Christmas

I've had a busy few weeks and haven't had a chance to update my blog. I went to Germany with my family for nine days over Christmas. I flew straight from Denver to Charlotte, NC and met my family there for our trans-Atlantic flight to Frankfurt, Gemrany.

For a while before I moved out to Colorado, my parents expressed concern over me becoming and alcoholic or forming other bad habits. I hadn't seen anyone in my family in several months, so I decided to play a practical joke on them. Before I got off of the plane in Charlotte, I put on a fake lip ring. My family's reaction was priceless. They asked why I hadn't mentioned it before and I could tell that most of them were hiding their true feelings about it. I held up the sharade for about an hour, until we were about to eat dinner (I didn't want to attempt to eat food with it in). The whole time that I had the lip ring in, my mother had been avoiding looking at me and talking to me. She seemed genuinely upset. She barely even hugged me when I saw her. After I took it out, she confessed that she had been thinking the whole time about how she could avoid looking at it and how she would only stand or sit on my left side (the ring was on the right). It was a pretty entertaining eperience.

Our trip to Germany was great. We rented a 9 seat VW van that stuck out like a sore thumb compared to all the small German cars. It was neat because it had a standard transmission, which you just don't see in the United States (especially not on a van). During our nine days we visited Wurzburg, Rothenburg, Nuremburg, and Heidelberg. It snowed almost the whole time we were there (they got over a foot of snow during our trip), which I was greatful for, becuase just as I was leaving Colorado, a huge storm came in that dumped three feet of snow over three days.

I love to visit Germany because it has such a great history and is very old. Some of the cities we visited date back to 1000 AD. Rothenburg is one of the few remaining walled cities and was one of my favorite of the cities we visited. It was also cool because you can still walk up the stairs to the top of the wall walk along it. You can look out the slotted windows that were used to defend the city from attack. There are even houses built into the side of the wall!







I liked Nuremburg a lot, too because it has a lot of more recent history. We visited the Palace of Justice, which is were the Nuremburg Trials were held after World War II. It was very interesting to see the courtroom where some of the Nazi's worst war criminals were tried. I also learned a lot about the history of the trials.

There are a lot of great pictures from the trip on Flickr.

Before I left for Germany, I closed down the cabin so that nothing would go wrong while I was gone. Basically, that consists of shutting off the water and draining the pipes to keep them from freezing. I also turned down the heat in the living room and my bedroom (the only two heaters I had running). I didn't get back to the cabin 'til about midnight, after traveling for around 24 hours and hardly sleeping. I was welcomed by a cold house with no running water. I turned the water back on and filled the water heater, but obviously couldn't take a shower, because there was no hot water, yet. When I finally went into my room to go to bed at 12.30, I realized I had made a big mistake. I have an electric baseboard heater in my room and had turned it almost all the way down before I left. It was about 34 deg F in my room (I have a watch with a thermometer on it that I checked). The baseboard heater works great at keeping my room warm when it's cold out, but lacks enough power to heat it quickly (partially because there is no fan - the heat has to spread through free convection). I got in bed that night with all of my clothes on and curled into a  ball, and still froze all night. Getting up for work at 6.30 the next morning was not fun, though at least I could finally take a hot shower.