Nemesis water spout..pure hate!We have officially spent one week in our new pad and already there has been a fire, water leakage, and an electrocution. Best to get all this out of the way, I suppose? At least there hasn’t been any incidences involving blood. Yet.

The past weekend’s move proved to be a physical challenge. Our tireless helpers made the job completable in just 2 days. A huge thanks once again to the buff men (and woman) who not only heaved Bertha, the washing machine, up four flights of stairs, but the rest of our possessions in record timing. It all started last Friday with Alex cursing me as he carried boxes full of books up the stairs alone while I packed. oops. (Glaub mir. Es war nicht mit Absicht!)

Artist: Thao
Album: We Brave Bee Stings And All
Title: Bag Of Hammers

This week Alex has been hard at work wrapping up his obligations to soon-to-be former employer. He gave a course in Dusseldorf, giving him an opportunity to visit with family. I, in the meantime, have been playing a triple roll as domestic goddess, plumer-ess, and electrician-ess.

      whew! Flammküche saved from flaming Backpapiere

It’s amazing how much more room we have, even though our new place is only 6 sq meters bigger than the last place. It’s definitely growing on me.

So our housewarming is on the 29th of this month. All are invited who want to attend. We’ll see how ambitious I am about learning a linux version of video editing software. I might feature a video “Wohnung Walkthrough” post.

Moving boxes. Pizza Boxes. It’s hard not to feel stressed by all this chaos filling our once comfy home. Even though it is only temporary, the debate as to what to take and what to toss is a bear and a half. It snowed yesterday. Not good for moving hands. The temperatures should creep back up tomorrow although it should schnegnet (a verb invented by my american expat friend, Mandy, meaning the act of snowing and raining) again Saturday morning. Bah.

I haven’t had the desire to cook, rather clean, organize, recycle, and you know, have regular meetings with the trash can. So it’s been a kind of saying good bye to all of our restaurants in our neighborhood this week. I will truly miss the Phone Pizza dudes when we move. There won’t be a quick pizza joint near our new place. Or at least one I have yet to discover.

I remember it took a little while to get used to the pizza here in Germany. There are a lot more unusual options available than I’d expect from a small pizza delivery shop but also some treasured toppings are also omitted, like Italian sausage, green peppers, pitted sliced black olives..umm.

Alex and I like to split a “jumbo” Americana pizza (about 12″ in diameter) served thin crust-style, topped with mushrooms, sliced red onions, yellow corn kernels, and Salami slices (shown above). Sometimes Alex will order a pizza topped with peas and chicken and crowned with a cracked egg before baking. That goes beyond my yum factor and that’s when I resort to a ham and pineapple pizza. Alex won’t touch it.

One thing to remember Salami here is their equivalent to our pepperoni in the U.S. Peperoni here is the green peperoncini you can find in the corner of a Papa John’s pizza box. (or do they not do that any more?) Sometimes Peperoni here is also another word for Jalapeños, got to be careful. But what’s really wonderful about pizza here, you don’t ever have to wonder whether it’s made with 100% real cheese.

I’m going to really miss our newly painted red wall and the dish washer. Strange that I can associate the two. The idea to move came up as soon as we got home from winter holiday and read an ‘oh-by-the-way’ letter from our landlady that our rent will be increasing about 100€/mo starting the first of February. Alex looked up on wikipedia about our rights as rentees and found the need to educate our landlady: Actually we need a reason for the increase and 3 months to decide whether we accept the increase before she grabbed into our pockets.

The good news is that we found a place relatively near, a room larger, a whisper away from the U-bahn and about 40€ less per month in rent. We’ll have to say goodbye to the elevator and underground parking garage (those were the things bringing up our rent) and hello to the fourth floor and bigger lung capacity.

All this will happen just before Alex is switching jobs and I’ll be switching my academic profession to something more suitable for me and our future.

There is much to do and still it hasn’t all sunk in. I’ll blame it on this warm spell and sunny weather (16°C today!). It feels like bikini weather. But for now I’m getting used to working with Linux. We killed the computer this weekend and started fresh with partitions of WinXP and Ubuntu. Bennie Q (the computer) is running much quieter now.

I’ll post when I can (I guess that’s today) but I make no promises in the coming weeks.