Good Night!

Big City on a Small Budget

We visited the biggest city our region has to offer today (Wuerzburg). Being a village boy (well, at least for the past 10 years) I tend to OD on fastfood whenever I actually get to a big city. Three cheeseburgers did the trick for me. That was three Euros. And I managed to spend an hour at a big bookstore with a good English literature section without spending a cent. Parking was another three Euros. I'd say that was a relatively cheap trip outside of timbukthree.

Update on the home office / study

Okay. So the Macbook Air still gets put to good use (especially for all the Mac OS X Leopard only apps like evernote) but there is also a Mac Mini here now. I love the mac mini (running the old but not obsolete OS X Tiger) for most day-to-day tasks.

It really is funny how an OS or a platform can change your habits online. There were Mac zealots who tried to proselytize me years ago but they didn't have the right arguments. Had they said nothing... the switch might have been made years ago.

Okay: there is still that problem of incompatibility. At WORK I have to stick to windows PCs. Perhaps - I believe CERTAINLY there is a solution to this problem.

Pushin' Through

I was hoping for a winter without snow (actually more the norm these days) but instead it snowed for two days and is freezing cold here in southern Germany so the snow is here to stay. Oh well, might as well make the best of it.

Isa had her first day of swimming today (apart from the swimming we did in the summer at Lake Balaton in Hungary). Imagine a bunch of babies, most of them swimming for the first time in their lives, all clinging to their mothers' necks... Kati said Isa had a good time and visibly enjoyed the water. I figured she would.

Photo: A peek into the castle garden from the walkway from the inner courtyard.

My New Home Office

We turned our spare room at home into a home office over the past 24 hours (a process lengthened by the children; with them crawling over everything it seemed like two steps forward, one step back at times).

All I need here is my notebook (note the coffee cup on top of it that is alos a must have), my iPod Touch, the telephone and my MacBook Air.

I spent an hour or so of returning phone calls to break in the new office. Very nice to have a quiet room, a sanctuary (the kids are to learn not to disturb here when the door is closed; we'll see if that works...).

January is here!

It's the month we castle dwellers have been waiting for: the "quiet month" of January. Ah... what to do with all this peace and quiet? I am still working on my book (and probably will be for a long time...). I may also get to go on long walks and take pictures (I haven't fed flickr much lately).

And cats seem to be adapting nicely, too: