theinbetweenismine

just a girl living the expat life

Archives for October 2007

Happy Halloween!

filed under: fun!, holidays, my so-called life


© toughpigs.com

Happy Halloween everyone!

When I stepped out of the house this morning, it was dark and misty. Perfect Halloween weather :) I must admit that I am a wuss when it comes to scary things. Halloween is J’s favorite holiday, he loves watching scary movies and he takes particular joy in scarying the you-know-what out of me. I’ve yelled at him and cried several times when he had been going too far. I don’t enjoy scary movies, I can’t really read scary stories and I can definitely not stand any haunted houses or that sort of thing.

Apparently, Sacramento is a famous place for haunted houses and paranormal activity. There is an abandoned house, not far from where I live, that J and I passed on an evening walk sometime and we stopped because it looked so spooky.There was a huge fence around the house with a big lock on the front gate. When we returned home, I asked Kari about the house and she said that nobody has lived there for years and it is supposedly haunted. People claim that they have seen apparitions in the windows. Unfortunately, I can’t really find a good website about this house, but I swear I am not going anywhere near it tonight ;)

There is another house in our neighborhood that is completely decorated for Halloween. There are gravestones in the fenced front yard, fake spiderwebs all over the place, flickering lights in the windows and dramatic music is playing from hidden speakers. I think they have a Halloween event going on, because they offer tours through the house calling it “the best paranormal experience that you’ve ever had”. Ahm no, thanks.

I think we’re going to watch a movie tonight, have some dinner and stay under the blankets [at least I will :)]. We went to Blockbuster yesterday and J and Kari wanted to get “The Ring”. I was somewhat relieved that we didn’t think about renting it earlier, because it was already rented out! Pwww. I was not particularly looking forward to watching it [= which would probably have turned into me hiding behind a big pillow half of the time ;)]. We went home with “23”, which should be somewhat “disturbing”, but will hopefully let me sleep tonight.

Have a spooky Halloween – or, at least as spooky as YOU can handle.

Happy Birthday, love!

filed under: fun!, love

Yesterday was J’s birthday. When I got up, I baked him marble-cake-muffins while I was in the shower. [clarification for Ute : The muffins baked in the oven while I was in the shower :)]

I have to say that I am a big advocate of everybody having a birthday-cake [or -muffins] on their birthdays. Preferrably homemade.
When I see the cakes that you can buy at the supermarkets here, all colorful, supersweet and disgusting, I really want to throw up. I once bought one of those “cake mixes” where you just have to add water *ieeek* or milk… but the outcome tasted terrible. It’s really not worth it to buy a cake mix, if you can buy and mix the single baking ingredients in the same amount of time. And the actual cake tastes so, so much better if you make it from scratch.

I also put some candles on the muffins and got J a card, a gift certificate for Amazon and tickets to the Causeway Classic which we will be going to on November, 3rd.

We’ve been a couple of times before and it’s always a fun game and a “heated” atmoshpere. I really don’t know who I am going to cheer for this year, J [and I somewhat] being UC Davis alumni and I being a Sac State Employee now.

I only worked a half day today, so I could spend some time with J. Since we took Kari to the airport in the afternoon [because she’s visting a friend over the weekend], we had the rest of the day -and therefore the rest of the weekend- to ourselves.

First weekend in Sactown

filed under: friends, fun!, my so-called life

So, last weekend was the first weekend we spend in Sactown since I started working. Living in Midtown definitely has its advantages.

When we lived here two years ago, we didn’t really explore the city. Yes, we went out to dinner in Downtown/Midtown once or twice, but we never really got to know the area really well. I loved living in East Sacramento [which actually was Greenhaven – as I was told ;)] and we were in a phase where we didn’t really wanted to go out a lot, so we stuck with the occasional dinner here and there, hanging out with the few friends/bookclub people that we still knew in Davis and a visit to the mall now and then.

Perspective has definitely changed since I “moved” back here.

Having found a roommate situation in Midtown, I really got to see a whole different side of Sacramento that I didn’t even know was there. The street that I live on is really quiet. I mean, so quiet you wouldn’t even think it’s in the Midtown area of a big city. There are lots of old and huge trees lining the street and most of the houses are Victorian. Beautiful! But if I walk a few blocks, there are restaurants and coffeehouses, galleries and little shops.
Everything you want from a big[ger] city :)

Although Sacramento is the capital of California [yeah, who knew that and who thought it was SF or something?? *g*], it “only” has a population of 480,000. Compared to Cologne [990,000] or even Düsseldorf [582,000] it’s fairly small, but it still has as many inhabitans as the whole Rhein-Kreis-Neuss region where I grew up! The metropolitan area of Sacramento of course has a population of over 2,103,000. But I digress.

Every 2nd Saturday there is an Art Walk in Downtown/Midtown. All the Art Galleries have an “Open House” for people to walk around, have some wine and finger food and enjoy the Art. We went out to Dinner at “Paesanos”, an Italian Restaurant, with Kari and Dylan and afterwards we walked around and enjoyed the nice atmoshpere. It was fairly warm Saturday night, so a lot of people were out. It was fun!

Sunday we slept in, hung around the house, watched some TiVo [“Ugly Betty” -Kari’s favorite show- which totally reminds me of our German Soap “Verliebt in Berlin”] and did some yard work. Kari and I also went grocery shopping together for the first time.

Many “first timers” this weekend ;)