Current state of affairs

Whew!  That's the longest I've ever gone without a blog entry.  We don't have internet access at the house right now, so it's been a little tricky.

In a nutshell, here's what we've done since the beginning of August:

1.  I started my new job.
2.  I bought a car.  Stace actually likes it!
3.  We closed on the new house.
4.  With the help of Stace's mom, we got the old house ready for our renter.
5.  We moved our stuff from the old house to the new house.
6.  We received some of our stuff from Switzerland, with the rest to come in a couple of weeks.
7.  We bought a van.  Stace loves it!
8.  The kids got here, ready to start school on Tuesday.
9.  We've somehow managed to hang on to our sanity, barely.

All in all, life is good.

Surprise!

Well, here I am in Utah, to everyone's surprise.  I decided that since I hadn't seen the kids for almost six weeks, I should probably reintroduce myself.  I didn't tell anyone I was coming.  The kids were quite surprised and seemed happy to see me.  Stace put up a good front, but I know that deep down she was probably a little annoyed.  But she loves me anyway.

I'll be here until Tuesday, and then it's back to the couch in Lakeville.  We close in just over two weeks!  I bought one car, so there's just one more to go.  I plan on us owning one minivan in our entire lives, and this one will be it.

I'm a true suburban American

Guess what I'm going to do now?  Yup, I'm going to mow the lawn at the old house.  I haven't done that for about four years.  The good news is that I won't have to do this very much at our new house because it comes with a built-in thirteen-year-old who mows the lawn whenever necessary.

More fun with German

I realized that yesterday's post contains a phrase that sounds a bit odd in English:  "lady walker."  The reason it says that is because in German, most nouns that refer to a person still have an ending that depends on the gender of the person to whom the word is referring.  We have a little of this in English, but not much:  actor/actress, steward/stewardess, waiter/waitress.  If you want to get even more arcane, some words used to end in "trix" to refer to the feminine:  prosecutor/prosecutrix, testator/testatrix, dominator/ . . . well, you get the picture.  (This is a family blog.)

Anyway, let's have some fun with English:  how about co-workeress?  or friendess?  maybe grantrix?

Man, am I going to miss this place

From the English version of the local paper:

Stolen Giant Plastic Sausage Found

In a crime previously unreported in the Zug Post, a giant plastic sausage was stolen from the street in Hünenberg last week. Now, much to the relief of the owner, it has been found.

The two-metre-long sausage, in the form of a large Bratwurst and weighing 10 kilogrammes, was used for advertising purposes and strategically placed in front of a butcher's shop in Chamerstrasse in the municipality. The owner reported the theft of the sausage, valued at CHF 3,000, on Wednesday 20 July.

Now, thanks to an observant lady walker, the sausage has been found undamaged in the Frauentaler Woods near Hagendorn in the municipality of Cham, 6 kilometres away from where it was stolen. It seems the thieves must have dumped it there some days ago.

The Zug Police are now closely examining the sausage to see if they can find any clues which might lead them to finding the culprits.

The sausage is not the only large 3-dimensional advertisement in the municipality as the Hotz Rust bakery also has oversized models of a croissant and an ice-cream on display. There have been discussions as to whether they should be there at all as not everyone is happy about them. Legally they may be on display, unlike in the city of Zug, where an oversized model of a cherry cake had to be removed from Landsgemeindeplatz in 2007.

From now on the sausage is being taken in every evening.

Our lives

Just a quick update because I know how fascinated you all are by the minutae of my daily existence.

I'm now back in Switzerland, trying to enjoy every second of the view from our terrace, which I only have for two more days.  Monday is moving day.  I'll move out of my apartment and spend some time living with another temporary bachelor, Bob Cluff.  I'll fly out of here forever on Tuesday the 31st and start work back in Minnesota on August 1.  I'll sleep on the couch at the old house (assuming I can find a pillow) until we close on the new house.  In the meantime, I'll do some car shopping and get the old house ready for our renter, who will move in at the beginning of September.  (If having one mortgage is fun, then having two mortgages must be twice as fun, right?)

