From the Be-Careful-What-You-Wish-For Department

Hey, another post!  All right, I know that I've been blathering on about Winter a bit much, but this one I gotta share.  I'm at work checking the weather forcast, seeing if I can take the bike tomorrow.  Well, according to it, it's snowing as I sit.  I scoff a little, as it was mostly cloudy when I came in this morning, and those weren't even the type of clouds that you would expect parcipitation from.  The sun was peeking out intermittently, so I guess the better description would be partly sunny.  Whichever, though, it certainly wasn't snowing, and it didn't look like it would be any time soon.

So imagine my surprise not three minutes later when I look up and see it snowing outside.  Now mind you, the sky was the same as it was, and in fact the sun was shining at this particular moment (the first thought I had was, is there such a thing as a snow-rainbow?).  We've got a pretty good panarama of the skyline out of the office, too, so we could say with a fair degree of certainty, hey, this shouldn't be happening, should it?  I mean, where was it coming from?  But as much as you know that I loooove Winter, this was pretty cool.  It reminded me of something, but I was having the hardest time figuring it out, since I have virtually no experience with snow (besides the fact that if it snows, you are required by law to buy all the bread and milk you can, and you must drive down the road doing 10 mph at most, or risk instant death and mutilation).  And then it hit me.

I was in a snow-globe.  I can't really describe it any differently.  There was a pretty good wind swirling around, as well, so that the snow wasn't just coming straight down, so that added to the effect nicely.  About fifteen to thirty minutes later, it was snowing normally again.  By that, I mean gray, overcast with a low ceiling, and kind of dreary.  An hour or so later at around lunch, it had quit, and now it's back to sunny again in the early afternoon.  When I lived in both Oklahoma and Carolina, there was always the joke, if you don't like the weather just wait a few minutes, but they got nothing on this place, let me tell you.

Anyway, that's it for now.  Nothing special, really, I just thought I'd share.  Like I said, be careful what you wish for.

What's Happenin'

Okay, so maybe I've found a way to post in a more timely, or at least frequent, manner.  Apparently, my muse shows up after I've been to the bar for a few beers.  Or at least she did tonight.  Who knows, we'll see  next Sunday when Nürnberg has another game and I go back.  

In December just before the end of the first half of the season, I found an English pub that shows Bundesliga matches and they even added my favorite local brewery's beer on tap recently.  Now, you might say, wow, what a shock - an English pub that shows soccer.  Well, there are about five English pubs in town, and really, only one of the others even shows football, and they only have the English Premier League.  So if I want to watch the Bundesliga, I've got to go to this other one.  And I do.  I mean, come on, I'm in the Germany, why would I watch English football?  Plus, at this bar, all of the staff, regulars, etc. speak German.  

Well, yeah - it's Germany, you say.  And you're right.  At the other place, they do as well.  But just because they can speak German doesn't mean that they do.  Basically, this other place is a little piece of Britain.  And I love the place, I really do.  The food is great, the beer is good, and the people are really cool.   But if I want to immerse myself in German culture, that's not the place I need to hang out at.  It's more of a place for a temporary escape (and since they also have monthly golf outings...  you better believe I will).

And I need the German atmosphere.  I don't really know what the problem is, but I am having the worst time learning German.  And it's not even learning German, per se, it's hearing it and understanding it.  I can say quite a bit, even though my vocabulary is pretty limited, and I understand most of the grammatical rules and such that I've come across so far, but damned if I can catch what anyone's saying to me unless it's the simplest thing, which means conversations are out.  Possibly, it's because I don't have a television in my house, so I get home, and I'm right  back to the English-speaking world, since, of course, it's just me and my English language TV shows, DVDs, and books.  But on the other hand, I don't really want to get a television.  I have a bad history of just plopping my lazy ass down in front of it, and I definitely don't want to do that, plus it would just be one more thing that I wouldn't be able to bring back to the States with me, and I'm trying to keep those items to a minimum.  So this place may be my new hangout, or at least for one day a week.  I can watch sports, the beer's good, the people are pretty friendly, and maybe, just maybe, I can improve my language skills.

Other than that, there's really not that much going on right now.  The weather has been back to a good level, temp-wise (although it was snowing again tonight on my way home, so it'll be the bus to work tomorrow), the German lessons are on-going, and we've even started back up having practices with the baseball team.  Mainly, it's just conditioning and minor throwing and hitting drills, but it's something, and after four months without any practices and a month plus without even being able to ride the bike because it was so damn cold, I need it.  I was shocked at how much I missed the torture machine, but I think that besides the occasional rainy/snowy day, I should be able to ride it most every day from here on out.  As for the conditioning... well, I'm still old and out of shape, so that sucks, but hey, I've still got a few months before the season starts.

Screw Mr. Snow Miser

So I've bitched before about the snow and cold, but I've gotta say, I was actually getting starting to get used to it.  Every morning for while there, I'd go to work on the torture machine thinking, 'Okay, surely this will be the day that I decide that it's just too cold to do this', but I'd get to work, and it just wasn't that bad.  And when it was, it was usually more about the precipitation than it was about the temperature.  It's a pain in the ass biking down the road not being able to see anything because the snow is getting in your eyes.  But snow really is a pretty sight when it's covering everything, and not melting immediately, thus making things even messier than they are already (above is the view from the office overlooking one of the parking lots in the complex).  And it's even more enjoyable when you realize that you don't have to shovel one bit of it.  That part I especially like.

This part of it, though, can kiss my fat behind.  I finally reached the point of "screw that" about a week ago last Tuesday, just before the New Year.  When I got to work, my face felt like it would shatter into a million pieces at the slightest touch, and this was with this thing wrapped around my chin and ears (not an ear-warmer, per se, but some piece of cloth that folds/twists/scrunches into everything from ear warmers to a toboggan - very handy) for warmth that had been quite effective in temps right around freezing.  And that was last week, the beginning of the Arctic snap.  This week it's been colder.  Pictured above is the three day outlook including today.  I would have done the seven day, but it's supposed to actually get back up to around the freezing point next Monday or Tuesday.  And let me tell you, never have I looked forward to "just" freezing as much as I am now.

And just in case you think I'm being a whiny bitch (which... okay, maybe a little), even the Germans think that this is too cold.  They're used to cold and having it last for months at a time (you know, actual seasons), but like I've mentioned before, usually things hover a few degrees below freezing and pretty much stay there.  So even they don't like it much, which made me feel a lot better.  Then again, I saw a surprising number of people on bicycles today, and even a couple of people out jogging.  Insane.  

But, hey, who knows.  Now that I'm not going anywhere for a few days, maybe I can get a post or two done.  Of course, it's taken me a week to expound on "Damn, it's cold", so we'll see.  Bis nächstes mal.  Tschüß!

P.S. - And since I don't want to be accused of being a tease, for those of you hoping for this from the post title, enjoy.

Update

Just as another way for me to feel sorry for myself, and to prove to you that I'm not crazy, check this out, and if you're looking at it any time after I'm actually posting this, just reference today from the various graphs (letzten 24 stunden is last 24 hours, woche is week, and monats is month, and jahres is year).  Right now, it's -15.7℃.  That's less than 4℉.