Blogstalking

Blogstalking. This is what people call it when someone, such as myself, takes an hour or two and reads blog post after blog post, catching up on what his old friends from high school, or their friends, or their friends' friends are doing. I have even been known to find my way to the favorite cooking blog of a friend's friend.

The best part about blog stalking is that I can come and go as I please, and no one is the wiser. Perhaps I visited your site twice today, and left no comment. You would never know... or would you? Well thanks to the wonderful world of IP addresses, most people now do know. There is a blogger function that tracks the home regions of the people that visit your blog. Well there aren't a whole lot of people living in Hessen, Germany that are visiting these blogs, so whenever that happens to pop up it is painfully obvious where I have been. Lol.

You're really raining on my secret parade. No more cooking blogs. No more scrapbooking. And maybe no more crocheting blogs... for now.

New Year Resolutions

Good bloggers probably have a notepad somewhere where they outline what they are about to write. Me, I just wing it. I sit down in front of this computer and type--straight stream of conscience--and I am sure it shows. So this post is no different. I thought, I should write about New Year Resolutions, but I actually haven't resolved to do anything yet, I am just going to make it up as I go.

1. Leave work earlier

Do I stay at the office too late? Yes. I don't get paid overtime, and sometimes I work late into the night and the next morning solely because there is nothing waiting for me at home. Once I am there until 9, I am not going to make it home before the grocery store closes, and it has been dark out since 4 pm, so what is the point? Second part of this resolution: Avoid the office on the weekend. I am going to stop coming in to "get ahead" when I don't have any deadlines to meet so I can try to enjoy myself a bit more.

2. 24 Trips to the gym

Who am I kidding? Do I have a gym membership? Sure. I have been 6 times in the six months I have had it. My goal: Double that number. One trip every other week. And if I manage to get on some sort of schedule, I could hit this resolution within a month :) I am hoping the summer will make things a little easier. And hey, I am planning on playing basketball tonight, but not at the gym, so I won't count it.

3. Try to cook more for myself / Watch what I eat

www.Pizza.de is where I order my food most of the time. High in carbs, high in calories. I am going to try to make more food myself. Buying the pasta, meat, and seasonings and tossing them together. I figure this should help with portion control (since I lack the ability to not eat everything I order) and should keep me from downing entire pints of Häagendazs at work.

4. Get out more

My goal is to make 5 new friends, and find one that will end up being a really good friend in the years to come. For this, I figure I need to get out more. This is kind of hard because I am tied to my blackberry and often work a very unpredictable schedule, but, in keeping with my first resolution, there are always the weekends when I should be able to make a few hours of time, sometime.

5. Learn another language

I am going to try to spend an hour or two a week learning a different language. Shouldn't be all that terrible. In fact, it should be quite enjoyable. I think I will choose Spanish, and I will plan a couple weekend getaways to Spain and see how things improve.

Snow in Frankfurt!

So before I took this job I was told "Frankfurt had a very moderate climate and it doesn't really snow there..." Fat chance. I am sitting in a half a foot of snow and it is still coming down. I walked home from work last night and it took almost an hour because I had to walk so slowly because my dress shoes are so slick on the bottoms.

Never snows in Frankfurt. And where is the bearer of this news? Oh, he took off to London before the winter began so I couldn't whitewash him with my frozen hands.

The Internet meets Street Urchin

If you haven't read this, it is pretty funny. Thank you to my friend Logan.

Click the image to view it in actual size (or right click to save the target to your computer).

Negligence...

Do you feel neglected blog? I had a long few weeks here at work, and in the tradition of the Sanders blog I am going to post my top five, not of October or November, but of the last 5 weeks since I haven't blogged in a while.


Number 5, Asian tour groups.

I am not sure what they are taking pictures of, but every morning when I walk to work I cross paths with about 90 Asian tourists scattered about the Plaza across the street from my work posing and making faces like those found on www.asianposes.com for their cameras. Don't get me wrong, I saw people taking pictures all the time when I lived in New York, but I was living in New York! This is Frankfurt. It is a few tall bank buildings and an old opera house. Not much to see here. It would be like booking a trip to the United States and having the tour bus make a stop in Manhattan, Kansas.


Number 4, My New Apartment

So I finally moved into my new apartment. It is pretty sweet, other than the fact that I live about 20 feet from a 180 foot crane and 35 feet from the large apartment building it is trying to assemble. Every morning at 7:00 I am awakened by the sound of clanging steel. But that was another story, I am talking about the inside. I actually have a walk in closet for my clothes, and that is pretty good for German standards. I don't however, have any other closet for brooms or a vacuum or other large eyesores.

Slowly I have been able to furnish my apartment. I now have a bed, a desk (kind of), a mirror, a reclining chair, a couch, a kitchen table and chairs, and some wall furniture to put a tv on eventually.


Number 3, M Steakhouse

So things at work slowed down enough for my team to get around to taking me out to lunch like they were planning on doing the first week I got here but we had to cancel a few times because things kept coming up. I chose the M, and I am glad I did. I got the most delicious hugest steak covered in deliciousness and served up with delicious sides. I thought it was delicious. Definitely worth going back for my Christmas present to myself when I save my pennies.


Number 2, 19 degrees in November

That would be 19 degrees Celsius. And that would have been on Sunday. So nice.


