Rock, Paper, Scissors

I am opening this as a discussion. Last night while having drinks and wings and drinks Jen and I played Rock, Paper, Scissors. Don’t remember why. Anyways, Jen chose a rock and I chose a fountain. Since the rock falls into the fountain I would have won, but Jen said there is no fountain in Rock, Paper, Scissors. So the question is is there a fountain in Rock, Paper, Scissors or not?

BTW if you ever play with Jen, you should know she always chooses the rock. Hmmm knowing this I wonder why I still lost 1:2. *head scratching*

I Love the Daffodils

I like the flowers
I love the daffodils
I like the mountains
I love the rolling hills
I like the fireside
When the lights are low

bom di ada, bom di ada, bom di ada, bom
bom di ada, bom di ada, bom di ada, bom

I just got to work and one of my co-workers gave me a Daffodil, which by the way smells great and got me instantly into a great mood. That's why the song above. Hope you had an awesome start into the day as well.

One Leg Cosmic Bowling

Since about 4 weeks Jen and I were planning to surprise Russell at his job at the bowling alley in Nanaimo. This Saturday we finally managed to do so. Since Nanaimo is 1,5 hours away, which is kind of far just to go bowling, we decided to discover the island before bowling. Lionel was the only one who was brave enough to join us on our tour and he volunteered to be our Chauffeur. I know we girls are spoiled :-)

11am and who was not ready to leave, me, oh well so we were leaving 10min later, who cared we had time and after all it was supposed to be a relaxed day. The weather was great and the sun was shining just for us, well maybe not just for us, but I like to believe so. First stop view point of the Malahat, which offered us an awesome view over the “Strait of Georgia”. By now it was past noon and our little stomachs wanted some food :-) How convenient that Lionel’s parents work at a sushi place in Mill Bay. So next stop Mill Bay, for some fresh prepared and absolutely delicious sushi. Thanks again to Lionel’s parents. With super stuffed bellies and a happy feeling we drove further to Ladysmith and the Parksville, where we hung out at the beach for some tanning :-) It’s quite amazing to sit at the beach and see the snow covered mountains on the other side of the bay. Our last stop before bowling was the Old Country Market in Coombs. Usually they have goats on the roof of the market, but I guess there weren’t enough people for the goats to show up, so no goats, but an awesome coffee latte. Mhhh, this coffee was first of all huge and then covered with little white and brown chocolate pieces, yummy yummy. And after the huge coffee and some sweets, Jen and I were bouncing around on our sugar hype. Just the right time for bowling! Well it did take us an hour to find the bowling alley. Russ could have been a little more specific and mention the name of the bowling alley more often or at least at times were Jen and I weren’t drunk and actually could have paid attention to what he said. However, we found it and Russ was quite surprised seeing us. We even were allowed to go in the back of the bowling lane and he explained us how things work… After chatting with Russ and 2 Shirley Temple Deluxe (this fantastic drink is the adult version of a regular Shirley Temple) it was finally time to bowl! We just needed to put on this really stylish bowling shoes, well Jen only got one, but therefore her cast was glowing nicely in the UV light, which was basically the only thing that was glowing, since we all forgot about cosmic bowling and were wearing mostly black… Anyhow, to give Jen a fair chance we created a special I-Bowl-With-Broken-Ankle-Rule: everybody has to bowl on one leg. I tell you, it is not that easy to bowl on only one leg, but surprisingly I was not that much worst than I usually am. However, I was not able to make such an awesome strike as Jen did. I am afraid to go bowling with her when she does not have her cast anymore, she probably will kick my butt big time. Since bowling on one leg is quite exhausting we only played one game and decided to eat something at the bowling alley. Well Russ should have told us that usually nobody eats there and that the poor 16years old guy, who prepared our food, didn’t have any kitchen experience, which is the reason why it took him 3 attempts to cook my chicken fingers (first one not done, second one burned, third one yummy). Stuffed and relaxed we headed back to Victoria.

I posted some more pics on my webpage.

X Days Till Jen’s Happy Day

Last Thursday Jen got her new blue Fiberglass cast, which she has to “wear” for the next 5 weeks. Arpil 27^th is going to be her happy day, the cast will come off and she will be able to walk without crutches though she has gotten really fast on her crutches. You should see her hopping around. Till then every morning she will happily rip of a page from her “Happy Day Counter”.

