I’m back!

Welp, it’s been a while but I’m back! I’ve busy with things like being pregnant and having a baby. Baby B was born in February and is coming up on 5 months old, so I don’t have much time to write, but I feel like I seriously need to before my English completely dries up.

I’ll be posting more in the coming days, including a summary of what’s been going on, how the birth was, how it is being a mom on maternity leave, etc. Looking forward to it!

Good news!

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but there’s a good reason for that. I didn’t want to blab the big news prematurely: we’re expecting a baby in February!

I’ve got 14 weeks under my belt (literally) so far, and I have to say it’s been pretty crappy up to now. I started feeling nauseous around week 5 and no sign of it going away any time soon. Strangely, I feel sick in the evenings most often, so at least it’s not really interferring with work (except for today, today I feel lousy).

The fatigue has mostly faded though, which is great. I was eyeing my watch at 8:30 on some days, ready to get to sleep already.

I’ve also outgrown a bunch of clothes already, which is surprising because I don’t think I look obviously pregnant yet. But I can’t zip up any of my jeans (rubber bands to the rescue!) and I’ve outgrown all my bras. Had to go out and get a new bikini for our mini vacation to the beach in a few weeks. Just in time, too, since it’s the end of the season and there aren’t many swimsuits left to choose from.

So yeah. My life for the past few months: wake up, eat a huge bowl of cornflakes because I can’t stand the sight of bread for some reason, try to find a shirt that still fits, get to work, snack all day, get home, collapse on couch, go throw up, feel better, eat supper, watch some TV, ignore chores, go to bed early. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

Should be in bed

I remember never going to bed before midnight in college, even if I had a class at 8.

Well those days are long gone! I catch the bus to work at 7:30 every morning, which means I get up at just after 6. If I’m not in bed by 10 most nights, it starts to catch up to me by mid week. Must be gettin’ old.

Don’t really have much to write, actually. Work has been stressful now that business is picking up. Now that I’m doing more coordinating than translating, I’m dealing with more people’s ignorance, roadblocks and plain old orneriness than before, simply because there are more people involved in every decision. I’ve also picked up some work in the evenings, correcting Master’s theses. They’re all written in English nowadays, and they need someone who actually speaks and, more importantly, writes the language to correct them.

Our garden is going well. This has been literally the coldest May ever, so my tomatoes and chilies aren’t growing at all. But the spinach is about to get out of hand and all the radishes are ripe at the same time, which I for some reason did not anticipate when I planted them all at the same time. Well, live and learn.

Tomorrow evening I’m meeting friends for drinks and dinner. Promises to be fun, as usual. I can’t wait for summer, virtually every restaurant and bar in this country has an outdoor seating area in the summer. Sometimes it’s in the pedestrian zone, sometimes it’s on a roof, more often than not it’s just three tables of 2 blocking half the sidewalk just outside the place. But it’s fantastic. I miss that in the states when I visit, people are just too used to the deep-freeze air conditioning in most restaurants, I think.

Sick

I’m just sick enough to feel miserable, but not really sick enough to justify staying home from work. It totally sucks.

This morning, Kürbis woke me up at o’dark thirty by scratching at the blankets. He knows this wakes us up. My job is then to hold the blankets up so he can slip in and curl up alongside you, purring like a chainsaw. It’s unbearably cute, especially since he isn’t always cuddly, but I could not get back to sleep because he was purring so loud, right next to my ear.

I’m so busy at work anymore, I hardly  have time to goof off and write anything. Our booth at this one trade fair needs decorations, I should coordinate pictures of sufficient resolution and with Chinese captions or whatever to be sent to the right person. Then a brochure is delayed because some idiot decided to take a trivial matter all the way to the CEO (literally, how we write the date in the brochure’s issue number). User manual needs to be translated, I’ll get right on that. Phone rings, it’s someone from our Chinese subsidiary wanting to talk to someone whose name I don’t understand. Another 10 minutes gone before I get that he wants to talk to someone named Schuetz and the receptionist thought he wanted to talk to me. Transfer him. An ad in a magazine is due at the end of the week, what pictures should we use? And so on. Right now I feel like I’m doing nothing but work. I have to really try to relax this weekend.

I’m going to go feel lousy on the couch now.

Back to the grind

The economy seems to be getting better, so they’re going to let us start working “up to full-time” again. It is a very complicated and boring new rule, so I won’t go into it here. Suffice to say everyone’s new hours and people’s generally low opinion of company policy were the only subjects of conversation at work today. Even though I am similarly outraged/annoyed/fed up, I’m really tired of hearing about it all the time.

My radishes, spinach, onions and chard are up. The radishes and spinach are doing best so far. There is a faint line of green tendrils where the carrots are supposed to be, but they aren’t growing very fast. The only thing missing is the leeks. I think I planted them along the bottom edge of the garden, but now I can’t tell if the little plants sprouting there are actually the leeks or just lawn. Time will tell.

