Continuing on from the last post, I was telling you about Christmas in Ireland.  After we came back from the North, we settled in for an icy and snow-packed holiday.  I’ve never seen Ireland quite so icy before; driving to Dublin for example typically took over an hour instead of the usual forty five minutes I would expect.  A couple of times on the Trim road we were limited to about 30mph simply because the traction was so bad.  It was really interesting seeing the difference between a country that is prepared for ice and snow, and one that isn’t.  I’m not being snobbish here; the ice and snow in Ireland was extreme, and we usually only get a few days of mild ice or frost there.  Of course they aren’t prepared for it.  In Munich they get far much more snow and ice, and they have a three week stockpile of salt for the roads, and two months of grit for the paths.  They grit the footpaths!  Anyway, it was damn cold.  Anna’s parents came over too, so we picked them up from the airport. Slowly.

Speaking of snow, we’re going to Bayerischzell tomorrow.  We are going to spend a week snowboarding and skiing.  I promised James I’d take some pictures this time, particularly of me getting serious air… which means I have to charge the battery in my camera. This post had started out with the title “on piste in twenty four and counting”. Now its more like twelve to be honest.  Anyway, I’m really looking forward to this next week.  Last year I ended up in hospital with a severed ligament that had to be operated on two days before our skiing holiday, and didn’t get any snowboarding at all. Tomorrow that’s going to change.  Provided I don’t crash the car on the way there ;-)

What else?  Oh yes, there’s a reunion of old AOL heads coming up.  Really old timers too, not just folks who were in Fulham Road, but further back.  This is for those who were in the Fulham Broadway office, which I got invited to on a technicality: Although I wasn’t in that office originally, I moved there early on from Fulham Road when we re-located the Marketing department there.  I don’t really think I can justify the cost though, and there aren’t many there that I would actually pay money to see again.  A couple for sure, but they’ll wait until another time.  We’re already going to London in July, so those that I really want to see will be covered.  Sorry Scally.

I started another German course on Monday last.  This time its with the Deutsch Akademie, and the teacher seems to have has a relatively illustrious career having worked in directorial capacities for both the Goethe Instutite and Berlitz previously.  The course is far more what I need, I’m finding the pace just about right, and unlike the last one it seems more at my level.  I may stick with this group for a bit for a couple of reasons.  Firstly they have a higher quantity of narrower scoped bands (twelve as opposed to Berlitz’s ten), and secondly the class sizes are really nice.  There are ten people in my class at the moment, which is so far working out really well.  I’ve had two in a class at Berlitz, and twenty eight at the Volkshochschule, and ten is nice and comfortable.

Right, gotta go get packed and wax my snowboard…

Okay so I'm back, and I've got coffee. I’ve no real excuse for not posting except for being really busy.  That and the inevitable blog-apathy that comes in early every year.  If you could graph the frequency with which I posted I’m sure you’d come up with the winter being the least populous.  Right, so after typing that last sentence, I did just that.  I was wrong.  My least frequent posting is done during the summer. Here is the average number of posts I’ve made every month for the last nine and a bit years.

Naturally enough, I also drew a pretty graph about it. So what can we tell from all this?  Well, I’m not the most prodigious of posters, that’s for sure.  That’d be about it really.  I do find it strange that the most frequent time of year for posting is actually in the Autumn, but that’s just me.  Anyway, the reason I was able to get all this data into Excel really easily is that I’ve been working a little on a new design for here.  I know I’ve been talking about this for months, I do have a good excuse for not rolling it out sooner.  I’ve just been really busy with other things, and not in a position to do significant typing with my finger. So, even though I’m still in this cast, here’s a rundown on everything that’s going on at the moment. 

I finished watching Buffy last night.  The ending was good but lacked something I think.  Then again, I was used to having each of the series end with a cliff-hanger, and this one nicely tied up all the loose ends.  It left something for the future, but I guess that never panned out.  Overall it was a brilliant series.  There were high points, such as “Once More With Feeling”, “The Body” and of course “Hush”, and… well not much in the way of low points.  “Once More With Feeling”, was an episode that was filmed as a musical and was so good that I can’t get the music out of my head. Its very Sondheimey, and brilliantly written.  I also have the entire six series of Angel to watch, though I’m a bit tired now, so maybe that can wait for a few weeks. Awesome series though, I have no idea why I didn’t watch it years ago.  If you don’t already know, the guy who created the show is called Joss Whedon. He the one who created both Buffy and Angel, and also Firefly with its spin-off movie Serenity. He also created the excellent series Dollhouse, which is airing right now.  I had been a fan of his long before I knew who he was.

German classes are of course ongoing, though a little slowly at the moment.  There were so few applicants for my course (ie: two) that they decided to change the times around to once a week instead of two.  On top of that, our teacher has been out for the last week, so apart from some homework (which I got mostly wrong!) there’s fuck all happening there.  I thought I had a complete handle on the meaning of the words in the homework – obwohl, falls, wenn, dass, weil, um, damit etc.  English translations would be although, if, that…, at…, with etc, and it turns out I didn’t know them as well as I thought I did.  I actually though I had nailed the meanings of these words about a year ago and had no problem with them. Until now.  Oh well, there’s a major re-learning session coming up I think.

I’m going to be potentially doing some interesting work for James soon, if a couple of quotes that we have sent out are accepted.  More on that as it happens, but there’s a chance to get better at some things I’ve been familiar with but never used extensively in the past.  Oh, and in the next post I’ll tell you about my new mobile.  I’ll start that in a while, just have to go do some things first.

Today I started a new German course.  I guess its official that I’m not actually a beginner at this language anymore.  This course is for middle tier students, which is pretty cool when you think about it.  Sure I took some classes in London, and they were a great foundation, but I never really considered myself anything other than a beginner before.  I believe that after I have finished this course that I can take the official “Look mommy, I can speak German” test.  This is the official test that you get a Government certificate for!  We have the same teacher as last term which is good. 

