TMI following, feel free to skip: Then I got to fast. Wednesday morning was my (delayed) colonoscopy. After we extended he contract here in Germany, I realized that I needed to start actually considering my health, getting a three years too late annual exam, a full gyn, a mammogram (and ouch, they were extremely good at checking the margins!), a lung X-ray when my internist got tired of hearing me cough, and finally the colonoscopy. This is when I am grateful to be on extremely good Expat insurance (legal because we are here on secondment, otherwise not allowed to German residents). I think that with family history one can get checked for these things earlier than the German standard, but I'm not certain. What I do know is that my sister-in-law hasn't asked and she has an even stronger (worse) family history than I do: at her age I had been checked for 5 years. All was well with all the tests, the German prep for the colonoscopy was even worse than the American one, and I can wait four years until the next: Yeah.

Then more traveling:
Next came the last days of school and the drive to NRW. That's where we really ran into the weather issues that we had avoided traveling to the UK: 9 1/2 hours to travel a distance that usually takes us less than 4 1/2. The A2 was closed in the morning but then it reopened and we thought we could get through. Until it started raining heavily while -.5C and the Autobahn became a sheet of ice while all salt and grit washed away. We were actually very fortunate that the traffic came to a dead halt while we could see an exit and we wound up getting off, taking the kids to the (unbelievably packed) McDonalds we saw in the distance and checking the computer and with the in-laws to discover that there was a 26 km stau– we spoke to people who had stood on the highway unmoving for more than 10 hours. In our case, after consultation with our neighbors at the table to the right (they had a million maps!) and father-in-law, we wound up going south and detouring through Kassel before heading back north. It was much easier as we went south and it became colder with the precipitation being snow rather than rain. I was cursing that we hadn't chosen to take the train after hearing the forecasts, but we found out the next day that four ICE trains had been stuck on the tracks between Berlin and Hamburg due to cold and ice, so we were definitely better off in the car. We got there a bit before 2 am and carried the kids to bed.
Then we had a leisurely and domestic holiday. Some highlights:

This is an actual German Christmas tree. Those lights that you see are not cleverly designed electric lights, they are actual candles burning on an actual pine tree that is not sitting in a container of water (because they don't water trees here) in a room lined and roofed with wood and next to curtains.Amazing, isn't it? (Also, note no fire extinguisher or bucket of water in room). Keeps one on one's toes:).










This is my charmingly anonymous spouse and the girls. Note how warm they appear. The one without ski pants or waterproof gloves is the one taking the picture. The hill is the actual street outside my in-law's: the day after we arrived it became usable only if one entered above and exited below, Those who tried it the other way made loud revving noises until the German and the F-I-L dug them out. They seemed to enjoy it and we spent some time every day sledding here and on other hills in the area. We weren't as venturesome as my sister-in-law, whose husband dragged the kids on sleds up a steep hill in a neighboring town, then rode back down with them.

We met up for lunch with our former au pair in the US (I can't believe that she's about to start her internship in medical school) and had a nice chat: I wish we lived closer by and I hope she has the time to visit us after exams. All around a pleasant and domestic time, which included all members of the family playing instruments and singing carols as well as enjoying (adults only) the traditional Feuerzangenbowle. I actually like this, which is surprising because I generally hate Glühwein– perhaps because what I am served at Weihnachtsmarkts is more usually Glögg?

It was a relaxing and pleasant wind-up to a frenetic holiday season and the trip back took only four hours:).

Welcome to Winter

After over a week of grey and rain, it's snowing. I hope this weekend is not too late to find snowpants!
I wouldn't mind if it weren't grey and snowing:(.

What do the German and Crown Prince Haakon have in common?

Stranded due to volcanic ash.

The NYT is inaccurate: Munich closed at 7 pm.

Another beautiful day in Berlin

And I'm not kidding. For all the newcomers: the fact that it poured this morning but stopped by 8 am and that it is coming down at 17:20 in absolute buckets, while it was grey and cool today, is great weather. Any day that I can run errands without getting soaked is indeed a great day. And it wasn't raw! A simple sweater and scarf carried me through.

Here's hoping for another one tomorrow.

It's a gorgeous day.

For the third day in a row Berlin is having absolutely glorious weather. It's warm and sunny in the day and cools off and is comfortable at night. I have just moved the French doors to the patio to the tilt position and I still have two of the skylights open.

I spent several hours this morning, while the girls were at school, working on putting together almost a year's worth of insurance claims. After my recent hospitalization and the many medical visits prior, I though that it was about time.

