The eagle has landed!

Oh, internet! How I have missed you! Seven whole days without your sweet nothings in my eyeballs, without your virtual universe of time-sucking applications! Let us never be parted again!

I think the most depressing thing about being away from my email for a week is coming back and finding 90% of my inbox is junk mail of one type or another. 

Okay, so let's get caught up!

First of all, and most importantly, we got housing! Randy and I discussed the pros and cons of on-post vs. economy living and while there was a long list of both for each, ultimately there were three or four things we just couldn't compromise. A lot of these had to do with the fact that we have no transportation until Randy's truck gets here: NEXT MONTH. When the lady at the housing office, whom I suspect of having a German real estate market agenda because she pushed hard for a private rental, couldn't guarantee even one of those things, let alone all of them, she found us a two bedroom apartment in post housing. 

From the outside, post housing typically looks like the projects. From what I understand, oftentimes the inside fares little better. However, we seem to have lucked out and the first unit we were offered was a first floor, newly renovated space. I know, I know... "newly renovated" can mean anything from "fresh shelf liners" to "there's a wall still missing". But in our case means new paint, tile and kitchen cabinets. (The garbage is ours... that's right, 10 minutes after I get the key, I start mucking up the place. My mother is SO proud.)

Random fact: German housing (which the army housing qualifies as) is made of concrete, not wood, which makes it air tight and smell like feet if you don't air it out for at least 10 minutes every day. But the windows are HUGE and AMAZING and open in TWO DIRECTIONS, so the airing-out process is easy to accommodate. Added bonus: vast amounts of natural light. I might die of happiness. (Note the borrowed furniture, which is ghetto-fabulous.)

The kitchen is miniscule, but no smaller than our Maryland duplex and has enough built-in storage to make a squirrel jealous. Another pro of on-post housing? DUAL VOLTAGE! Which means that my beloved KitchenAid stand mixer is NOT just an expensive door stop! (Yes, there's such a thing as transformers, but they're large and expensive and look vaguely menacing, like alien pods.)

Can we just take a moment to observe the cathedral-like quality of the bathroom? Check out the tub. (To give you an idea of scale, Rowen is 5' tall.) I may never get out of it. No really, I'm lounging in the empty tub right now. JUST BECAUSE I CAN. 

Of course one of the downsides to letting the army pay for your abode is they don't believe in extra rooms. This means that the open invitation still exists to everyone we encouraged to come visit, but you're gettin' the couch. Or the tub, because seriously, IT'S THAT BIG.

We finally got out and about this weekend in a rented car and discovered something VERY important. If Randy and I are to stay married, we must invest in a GPS, right-the-hell-now. 

Schweinfurt currently has a "winter market" going on in it's town square, which is adorable. There are about a bazillion places for Americans to spend their Euro and I plan on visiting them ALL. Saturday, however, we confined ourselves to brautwurst and ice skating. 

Sunday, we took a trip to Bamberg and got lost looking for a parking space, which was amusing for approximately the first three seconds; not so much the next 29 minutes, 57 seconds. Future adventuring endeavors will probably include A PLAN.

Also, I think I found my penguins. I'm pretty sure these are mine. They are, after all, guarding the wine!