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 ;)

Guess what…

filed under: excitement, fun!, my so-called life, yes!

October 11, 2007 - day 286

Yes. They’re finally back: my posts about the Sacramento Kings :)

One really good thing about living in Sacramento again is that I’ll be able to watch ALL the Kings games on TV again – on a local TV station with my favorite commentators of all times, Grant Napear and Jerry Reynolds :)

Another good thing is, I’ll be able to go and see them LIVE again. Like last night. My co-worker has season tickets and whenever she can’t go – she offers them to one of us at the office. Because yesterday was on such short notice, nobody could or wanted to go… except for ME :)

So cool that Jon is here and he could actually go with me. He picked me up from work, we had a quick dinner at Subway’s and almost made it to Arco Arena in time for the game start.

Unfortunately, it seems like I have to re-familiarize myself with the team again. A lot of changes have taken place since I closely followed the NBA games. I think there are only three players left that I remember from two years ago. It was still so great to see them play again :)

It’s still Pre-Season and they didn’t do too well last night… lost by a 12-point difference against the Phoenix Suns. They just didn’t seem as “awake” as the other team, but I hope that’ll improve during the season. I am so excited that I’ll be able to watch NBA again :)

The Dinner Club

filed under: food, friends, my so-called life

Last night we had our weekly dinner again.
I am already getting used to having this weekly get together and I look forward to it all week. The nice thing of having a really cool roommate and next door neighbor is that it makes it really easy to just “do things” together. I mean there is no planning in advance or driving or anything involved and we all have to eat in the evenings anyways – it is just a slighty nicer way than having dinner all by yourself every night.

Dylan volunteered to cook this week. He came over to our apartment around 7 p.m. and started preparing the meal. Kari and I ended up helping him with chopping vegetables, preparing the dessert and cleaning up. In the end, he’s just a guy ;)… but a guy who can cook! He made baked Salmon, baked tomatoes with onions and garlic, green beans and mushrooms and a big salad and it was delicious!

Seems like we’re trying to trump each other with culinary viands each week now ;)

Kari and I also helped prepare some homemade tiramisu … *yum* but we were all so full after the main course that we decided to save the dessert for today. It needed some more time to soak in and chill in the fridge anyways.

Next week is going to be J’s turn to cook and of course I’ll help him prepare something special. We actually always end up helping each other with the cooking, the designated “cook” just picks out the meal and goes shopping for it. Not sure yet what to cook next week. Maybe some roast beef.
J makes some fabulously medium-rare-and-tender roast beef. With fried onions. And potatoes. Yummy.

Any ideas for dessert?

What’s YOUR definition of a “good time”?

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

Last weekend, my definition was ” getting cozy on the couch, watching DVD’s and ordering pizza” :) Yup. That’s what we did for our somewhat “anniversary”. I know nothing fancy, but this is what I think we just needed.

Well, actually, we also went out to dinner Friday night. J picked me up from work at 5:30 p.m. sharp and we had enough time to go out to dinner before we had to head to the airport to catch our flight back to Southern California.

Originally we had planned to go to “Olive Garden” because we hadn’t been there for a while, but we couldn’t get a table. Can someone explain to me please why restaurants don’t take reservations for a ‘table for two’ here?? That really pisses me off.

I mean, we were kinda early for dinner – well, for German standards anyways – but even at 5:30 p.m. there was a 30 minute-wait. WTF? I think the receptionist thought I was a little rude when I told him that 30 minutes are too long of a wait. He probably thought this was pretty “fast” – yeah, but not if you have to be at the airport at a certain time. We definitely didn’t have 30 minutes to spare. So we went “across the street” to “Mimi’s Café” – not a bad idea, if you ask me, because I love that place and they have the best Caesar Salad ever! :) – and had some yummy dinner there…

We made it home by midnight, ran some errands on Saturday morning and besides that we pretty much just enjoyed a lazy weekend and some last summery temperatures ;) Sounds good to me!

Somewhat an “Anniversary”

filed under: love, my so-called life

J and I met exactly 6 years ago today. Did I ever tell you the full story?

I had just started my exchange semester in CA and I was walking on Campus that night with two other German girls. We were heading towards the gym to attend a Freshman party.
All three of us – not really Freshman anymore age-wise – definitely were “Freshman” at that particular college and – lacking any other exciting evening entertainment - we decided to check out the Freshmen ;)

J had just started college [ha, a real! Freshman] and was walking on Campus, too. When he passed us and heard us speak German, he turned around and followed us to the gym. As I learned many months later, he claims that he turned around and followed us because I had been the most beautiful girl he had ever seen – oh so sweet! -  but I think it was the fact that we spoke German, since he had just started taking German classes in college.

He introduced himself in German [and that was all he could say at that point ;)] and hung out with us pretty much the whole night. It was almost a little weird *g* because so far I had made the experience that it is really easy to meet new people, but not easy to “really” meet new people, if you know what I mean.

J however didn’t seem to want to leave at all. We talked about anything and everything and it really felt like we’d known each other for a long time already. And the rest is history :)

So yeah, meeting him was totally random and so unplanned and we had absolutely NO idea at this point that this would become a wonderful love story. YES, a love story that had to overcome very many obstacles including months of separation, fighting for the legal right to be together and proving to the world that relationships across the Atlantic can indeed work out. It has been wonderful nonetheless and was absolutely worth the effort.

There is not really a day that we call “the day that we officially announced being a couple”, but we both believe that the 5th of October has been something like a turning point in both our lives and therefore it is a meaningful date for us.
Since I worked today and we’ll be traveling home tonight, we’ll probably do something special this weekend [although I don’t know what it’s going to be yet ;)].

I worked an extra day this week to collect some more vacation time, but we’ll still get the three day weekend, because Monday is “Columbus Day”. Sweet! I hope you’ll all have a good one!