Five Alarm Funk

Five Alarm Funk is a 12 piece afro-funk band from Vancouver, which I have meanwhile seen four times. The last time was last Friday, they were playing at Steamer, a pub here in Victoria. You have to know that Steamers stage is actually not that big, but somehow they managed to fit all 12 of them on stage plus instruments. Anyhow, since I already knew that they are great I convinced a bunch of people to go to the concert. I knew it was getting pretty packed so we went to Steamers quite early and got us a table at the end of the room just beside a ledge. This ledge turned out to be great, because we actually could stand on it and dance and see the band perfectly. Even Jen with her broken ankle was rocking to the music, which was highly appreciated from the band. On our way out four of the band members came up to us and thanked her for coming to the show. “That’s dedication” is what Tayo, the drummer, said :-) The whole evening was a blast (great music, great people, lots of dancing and fun and all without any alcohol at least for me, since I was driving :-) ) I can’t wait to see their next show and till then I will just listen to they CD (like I am doing right now).

Pudding-Pastry

I just had a chat with my dear friend Anz on MSN. Anz and I always used to eat pudding-pastry back home in Paderborn. We got it from Ms. Jovanellie, who used to work in the bakery right beside my house. Hmmm yummy, my mouth is getting watery just by thinking of them… And we noticed that since our time in Paderborn we don’t eat any pudding-pastry anymore, just because it’s not the same eating them alone. Isn’t it strange how some little things are just no fun if you don’t have the right people around you? So we decided that we both will buy a pudding-pastry and eat it together on the phone tomorrow morning :-) Still not the same as if Anz would sit beside me on my bed, watching “Zwei bei Kallwass”, clapping because the people on that show are so great and yes eating pudding-pastry, but a beginning. Anz I miss you lots.

Witty's Lagoon

Okay, it's 11:30pm right now and my goal for tonight was to be in bed by 11 since I need to get up at 6-6:30am tomorrow. So I missed the goal, which is the reason what this one is going to be a short blog about Witty's Lagoon.

Last Saturday a couple of friends and me went hiking or let's say casually walking. Since it was the day after the St. Patty's day party and I had only slept 4 hours I didn't mind that is was a very easy hike. It took us about 20min to get to the beach, where we had somewhat of an lunch break in the shining sun, though it was a little chilly, but I guess just because I wasn't wearing a jacket as everybody else. Again a tea would have been nice, but since Russ was once making fun of me that I once wanted to take a tea on a 2 hour hiking trip, I don't dear to raise the tea issue anymore... After lunch we walked at the beach for a bit, observe some birds that just wouldn't move at all (an intangible behavior, if you asked me) and went back into the woods for some more hiking/walking. All in all it was a great, relaxing day, outside in the nature and believe it or not I even got a little tanned that day.

St. Patrick's Day

Last Friday was St. Patrick's Day, an Irish holiday, and it seems that every inhabitant of Victoria has at least a drop of Irish in his/her blood, since the local Irish Pub was already packed at 11am. No don't worry I was not on of the people that was standing in line at 11am to get one of these delicious green beers. I was at work sitting in my office (without windows) talking to an half Irish construction guy, who was complaining that I didn't wear any green. Yes even as German you should wear green on an Irish holiday. In order to get not even more into trouble I decided to wear green at night for our Nyumba Rafiki St. Patty's Day Party. So I had a look into my closet and all green I could find was a thick sweater and some underwear, well I was going to party, so who is wearing a sweater? Not me! However, my guests were complaining that I wasn't wearing enough green and as punishment they sprayed my hair green. I must say that was hot! Well there is not much more to say about the night except that it was a fun party with friends, a great crutch-chair-rowing competition and maybe a little to many green Jello Shots :-)

Some picture are posted at linse.tk.

The Real Me?

Russ got a new camera and now hides behind every corner to take random pictures, which first of all scares the hell out of me and second of all creats the most beautiful pictures on earth… Today he sent me the result. I guess that is how my roomies see me, the real me…

"Promoted"

As you probably know I am on co-op since about 2,5 month. The people at work are fun and the work itself is alright, there is lots to do and lots to learn, which is good. One thing I really didn't like is that I was sitting in a cubical and the only window I could see was the one from a co-worker who likes to have the blinds closed. Well at least I knew that the sun was shining when the blinds were a little brighter than usual. But today my boss came up with the idea that we need to make some space and that we all need to move to different desks, well I got PROMOTED to a desk in a room without windows. Just the though of it makes me depressive. Oh well I guess I will spend all day at work looking at the Weather Network page in order to find out whether the sun is shining or not.