Number 1, The Pedal-Around-Town Bar on Wheels Thing I Saw Again Today

There is this trolley looking thing at which 10 people sit. They are all pedaling like they are on a bike, and their pedaling drives this thing around like a big bicycle while a bartender steers and hands out beer. Today on my way to grab some soup for lunch I couldn't help but smile and laugh a little out loud as the rowdy bunch rode around the town square singing drinking songs and pedaling away. So simple, yet so clever, and obviously so much fun. Contagious fun. That is my favorite thing about the past 5 weeks. That and not getting fired.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Printers

Let me let you in on a little secret, books are printed at a printing press. Yup, that is right. Type is set, and the printing is done just like the old days. Well in the business world, lots of things get printed: annual reports, quarterly financial statements, company presentations, and as is the case in my line of work, offering documents. An offering document is usually a prospectus, or a collection of forward looking statements in the form of "a legal document that institutions and businesses use to describe the securities they are offering for participants and buyers" as wikipedia would like to call it.

Some people ask me what I do. Well, I write these offering documents. Actually, I would say my team negotiates, drafts, renegotiates, redrafts, proofreads, redrafts, rethinks, redrafts and proofreads these documents. And most of the work is done on the old word processor from the comfort of our offices, however, putting this 250 page masterpiece into book form is no easy task, and the company will enlist the help of a printing company, or as I call it, the printer.

It is at the printer that things really start to get cooking. Time runs short, as do tempers and sleep. Usually the printing marathon runs between 72 and 100 hours during which people never leave the printer. I have managed to get home for about 7 hours in the last 3 or 4 days, and it is a weird feeling when you can't remember what day it is, when you got to be where you are, and you really don't know when you will ever leave again. There is a shower with all the amenities, and the bathroom counter is fully stocked with toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, axe body spray, razors and shaving cream, and even q-tips. Meals are served three times a day, and there are staff here to set a new cola, red bull, sparkling water, peppermint tea, orange juice, or smoothie in front of you before you even finish the one you have. You literally never have to leave the room.

The printing process is rather intense, but simple. The printer sets all the type. The problem with a document this long, and one that is changing with every passing day and is constantly being renegotiated, is that the type has to be set long before the actual printing is done. Once the document is sent to the printer for setting, all changes are made by hand, scanned in, and the proper changes are made. Then the proofing begins, each change is double checked to make sure it was done correctly, the hyphen was inserted rather than the dash, or the quotation marks were accidentally set in bold face and will have to be replaced. Longer changes take hours to be made, and while one page is being reworked, no other changes can be made to that page. Because of my native English abilities, I hold the master document, the one with all the most recent changes and the only one from which pages are submitted to be changed. As pages come in and out the huge pile of papers shrinks and grows in front of me: a living document! It is quite stressful keeping up with all of the proofreading as pages come back, making sure no changes were missed and that they were all done correctly and juggling the task of consolidating changes from 12 lawyers, 14 bankers, 25 company representatives, and the changes I make myself as I read through the text.

Needless to say, the paper builds up. In fact, had I had those trees, I think I could have built a little treehouse. Luckily there was a German soccer game on tonight, so the changes stopped rolling in for a few hours and I was able to catch up and write this blogpost, but it looks like break time has past and looking at the clock it would seem Day 4 at the printers has already begun...

Back to work. But before I go. Let me tell you how delicious that steak was. Very delicious, and even more delicious when I realize that little spread from Buzzano (http://www.buzzano.de/) cost over 100 euro. The company gladly picked up the tab for the poor soul who worked through the soccer match and won't be leaving until after they wake up tomorrow.

From last weekend...

So this weekend we had terrible weather. Lots of rain and it hasn't let up as I look at my raindrop spotted window. But last weekend, like 9 days ago, I remember that there was this yellow ball in the sky and it made me warm. It was on that weekend that I made a trip down to Dieburg (pronounced DEE-burg) to visit my good friend from the states, Adam, and his special lady friend Marie.

I was told we were making pizza, but when I arrived I learned that they had told Adam we were making pizza because he was unable to understand the concept of a pflamkuchen, which is in fact what we were going to make. I had never actually made pflamkuchen before, but I had eaten it at some of the weekly markets here in Frankfurt. This pflamkuchen was special, however, because we were making it in a homemade pizza oven! That's right, Marie's brother Martin and his friends had one of those itches, one of those, I need to build something itches. So they built a pizza oven in Christian's backyard.

After it was finished, they had a fundraiser baking pizzas and a good deal of the little town of Dieburg and even the newspaper showed up to take part. I was able to eat some delicious pflamkuchen that came out of this very oven. Oh the joys of a Sunday afternoon and the benefit of everything being closed and so people have 2 hours to heat up the oven and spend another 3 hours cooking and talking with friends.

Enjoy the pictures, and think about how much I enjoyed the pflamkuchen. I should probably describe it. It is a thin crust topped with a creme fraiche like sauce with toppings like cubed ham/bacon and onions. One of the pflamkuchen was veggie style with green olives, onions, and sheep cheese. Marie's little sister decided to make one herself with about triple the ham. It was a splendid evening, and was crazy to see an old friend from California 7,000 miles away from home in a little German village. And I know what you are thinking, and yes, sometimes I wear part my hair when I go to work, but I have since got it cut...