Incandescent Rebellion!

I came home and turned the lights on in my apartment today to witness another bulb burst into light bulb shrapnel.  The only lights in my living room are the overhead lights which have, had, 4 bulbs.  I'm down to one.  When the first one blew out I thought psssh, there's still 3 left.  Missing one bulb isn't going to kill me.  A few months later the second one blew out.  Mother fucker.  Whatever, it doesn't need to be that bright in here.  I've got a skylight window anyway.  Today the fourth one shattered into a million pieces of light bulb shrapnel when I hit the switch and scared the shit out of me.  One bulb ain't gonna cut it.  It's dark.  But there is still hope.  There lies the untapped resource of the overhead stove light.  At 18 inches long and 72 inches high (yes, that is 6 feet, thanks for doing the math) is a fluorescent to rescue me from the dark.  That thing by the way, works like a champ.  I can almost turn off the overhead lights and just run on the stove light.  Almost.  That wouldn't do anything about the two light bulbs that blew out in my bedroom.  Otherwise I'd probably put off buying light bulbs until the stove light eventually went out.  I'll probably end up buying a box of CFL's this weekend, or perhaps tomorrow after work if I'm feeling really ambitious.

A few days ago I decided to give this blog a facelift.  Before now I was using a template that someone made.  With those things your creativity is kinda limited to picking from a pool of pictures and swapping some color schemes around.  It kinda felt like borrowing a hoody from somone and telling all your friends it's yours.  Since I'm not a programmer or web designer, I'm kinda stuck with those templates.  What you can do though is upload your own picture.  So I got creative with powerpoint and paint and came up with the header that's now at the top of the page.  My pixelated work of art is far from perfect but it's my p.o.s. and I'm diggin' it for now.  Eventually I'll get crafty with my camera and make a more stylish background with my own hardware.  Until then enjoy the pixels.

Blog Fail continued

For all those wondering, it gets cold here in Germany.  And it snows.  It's been snowing on and off since Sunday night and it hasn't broken 30 degrees yet.  Did I mention winter was here?  He ain't packin' up any time soon by the looks of it.

Last week was my first week back in Germany and it just couldn't wait to get started.  Seven guys from the US, all Netzsch regional sales managers, came to Germany last week for pump training.  Guess who was in charge of most of the training.  The American.  Lucky for me, we all speak English.  American English at least.  We went through assembly, disassembly, competitor analysis and a few application visits to a biogas facility (farm) a wastewater treatment plant and a paper mill.  All went well except with this one guy.  He wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders.  When you ask too many dumb questions people start wondering if you belong here.  I have strong doubts about this guy.  Moving on though.  The best part about colleagues coming to visit is going out to eat.  I ate out for lunch and dinner every day that week.  Lucky for me because I didn't have any food in the house when I got back from my break in the US.  I ate damn good that week and all on the company's wallet.  All for the sake of entertaining our guests.  I was too busy chatting up the waitress, but that's beside the point.

We ended the week on Friday by going out to dinner in Munich.  Our development team and all the Americans made for a grand total of 13.  First came the biers, then came the schnapps.  Then dinner.  Schnapps first.  I snagged one of the bottles that they came in, each one containing exactly two shots.

It's not expensive or anything like that, but it's got a nifty top that you can close back up, as if you were going to save your second shot for some reason.  I've seen it beer bottles before, both here and back in the States.  Nothing new, but still pretty cool on a single-serve schnapps bottle.  After dinner a bunch of the guys decided to go find a club.  I tagged along with the crew that opted to turn in early since I had to be up, and functionable, for a soccer match the next day.

Blog Fail

I have committed complete blog failure.  I let it go stale and now it's like some abandoned car on the side of the road that hasn't been repossessed yet because the township doesn't want to pay to tow the shit heap.  It's been over a month since my last update and it wasn't even an exciting post.  Neither was the post before that, or before that.  EPIC FAIL.  Last month I went back home to good old Pennsylvania for the first time in 7 months of being in Germany.   It's pretty wild that I've been out of the country for that long.  In some ways it doesn't really feel like it's been that long.  Kind of like how a semester of school can go by so quick.  Then you start studying for finals and realize exactly how much crap you "learned" and now have to re-learn just to pass the test.  It feels like that except I don't have the test to worry about.  I might kill someone if there was a test.  Thinking back on all the stuff I've done since being here and all the things I've learned on and off the job and then putting that into a timeline makes me see that it really has been 7 months.  Seven great months.  Sure work gets in the way and sends my morale on a nosedive from time to time, but the weekends have a way of muting all that.

