So I go over to the Volkshochsshule this afternoon for my Integrations class, all set to learn something new. We had all just got seated when one of the instructors came in and said that the tests from yesterday had been graded and that the following people on her list needed to gather up their stuff  (including their  little name plaques) and gather outside the classroom in the hall if she called out their name.  I am thinking that we will be divided into groups according to the level of German each person knows and that I either did pretty good or I bombed miserably. She calls out a couple of names then mine, and I am thinking to myself “ what group am I going to be in now?” I noticed that the people that hardly spoke any German were not in the dozen or so people she called out so that was a good sign. At the very least I would not be stuck in the beginning German class; that would have sucked.

I watch the woman come out and pull 3 people to the side to talk to them. I could hear her say that they had very bad test scores and they needed to do a lot of extra work outside of the class to keep up. Then she sent them back in to the classroom and called me and two other guys over to talk to us. My jaw nearly hit the floor when she said that we had the highest test scores in the class! WHAT?!?!? Here I am thinking that I did okay, not great and here I got better scores that some of the people that had been in Germany over 10 years (they are doing the course as a requirement for their permanent visas)! So the three of us are going to go into the 2^nd level course, I am not sure where that starts off, probably at the B level of the language ladder. A is the basic level and if I am understanding this correctly, I only have to do 100 hours instead of 600 which translates into a 500 euro savings (100 euros per 100 hours). Wow, I can’t say much more than that now. I am by no means fluent, my speaking isn’t very great, but I understand a lot and I do good tests apparently.  The course starts in April so I have to wait (again) for another month. She also said to me that I need to work on my accent, I have an American accent and I will get points off on the exam if I am pronouncing words like a American. So I have to work on that and she mentioned that Susanne had a bit of an American accent too, which I guess was bad for me to learn from. I don’t know all that she said, I didn’t understand a bunch of it, which was really funny since I am there in the hall with one of the best test scores in the class. LOL!

After she sent us on our way, I walked back towards home with Joel, one of the other high scores. He is from Portugal and we talked about how we both were ready to be in class learning and not waiting around for April. But on the other hand, it is great to not have to do the whole 600 hours. We exchanged numbers and I think we will get together and work on our German from time to time until the class starts. Very cool, looks like I made a  newfriend and I find out that I am better at learning this language than I give myself credit for.

The first class of my Integrations Course started today. It was pretty cool sitting in the classroom at the Volkshochschule with 29 people from various counties. We had to introduce ourselves (of course in German), and there are people from Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Russia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Kenya, Turkey, Iran, Morroco and another from the USA. We didn’t do too much, they collected money, 100 euro for the first 100 hours, and then everyone took a test to see what section they will be in for language. I have been watching/ listening to tv constantly for the last 2 weeks to get really used to hearing German and it has paid off, I could understand the instructor for the entire time  I was there. It is becoming easier to understand people when they are talking fast. I may not understand every word, but I hear every word now instead of a bunch of sounds. Finally something to write about again, it has been pretty quiet here, I have just been working at home on websites and my ecards and not doing anything new except teaching myself CSS.  Every day from 1:30 – 5pm I get to go learn more German and for 45 minutes out of that time I am learning about the German culture.

We got a new lamp ( actually just a lamp) from Susanne’s parents for the kitchen. Since we moved in, the kitchen has had nothing but a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, I actually forgot about it, I don’t look up much when I go in there, I just cook or wash dishes.  The 70″s lamp ( it looks like it was made then, really), made the room a tad bit darker but it does look better now. The weather has turned around, I never thought I would be happy to see a gray rainy day, but I am now! It is not snowing and the temp’s are up in the 40’s and lower 50’s at the moment, I feel a bit closer to getting the shorts out!

Susanne has been adjusting to the German office life. In her last post , Susanne’s page, she wrote about her co-workers being really sensitive to food smells. It turns out that it may not be a German thing, perhaps something more local to the  Krefeld area and more specifically to the guy that doesn’t like her that she has to work across from. She was talking to another woman who works in the building and this woman said she considers it rude when someone eats something with garlic in it the night before and comes to work the next day. Like she can really detect that someone has eaten a minute amount of garlic the night before! Give me a break!  No wonder the food here is so bland ( my opinion only).  Even the cayenne pepper doesn’t seem hot, I have to pour a lot on something to actually make it hotter. Oh well, I keep a bottle of hot sauce in the fridge, maybe one day I’ll have my brother send me some Dave’s Insanity Sauce. You only need a couple of drops of that at any given time, so it should last a while.  While I am on the subject of food, what is with the Gerber Greens? We were given something that tasted like greens spiced up with bacon recently. I couldn’t tell it was greens though, they had been put through a blender and looked like baby food. Food weirdness. I tasted it, it was okay, a bit on the greasy side with the bacon taste but if I had to eat it again, I probably could. Susanne didn’t like it at all.