White + Blue = Green

This Friday the Nyumba Rafiki is having a St. Patt's Day Party and since you are supposed to drink green beer on St. Patty's Day and I don't really like beer, we decided to make green jello shots. And because I am so excited about it I bought 2 packages of green pistachio jello. Well let's say that is what I thought I got. It turns out that I bought pistachio PUDDING, which cannot be used for jello shots. Hmm how am i supposed to know. All over the package there was written down JELLO. Anyways, since it is useless for this Friday, I made this delicious pudding. All you need to do, is add milk to the powder stir for 2 minutes and let it sit for another 3 minutes, how conveniently easy. So I open the package and the powder is blue, since when is pistachio blue??? Then I added the milk and guess what! It turns into a nice artificial green. White + blue = green. That's new to me, but who cares, it was a yummy super sweet artificial pudding, which only none modified ingredient was pistachio. I am glad they used real pistachios. The only concern I have is that I might glow if I turn the light off tonight... Can't wait to eat the other package...

Rich

In middle of February a couple of my co-workers and I (all together 15ppl) joined the lottery and bought tickets for, I believe, the next 5 weeks. Since then every Wednesday and Saturday we pray and hope that we will win. And finally it happened. Yesterday we won 10$. Yeahhhhhhhhhhh. I guess we have to watch out that we don’t spend it all at once.

The Trampoline

Last night at 8:45pm I thought this is going to be a fun blog entry, but things have changed a bit. It all began on Monday when Russ brought his tamponline from Nanaimo and set it up in our backyard. It is a quite huge trampoline and I was looking forward to have my first jump last night. The Nyumba Rafiki crew met at 8:30pm for an initialy fun jumping evenning. We jumped, we laught and Russ showed us how to do flips and I even managed to do a flip myself. Since we were having a blast, I though I get the camera to take some pictures that I could post here. But when I came back Jen and Russ were lying on the trampoline, yes lying not jumping anymore. What happened you may ask. Well, while landing Jen twisted her ankle or something like that, she couldn’t move it anymore and had lots of pain, so we brought her to the hostpital. It didn’t really make us feel better that the nurse said “I don’t even need an xray to see that this is broken.” Ouch. We ended up spnding about 4 hours in the hospital and unfortunately we were not allowed to take Jen home with us. Her foot was misplaced and fractured and she will need a surgery. The surgery will be tomorrow and I just hope that her foot is healing fast and that soon she is going to be up again and maybe even jumping on the tramponline.

Jen, get well soon.

A Shovel Goes Its Way

It has been almost 2 month now that my brother is in Sudan. He is working there as a civil engineer on a project at the Nil. I actually can't tell you what he is really doing there, since every time I try to call him either he can't her me or I can hear him due to the back phone connection. Anyways, to make sure he is not getting bored there, my sister and I gave him a nice colourful little sandbox toy kit for Xmas, so he can play in the sand, since there is more than enough sand in Sudan. It included a bucket, a shovel and several little other forms and I gotta admit it is not easy to find a good set of sandbox toys in December, since it is not really sandbox playing season. However, we found one and I still think it was an awesome idea. However, he first refused to take it along with him and pretended that he hasn't enough space in his suite case. All excuses! He could have left some sweaters here, he does not need them there, it's way too hot anyways. But never the less, I assume my sister and I nagged him so much that he agreed to take the shovel along. Till today I was never sure whether he actually took it with him or not, but then I just got an email with a bunch of picture and see what. The shovel had gone all the way from Germany to Sudan. And it seems that it has been a nice companion on his travel. The shovel even got to ride the camel together with my brother and it got to see some pyramids. I think that's awesome that this little shovel after all gets appreciated. And with this happy feeling I am now off to bed... Dreaming from nice other places the shovel could go.

Too Much Coffee

Did I tell you guys that I signed up for a 10k run? Don’t ask why. It must have been in one of these moments where little Christina though she can do anything, so why not a 10k run. Anyways, since then I planned to go running on a regular basis so that I don’t make a complete fool of myself at the day of the race. Well, 2,5 weeks ago, clumsy me twisted my ankle pretty badly while practicing and so I barely did any sports since, which I planned to change today. So I am getting up early to go running before work. First of all it was freaking cold and because I haven’t done any sports since ever, I barely made it through the first round (4k). Oh oh, not good at all. Anyways, after I took a very hot shower, I decided to get my daily coffee from the Uvic coffee shop. Since we have a coffee machine at home and I am on co-op I haven’t been at this coffee shop since at least 2 month, but right when I stepped to the counter the girl said “Good morning, a large latte with regular milk as always?” If she remembers how I like my coffee even though I have not been there for a while, does that mean I drink way too much coffee???