We'll close on the new house on August 27.  On August 28, we'll move stuff from the old house, and on that same day, our stuff from Switzerland and our new bed from Minnesota should arrive.  Once all of that stuff gets there, our lives should be easy and stress-free, right?

Done deal

After some competitive bidding (which was kind of a bummer), we got a house.  I like almost everything about it except the fact that the closet for the master bedroom is in the master bathroom.

It's in Lakeville, but it's actually part of the Farmington school district.  We're about a ten-minute walk from Farmington High School, which is only a couple of years old.  That will be nice when Tanner goes into ninth grade.

That was just the first hurdle, though.  The insanity continues!

The closet is where?

We're close to getting our housing situation straightened out, but I just have to ask one question:  whose idea was it to start putting the master bedroom closet in the master bathroom?  Every home we've looked at that's less than about ten years old has the master bedroom's closet in the bathroom.  What the heck?  I don't want my suits hanging in the same room as my bathtub.  When I've complained to people around me, they've acted like I'm the one with the problem.  That's clearly not the case.  Apparently, the world went crazy while I wasn't looking.

End of rant.

Stockholm

On Monday, we got off of the cruise, happy in the knowledge that our vacation was only half over.  Unfortunately, the weather in Stockholm that day was awful.  We did some shopping while it rained like crazy.  Our hotel was nice.  Because it never gets dark at night in the summer in Stockholm, those slanted windows you can see had dark blinds that we pulled down at night.  They worked great.

The next day, we went to the Vasa Museum.  The Vasa was a military ship from the 1600s that sailed a few hundred feet and then tipped over in the harbor because it had been poorly designed.  They found the ship about 50 years ago and brought most of it up and reconstructed it.  It's Stockholm's most famous museum.  It was dark in there to preserve the ship, so I didn't get any good pictures.

On Wednesday, we went to Skansa, a huge open-air museum and zoo.  We spent most of the day there.

Our flight hom on Thursday wasn't until the late afternoon, so we took a couple of hours in the morning to cruise Stockholm's canals.  Stockholm, like Venice, is actually made up of several islands connected by bridges.

We got home on Thursday night, the kids flew to Utah on Monday, and you know the rest.  I guess it's time to rename the blog.  "The Woods in the Southern Twin Cities metro" doesn't quite have the same ring to it, though.  Maybe I'll stick with the original name.

St. Petersburg

As you can probably guess, I didn't feel like a day was enough time to absorb all of Russia.  But a day was all we were going to get.

We first visited the Hermitage.  As with most of the world's great museums, we could have spent several days there seeing everything there was to see.  Three hours was enough to do only a little bit.

After that, we had a Russian lunch with some traditional Russian dancing.

Then we saw more of the city.

We visited the Peter and Paul fortress, which contains a cathedral with the tombs of Peter the Great and the Romanovs.

And we ended the day with a visit to the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, which reminded us a lot of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

Tallinn, Estonia

We arrived in Stockholm late on a Wednesday night and stayed at a hotel right by the airport. Thursday morning, we told the kids that we were heading on a lunch cruise, and we headed for the pier.

Upon seeing the Royal Caribbean cruise ship docked there, Tanner became predictably wistful and longed once again to be on a cruise. We extended our sympathies and told him to get ready for the short lunch cruise. He started thinking that it was a bit weird that we dropped off all of our luggage and were checking in at the same place that the Royal Caribbean cruises were checking in, and then it finally dawned on him that we were going on a real cruise. Needless to say, he was quite excited.

The next day found us in Tallinn, Estonia. We left Lindsey on the ship to translate for the German-speakers in the kids club, and the three of us headed out for a walking tour of the old town. With apologies to my Estonian readers, I can't say that there was a lot that struck me as unique or particularly memorable about Tallinn, but it was a nice afternoon.

Happiness on a plane

Is it possible to be happy during an overseas flight?  Well, not completely, but sometimes you can be less unhappy than other times.

This flight was happier because when we got to the airport and dropped off our luggage, the Delta employee behind the desk informed us that we'd both been upgraded to business class.  Nothing helps a nine-hour flight go down easier than an upgrade.  Just between you and me, Stace is only a silver elite, so I don't think she really deserved an upgrade (I'm platinum), but the upgrade at least made it easier for me to manage her during the flight.  I didn't have to put up with all the usual "Are we there yet?" type of questions, or all the complains about being bored, or any of that kind of stuff.  I'm thinking that I should always fly business class with Stace.