Well that is it for now, there is something wrong with the T-Mobile internet connection, since the weekend everything is taking forever to load. I have a hard time looking at my ecard site because it takes minutes to load and I am having a hard time saving this post,  what should take a second or two to save is taking a few minutes, so I’ll wrap it up for now, I’ll be writing more about my new class and (hopefully) the progress I am making in it.

Susanne has finally taken a little time out of her busy schedule to post about a few things that have been on her mind since moving here to Germany. Below are the snippets of her posts. Either click on the links below or you can view them through; Pages (on the side bar) – Susannes Page.

Are Germans allergic to food smells? Posted February 5th, 2010

The longer I stay in Germany, the more I appreciate the almost 30 years I spent in America.  It took me 30 years  to relax from the uptight German that I was to the passionate person I am now.  I left Germany in ´77, came back in ´78, stayed for a month and couldn´t stand how I felt so boxed in here.  Then, for years in America I wondered, if I was missing something in Germany. Somehow I thought things might be better in Germany than in America. Now I keep being reminded of why I left.

Coming back home as an immigrant/foreigner Posted February 6th, 2010 – scroll down on the Susanne’s Posts page to see this post.

Coming back home to Germany as a naturalized American, I had to go to immigration and only got a 1-year permit to stay in my home country, where all my family still lives and has always lived. It can be extended after that year, if I make enough money. That did not make me feel welcome, though it´s better than what the situation is for a non-former German foreigner.

It is snowing again, it started about a half an hour ago. I was just thinking yesterday how lucky we live where we do, it seems like we miss the worst of the snow, which seems to be to the north, east and south of us. But if  the big flakes of snow keep falling this morning, I may have to take that back. From what I am hearing, this is the coldest winter in about 30 years here in German. Lovley, we moved to Florida  in 2005 and 3 months later and Wilma hit, the worst hurricane to directly hit Broward county (our county), in over 30 years. I can’t wait to see what happens when we move again in a few years. I found my snow pics. These were taken from the apartment and an the way across the bridge to the park.

I spoke too soon in the last post, I found out after wards that since I updated my WP with the newest version (as suggested by WP),  I now do not have any insert media buttons. I lost them somehow. I can insert links now, but I can’t add any photos, music or videos. Sucks. I am not finding a fix, actually I gave up for a while. I’ll just put my pics on Facebook, I guess. Not giving up yet, like the CSS thing, I keep plugging away at it, sooner or later I get something to work! Actually I am learning, be it slowly. how to work with HTML and CSS. It is maddening sometimes though, I still want to just open the info panel and place images with the x,y values, but there is no info panel. No move tool.  Arrggggghhhh!

The weather has warmed up to a balmy 35 degrees,  earlier this week it was down below 10 degrees, it was -25 celcius ( I didn’t bother to look at what the conversion in Fahrenheit was), over in Berlin and the eastern part of the country. Down right cold with the wind chill. Ice everywhere, on the news I saw a goose with ice all over its beak, it couldn’t open its mouth. I feel sorry for the animals when it gets really cold. I had a pair of shorts on under my pants, and thermal shirt and  a thermal hoody on under my coat  when I went to pick up Susanne at the train station last night. The platforms are pretty cold when you are standing there waiting for the train. Today is has warmed up a bit so it can snow. Speaking of snow, last Sunday afternoon, Susanne and I were walking home from the station. It had started to snow earlier and I noticed now that the tight little flakes of snow were bouncing a little as they hit the pavement. Not quite hail, frozen, tight, little snowflakes. When we looked at them up close, we discovered that they were in the shape of a perfect 6 point star. Every one of them! What a treat, it was really beautiful, they were so tiny and so perfect. Only nature can make billions of flakes so wonderfully! We must have looked like we were crazy because we were almost on our knees on the sidewalk and in the street looking at them.

I finally got made a page on Facebook for my ECards and a FB icon for the site. I gotta get the marketing end of  the business going. I will do the same with my Twitter page and get an RSS feed too. I made 1 valentine’s day card so far, I want to get one more done then on to more birthday cards. I also have to figure out a cheaper way to do customized bulk emails.

