Vacation - The Flight

What is nicer than two weeks spent in Florida while Germany is opening the doors for winter, snow and ice. You just board a plane and after some nine hours you have crossed the ocean and landed in New York. One and a half hours later you take off to Florida. Easy. That was the plan. After eight hours over the Atlantic Ocean it started with a circle on the screen. This circle was not exactly what we expected because it represented our flight line. A circle is far from a line and we were informed that because of bad weather conditions the Kenedy Airport (NY) had closed one of two lanes, everything was delayed. But since every flight was delayed the same would happen to our connection flights, we shouldn't be worried at all. We started worrying when the pilot said that the airport had been closed down for change of lanes. We were furthermore worried when we were informed that the airport had been opened again but because of our low level of fuel we had to land now or be redirected to another airport. Fortunately we were allowed to land. 200 metres from the gate the plane stopped. We were told that because of little space the plane had to be carried in by a carrier into the gate. Ten minutes later we were headed for the gate. Another two minutes later the captain told us that the engine of the carrier had broken down and we had to wait for an exchange carrier. It was exactly at that moment that I felt histerical for the first time on the flight.
J

Who would have thought that after having travelled for almost 24 hours we would actually get settled that fast here in Florida.
Yes, it took us a mere twentyfour hours to get from our door in Berlin to our friends house in Fort Lauderdale - due to the fact that we went through JKF and that they had closed that airport for like thirty minutes due to bad weather thus a bazillion flights in and out of JFK were delayed. We kind of like HAD to land due to the fact that the flight took longer than usual in the first place due to very heavy head winds and we were almost out of kerosene when we finally were cleared to land. Needless to say that one flight out of New York was not delayed - our connection to Fort Lauderdale. In fact they started earlier. A lot of energy and a lot of I WAS HERE FIRST made it possible that Jens and I were in front of everyone else in line of rebooking our ticket, and we did manage to get on a plane to Atlanta to connect to Fort Lauderdale, even though that last flight was sold out and overbooked we still managed to get on the plane and land in Fort Lauderdale at 1240am - some six hours later then we should have and well less one suitcase, Jens' suitcase vanished. Well not completey they found it Sunday afternoon but not before our American Express Travel Insurance kicked in and we were allowed to go shopping for 600 Euro in clothes and bath room necessities. :-)
T

off we go

In about 12 hours we will be at the airport on our way to Florida.
Fortunately we both already had a day off today so we managed to get a lot of things done. One thing I did not get done today was secure two tickets for Dolly Parton. She is actually going to be in Europe next spring - but won't go to Germany. So we looked at tickets in Stockholm - sold out - and guess when there will be tickets on sale for Oslo and Helsinki? Tomorrow and Monday - I guess we will have to get up very early on Monday to see if we can get tickets in Helsinki...
:)
Will try to post while in Florida.

T

Cats are back "home" / Real Internet Speed

Cats are back „home“ Real Internet Speed /

On Thursday we did celebrate our 10 year -Anniversary. We picked up the five cats that were castrated at the shelter. All went amazing well. All cats are now chipped, and castrated. They were even de-wormed and de-ticked. And all we did was pay the gas and gave them a tiny donation of €25 - the rest was paid for by “Aktion Tier” The mother cat and all four babies remain in the area of our development - they all came back to be fed - Thursday night, after we returned for the movie The Devil Wears Prada there was one hedgehog and six cats waiting to be fed ( yes, six - Daddy was there as well - we did not manage to catch him - ) the movie btw was a lot of fun.