The house hunting insanity begins on Monday.  Ugh.

Best spam ever

I just got the funniest spam message I've ever gotten.  It came into my work mailbox, but the tech powers that be had stripped out the links and attachments.

The title of the message was "You Pig!"  The body of the message was (original spelling and grammar retained), "You should be stoping ignoring me or i will send this photos to your spouse!!!"

Kids, the moral of the story is that if you want to be immune from blackmailers, including blackmailers who can't spell or use correct grammar, then never put yourself in a position where someone will have compromising photos to send to your spouse.

A Stace story

It's been a while since I told a good Stace story, so here we go.

Stace and I were sitting in the cafeteria having lunch during our cruise.  She was wearing an old Minnesota Twins shirt of mine.  Now, if you're not an American and you don't know anything about baseball, what are you going to think when you see a woman with the word "TWINS" written across her chest?  Stace was telling me that yes, her Austrian friend thought that the word on the shirt referred to the contents of the shirt itself rather than to the baseball team.  A lot of foreigners probably make the same assumption.

Anyway, no sooner had Stace finished telling me this story than an older man came up to us and asked, "Are you from Minnesota?"

Dear Reader, you can probably figure out how this man guessed that we were from Minnesota, since we had just finished a conversation about her MINNESOTA TWINS shirt, but not Stace.  No, her first question was, "Oh, have you seen me before?"  The man seemed a bit baffled by Stace's assumption that everyone in Minnesota knows who she is, but he quickly shook it off, and we had a nice conversation.  It wasn't until later that Stace figured out how the man had pegged her as a Minnesotan.

And they're there!

Don't you just love English?

Anyway, the kids arrived safely.  The report is that Lindsey celebrated her arrival in Salt Lake by throwing up at the airport.  The whole thing can be tough on an eight-year-old, or anyone else for that matter.  You have a lousy eating schedule with lousy food, your internal clock is thrown off, you're tired, and flights can be bumpy.  Lindsey was exhausted and slept for pretty much the whole flight from JFK to Salt Lake, about five hours.  Tanner said that the approach into Salt Lake was a bit rough.  I guess all of that was a bit too much for her.

For the kids, at least, the adventure is over.  For the adults, it's just beginning.

And they're off!

The kids are now about two and a half hours into their seventeen-hour trip to Utah.  We sent them off this morning.  They've spent enough time on airplanes that they weren't at all worried about being alone.  Also, the airline will take good care of them.  I just hope they haven't killed each other yet.

Sweden and Russia pictures still coming . . . .

Whew!

And we're back for the last time.  We somehow managed to survive the cruise and the time in Stockholm.  Everything went fine.  Our cruise lasted four nights, and we had to change our clocks every night as we moved back and forth across time zones.  Sheesh!

Anyway, more details to follow.

Last one

Our last family trip in Europe beings tomorrow night.  We'll fly to Stockholm and spend the night.  The next day we'll take a four-day cruise that visits Tallinn, Estonia and St. Petersburg, Russia.  I wish we could spend more time in Russia, but a day is better than nothing, I suppose.  We'll then hang around Stockholm for another couple of days.

After that trip, the insanity begins.  Let's see if I'm still sane in six months.

I love the Swiss and I want to strangle them all

I'm currently going through a typical and frustrating Swiss experience.  It's so dang Swiss!

Here's the story:  Every year, anyone who lives here buys a half-price train pass, which allows you to buy train tickets at half of the posted price.  (It's really just a scam to gouge the tourists.  No one who lives here pays full price.)

I renewed mine about a month ago.  The new pass usually comes in the mail in about a week.  I've been watching for mine, but it's never arrived.  It must have gotten lost somewhere along the way.

I've now had three almost identical conversations with the clerks at the train station when I've gone to explain my dilemma.  The clerk patiently listen to me as I tell him or her that I renewed my pass but that I never received it in the mail.  They then call some central number to find out what's going on.  After they talk in Swiss German for a minute, they hang up the phone and, pleased as punch, report to me that my pass was mailed out at the end of May.  They then contentedly wait for me to go away.