The man who’s website I designed has another project for us. Susanne is going to talk to him on Saturday about it. Meanwhile, I am still tweaking with the his first one. It is a good one to learn on. A little more money for next month. Susanne is liking where she is working, she is still working freelance for the same company, now she works at the company, 4 days a week. It’s kinda lonely around the apartment now, we have spent the last 9+ months together. The nice thing about it is that we are getting to sleep earlier, no more working until 1am in the morning. I like getting up early with her and getting the day started at 7am instead of 10 or 11. I get a lot more done. At night I stop when it is time to go meet her train. It feels nice to take a break, I am so used to work, work, work. In Florida we were either at work, in school or home doing homework, pretty much no time for anything else, just eat, sleep, school and work. I am not missing the homework/lab  part of school at all. I would spend 20 hours on the weekends working on some project for one of my After Effects classes alone! Wore me out!

It’s about break time for me so I am going to stop here, I am trying to work more sanely now and not sit at the computer working for hours on end. I am determined to not be so spun out this year, be less stressed and take it easy a bit.

Back at ya in a minute!

(PS-Well almost gone, it appears that my insert media is functioning again, so back to link up again. Best part, I didn’t have to do anything! )

I finally got my insert link button working again, it  took a few days and some frustration but I think I have the problem fixed, though I haven’t figured out why all of a sudden the insert link wasn’t working in the first place. The  problem was that I would highlight my text and hit the insert link button on my WP blog and the pop up window would come up but there was no text in it and the screen was grayed out. I could not click on anything and I had to use the back button or right click and refresh the page. I didn’t see an error message in Firefox so I had no idea what was going on. I had read on the forum in WP that it could be a tinyMCE Popup error, so I downloaded what I though was the right plug-in  but it was not, it did not fix the problem. Fine. I stopped trying to figure it out after a while, I was getting nowhere. So today I figured I would give it another try and I thought that maybe it was a Firefox problem, so I logged into my admin from IE to see if I could use the insert link there. I got the same thing, a blank pop up window, but down in the  browser corner where the word done was was a little yellow error triangle and when I clicked on it I could see the tiny MCE error message. Now I am in business! I went back to the forum page, downloaded and uploaded the right plug-in, followed the directions and shebang! My insert link is working once again!   The tread I read was

Can’t use Insert/Edit Link in Visual Mode: tinyMCEPopup is not defined. Scroll down to the last entry. If that can help someone, I am happy.

So back to a subject that I talked about last post, the hatless German people. This time they were topless. Okay, clean it up, I wasn’t talking about clothing, I am talking about convertible cars. Last Wed. I was out for a walk, the sun was actually out and it was nice. Still cold, mind you, but nice. I am walking down the street (with my hat on) and here comes this guy in a red sport something-or-other car with the top down! Like it is summer! It is 30 something degrees here and this guy is rolling around with his top down. I just stood there and looked at him, as he sat at the red light. He did have a hat on too. So let me get this straight, people don’t wear hats when it is cold out, but if they have the roof of their car down in the winter, then they wear their hats. What the ****? I do notice that the people with hats look like they come from somewhere else. Foreigners! I will not try to make sense of this, all I know is that it seems that most people love the cold here. More power to them.I feel like I live at the top of the world. South Siberia.

And while we are on the subject of things I still don’t understand yet, why is it that people here stand while they eat and drink? I have been and seen a number of places that have tall tables and no seats, everyone  stands around the tables eating and drinking coffee or beer. And some places have the tables outside,where hatless people stand around chatting and having a grand old time. Sipping Schnapps probably, that’s why they appear to not notice that they are standing in the cold. I keep meaning to ask someone why they stand up when they eat, I guess maybe they just like to, or maybe it gets the food to the stomach faster. I’ll report back on this later when and if I get an answer.

I was talking to my landlord the other day, the sunny one, he was saying that in a couple of months the sun will be high enough in the sky to actually reach the ground here in the city. YO-DE-LAY-HE-HOO! Two months?!?!? Damn, think I’ll go get my shorts on and wait out on the balcony! That will be late March. I noticed he didn’t say it would be warmer though. Actually I have started to wear my shorts around the apartment, I am tired of wearing pants everyday, I wear them with my thermal knee high socks. Tooooooasty!