I managed to reduce an armful and several stacks of miscellaneous papers to 6 neatly paperclipped stacks with claims forms attached. The German will scan them today and I will securely e-mail them in this evening.

When I added up the total amounts (our expat insurance gives us a 20% co-pay on most visits other than well care) it was a significant number: I think I will try to remain current from this point forward. 

Additionally, I love that feeling when one reduces chaos to order and in the process decreases the amount of paper clutter in the house.

Where is Summer?

64F in Berlin and 86F at home. Where is summer? We had two weeks of hot and very humid weather surrounded by cold and clammy and raining. I could never commit to living permanently in the climate that Berlin has.

Today is at least clear, bright and cold (so far)as opposed to the last many days of grateful that it's not actually raing on my head.

Where is Summer?

While New York is sweltering in an elongated heat wave, the weather here in Berlin as, well, quite chilly. And wet. Will this be last summer all over again?

Yesterday when we ate lunch outside, we had to ask for the patio heater to be turned on (as were all the others next to outside diners). This is really taking the fun out of summer.

Insomnia

Thing2 woke me at 4 am this morning and after changing her I just couldn't go back to sleep. So I ate a cupcake, had a glass of apfel schorle (herbst only!) and I have been cleaning out my TBR blog queue. Do you know that sunrise is at 4 am here in Berlin? It's now 5 am and broad daylight. With the sun setting after 9 and rising before 4 am, this is really a different world than I am used to. And no wonder that during the winter, when things reverse, that SAD (seasonal affective disorder)is such a problem here.

What I haven't Blogged about...

It's been a busy few days.

Saturday was the first night of Passover and things were a bit chaotic: my landlord had said that he would be going by Ikea and could pick us up another bookcase and a few things that we needed and then he wound up not doing so. I'd been relying on getting that bookcase and doors put together so that I could get my surfaces cleaned up and do a final chometz clean-up and flat tidy before getting the seder meal together.

I was not mentally prepared to have piles of books floating about on surfaces. I still had three boxes of unpacked books (that I had shipped over from the States), another box that I had "inherited" from some ex-pats in Alt-Tegal (who are planning on moving back to CA in the fall and are deaccessioning books) and the car seats and suitcases that we had needed to unload from our limited storage area (which has our sold and sealed chometz boxes packed away in it). I don't do well with clutter at the best of times: due to my reading addiction I always have trouble dealing with my accumulation of reading material. Leaving aside the books, we read a number of periodicals every week: The Economist, Newsweek, Businessweek, US News & Worldreport, Money, Cooks Illustrated, Forbes, Fortune, Publisher's Weekly, some Treasury/ Accounting/ Controls trade magazines, and Analog. Thank heavens for recycling, although I wish I knew folks here in Berlin that would enjoy reading them: it feels so wasteful to just recycle them after 1 use.

So the German took a run to the closest Ikea and came back with everything (including a corkboard, some extra place settings, the Billy and its doors, and a Malm chest. We put them together (and he says that the doors are unbelievably difficult), I loaded them up (and now I feel extremely tidy and under control) and then he took the Things out to the zoo and I started to scramble to get things together.

First off was the Pesach plate. We cleverly hadn't brought one with us, so I drew one on paper, put it in plastic and put that on a tray. The German had brought me whole walnuts by accident, so the next thing was to put the eggs on to boil, the chicken to roast, the potatoes to boil and then to start cracking walnuts (and picking nut meat- a phrase I have never gotten to use before) for the charoseth.

I got that together (and I quite liked it) then I printed out the haggadot that I had downloaded and formatted the prior evening.

I put together the Seder plate and tidied up and had a glass of wine (that must be why the charoseth recipe calls for a dry red) and had a good half hour sit down before the family came back from theplayground and it all went well. Thing1 did a great job of doing the 4 Questions, we used her Pesach book as well as the haggadah, and the cat did not get to jump on the table and eat the poultry ( a family joke. I did cut up quite a bit and put it on his plate). We didn't have room for the chicken soup and I expect that we will be eating that for the next few days: I'll need to be making matzoh balls next week. We had the seder comfortably early and the kids were in bed by 9 and then we cleaned up, kicked back, and watched last weeks Oprah's the Big Give.

On Sunday it didn't rain. First day in 50 days (since I started counting on an arbitrary date). We had some family time and then a babysitter, so the German and I could have a grown up Seder. It was at a large hotel here in Berlin and, according to the Rabbi, it was the largest seder in Germany. Very nice. Amusingly enough, someone from my german course was seated next to us and the other Parent representative from Thing1's class was at the next table. We had to run like Cinderella at 11 to get back by our 11:30 curfew (the babysitter is a kindergarten teacher and we felt badly enough keeping her up so late before a school day). It was a nice evening, I'll try to add photos later.

