Please sir, can I have some more?

I promised there was more coming, so here is more.  It started snowing here in Germany a few weeks ago.  Within a day or two it accumulated to about a foot.  I was pretty pumped to see the town covered in snow.  I went for a run on the trails and it looked even better.  The entire ground, normally blanketed in bright green moss, had been painted white with snow while the trees boasted a nice coating of their own.  I didn't get a picture since I was running but I managed to get a picture of the trees outside my apartment before the snow was melted away by rain the following week.

Since then we've gotten a few dustings on top, nothing more.  It was still enough to get me pumped for the skiing season.  I'm looking to plan a weekender in the Alps with some friends after the holidays.  Speaking of, I'll be coming back to PA this weekend!  I've been hording my vacation days so I'm able to spend three weeks relaxing at home with an additional week of work in Exton.  In all I'll be home for four weeks, which ain't bad.  With the German vacation schedule I'll still have 14 days of vacation for the next year.  That gives me about three weeks to play with, which is way more than we'd get in the US.  I'm looking at a trip to Gardasee, Italy in the spring with my mountain biking buddy from work.  We'll probably go for a long weekend.  After that I'll start looking at a trip to England.  A colleague of mine offered me a place to stay and a tour.  I'm thinking another long weekend trip.  That still leaves me with plenty of time to plan another trip or two before my time is up here.  I haven't put too much thought as to where else I want to go yet, but I've gotten a handful of suggestions.  I'm thinking Spain is a must.  It's all just words right now, but I'll post the pictures after it all happens.

Kicking some virtual ass!

No, I have not forgotten about this blog.  It's just that I've been spending a lot more time with my Playstation since Call of Duty: Black Ops came out.  That sounds like telling someone "it's not that I don't love you, I just love (insert name of love affair here) more."  My computer is a bit jealous too so don't feel bad.  For those not in the know, Black Ops is a first-person shooter video game based on the Cold War and involves a lot of shooting and outsmarting other players across the internet.  And it is ridiculously addicting.  I wouldn't call myself a gamer,  but I feel like some people who don't play video games at all have the wrong impression about games like Call of Duty or Halo where the simplified objective is "to kill people."  Yes, you kill people.  But it's not just the virtue of shooting someone that draws people to play such games.  It has a lot to do with entertaining your imagination as well as testing your strategic abilities.

Lots of folks like getting lost in books (I'm one of them).  Books give you the opportunity to imagine yourself as one of the characters, doing all the crazy things that they're doing.  Movies provide a similar outlet in that lots of viewers will imagine themselves as one of the characters, making them feel like a super hero, a genius, a badass or whatever.  Video games let you do the same thing but with a level of control.  That control is very rewarding in that you know when you've done something wrong, and failed, and when you've done something right, outsmarted the enemy and downright kicked some virtual ass.

I haven't turned into a hermit yet and I have proof.  You can click here to check out some pics of me hanging with my friends at a bar that just opened up in town a few weeks ago.  Girls like me here.  It doesn't hurt to be the only guy in the group that will dance either, after a few weissbiers of course.

More to come soon.  No lie.