Being home was nice though.  I've been given the privilege of the German vacation schedule which means I get 30 days per year.  Eat that!  I took a good chunk of my vacation time to come home during the holidays and visit friends and family.  Three weeks of no work and staying with my parents let me shut off my brain and tell stress to piss off .  I got to go out to lunch (or dinner) with friends.  I FINALLY finished the mammoth Stephen King book I've been reading.  I even made it out snowboarding thanks to a friend that had some extra gear I could borrow since all mine was still in Germany.  I promised I'd go snowboarding in the Alps, with proof of course, and it looks like I might have a chance of doing that in a few weeks.  All in all it was nice to be home.  I will say that it absolutely sucked hearing how good the Eagles were doing all season only to watch them get butt-raped two games in a row, pissing away their chances in the playoffs.  Same old birds.

I've been stashing some things to talk about on this blog.  Right now it's all on paper but it will eventually makes its way into the next post.  To be continued...

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.

Where's my stamp?

As I might have mentioned to a few people,  I was in Budapest this week.  A colleague was giving a presentation/training on our current pumps to some of our reps and distributors around the area (Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, etc).  I was there mostly to observe since this the same presentation that I will be giving all across the US when I return.  There were 16 of us that had gotten together at the Ramada hotel representing about 8 or so different countries and everyone spoke English, sort of.  The presenter is from England so he was the only real English speaker.  Americans don't really speak English according to England, so I didn't count.  Americans pretty much stole the English language and then started changing things we didn't like.  No wonder England doesn't like us.  We steal everything from them (e.g. music and David Beckham).  Some of the group could understand more than they could speak, which was fine since Netzsch would be doing most of the talking anyway.

Let me take a step back for a second.  I met up with my colleague from England and we took a taxi to the hotel.  We got there around 2PM and didn't have to be anywhere until 8PM for dinner at the hotel.  So we dropped our bags off in the rooms, grabbed a few maps and headed out into town.  Budapest is divided into two areas, Buda and Pest (pronounced Pescht).  They are divided by the Danube River.  Our hotel was on the Pest side.  Anyhow, we walked into town and managed to navigate to the subway and locate a place where we could get some food and a couple beers.  Afterward we trekked down to the river which would lead us to the Parliament building.  It's one of many buildings there that still maintain that old style architecture that looks like it came from ancient Greece or Rome.  Magnificent sculptures and artwork on the outside of the buildings.  Well we got a little too close to the Parliament building and a security guard in a green poncho swooped down to the ground like batman to scold us.  A little startled by this angry man, we laughed and continued on our way.  My partner in crime thought it was funny that he immediately started yelling at us in English rather than Hungarian.  I suggested that he knew we were foreigners because no other idiots would hop over the chain-linked fence that surrounds the building.  After that we used our inherited manly sense of direction to get back to the subway that would get us within walking distance to the hotel.  We even managed to buy the correct tickets from the automated machine rather than going up to the teller.  After getting off of the subway we were greeted by more security guards at the top of the escalator asking to see our tickets.  Fuck.  I had just thrown mine out in the trashcan at the bottom of the escalator.  I figured I was already off the subway so I didn't need it anymore.  Well they weren't buying it.  My accomplice and I both tried to talk our way out of paying the fine but they weren't budging.  6000 forints ($1 US = 200 forints).  Having been defeated, I payed the 30 bucks so they would shut up and we could get back to the hotel for dinner.  My stomach was a rumblin!