Additionally, I have tomatoes, chilies, bell peppers, squash and zucchini started on the balcony, but I can’t plant them out in the garden until a) they get a lot bigger and b) it gets a lot warmer.

Well, after this riveting update, I’m headed to bed. Good night!

Back, despite the volcano

I spent all week at the Wire and Tube trade fair in Düsseldorf, Germany. My company had a booth and I, being female, was asked to work as a kind of hostess for the booth. In other words, I got people coffee, topped up the bowls of peanuts, sliced Leberkäs for guests, and washed many many dishes.

I’ve never worked a trade fair before. It was really tough the first three days, and really great the last two days. The toughest part, besides standing all day, was being around my colleagues virtually 24/7. Not that I don’t like them, but I had no time to myself at all. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever consumed that much alcohol in a 6 day period, ever.

Every day, after the fair closed, we cleaned up, packed up, drove to the hotel, got changed and went out for dinner. Dinner is always washed down and followed by many drinks. And you can’t make excuses: everyone goes and is expected to have fun. Naturally, people talk  about work, which is extremely boring since I’m not in sales like all the other guys I was with.

The fair ended on Friday. Four of us were supposed to fly home that evening, while three would have stayed until Saturday and driven home (they drove a station wagon and a van up there with all the stuff for the booth). Well, of course by Thursday evening, the volcano in Iceland was spewing ash and flights were being canceled. Ever optimistic, we held out hope all day Friday that our flights wouldn’t be canceled, but it was not to be.

The crew at the booth of a Spanish company next to ours took a taxi home. To Barcelona. All train tickets were sold out, rental cars were gone by 9 am Friday morning. They left behind a lot of wonderful Rioja and olive oil, which they had been giving away to important general managers. The hostess came over to our booth and gave us a few bottles.

By 6 on Friday evening, we had packed everything into the van. Three colleagues drove home immediately, four of us stayed overnight and drove in the morning. We had dinner and many drinks at a hole in the wall near our hotel. Afterwards, one colleague and I managed to empty a bottle of that Rioja with nothing but water glasses and sheer determination.

Needless to say, getting up the next morning was tough. It took us about 7 and a half hours to get back to Linz. My partner in Rioja-based crime spent most of the drive imitating a yo-yo: drifting off to sleep, head falling to the side, jerking back awake. Lather, rinse, repeat. But I can’t sleep in cars, I had a book along. Thank god Stefan suggested I pack a second one!

I had to skip the ladies night out I had planned to go to on Saturday night. Also, the weekend has been very short. Just today, really. But in general, it was a good week and I’ll probably be doing it again come November, at the Aluminum trade fair in Essen.

Vegetable garden

Just got in from outside. I’m “taking the week off”, which in this case means I’m working half a day Mon-Wed and taking Thursday off. Naturally, me and my colleagues all decided to go on vacation the same week, so I got stuck holding down the fort these few days since I’m not leaving the country. What are ya gonna do.

Our land lady agreed to let us have a little vegetable garden in the yard. It’s small, just 2×2 meters (6×6 ft). But let me tell you something. It is not easy to de-sod 4 square meters of lawn.

Being over-educated, Stefan and I immediately got a couple of books on gardening. One brushes this part off by saying, “Remove the sod from the area, it can be used to fill in bare patches of your lawn.” Then it breezes on to the next step. But grass wants to stay where it is, so that’s taken a few hours in total. Plus digging it all up, adding compost and some grass cuttings (which is what I was just doing), trying to keep most of the dirt within the borders.  It all adds up. But at least you only have to do this part once.

We’re planning on having tomatos, peppers, onions, carrots, garlic, spinach, leeks and greens. We might have room for a few other things, but not much. 4 square meters is a lot when you’re digging it up, but not a lot when you’re planting stuff, since you have to allow for the plants to grow.

Now to wash off. Quesadilla time!

Monday and mud

It’s Monday and I can’t concentrate on translation. I’m too tired and the radio is on, bothering me. Why am I tired? I stayed up late to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 3, which was a complete waste of time.

It snowed again this weekend, and it’s snowing as I write this. We had a few weeks of serious snowfall in February, which led to a lot of shoveling and cussing as we tried to keep our curbside parking space clear. Then it thawed as the temperature climbed to a balmy +5°C. I went for a run after a few days of thaw.

I’m not sure what I was thinking, but the ground was surprisingly (to me and noone else) muddy and waterlogged. The trail through the forest, which I had run in the snow (beautiful) was now a trail of ice where feet had compacted the snow into slower melting ice, surrounded by what can only be described as quicksand. As long as I stayed on the ice, I was dry, if in constant danger of wiping out. But then the trail leaves the forest and crosses a field in full sunshine. That was really, really muddy.