For the past seven weeks we have experience with something called Vodafone At Home Easy Box allowing us internet access through a mobile modem. Due to the fact, that the development that we live in was built in the late 90’s when DSL was still being tested German Telekom smart as they are used fiber optics to connect our phone and cable TV lines to the main switch. Unfortunately DSL only works on copper lines, thus for the past seven years we have simply been waiting for a real internet connection or a flat rate or anything of that matter. Now it is 2006 and German Telekom is up again and re-arranging millions of kilometers of new fiber optic lines to connect homes to the phone switches to allow download speeds of up to 50 Mbit/s. Well you can guess - the fiber optic lines that have used here in the late 90’s are not compatible with the new switches, thus nothing for us.
However, we can now use the new 3G network to use Internet Access though a wireless and mobile modem.
On Friday they must have upgraded our mobile tower, because we can finally surf with real speed. 1.8 Mbit/s. We can finally watch a movie preview or must not worry about a new 30MB Microsoft Update. Mind you it is not cheap, but so rewarding ‘cos you no longer sit and wait in front of the monitor to wait and wait and wait.

T
:-)

T-2 and T-11

Only two more days and Jens and I will have been together for ten wonderful years. Amazing how long we live side by side... and eleven more days before we are off to spend a couple of weeks in Floida.
Nothing new on the cats, looks like as if we can fetch them on Thursday...

Good night from Berlin

Toddy

Did we mention

Did we mention


we are off to visit our friends C & S in Fort Lauderdale very soon and luck would have it that my dear colleague D mentioned that one of her friends is flying to the US to see Ms Streisand in concert…
Low and behold - she will be in SE Florida the same time we are going to be there and we actually managed to get ticket for her show on 30 October 2006 - we might not have front row tickets, but still - we will see her - maybe from far far far far far far away, but you know the 2,000 $$$ tickets were already gone, so we had to settle with this - still
WE ARE GOING TO SEE BARBRA STREISAND IN CONCERT - how cool is that?

Smiles from T & J

www.barbratour.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand:_The_Tour

Eureka, we did it!

Eureka, we did it!

What did we do? Well, we managed to finally get another blog entry and update online and we got the cats today. All five cats that we have been feeding for the past three months. We caught all of them, we even managed to get the mother, and never in a million light years did I really believe in catching her. She has been suspicious of the trap the day I started to feed the cat inside of the cage. But, guess what? She must have been really hungry today.
It was actually easier than I thought it would b, never the less very emotionally touching. After the last cat was in the box I really cried - maybe because I felt relieved, maybe all the stress just stopped.
Our wonderful neighbor Marianne managed to convince the boss of the Humane Society and their janitor that it would be best to bring them to the kennel today rather than tomorrow. We have no place to keep five wild cats… Well, we had them in four transport boxes (thanks to all of our neighbors) but we did not want to keep them all boxed up inside our apartment. Anyway, the janitor came out to the kennels and we left the cats there to be castrated tomorrow.
We will now have to wait and see, if they want to keep the cats so that they can give them up for adoption, or if they will give them back to us so that we can bring them back to the place where we caught them. I guess they might keep the kittens, and return the mother - who might just be pregnant again… We didn’t get too close to her to have a proper look.
What a day…
In the end we had the trap like six weeks and were patient enough not to rush things, now we have the whole lot and at least from that batch there won’t be any new cats!
What else is new? We are leaving in less than two weeks for our vacation in Florida. We both can not wait to get out of here.
I am sure when and if Jens has the time to write he will tell you why he needs it - I have been working like silly for the past four weeks. We had our bank merger on the weekend of the 23rd of September, mostly everything went smooth on our end, but since we are not alone in this world and there are other banks that can make mistakes, let me tell you - THEY MADE MISTAKES.
Things are finally cooling down thus I can actually take a day of next Thursday - both Jens and I get to take a day off… The 19th of October is our “Kennenlerntag” - the day that we met - ten years ago. So we want to do something special on that day. We might so out for lunch or dinner and we want to go and see “The Devil Wears Prada” - the preview look fantastic so we thought that might be a fun thing to do on our special day.
Anyway - sorry for not posting anything here for the past two months, but we have simply been too busy with other things.
Smiles from Berlin - where fall is knocking on our door - the temperatures are dropping close to 0°C at night, and where the colors of the leaves are changing from green to yellow and red and the chestnut trees are almost without any leaves already…

Torsten