Goodness it has been a busy season.
Halloween, of course. Then recovery from Halloween, leading in to Turkey Day which was replete with Turkey, Pie, and laying in a bamboo floor along most of the lower half of our house.
After that a VERY brief period of recovery and then Germany for me for a week, well, five or six days.
Preparations for that trip were fairly intensive, and I really did NOT want to go -- I had a house to clean, a workshop to clean, an article due on January 15th to test projects for, and so on. But went I did, and I had a great time.
Met some engineers, spoke my six whole words of German repeatedly (danke! bitte!), and puzzled out signs and directions and stuff with my extremely rusty high-school German. It was neat.
Drank beer (bier! Weissbier rocks my world), ate food (sausage! schnitzel! saurkraut!), and did not have any access to the internet at ALL except for a kiosk in the hotel lobby with a weird European keyboard. Okay, it did, but it was a Euro an hour (about $1.30 or so) if I bought it in 12 hour chunks or larger, and even then it was severely bandwidth limited.
Some of the BEST food we had was at an Italian restaurant, with five courses of meal and some very fine food it was. The outside looked like a total dive, but inside, oh yeah. Food. That had to have cost a pretty penny (the host company paid to have the participants eat there).
The hotels, which were quite expensive, also had some VERY nice breakfasts; and breakfast to a German is quite a different prospect than our sugar-laden American monstrosities.
Yesterday I spent half the day recovering from the trip (it's a 7-time-zone transition, and I haven't slept properly in about a week now, except for last night), and today I worked on cleaning the workshop and working on the article projects.
Of course, I'm sick now. I always get sick after a timezone-shifting trip, when I can't sleep right. So far, it's just painful sinuses and a slight woozy feeling. Hopefully it passes, because Wednesday we have vacation until the 28th and dammit I don't want to be sick on my xmas vacation. Because that would suck.
Anyway, I must be off; should eat soon, and stuff. You know, things to do. People to be.
I'll try to log stuff here during vacation. Because, you know, Oregon has cheap or free wifi. Not like Germany.
Bastards.