The last section of the trail runs along the bottom edge of a field that slopes down from the right and continues on down as a forest on the left. There’s a mini levee, about two feet high from the lower side and a foot high on the field side, along the bottom edge of this field, presumably to keep all the soil from washing away. The trail runs along top of this levee now, since the original trail beside it was overgrown with stinging nettles.

Anyway, because of all the melted snow, the field to the right was a huge lake, at least up to the top of this rim. Halfway down the field, I came upon a brand new creek. The farmer (I assume) had dug a little tunnel under the levee to drain his field. The water cascaded down the levee, onto the old trail, before being diverted to the left into the forest by a make-shift dam (sticks and mud held in place by branches driven into the soft dirt). In the forest, which is mostly pine trees, the many layers of dead pine needles on the ground were pushed around by the water, forming impromptu dams, diversions, channels and lakes. It was very pretty and sounded like spring. I walked in and created some channels of my own for fun with a stick, getting my feet soaking wet in the process.

By the time I got home, my shoes were completely caked in mud and soaked all the way through. I might go running again today, I love running in the snow.

Schifoan

We went skiing last Saturday with some friends of ours, in Schwaz, just across the valley from Stefan’s home town. It’s the only place I’ve ever skied, actually, because it’s just so convenient. In case you’ve never skied before, here’s what you need: long underwear, special padded socks, ski pants, a ski shirt, possibly some kind of undershirt (depending on the temperature, a ski jacket, goggles, a hat or helmet, warm waterproof gloves or mittens. And that’s just the clothes! Oh, and tennis shoes or something for driving in.

You also need poles, skis, boots and a sack for transporting the skis in so you don’t slice up your car’s upholstry. The skis have to be waxed before you go. All in all, it’s a lot of stuff. Then you throw everything in the car with the back seat down and head to the lift.

At the lift’s valley station, you’ll have to buy a ticket. We normally get a morning or afternoon pass, but you can buy individual rides as well. If you don’t go often, they’ll give you a little cardboard ticket you have to stick in the card reader at the turnstile, but we have key cards that the lift operator loads our ticket on. The key cards are then zipped into your left jacket sleeve, which you just wave in front of the card reader to unlock the turnstile. Not a bad idea at all.

This is wear skiing experiences (apparently) diverge. The lift in Schwaz is tiny and requires a few transfers. The first section is a one-seater, which is exactly what it sounds like. Essentially, chairs on handles hang from the cable about 25 feet apart. They don’t stop to let you on. Rather, you grab your skis (which are velcroed together) and poles under your arm, wait for a chair to pass and then step into the path of the next chair. The lift operator will normally steady the chair as you sit down in it and it whisks you away. Whisk might be the wrong word here, this lift is so ancient it moves very slowly. I’d estimate 5-6 ft per second. Once in the chair, the lift takes you up over the street and over a lot of people’s yards, into the woods and up the foot of the mountain.

If you’re a wuss like me, you’ll swing the safety bar/footrest around to in front of you. If you’re Stefan, you’ll sit with your feet dangling, up to 20 ft up in the air. Whatever you do, don’t drop anything. You often see lift tickets, goggles, gloves, cigarette packs, and so on right under you, which previous visitors have dropped.

At the end of the first section, the chair passes over a paved landing pad and you stand up and quickly walk to the right, out of the way of the chair. Then it’s on to the next section, which is also a single chair lift. Here, they normally shovel a little bit of snow onto the take-off area so you could put on your skis right away, but we normaly don’t. Repeat the process, this time going up a very steep incline, through the woods.

At the top of the second section, you are now at the bottom of the actual slope. Which means you have to take yet another lift to get to the actual start of the skiing area. First though, you put on your skis.

You undo the velcro, unhook them and throw them onto the snow in a more-or-less parallel position. When the boot latch is open, two little rubberized arms snap down to keep the ski from sliding away, which is great if you crash and lose a ski. You step into the binding and give a good kick down with your heel, almost like kickstarting a motorcycle. The latch should flip and grab your boot while also lifting the little safety arms away. Oh yeah, you should be doing this on relatively even ground or perpendicular to the slope. Next, the other one.

Then push yourself forward with your poles to the corral for the lift turnstile, wait your turn (or not, if you’re Austrian) and get on the last chair lift with a partner, since this is a two seater. Since skis are surprisingly heavy, you will definitely want to pull down the safety bar / footrest this time to keep your boot from being pulled off.

Not too far from the top, you emerge out of the forest and onto the slope, sneaking up on the tree line. If it’s a sunny day, the view will be amazing. All the exhaust from cars and heating systems and whatnot pools in the valley, looking like a thick yellowish fog. But up on the mountain, you are in fresh air with crystal clear views of all the other snow-covered peaks around you. Not bad at all!