We’re experimenting with using Moodle to enhance the course, but I have to say we’ve been relatively unsuccessful so far. This is mainly because of a lack of discipline on my part I think.  I take notes on my PC every class, and transcribe them into better German / English later on when I’m studying or doing homework. I should really be using Moodle to ask questions of my teacher, but I find that its easier to simply look up the information I need on the net.  I use Leo, Chemnitz University’s excellent Beolingus service and a couple of other online resources to do things like this.  I also have a rather large paper dictionary at home that I turn to should the online research bear no results, or indeed should I not actually be online.  Not online: What a quaint idea.

So, I went to enroll in another German course today, but they were all full with the exception for one which was too far away to be viable.  So, I'm going to enroll for one starting in April.  I'll do it early so that I can get the course in the location I want (ie: close to where we live).  I could have enrolled for one today, but it was three days a week and so far out from us that it would have taken an hour or more to travel there.  It seems to be very common here that people speak English.  That makes it not impossible for me to do stuff like buying things and interacting with people, as long as I can take the time to communicate with them.  I went to get a hair cut today after searching for the German course.  There were a bunch of salons that would have suited my needs, but they were all booked out for the next few hours.  So, I found one, and absolutely typically I discovered the one salon where the guys spoke German and Hungarian, but no English. Still, after getting around that with Anna's help, I ended up with a fairly decent haircut.  Unlike London, hair salons here are stupidly cheap for men.  The women's prices are lower than in London usually, but the men's prices are just stupid.  Figure €10 to €15 for a decent wash and cut.  Try matching that in London (though the barbers down the road from the office used to be seriously cheap too).

In other news, my sister just passed the last phase of her doctorate!  I think she has a couple of revisions to make to her thesis, but nothing too much, which is nice :-)

I have been doing some more work on the C#.Net version of this site of late, though not as much as I wanted as I've been bust with other stuff.  One thing I did discover was that there is now a fantastic new .Net blog engine around that I have downloaded and played with a little.  Its called BlogEngine.Net, and does everything that I want my blog to do already.  It is written in C#, and released under Open Source (actually I think its shared source, but I don't have the license in front of me.  Its so good that I may end up actually using it on this site instead of something else I might write myself.  Stay tuned for more!

After my course today, we went to the cafe downstairs, and practiced our German.  We talked about the weather in Germany, and how we couldn't speak the language well enough, and languages in general and how they are thought in schools.  We did it all in German.  I really had forgotten, and missed the feeling of being stretched to the limit, with that conversation.  Maybe some of my sentences came out badly, and maybe the grammar was crap, but we still had the conversation.  We talked about a range of subjects and managed to get our points across in German.  Fantastic!  It was the first time I've managed to do that in a situation where I couldn't switch into English and had someone translate for me.
So, we moved all our stuff to the new apartment in Daglfing over the weekend.  It took us three trips, in a van and the car with the seats down.  We should be able to get everything else done in a single trip on Wednesday :-)  Haven't figured out how we're getting there yet - we'll fill the car and take the train while Andreas drives maybe?  There are some bookshelves to move too, which are 3m high.  They can be dismantled and will fit in the car if the front seat is down.  That means only one person can go with the car.  Yummy, logistics.  We're not going to have an Internet connection straight away either, so I have to make sure that everything gets done for the guys in London before the end of tomorrow.  Its all finished now, but I need to go see if I can break it before I give the code to them ;-)

My German course just got harder. We're studying the Genitive case, and its turning out to be bloody hard. I STILL haven't gotten a handle on word gender in the different cases yet either, and that's turning out to be a pain in the ass. Still, its going better than I expected, and my German is far better than it was last month. The course finishes on Friday, and we've got a test either that day or on Thursday. Yummy. I just love tests. I'm in the process of signing up for the next level too - which doesn't start until the week after next. That gives me some breathing room to practice though, which is nice. I really do have to figure out the Dative and Accusative cases for once and for all.  So, we're almost there now - we move into our new apartment mid way through next month.
We've been doing some shopping for stuff to furnish it with, and will be doing more today too I think. We have a now a better idea of how we want it to look, and I even have a picture of a couple of the rooms in my head now. Of course... my pictures include lots of shiny black wood and chrome, so I'm likely to be overruled on many issues. Perhaps quite rightly so too.  
I was just talking to Anna on the phone (I'm on the train at the moment*) and she told me her interview went pretty well today. She was talking to a pharmacutical company in Ismaning, which would probably be a 30 minute journey from door to door.
* Mobile phones work UNDERGROUND on the Munich tube system. /me flips London Underground the bird.

I could not get motivated earlier to do my German homework. Did you know I've been studying German for the last few months? That shows you how much of an impact it has made on me. But tonight, I sat down and opened my books, and started typing some stuff on the PC. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot actually. I had forgotten how much fun it is to get back into learning again. I don't do that too much these days, and I should, because its one of the things that keeps me going. I just seem to play too much Eve lately, and that is taking all of my spare time. ::sigh:: Maybe I should quit playing Eve and start learning something new again. Nyah... fuck that ;-) There's a compromise to be found here, if I can reach it.

Going go Germany today. As usual, Anna is a nervous bundle of energy who wants to leave NOW (3 hours before we need to), and who wants to know how we're going to handle the luggage NOW ;-) She had to cancel her Open University course yesterday because there was a pre-course assignment she had to do which was going to interfere with her finals for her full-time course. She wasn't happy about that, poor girl :-( Still, she can do another one later on with no problem :-) Anyway, I'm off to get everything packed to go, will update this as I get a chance over the holidays :-)