Time

Too much of it and too little

Wow!  It’s been awhile since my last post!  I have all the time in the world;  I don’t work.  Keeping up with the house and laundry is not that hard or time consuming, but it is easy to get myself lost in stupid time wasting things that help my day pass more quickly.  But I refuse to become one of those miserable army wives that live in oversized sweat pants and baggy t-shirts, doing nothing but bitch and complain all day, and I feel like I might be heading that way.  But NO MORE!  I’ve decided I have no excuse not to use this time to better myself and I’ve assembled a plan.

Firstly, I outlined a schedule for my self that includes gym time.  I stopped working out months ago, and I’m lucky I only gained a few pounds back.  Now that I have a MUCH more sedentary lifestyle and there are multitudes of delicious beers and platters of bratwurst and schnitzel, I really need to get my ass in gear.  I can’t let the past two years of hard work just go down the drain.  And I’m certainly not going to diet my way thorough Germany!  HA!
I also scheduled a dedicated dinner time and bed time.  I’ve been suffering from some serious insomnia as of late and that has never been a problem for me.  But I have also always kept a pretty consistent schedule of sleeping a waking up and lately that has all gone to shit.  So hopefully getting my body into a normal sleep and wake routine will help that.  (I like to try to fix things the logical way before seeing a doctor and taking a pill)
Finally I scheduled in project time!  Now that all our stuff is here (more on that later!)  I have a list of projects to prettify the home that I want to start.  First of which will be re-finishing our dining table and chairs.  WHEW!  That’s gonna be a tough one!  I also want to paint a side table in the living room and sew up a few pillows for our couch when we get it next week.

Side note:  I just used “firstly” and “finally”  like I’m back in 9th grade English!  naughty, naughty Sarah!

Before Christmas, Cody brought home some MRE (meal ready to eat) since I had expressed an interest in trying one. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Well, there is just something about meat in a bag that never goes bad, that is just SO appetizing! It wasn't terrible, but I definitely don’t want to eat another one anytime soon! I got Beef Brisket. It came with two massive stale crackers and a cheese spread, a large, flat biscuit, “toffee rolls” which turned out to be tootsie rolls, and the most dry and crunchy M&M cookie I’ve ever had. Dipping it in milk didn’t even soften it up! It made for a fun lunch experience for me either way.
Christmas was lovely!  We spent Christmas  Eve with our friends the McKenzies.  They hosted a dinner gathering for all their friends.  We all brought a dish and Jess made a HUGE turkey.  The kids were running around high on sugar and Santa’s eminent arrival,  and it reminded me how much more fun Christmas is with kids who are wrapped up in the magic of Christmas.  Christmas day was our little single soldier Christmas gathering.  We had so much fun laughing and watching classic Christmas comedies that I forgot to take pictures.  To top it off, my first ham was a success and produced many, many left overs.  I made split pea soup with the ham bone tonight, which also produced many left overs.
The best part was right after I posted my whiney, selfish, pity-party, blog entry, I got an email stating that our HHG had arrived and could be delivered on the 21st!  RIGHT BEFORE CHISTMAS!  I was so excited!  Cody and I busted our butts to get everything unpacked and put together before Christmas and it almost worked.  The downstairs looks great!  The upstairs, our bedroom in particular is at a level of turmoil that’s hard to describe.  No matter!  It will just have to become another project to add to the list.

We finally got our DLA (dislocation allowance) in and are planning to rent a car and go to Ikea next weekend to FINALLY get new couches and some other things for around the house.  This will be the first time in my 30 years of life that I will have owned a brand new couch that no one else has sat on, slept on, or done god knows what else on!  We are going to get a VAT form that lets us purchase it with out the 19% value added tax that’s included in the price of everything here.  Yes, new couches can’t come soon enough; the ones the army provides are hard and slippery, not to mention ugly.
Since we have our bikes now, Cody and I took a bike ride into Vilseck on Friday evening for a date night.  We first stopped into a pub for a beer since the place we had wanted to go to was closed until after the new year.  The Rose and Crown was possibly the most depressing bar I’ve ever been in!  They played nothing but old twangy and whiney American country music of the slowest variety, and all the patrons drank alone and played those bar arcade games.  We sank our beers and high-tailed it out of there with a quickness.  Afterword we ate dinner at a little sit down Greek restaurant.  It was nice that the Greek owner spoke very good English.  I had gyros and Cody got some sort of schnitzel, which is not Greek at all, but they had it on their menu.  It was very good and the service was very much the same as one would receive in the states.  We also got an after dinner shot with our meal.  Cody, because he has a penis, received Ouzo and because I am obviously a female and cannot handle strong, manly liquor, I was given a little odorless pink shot in which the secret ingredients would not be given up.  It was tasty though, and my bout of feminism was short lived. We peddled our way back home and enjoyed the rest of our evening on the couch with beer and a move.
Tomorrow night we are ringing in the new year in Nuremberg at da club.  Since we are wanting a baby in 2013 we decided to have a last hoo-rah, drink it up and party the night away, while we still can.  Plus German clubs stay open late, so we won’t be coming home until the next morning.  But my friend Faron always told me the Germans like to “party it in AND party it out”
I crammed a lot into this post, but hopfully with my new schedule, I’ll stop wasting away my time and start being productive!  I hope all of you had a very merry Christmas!  Have fun and be safe this New Year’s Eve!