-
Directories
Stay Tuned For: Christina v. German Customer Service Reps, Round 200
So I picked up the memory and it doesn’t work. My computer boots up, recognizes there is more memory, waits five minutes, then crashes. It works fine once the new memory is removed. Now I will have to do battle with an evil Customer Service Rep. I usually lose these battles here in lovely Deutschland.
And if anyone is into error messages, here are mine (after a quick google search produced nothing helpful, I just assume they say, “something is wrong with this memory, ack!”):
STOP: 0x00000024 (0x001902FE, 0xF21965A0, 0xF219629C,0xF74A5B0F)
Ntsf.sys - Address F74A5B0F base at F74820000, DateStamp 41107eea
-and a variation-
STOP: 0x00000050 (0xFFFFFF8B, 0x00000001, 0xF74853B7, 0x00000000)
Ntsf.sys - Address F74853B7 base at F74820000, DateStamp 41107eea
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
It was the egg by a nose!
I had a strange dream the other day that I was cracking open an egg (presumably to cook it) and there was a baby chicken embryo inside. Some random person was with me and told me that I should eat it because they’re incredibly delicious. I told them that I believed that they are yummy, but that I couldn’t eat it. Very strange. I have no idea what that could mean (probably that I’m nuts), but, I’m curious, so I ask you, Gentle Reader:
(1) What’s the most disgusting thing (by conventional standards) you’ve ever eaten? (that’s shark fin, for me - although Matjes is a close runner up - oh and I had a plate of fried baby fish at the docks in Helsinki; the first handful were yummy, but then I felt sick - oh, wait, I forgot about blood sausage *barf!*)
(2) Do you think embryonic chicks would be yummy? (I mean, baby animals are, i.e. baby cow = veal, right? So what if you just take it a step further…)
(3) Would you eat an embryonic chick and how much money would have to exchange hands for this to occur? (hmmm… that’s a tough one - maybe for $10,000)
(4) What came first, the chicken or the egg? (see title)
Weekend Update
This has been a fairly enjoyable weekend, despite the mostly gray, rainy weather. The one annoying thing that happened was that the memory upgrade I ordered for my computer arrived Saturday per Nachnahme (COD), when I thought it was coming per Rechnung, and I didn’t have the cash to pay, so I need to go to the post office Monday to pick it up. It seems that Brandenburg postal carriers do not yet have the technology to accept payment by card, although, the postal worker explained to us, the postal workers in all the other states in Germany can. He seemed to be very annoyed by this. We finished off Saturday by taking a long walk with Charlie through Park Babelsberg.
Today was spontaneous roadtrip day, so we struck out and ended up in Moritzburg, where we took a stroll around the Schloss. There was a dog show going on in the gardens and the dogs all laughed at Charlie because they didn’t need leashes and Charlie has to wear a completely silly looking Halti to keep him from pulling our arms out of their sockets. People kept walking by saying, “Arme Hund!” (“Poor Dog!”).
After Moritzburg, we headed 7 km further down the road to Meissen, where Dresden porcellan is manufactured.
Charlie pulled us all the way up the hill to the Dom (cathedral), where we had a beautiful view of the valley and the Altstadt.
Next weekend: Off to Hamburg! We figure we better visit before we move further away.
Doing anything on the 18th & 19th November 2006?
If not, The Second Whiney Expat Bloggers in Germany Meet Up is taking place in Bonn that weekend. Get details here. I’ll try to be dabei.
Moving on down the line
Sorry for the lack of posts, I’m just feeling extremely antisocial and have locked myself in the house and refused to check email for days. Don’t worry, it’s a phase I go through every once in a while and it will pass within a couple of weeks at the most, and maybe I’ll be back to my old social self tomorrow, who knows? I think it might be the shock of being back in Germany. Yes, going back to the USA would require a readjustment period, but I’m still not German-ized yet, and while Washington DC metro-ers are losing their friendly sociability, they have not quite made it to the level of the average German’s if-I-don’t-know-you-you-don’t-exist-ness (unless of course you are doing something wrong, then I will have to give you a lecture).
We will be moving sometime soon, someplace at least an hour from Potsdam. Rainer is finishing up negotiations for a position at a German university. I will blog about it once the contract is signed. Sorry for the mystery, but there are multiple universities at play here and I don’t want to say anything that could affect the outcome. My traffic volume is so low, I doubt there is anyone involved reading, but you never know.
And my grandfather’s condo was sold today. I don’t know exactly how these things work, but I’ll be getting 1/6th of the proceeds and I need to figure out what to do with the money. Is it better to leave it in the US or bring it to Germany to invest it? I guess leaving it in the US only makes sense if we expect to go back there someday, but changing the value from dollars to euros just makes me feel bad, but I guess the dollar’s not going to get stronger anytime soon. I need a financial planner.
Back in the BRD
I made it safely back to Potsdam and even had a fairly comfortable flight, in that it was only half full so I had an empty seat next to me. I also breezed through security at Dulles - I wasn’t even wanded! - which was a little worrisome. I unfortunately was not able to blog immediately because while I was away, Rainer was moving my computer desk and it collapsed, so I first had to put the desk back together (yay! fun with power tools!), then I had to untangle all the computer cords and hook everything back up again. Luckily, there seems to be no damage to the computer, but I haven’t tested the scanner yet and Rainer said the desk landed on it, but it warmed up when I plugged it in, so maybe it survived the devastation.
The big news here is that (1) the workers at the Volkswagon plant in Mexico are preparing to strike and (2) Germany is sending naval ships and possibly up to 1,000 peacekeepers to Lebanon. This is troublesome because of the history between Germany and Israel and there is some worry over what will happen if a German fires at an Israeli soldier.
And my lazy butt still needs to unpack, so I’ve got to get going.
T-minus 5 hours and counting…
…until I board my flight for New York and by 8am CET tomorrow, I should be back in Germany. I’m looking forward to getting home to Rainer and Charlie, and actually, I’m looking forward just to be going back to Germany as well. I think if we ever moved back to the USA, I’d have a definite readjustment period. People here (in the Washington DC metro area at least) have gotten much less polite since I left. For example: Many able bodied, young people left a VERY pregnant woman to stand on the entire metro trip from Metro Center to Vienna; nobody is holding doors open for each other anymore and people were quite (pleasantly) shocked when I did it for them; and people are constantly on their cell phones, it’s almost as bad as Italy over here now. The one breakfast I had with my brother while here was spent watching him talk on his cell phone. I think it’s all about the “greener grass”, allow me to elaborate: cell phones have allowed us to know what’s going on wherever anyone else with a cell phone is at any given time, so now we are left wondering if it’s more fun wherever the other person is and we worry that we’re missing out on that fun by being wherever we are. So in essence, cell phones are keeping us from living in the moment.
At my going away party four years ago, half the party ended up at the complex’s pool, while the other half was dancing in my apartment. I would be dancing in my apartment and see the people by the pool laughing and think, wow, it looks like much more fun over there, so I’d run over to the pool, then I would be sitting there not paying attention to the conversation because I’d be looking over at my apartment and seeing all the people dancing and thinking that that looks like more fun. Finally, I realized I wasn’t enjoying where I was because I wanted to know what was going on in the other place, so I made a decision that from then on, I was going to live in the moment and enjoy wherever I happened to be as much as I could.
Okay, enough babble, I need to check my carry-ons again to make sure there aren’t any liquids in there. Later!
-
Subscribe to AmiExpat
creativecommons License
Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License.