Monday we spent having family time. None of the local services had babysitting and our girls are just not able to take 4-6 hours of services without going insane. So we read the Passover story, had some matzoh brei for breakfast, then went to Kreuzberg to check out the Market Halle. It was nice, much better produce and meat than I have around me, but how is it possible that hot pepper here in Germmany can actually be bland? I bought olives in red pepper flakes and they are completely tasteless (except for the olive part).

We had lunch at our favorite Mt. Everest, but I wasn't able to have Momo balls (dumplings not allowable during Pesach). Then we spent an hour at the playground behind the hall. There's what appears to be a new book store there, Other Worlds. It seems to be so new that I can't find any on-line references. I checked it out: it's a SF and F store with a great selection, both in German and in English. But I just can't make myself pay an even exchange between dollars and Euros. That is, pay Euro 12.99 (+tax!) for a book priced at $12.99. That's an 80% mark up and far cheaper for me to have the books shipped over. They have used as well, so next time we are there I may stop in to see how they pay for used: it might be worth getting store credit. I ran in for a few minutes while the family was eating gelato, then the sky clouded over and we hopped the U-bahn back home.

A nice weekend.

It's raining again...

But of course, that's no different from any other day here in Berlin.

Yesterday had masses of dry time between the rain, so I ran over to pick up my tickets for second seder (held at a large hotel near here). I need haggadot (the 'lesson plan' for the Pesach meal) as well because I left mine at the in-laws and some shmera matza, so I'll be running back on Friday morning to pick them up. We had reserved the tickets earlier and I wonder if the reason we needed to pick them up in person was to ensure that we were not psychotics? I always wonder, here in this country where all Jewish organizations and facilities require a permanent police presence.

I am not looking forward to trying to gather all the ingredients that I need to make a seder with my little trolley this evening. particularly because I need to go to first causes, that is, to make the charoseth and horseradish and all the other underpinnings required. I even need to pick up a seder plate and the local Judaica store is wildly overpriced: I may wind updrawing one with crayon and putting it under plastic!

We would have done both seders out, but first night the community seder starts after 21:00 and considering that the children are in bed by 19:30-20:00, that would make it difficult to share it with them! Second night we have a babysitter.

I am, however, looking forward to hearing Thing1 singing the 4 Questions: I already hear her practising and I can't wait.

Today I finally have the introduction session for my gym. I am writing this here so that I will be too embarrassed to blow it off and sit here drinking coffee instead (I assure you I would prefer that). I need to get going: I am more unhealthy than I have been in years and more physically inactive than I have been in decades. Add that to the inability to get fat reduced dairy here and the (forgotten but high) cholesterol levels I had before I left the States means I had best get going on exercise.

(My goodness, I love wikipedia! How did I live without it?)

Things I have done today...

• Of course there is an automatic extension for Americans out of the country on tax day (for filing, and we expect a refund, therefore no need to estimate taxes) but how strange that in Germany if one uses a professional preparer (and we will be using the German's firm) the tax filing deadline shifts to the end of December (ie 12 months later than the year one is filing for).
  

• I'm making banana bread.

The German kept on trying to discard my old bananas (the Things and he like only firm bananas) and i kept saying that I would make banana bread, so here I am. It's a James Beard recipe that my mother sent me. I have converted the F to C and then converted again to a convection oven and I had no lemon juice and so squeezed some orange into it so I have to see how it works out. If it's good, I'll make another with the remaining bananas I froze to use and I'll put a picture in. (It was good and I made a second loaf. I'll put the recipe in later, when I figure out how to arrange recipes in this blog.)

• I'm on my second load of wash and have put away an overflowing basket of folded laundry.

On Saturday I ran out to C&A, the only cheap clothing store that I know of around here, and bought the girls masses of inexpensive spring things. Can't beat 2 colorful tops for 3 Euros! in any case, I needed to wash everything thoroughly. Not only because I saw the House episode where the children nearly died after wearing unwashed clothes that had been contaminated with a pesticide, but because I had this experience with Thing1 after letting her wear a new pair of pajamas without washing them, and I never want to go through that again. I also now use Persil for sensitive skin.

• I had asked Jenn if it were too late to see spring bulbs in the Netherlands (something I have been saying I will go to see for years and years) and she said, not yet and recommended the Keukenhof . I need to head west with the family over the 26th for the big Geburtstag bash my sister-in-law is having as she turns 30, so I am now planning to take a day of the long weekend we had planned and head over with the family to the Gardens (only two more open weeks after that, so my timing is j-i-t! thanks, Jenn! I would have been really disappointed if I missed this.