I can’t believe how time is zinging by, I thought I had just posted and it has been 2 weeks! I now have a small website project, 10 hours a month, around 120 euros, for a man here in Muelheim. With Susannes help, it is now live and functioning okay. I had to get a crash course in CSS, I knew nothing about when I started and I had to relearn HTML, I haven’t used it in a long time. I had stopped concentrating on web design after my first audio production and video editing classes, I was more interested in the latter two. But now I see that I can possibly make money (FINALLY), here if I can do web design for people. I have seen websites here that belong on the “Websites that suck!” site. People can certainly use the help!  I am teaching myself more about CSS, slicing and more HTML, it can only help in the long run. So I am earning my first money here after 9 months, not much but it’s a start. I am still making e cards, it is a slow process but it will pay off in the long run. I am making valentines day cards at the moment and I found  great tutorial that walks me through creating a CSS driven website. I found it the other day, I wish I had found it last week when I was trying to learn CSS and was about ready to tear my hair out. I sat here tring to figure out how to use the stylesheet with HTML and I was sooooo lost. The fact that I had to work without a timeline and keyframes was frustrating. I gave up and gave up and keep going back until finally, something started making sense. I sat with Susanne and watched her as she worked also, which helped immensely. I will post some of the sites I fould to be the most helpful.  So now I am confident I can learn how to do wed design without using Flash. I am really looking forward to making nice sites for people. Yes, finally the wheels are turning and we are moving forward. I guess we have been all along, but now it feels like we are out of the driveway and on the road.

The snow has melted – YAY!. I was getting used to seeing it, now it looks bare outside, back to gray, soggy days! I looked at my shorts today, they miss me, they told me so. I told them they would have to be patient, it is another 5 months until it gets (what I consider) warm. I think they actually cried a bit. My hands stay the coldest, I sometimes work on the computer with gloves on, to keep them warm. We are lucky here, it hasn’t snowed nearly as much as in the eastern part of the country. Susannes friend up in Lubeck, near the sea, was snowed in for a week. They just got the three roads leading into town cleared and now it is snowing again.

Susanne and I went to get me signed up for an Integration course over at the Volkshochschule, about 6 minutes from here. If they have enough people for the class, I will begin at the end of the month and will have class in the mornings for 4 hours, language and German life and politics. It is a little expensive for us right now, but it is good that I can get more language lessons. I started reading a novel witten in German, I am almost past the 1st page, I should be finishing it by the time I am 80. It will be cool to be with others learning the language, I hope to make a few new friends there. That’s about all for today, I have to get back to work, I’m going to get back to posting 2 times a week, things got busy over the holidays and I got lazy about writing. Now I gotta get back into the habit of writing.

Til next time!

I hope everyone had a great time over the holidays! Susanne and I celebrated quietly, quite frankly we didn’t have the energy for much more, we have been stressed out for far too long trying to get settled here. We spent Christmas eve and Christmas Day at Susanne’s parents house. They put up a little tree, first one in years, I guess. I liked the fact that it had edible ornaments on it, can’t go wrong there! Then we spent time at people who live next to Susanne’s parents and the parent’s house. It was a nice evening, I stuffed myself, first with potato salad and then with 2 heaping bowls of spicy chili and bread. At midnight we went out with all the other people on the street and blew off fireworks, the real ones, not the kind you get in American supermarkets. That for me it is the best part of the holidays, seeing and hearing the entire city lighting off their fireworks at the same time. It was snowing too which made it all the better!

So back to work, I made my first birthday card, I had to get the new years card off the home page! Boy, I’ll tell you that is a lot of work trying to keep up with the upcoming holidays, Valentine’s day is right around the corner and I have to get them ready fairly soon. Coming up with ideas isn’t easy sometimes either, I have creative crashes, can’t think of a damn thing to create for a card. Maybe I should go for a walk, but it is cold out there and there is snow. Today I wore my shorts for half the day, I got tired of wearing so many cloths. It felt good to have my legs free!  The cold is nice, it feels refreshing to get out in it, but at the same time I feel encased, encapsulated, engulfed in cloths. Being fresh out of Florida, I need extra layers, a hat and heavy duty thermal hunting socks. That’s right- heavy duty thermal hunting socks! Keeps the feet TOASTY! The hat I mention because it seems that nobody here needs to wear one, they must have super heated heads or something, even when it is 10 degrees here they have no hats on! And not just a few people, I mean nearly everyone! Guess they’re used to it. I was at one time too, back in upstate NY, I remember running around in 20 degree weather in a tee shirt and a hooded sweat shirt! I did have my hat on though. I have grown soft now, the body likes to be warm when it can, it performs better, less bone creaking and aching muscles. Lord, I’m getting old!

