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!

Well folks, it is that time of the extension again, the “only a few days left and then what?’ time of the extension to stay here in the country. Wheee! A thrill a minute here! Last time  (back in July), I was so stressed I couldn’t talk to anybody, I could barely breath. I made up this story in my head that I would be pushing a shopping cart with all my possessions around Muelheim, penniless, a bum. And then I bought into my own story, made it a possible reality and voila! instant MEGA STRESS! I got my extension anyway by coming up with a praktikum (internship) at the last moment.  This time is a little different, no promise of anything, nobody is hiring (at least not me!) and not sure if I remember how it feels to have money I made from working anymore because  it’s been so long since I have done this.

So what in the hell to do this time? Stress again until my hair falls out and I am totally useless? I decided not to this time. I decided this time was going to be different. I can’t do much more stressing, it is not very productive and takes a terrible toll on the mind and body. What Susanne and I have been doing is listening to Jennifer Hough non-stop (I talked about her in the Road Map of Miracles). She had been a BIG reason I am still here and not some insane, over-coffee’d monster. Through listening to her coaching with others, I have been successful in keeping the drama at bay. And I can do some goooooood drama! A lot of it comes from childhood, honed by many years of dedicated practice. The OH MY GOD!!! channel on life tv and the “I CAN’T DO THAT! NETWORK”, a very popular one, I used to watch that one all the time.

I have been self coaching myself (and Susanne has been another HUGE help with coaching also) through the last several weeks. I am finally getting it, how to turn off the drama channel and get back into a positive mental state. Back into what Jennifer calls “the miracle zone”. I gotta tell ya, it has been much smoother this time. Sure, I have my moments where I think all hope is lost and I am destined to wander around in destitutional vagrancy (my own  made up word) for the rest of my life, but now those moments don’t last long, there are less of them and I am able to flip  around much quicker. I can step outside of the mind chatter, look at it and know that is my conditioned mind taking control.

What happens now? For starters, I got another 3 month extension while we wait on paperwork. I am not at liberty to say how at the moment (yes, it’s totally legal), but it involves both Susanne and I and I will be able to get a work permit as well as a real permit to stay. I just found out yesterday and got my extension today. I can’t tell you how relieved I am, even though I don’t have work yet, this makes things a bit easier. One step at a time. What a heck of time too, it’s like giving birth to a new me through being in labor for three weeks. I can’t thank Jennifer enough for her work with Quantum living, I don’t know how I would have made such a radical change in so short of time and it is needed if we are going to succeed in this endeavor of moving to another country without a real plan.

The other day I finished my photoshop tutorial, Design an Epic fantasy Scene, I really like this one, I wanted some new inspirational thing to keep me going. It has a quote from James Cook, I find it very fitting for us; “Do just once what others say you can’t do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again”.

We ( I should say Susanne), are trying to decide what health insurance program to get.  Since the  health insurance reform of 2007 each person living in Germany has to be on some kind of health insurance. It is a requirement for getting a permit to work and stay in Germany. So Susanne has had to read (since it is all in German)  and sift through pages and pages of information to try to find out which insurance would be better for us. It is not easy!  I still do not understand it all. We have to choose between two types of  health insurances; the Gesetzliche Krankenkasse, state health insurance, the Private Krankenversicherung, private insurance. First is the cheapest and dependants can get on it for free. The second costs more and each person pays, plus you have to get a physical complete with a finger up your butt. I think we are leaning towards the private. I wish I could write more on the subject,  but I don’t want to give out misinformation and there are resources online for people looking for information. How To Germany, Toy Town Germany, Just Landed are a few of the expat sites I have found information about health insurance on.

In America, I had no health insurance for years. Millions of people there don’t. It’s been okay, I really don’t like doctors all that much, we have used homeopathic remedies and natural healing for years. We have a great homeopath. She is in Oregon, but she has helped by phone when we needed her in Florida and here. I had food poisoning a few years back and she helped me get past the worst part of it. I absolutely did not want to go to a cold hospital and get some pharmaceutical drugs put into my body. She has helped the cats too. I could go on about natural healing, I believe that our society needs to get back to it and get away from the -pills-for-everything mentality. But I will stop, I don’t want someone reading this, taking something they did not first research and then suing me because they are now dead or something. Anyways, yet another hoop to get through here in Deutschland. Once we get our insurance, I will probably be glad I have it, then we will move on to the next hurdle, whatever that is.