At that point, I explain that yes, I'm aware that my pass was mailed.  The problem is that it never made it to my house.

There's some puzzlement as the poor clerk tries to process this information.  It's difficult, I can tell.  This just doesn't happen in Switzerland.  When something is mailed, it arrives, period.  The clerk's first response is usually to repeat that it was mailed to me at the end of May.  After that, the clerk will pull up my address on their monitor and confirm that it's still my address.  Yes, I say.  They'll then ask if my name is on my mailbox.  Yes, I say.

At this point, the game shifts to "Blame the Ignorant American."  They come up with different variations, but they amount to the same thing:  this is my fault.  The second clerk patiently explained to me what the envelope would look like and suggested that I had probably thrown it away by mistake.  The third clerk suggested that I go home and conduct a thorough search of my apartment because it must be there somewhere.  (I found that remark to be so condescending that for the first time in my life, I felt the urge to strike a female Swiss train clerk.  I suppressed it.)

I haven't made much progress.  They keep giving me temporary passes under the assumption that it will show up in the mail or that I'll finally come across it in my apartment.  I may just live on temporary passes until I leave at the end of July.

On the other hand, I love the Swiss.  I'm taking the kids to our public pool tomorrow.  As I've mentioned before, it's spotless.  I know that I shall never again see a public pool as clean and well-maintained as a Swiss public pool.

Every six years

June 17th is always a special day, but it's even more special this year.  Something is happening this year that only happens about every six years (it varies due to the effects of Leap Year):  my birthday is on Father's Day.  That's right, this year, we're referring to June 17th as "Ethan's Day."

My family has something extra special planned for me.  They haven't actually said that, but I can just tell from the way they're acting that it's something great.  There's just something a little different in the way that Stace says, "For the last time, clean up this pile of papers," or the way Tanner says, "Dad, I don't want to practice guitar," or the way Lindsey says, "No, I'm not going to bed like you told me to."  The signs are subtle, but they're unmistakable.  It's gonna be incredible!

Another last

I just had my last good $45 haircut in German.  I can't wait to get a bad haircut for $15 in English!

One of those nights

Well, there won't be many more of these.  It's a perfectly clear night.  I've been looking out from our terrace all night.  We got a beautiful red sunset a couple of hours ago, and now the lake is being lit up by the crescent moon as it heads down toward the horizon.  There's going to be plenty to miss here.

Modified schedule

Some slight changes.  Here we go:

June 20-28, family trip to Stockholm and St. Petersburg
July 2, kids fly to Utah
July 6, Stace and I fly to Minnesota, buy a house
July 13, Stace flies to Utah
July 19, I fly back to Switzerland
July 23, I move out of my apartment and stay in a hotel for eight days
July 31, I leave Switzerland
Late August, we move into our new house

I still might sneak in a quick trip to Lisbon or something like that.

Still fine

Just really not much to report.  The kids go to school, I go to work, I try to spend time admiring the view from our terrace while we still have one, and so forth.

My brother Jed gets here on Saturday, though, so the party's about to begin . . . .

Summer plans

I haven't had much to say lately, but things are fine--just uninteresting.  For those of you who are curious, here's the plan for the summer:

June 20-28:  last family vacation, visiting Stockholm and Saint Petersburg.
July 2:  the kids fly out to Utah to stay with grandparents.
July 6-13:  Ethan and Stace fly to Minnesota to hunt for a house.
July 13:  Stace flies to Utah.  Ethan stays in Minnesota for a few more days to work and then heads back to Switzerland.
August 20 or so:  Ethan and Stace had back to Minnesota to close on the new mansion and buy two new luxury cars (like a three-year-old Elantra or something).
August 24 or so:  the kids head to Minnesota to get settled in, attend the Minnesota State Fair, and start school after Labor Day.
September 4:  Ethan starts his new/old job in Minnesota.
July 2033:  Ethan retires, Ethan and Stace sell the house and move to Orlando as a base from which to travel the world.

