Finally

It has apparently taken me 4 months to remember to update this blog. I'd like to say that now that I'm back, I'll stay for a while, but who knows.

The past 4 months have seen a lot of excitement. In early September, Susan and Paul came to visit for a week. We had a lot of fun! They were very good sports hanging out with our kitties, although they admitted they aren't cat people. :) We visited downtown Mannheim, Heidelberg and its Schloss, and made a day trip to Strasbourg, France. Unfortunately, I had to leave on a work trip the day before their return trip home, so Brian took them on a Rhein River cruise. I think they had a good time here, and we'd love to have them (and any other family, hint, hint) visit again.

Work was an adventure this fall. I went to Belgium in September with a brass quintet to play at a cemetery and several memorials marking the 65th anniversary of that particular town's liberation from the Nazis during WWII. This year was full of anniversary celebrations in Belgium and France, and I was lucky enough to attend quite a few. October was our fall concert series, where our concert band gave a few concerts in various nearby cities. I got to sing with the band on that series in addition to playing my horn, so that was a lot of fun. In November, I had to miss Amanda and Dave's wedding (although Brian had a nice trip home) so that I could go to Berlin and Köln (Cologne) to participate in another military music festival. We go to these and march around in an arena performing a show of typical American music, and they are always such a hit, which kind of blows my mind. Sure, it's a little entertaining and interesting for us to see all the other countries' bands and to see how they perform, but I can't believe the general public is as interested in it as they are! A couple weeks later, we did the same thing in Birmingham, UK, and that trip also included a couple of concerts: one by ourselves, and one that we shared with the band from Kazhakstan. They were so kind, and they really blew us away with their sound. That was a fun concert! Of course, now it's December, and we just finished our Holiday Concert series. Within the span of nine days, we performed six concerts, and now we're all exhausted. We came home from our last one (an overnighter) on Friday, and now our holiday leave has started. Most people are taking leave; we have 15 days blocked off for us to take it if we wanted to do so. I'm just one of the people who is taking advantage of several four day weekends during that time (one as comp time owed to us from working on weekends/nights/etc, and the other two are a gift from the Army - one for Christmas weekend and the other for New Year's weekend), so I only have to go to work for 4 days within the next 2 weeks (and those days will most likely be half days!).

I signed up for a German class about 4 months ago, too. So far, I've been to two 6-week installments. The first one was really just a lot of things I had already picked up on just by living here, like how to order food, or ask where things are, but the people were fun, and I liked the teacher, so i kept going. I learned more in the second one, naturally. I'm still learning a lot of vocabulary, and I love grammatical rules, so learning stuff like that is fun for me. I haven't decided whether I'll go when the class picks back up in January. I decided that it was nice having something to do a couple nights a week, even though on some days it felt like I was way too busy to do it (but I did it anyway), because the reality is, if I hadn't gone to class, I would have spent most of my evening on the couch in front of the TV. It was fun to meet people besides my friends from work, and of course, learn something along the way. I think now that I'm out of work for a while, I want to take advantage of some of the classes they offer at the gym. I might find something aerobic that I like to keep me busy (and in shape!) next year when work starts back up.

I started doing a lot more running this fall, too, mostly in preparation a PT test at work, but I realized I don't really hate it like I thought I did, and Brian's been running more, too, so that gave us a good excuse to get out and be active together. It's been snowing lately, and it's way to cold to go out for runs, so he's been going to the gym. I should join him tomorrow. He's on night shift right now, so he has to work around his odd sleep hours, and so far this weekend, he's been interested in the gym right about the time I'm interested in lunch. :) I don't go back to work until Wednesday, so I definitely should go work out tomorrow.

I think that pretty much catches me up. Brian is working for the holidays this year. He took leave in November to go back to the states, and since he took the entire month of December off last year (!) he didn't request any this year. I'm sure we'll have webcam Christmas again this year, so that we can see our families. :)

Now to start thinking about next year's resolutions that I'm sure I won't keep...