Beginning of May

So, I went to the German Butcher Shop Friday morning to pick up some pork belly for the BBQ at Susi‘s and J’s. I was all excited when I got there, just to find out that they were out of pork belly that day. Goddammit. Who in the hell snatched up all the pork belly before me??
That’s just my bad luck. Next time, I’ll have to call in advance to make sure they put some away for when the next BBQ comes around.
I went for some “Thüringer Bratwurst” instead and I had also prepared my secretly famous macaroni salad, so we could’ve been worse off, despite the rain that had set in in the morning. It was still pouring when we made our way over to the Bay Area.

Still, we were determined to BBQ, no matter what, and Susi’s J actually was so nice to stand in the rain and fire up the grill. Unfortunately, we couldn’t sit outside in the backyard, but we made the best of it… Susi and I had some catching up to do (girl talk) and (my) J played with the cats in the meantime.

Saturday I was just exhausted. I had been schlepping around some sort of “cold” all last week, you know, one of those that make you feel bad enough to be all weak and exhausted (plus, throw in a headache), but not bad enough to stay at home and call in sick (especially when you don’t get sick days “for free” like in Germany, but when you’ve worked hard all last year to accrue a decent amount of sick days for a time when you might really need them). Lovely.
So I dragged myself to work all last week, just to sacrifice a whole day of my well-earned weekend to recuperate. You gotta love employees like me!

I just got up for an hour and a half to do some necessary grocery shopping, including the purchase of a thermometer, which we didn’t own up to now, and was feeling sweaty and exhausted when I returned home. I could have sworn I had an elevated temperature, but the thermometer proved me wrong which also confirmed to me that I didn’t catch the “swine flu” and should be fine – which I was – after a few (or more) hours of sleep (the next morning.)
Thereupon, J and I decided to go the the “Maifest” and meet up with people of our German Meetup Group. After all, we had totally ignored the “May-festivities” that are usually going on in Germany on the night of April, 30 (did you do anything special, all you German people?? ;))

The Maifest was supposed to be taking place at a park, but because of the (unusual) rainy weather, they moved it to an indoor place. Unfortunately, the bad weather seemed to keep attendance very low, which was a shame, because there was good German food (we had a sausage in a roll with mustard and a piece of Apfelstrudel) and some people performed folk dances around the “Maibaum” (May pole) in traditional (southern) German clothes.

It was fun and that, my friends, was my weekend recap. Did you do something worth telling me about? ;)