We found someone who's going to rent our old house, so we won't sell it for now.  It looks like we're going into the landlord business for at least a little while.

I see dead people

As I'm walking around the office in Eagan (Minnesota), I've noticed something more and more the longer I've been gone. I still recognize a lot of people in the building after four years, but they've forgotten about me. It's like I'm a ghost. As I pass someone I know and wave or say "hi," I can tell they have this moment where they're completely clueless as to who I am or why I look familiar to them (but with more gray hair). If they figure it out, it's usually after I've passed them.

I'm trying to be a little more careful not to throw people off these days, but it still happens from time to time.

Lindsey's baptism

Lindsey was baptized today. I baptized her in German but did the confirmation in English. And then, of course, we ate, which makes for a perfect day.

Berlin report

For this trip, rather than breaking it down day by day, I'll do most of it at once. Maybe we can convince Stace to do a separate entry about the Third Reich tour that she and Tanner took.

But first, Legoland. We spent a day there and had the expected amount of fun. (Read that however you will.) Stace loved the restroom signs.

Here's a pretty cool Lego rendition of the Swiss town of Lucerne.

The next day, it was on to Berlin, where we took a bike tour. Here's Checkpoint Charlie.

And here's a marker showing where the wall used to be.

There's not much of the wall left, but here's one of the sections.

Here's the site of Hitler's bunker, where he committed suicide. The government doesn't want to open it up or even mark the spot for fear that it will become a Neo-Nazi shrine.

This is the Holocaust Memorial.

And, of course, here's the famous Brandenburg Gate. It was quite something to imagine the scene there twenty years ago when the wall came down.

The next day was really, really cold. Here's the Berlin Cathedral. (You all remember how much I like wandering around old cathedrals, right?)

Here's the Reichstag, sort of the German equivalent of Capitol Hill. We later walked up in the dome and took a tour.

Here's a view from the dome.

In this picture, you can see the Brandenburg Gate on the left and the Holocaust Memorial in the background.

At the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, there were many illustrations of the ingenious ways that people managed to make it out of East Berlin. On the other hand, there was this reminder of the many people who didn't.

It was a good trip. It could have been about fifteen degrees warmer, but we still had fun.

Und jetzt sind wir in Zug

We're back from Berlin. It was unusually cold--in fact, we spent Saturday night eating dinner near the Brandenburg gate watching the snow fall. It was a good trip; we only wish it would have been about fifteen degrees warmer.

We did something different this time: bike tours. All of us took a bike tour on Friday to see some of the sights of Berlin, and then Stace and Tanner took another tour on Sunday that focused on sites specific to the Third Reich and Nazi Germany, something in which she's always been interested. (I just re-read that last sentence and realized again how screwed up the English language is. Try to explain to me why both "sights" and "sites" work in that sentence.)

Pictures to come soon. Next up: Stockholm and St. Petersburg, and then on to Lakeville!

Am Dienstag fahren wir nach Berlin

Here's another last: The last spring break trip somewhere in Europe. We're heading to Berlin tomorrow, although we won't actually make it until Thursday due to a little side trip to Legoland. Next year for spring break, we'll be choosing between locales such as Fargo, Rapid City, and Wisconsin Dells. It doesn't quite feel the same.

It will be nice to be in a place where we have some idea of what's going on. None of us is fluent in German, but we do okay at navigating in a German-speaking country, unlike being in Egypt or Poland, for example.

Cover your ears

This place has really been tough on the ears lately. Over the past few weeks, we've noticed Tanner's voice cracking from time to time as it starts to change. (Heaven help us all.) Now, to make matters even worse, he's come down with a cold. It's awful. He can't utter a sentence without spanning about four octaves in the space of ten words. He's worse than a Garth Brooks song.

For the sake of our sanity, we've requested that he not speak until he turns 17 or until he gets over his cold, whichever comes last.

More "lasts"

Well, this past weekend saw us doing two more things for the last time: Stace and I had lunch at a ski resort in the Alps for the last time, and we all drove to an obscure part of Germany to play with monkeys at a monkey park for the last time. (Okay, honestly, that was also the first time to do the monkey thing, but I'm pretty sure that it was the last.)