And what is with people sitting outside in the cold drinking coffee? I don’t care if there is a blanket, the coffee won’t stay warm long, and neither will I. Another thing that amazes me is that some people leave their windows open all day long, no matter what the temperature is. We open ours for a while to air out the house, but there is a point where it starts getting cold in the apartment. Plus there is the heating bill to think about. I see some apartments witht the windows cracked all day long. It must be freezing in their apartment and they must either have lots of money to throw at the power company or they don’t use any heating at all. Amazing! My father would have killed me if I dared to open a window in the middle of winter. Mind you the winters back in upstate NY used to be a lot colder with lots of snow and ice, here it is alot milder. All in all I am managing to stay warm for the most part.  We will see when late Jan. and Feb. roll around just how well I’ll manage then. I have the thermal pants ready just in case and the apoteke around the corner sells threma care, pads I just slap one of those bad boys on my lower back an I am toasty for 8 hours!

Okay winter, bring it on, show me what you got!

Oops,I probably shouldn’t have said that!

Hello world!

After having a cold for a few days, doing something stupid and not noticing which allowed me to not be able to access my blog and then Christmas, I am able to write again on my blog. I’ve got some good news also! I am now the proud owner of my Aufenthaltserlaubnis, my permit to stay and work in Germany. I got it a week ago Thursday. What a relief and what a long r0ad it had been to get to this point. Now I can apply for any job and can take the integration and language courses.

Susanne and I got married, on the 11th of this month, actually it is a LifePartnership, but it comes with some benefits, it’s a real thing here in Germany!  After 11 years we tied the knot and it feels wonderful! It was a really nice ceremony, Susanne’s parents were there, a couple of friends and my interpreter. We went out for coffee after wards with Susanne’s parents and that evening we had a small party at out apartment.There was a photographer there and he took a lot of photos, we haven’t got the email with the photos to choose from yet, I would like to see them.

So about the blog. After I posted the last time on the 6th, I started messing around with the side bars on the new theme and accidentally got rid of the box with the log in and word press. When I tried to log in thru wordpress ( I didn’t know that wordpress.com was a separate thing from wordpress.org and that I am not part of either since I have my blog on my Go Daddy) and got the error message that my password was not correct. So I tried and tired and finally requested one, several times. I never got an email with a new password. So finally I gave up for the moment, I was busy with getting the ecard site up and running. I did some reserch though and found this site on how to recover lost passwords http://foliovision.com/2007/10/19/lost-wordpress-admin-password and found out how to get into the database on Go Daddy and fix the problem.  Or so we thought. Susanne had gone into the database  and found out that I had misspelled my email address and that’s why I wasn’t getting the new password, so she changed the password, but now the site wasn’t showing up at all. It was Christmas by now and the blog had to wait until after as we spent a nice time at her parents on Christmas eve and Christmas day. Yesterday we just chilled. So today she was able to get the blog working again. In between everything, I had a cold for a few days, just enough to drag me down and not feel like doing anything.

Something else wonderful happened, I finished my 3 cards for Christmas and Susanne did the programming that made them send-able and I am now able to accept money. People have been sending my cards out to friends and family! WOW! I feel so, well it is hard to describe how beautiful it feels to know someone likes your work enough to send it to their loved ones. Another dream  has become a reality. I have been wanting to make cards for 2 years now, every since I got a Jacquie Lawson cards for the 4th of July. I have to get busy though, Christmas is over and I need to make birthday cards to start expanding the site. I have started it, now I have to keep it going! If you want to take a look at it here is the link

http://www.sheilashonuff.com/shomeecards/

I will try to get a new years card up  in the next day or so.

So that’s what has been going on, I am that I am able to post again, I missed writing and shairing what is happening here with the internet world. I am not sure if I will have the time to post before  the New Year,  so I wish everybody now a very Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Finally, I have got my new theme installed, took long enough. I loved my other one, but for readability, this one is much easier on ther eyes and easier for readers navigate to see what is on the darn thing. I will be customizing it and hopefully get a new MP3 player for it. Anybody got any suggestions for one that is easy to install and dosen’t default back to the songs that cane with it? I had one that worked fine for a while, then it decided it wanted to play the 3 songs demo songs that came with the player and not the ones that it had been playing. I did not want people to think that my brother sounded like Paul McCartney singing Yesterday. So the family music page need some TLC and a new player. I also think the rss feed button is great, one click. Hope you guys enjoy the new look!