At the end of this lift, you stand up on your skis and travel along a litte path from the lift to the slope. Just above you, the Hecher mountain inn has food and drinks and a nice sunny patio overlooking the slope. You get to the edge of the slope, stop to adjust your goggles, boot latches, etc, and then go.

Now, when on the lift and watching other skiers, they don’t seem to be going that fast. But when it’s me, it feels like I’m moving at just under the speed of light. I’m not a very good skier yet, so I have to make twenty little turns for every two Stefan does. The fewer you do, the faster you go. Occasionally, a lump of snow or an icy patch will make one or both of my skis wobble, skid or almost make me lose my balance, but I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t normally fall down anymore.

The slope is divided into long steeper sections and short flatter sections which are perfect for stopping to catch your breath. At the bottom of the first steep section, there’s a t-bar tow lift to take up to the Hecher Inn. This lift just has these upside down Ts hanging at intervals. You get into position, just like with the chair lift and then pull down a T and position the crossbar behind your butt. A spring-loaded tow cable gets pulled out of the middle part of the T until it reaches its limit and then pulls you forward, standing on your skis. Two people to a T.

When you reach the top, just let go of the T, which is wound back up to close to the cable. You can head right back down the slope or slide over to the Hecher Inn for some refreshments. This is great for me: because I’m not a very good skier, I can’t do as many runs as the rest of my group. So while they go down a few more times, I unlatch my skies and leave them with my poles in the snow, get a cup of mulled wine or a bowl of soup (traditional skiing fare) and set up shop on the patio on the south side of the Inn. They even have those beach chairs for lounging in, the folding kind with fabric suspended from the top and bottom crosspieces. And it’s not too cold, even when it’s below freezing, because you’re bundled up, out of the wind and in the intense sunshine that rarely completely penetrates the smog into the valley.

Skiing itself is getting to be fun, but it’s hard work for a beginner. Especially when you’re as old as I was when you first start (I was 24 I think). Most natives get their first skis when they are toddlers, and plenty of 4-5 year olds zip past me on the slope every time we go.

There’s just so much to remember when you haven’t yet internalized all the steps. Transfer weight to the outside ski, keeping most of your weight on the heel, not the toe. Bend your knees and really lean against the front of the ski boot. Keep your chest pointed downhill. Keep your hands toward the front. Watch out for other skiers. Careful of your speed. Don’t cheat on the turn by lifting the inside ski, that’s a recipe for a crash. It’s not as easy as it looks on TV. But I’m starting to think it’s worth it: when you’ve got a good run, the wind is whipping past you, the snow is powdery and freshly groomed – it’s not too bad.

Snow! Again…

It snowed about 5 inches overnight! This does not generally lead to the kind of chaos we would experience in Illinois since everyone is required to put winter tires on their car as of Nov. 1, but everything does take a lot longer. It’s a strategic skirt day too, I need my knee-high boots to wade through the snow. Pants would just get wet up to the knee.

I waded through calf-high snow to the bus stop at the end of the street, passing various neighbors digging out their cars. The road the bus stop is on hadn’t been plowed yet, so I was able to enjoy watching cars driving too fast, tail gating, etc. Many had a hard time getting up our hill, despite winter tires. About ten minutes after struggling through the snow, a tiny sidewalk plow tractor came down the same sidewalk and pretty much cleared it. A little late, I thought. Another, slightly larger sidewalk plow with a hopper full of gravel on the back came flying over the hill and whipped around a corner, subsequently of course fishtailing into the ditch. Sometimes I wonder about people.

The bus finally came about 15 minutes late. Our stop is right below the crest of the hill and the bus had a hell of a time pulling out of the stop going uphill. Then I heard the most useless announcement of all time: the central switchboard informing passengers that the buses were running late. Well, anyone who’s on the bus to hear this message would already know that, wouldn’t they?

Anyway, it does make everything look very nice outside. The last layer of snow was already more than a week old and looking pretty dingy. I’m glad I went running yesterday evening because I sure as hell won’t be going today (though a few intrepid (or stupid) runners did pass the bus stop this morning).

Mostly I’m hoping the night slalom in Schladming won’t be canceled. It’s a highlight of the alpine skiing season. Counterintuitively, more snow is not good for races. The slopes are treated somehow to become extremely hard, dense and slippery, almost like ice, to allow the skiers to go faster. Any fresh snow has to be shoveled out of the track by hand (machines would ruin the treated slope). This is where the Army comes in. Austria has a tiny army, compose mostly of teenagers serving their mandatory 6 months right after high school. These recruits are never sent on peacekeeping missions or anything, they mostly do border patrols (and have caught exactly 0 illegal immigrants in the past year) and stuff like that.

Anyway, when there’s a “snow emergency” ahead of a big race, hundreds of boys in ancient olive drab uniforms are sent to the town in question and frantically clear the slope of snow. Good to know they’re good for something!