I did it! I passed the A1 with a level of 2.

That is a step below 1 the best you can do. I have had to learn so much in a short time. I have been actually working on learning the language for 2 months. The first month here was about finding an apartment, moving in and buying stuff for for it. Now I have to continue  to schnell learn (as I call it), I want to get as fluent as possible in the shortest time possible. Not easy for German, I found out after we moved that this is one of the more difficult languages to learn. For anyone getting started with the language, if you don’t already have one, get a German friend who is willing to help you out and make you speak the language.

Susanne would say to me-”use all the words you know”. She also will  talk only in German, if I want to talk back, I had better do likewise, or she won’t respond. She now will stop talking when we get in stores and the train stations, I have to do the asking and buying. I am getting more confident now. I do the same thing that many people do and not talk because I am afraid of making a mistake. But if you don’t talk, you don’t learn. Another thing that helps is to watch tv, especially if you can find a movie or show with subtitles. Then either take a class or get an tutor, at least for a week or two, either is invaluable.

I have a few workbooks, geared towards learning enough for the A1 test, but they are in German. I had to first figure out what the book wanted me to do for the exercise, then figure out how to to it. I have a English-German dictionary that I use constantly with the books. These books helped me to be able to read and write but they are not good for speaking, and they are the slow approach to the language. The other thing that slowed me down is that I have forgotten what dative, genitive accusative cases are in English. I really don’t care. I avoided English in college (I still have to find an online class), because the classrooms did not have After Effects and Final Cut or Photoshop  or some 3D program on the computers- BORING! I used to cringe whenever I would walk into a classroom and it didn’t have computers. I would think “what in the hell am I gonna do now?’ Get 3 Redbull’s I guess.

I’m getting off the subject here.  Enough about learning German. I’m taking a break. I think I’ll go watch the French channel for a while.

What  a day, I am worn out! I took my test and I think I passed it. I did great on the speaking part. I am glad I studied for it. There is a great practice test online (Links) for some of the tests given here. It is the same format as the real test, the example questions are the same on the real test. It helped immensely as did having a friend  go over it  word for word with me and a teacher to help me speak better and conjugate. It is nerve wracking though. The listening questions are very tricky and I had to listen carefully to what was being said. A couple I just didn’t get (didn’t know some of the words and they talked fast) so I did what any person would do- I guessed.  Taking tests in college were nothing compared to this. College was for letters A,B,C….This is so I can continue to be here, I fail and I am probably gone, even with the extension, this is a legal requirement. As with probably any country, if you can’t speak the language, you won’t get far.

So I will continue to study and learn the language, I can take classes providing I passed the test. I will know tomorrow when I call. Other than getting my test results over to the Ordnungsamt along with a biometric photo – a digital photograph taken only at specified places here, after it is taken it goes immediately into a database-  I am taking the next few days off. I deserve it and so does my partner, we have been going non-stop since before we moved here. Hopefully I wll figure out how to get my mp3 player on the blog so visitors  can hear my nephews music!

Big day today! I got an extension to stay in the country this morning for 3 months! Thank you Herr Gewert for being so nice! HE is the man I see at the Ordnungsamt.  As an American citizen, I can stay here for 3 months without a visa.Well. on Thursday. the 30th, my 3 months was up, would have had to leave here for I am not sure how long. The stories vary. I think 90 days is the legal time limit  before I could come back. So last minute scrambling, an internship offer from a small film  production company and a freelance English teaching possibility at Berlitz school helpd me stay.More on this later, I am taking a break, I have to go take and pass my A1 test at 3pm as part of my being able to stayhere too.It is a basic language test, well not so basic, to see if I can understand enough to function here in Deutschland.

Will post later, the results can take a few days to come in, I’ll have a sense of how I did though.