Weather, dad-blast it!

How can it be 37F here and 63F there? Life is so unfair.

Waiting for Godot

I was just realizing that I haven't written a letter to a friend that is now overdue three weeks. I keep waiting for something interesting to happen in my life. Compared to so many blogers out there, in Italy, Israel, Singapore and other exciting spots (for vacation, I mean) my life seems boring. But if I keep waiting, I might as well just stop blogging, so here goes with what happened over the weekend:

• 4 loads of laundry, washing, drying, folding

Some other bloggers have noted that they use a drying rack, but I can't quite figure that out. Either they have far more clothes than we do, or they must have a magic wand: it rains just about every day here and it would take days for jeans to dry on a rack. A load takes hours, with the slowness of the front load washer and then about another 90 minutes to dry. Then folding and putting away, which I generally try to do when the children aren't around:

• 3 loads of dishes, putting away each time
  
• Made a one pot ground turkey/rice/zucchini meal
  
• Went grocery shopping (I need to go at least every other day just to get milk. Then I add whatever else I can manage to put in my trolley).

Saturday morning the German and Thing1 (with 'help' from Thing2) put together the playhouse that we had gotten from Ikea (with help from our very kind landlord: we saw the house last week but it wouldn't fit in our rented car, so he picked it up for us this week). The Things love it and it's a help to be able to let them go out and play in it when it rains (again!) and they are begging to go out.

Sunday I sent the German and the Things out to play in the (wonderful) playground at the Zoo after breakfast: I needed to clean up, put clothes away, get dinner/lunch ready and in general reclaim the apartment. It amazes me how rapidly the apartment degrades after a few hours of the children playing.

They came back just after it started to rain (again) and Thing 2 was sleeping so we just put her down for her nap. Then I fed the others and set off for the first meeting of a potential women's book swap/club. It was in a section of Berlin that's quite close but which I hadn't seen: Charlottenberg proper. I quite liked it (and its architecture) and I found myself walking by the Broken English store that Dr. J had mentioned.

The group was nice (although no times were set for another meeting- let's see how it goes) and it was so relaxing to my eyes to see an apartment that was painted and had colors- I am so tired of being in a sterile white environment! But while we never know how long we will be here, we really can't paint. This is the longest (6 months) I have ever lived anywhere without painting the walls.

It's a small City...

Today I took the Things to a local playground after school. The goal is to exhaust them so that the light in the evenings doesn't keep them up.

After we had been playing for a while, a woman showed up with two small boys, each perhaps a year older than my Things. I thought she was speaking Hebrew, and Thing1 said she knew the boys. But when I asked her what they were called, she couldn't say, so I thought she was wrong. However, when I started talking to Thing1 about her school day, the woman asked if my girls were in the same school (she recognized the teacher's names). Now, that's a small world, because this school is actually out of our area and the girls are bussed to it. And, in an even more comical turn, when we were talking it turned out that R. is the organizer of some classes for children that I had been interested in and I will be taking advantage of them, trying the Judo this Thursday and the Dance on Monday. Both for Thing1 but R. assures me that there are plenty of younger siblings there to keep Thing2 amused while Thing1 has class.

I'm really looking forward both to getting Thing1 into these activities and also to perhaps meeting some moms and kids in the area. It rains too much not to know any other children to play with! (And it is pouring tonight, after an atypically gorgeous day.)

Another exciting Saturday...

• 2 3 loads of laundry
• 2 loads of dishes
• Cleaned the apartment
• Made breakfast
• Made lunch
• Watched the rain beat against the French doors
• Rented a car to:
• Visit Ikea to
• return a defective lamp,
  
• purchase some 'containers' for clothes, etc
• buy plants
• get a corkboard (it was out)
• and a metalboard (because my fridge is not metallic)
• get a vase tall enough for tulips
• pick up some candles and
• some picture hooks and
• Go to Kaufland ( a large supermarket)
• to get a case of Apfel schorle (applejuice mixed with soda water and bottled)
• beef
• putenwurst (turkey sausage)
• cheese
• bread
• milk
• apple juice
• canned tomatoes
• 6 klapp boxes (to use inside our Ikea wardrobe in place of our missed drawers)
• frozen rasperries and frozen vegetables
• Tomorrow go to the Biosphere in Potsdam (where there is an orchid sale I would like to frequent...)
  

And now it's snowing...

Weather in Berlin. Wait a minute and see what happens.

And now gorgeous sun...

It's hailing out there!