Friday tidbits

I know, you guys, I still owe you the third part of my Germany recap – and I promise it’s coming – but for today, I’ll just share some random things with you, that – each by themselves – wouldn’t make for their own blog posts, but all combined turn out to be a short, end-of-the-week summary, alright? GREAT.

The last three weeks have been busy with work, work and work. I haven’t even fully unpacked my suitcase from my Germany trip yet, and it has been over three weeks. Gasp. I know. I KNOW. Isn’t that ridiculous?

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My sister told me today that Greta misses me. It made me feel all warm, fuzzy and loved inside. You might wonder how does my sister know that, because Greta obviously can’t communicate the feeling of missing somebody quite yet? Well, apparently, whenever they go over to my parents’ house, Greta expects me to be there and whenever she sees a girl with long, brown hair – like mine – somewhere in the distance, she gets all excited and starts pointing with her tiny finger, yelling “Sand(r)a, Sand(r)a”  (she still has little difficulties pronouncing the “r”).
My sister says it’s the cutest thing and she hates telling her: no, honey, it’s not Sandra!
Aaah, breaks my heart. I miss her.

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Remember the story about my external hard drive failure? Obviously, $1200 was way more than I expected or could actually afford to spend on the hard drive recovery, so I told the company to just ship my hard drive back (consequently, I’ll have to find another way to recover my data).
So guess what? A day later, I receive an email from the company suggesting that, if I had turned down the recovery solely for monetary reasons, I should make them a reasonable target prize offer and they would see if they could work something out. Yeah, right. Reasonable target prize. They would render themselves ridiculous, if they would recover my data for a MUCH lower prize than what they originally tried to get from me, don’t you think? Someone sounds pretty desperate – and it’s not me!

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The start of the summer here in the Central Valley has been – surprisingly – mild so far. I’d be damned if I would complain about it, hell to the no, because if you ask me – the weather is just perfect. Warm enough for shorts and flipflops, but it’s been cooling off enough at night not to have to sleep with the AC on. (I hate sleeping with the AC on, but I honestly hate being hot at night even more.) Can I order this weather for the rest of the summer, pretty please? Kthx.

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I wasn’t really excited about the World Cup prior to its start, mainly because I am not a huge soccer fan to begin with (and that is saying a lot for being from Germany – Soccer Central.  Pretty much what baseball is for the US, soccer is for Germany.) However, I always get into watching the European and World Championships, when they happen. Looks like I do have something like patriotism for my home country.
Watching the first World cup matches of the German team have been getting me all excited and it made me reminisce  about the World Cup 2006, which took place in Germany. It was the year when J and I got married in Germany and we saw a few World Cup games in a typical German setting: in someone’s backyard, on a big screen and with a BBQ going in the background. We had a marvelous time. Unfortunately, the US doesn’t seem to be that much into soccer, there are no Live Viewing Events, that I know off,  that would be comparable to the ones that are taking place in Germany right now (I mean, something like this) and the time difference makes it hard to follow all matches live, because many of them are (very) early in the morning when I am at work. Bummer.
I will be getting up at 7 a.m. on Sunday though to see Germany kick England’s butt ;)

GOGERMANY!

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Happy Friday everyone!