Dinner was pretty interesting.  The food was good, but the portions were pretty small.  I'm still hooked on the American diet which means I don't want to see any white space on that plate.  Fill it up!  I ate everything that was put in front of me and made short work of the bread bowls.  The rest of the night was filled with lots of international jokes and conversation that kept us up until about midnight.  The presentation went fairly well the next day.  I enjoyed the witty jokes that were mixed in while also learning a bit more about some technical issues regarding our pump design.  The technical information proved to be too much for some people while others were simply overloaded.  The presentation took about 8 hours, plus all the coffee breaks that kept everyone awake (mostly).

After the training was over we all got ready to go out for dinner at a local Hungarian restaurant.  Again, the food was good.  The portions were a bit better than the first dinner we had, but still falling short of the 'American standard.'  Following dinner we drove around to some other historical buildings that were dressed in the same ancient looking architecture as the Parliament building.  Imagining how these building were made without all the modern technology we have now is mind blowing.  It's incredible how they were able to much such large structures back then and make sure that everything is in perfect alignment.  We made about 4 or 5 stops before arriving back at the hotel around 1AM.  Lucky me, I had to be up at 6 so I could be on time for my flight back to Munich.  I was pretty destroyed by the time I made it back to the office.  Somehow I snapped out of it just before a web conference that afternoon.

When I got to Budapest no one checked for my passport.  There was no check in point when I got off the flight.  You simply pick up your bags and leave the airport.  Where the hell is my stamp?  What good is a passport if you can't fill it up with stamps of where you've been?  I want proof dammit!  I asked someone at an information center and she told me that you can travel pretty much anywhere in Europe without needing to show a passport (other than to get your boarding pass).  There are a few countries that this does not hold true with, but they're like the red headed step children of Europe.  I made sure to hold onto a handful of Hungarian cash and coin, so at least I've got something to show for being in Budapest.  Aside from nearly getting arrested for trespassing and not having a subway ticket that is.

Prideless Independence

A week or so ago I had a conversation over the phone with a friend of mine, all in German.  At first I didn't think too much about it.  Heck I've been here for six months I ought to be able to hold a conversation, even if I still sound like a 3rd grader.  The next day when we got together, he told me how surprised he was that I never once broke out of German.  Even more surprised was his girlfriend.  She had asked who was on the phone and was taken aback when she learned that I was on the other side of the call.  It would have been a dead giveaway had we been speaking English, but since we were conversing in German there was no direct indication that it was me.  I'll admit, both of their reactions made me feel good.  It was a sign that learning to speak German, somewhat fluently, wasn't going to be impossible.

A few days later, I revisited those thoughts and it made me realize something else.  Since moving to Germany I've become more independent as well as learning how to ask for help.  That's not an oxymoron.  I've always thrived on being independent.  For as long as I can remember I've always been one to do things on my own, to do things my way and to do it without help.  Yeah, I was that stubborn ass and I still am.  It is that quality though that drives me.  It is the fuel that gets me through grueling track workouts, the fuel that gets me up the mountain, or simply the fuel that gets me through a shitty day at work.  It has been the driving force behind my determination and persistence in nearly all that I do.  My tenacious character isn’t all gravy though.  In fact it’s come back to bite me in the ass on a few occasions.  Like when taking a gamble that I was right about something, only to get it really wrong and watch it blow up in my face.  Or procrastinating something for too long because I was too stubborn to ask someone for help.  But when learn from our mistakes.

Living in Germany has taught me how to better balance the two.  There are times where I needed to be self sufficient while also needing to check my pride at the door.  Case in point, my survival instincts kicked into high gear when I needed to get some food in the fridge.  When I first got here, I had no means of transportation other than a good pair of running shoes and no means of calling anyone unless I wanted to make like Croc Dundee and wake up the whole neighborhood.  So I laced up my shoes and started my hunt for town.  On the border of walking home in defeat after not finding a store after an hour of searching, I made a final push and asked someone for directions (in German).  I made it to the store that day and stocked up.  I could tell similar stories of finding the laundry mat, or establishing a bank account, or getting a cell phone.  Some things I could manage with a determined search through town while other things I needed to ask for help from my friends.  I wasn’t really interested in messing up something like a bank account or getting raped by a ridiculous cell phone plan.

Being independent has taken on a new meaning since moving to Germany.  It means being able to get past the fear of trying new things while knowing when to let go of your pride and ask for help.  I checked both at the airport.