In which I talk randomly about not much of anything

Well, by the looks of this blog, our "adventures" must be pretty darned boring, huh?

Not really.

Actually, they've been pretty fun, but I've generally been off doing things rather than posting. What have I been doing? Let's see.

We went to Karlsruhe. Three times now. We did some shopping with friends, visited the palace, climbed the tower, wandered around the city, and last weekend we went to Das Fest. Das Fest is basically a crazy crowded outdoor (free) rock concert. Not usually our thing, but one of Branden's work friends invited us, so we went. It was fun. More on that later.

We've also visited a nearby town called Maulbronn (and its cloisters) twice.

I went walking in the woods with some new friends.

We've gone out to dinner with friends and sampled the local cuisine. It's good. We like schnitzel with noodles. (YES, Mom, I know that you now have a song stuck in your head...you're welcome. Thought I should share.)

We bought a toaster oven. Did I post about that? I don't think I did. I wrote a post about that, but I think it's still in the drafts folder. See, there's this problem with not having internet for a while. We do stuff, I write a post, save it in a folder, and forget that I never hit "publish." On a blog, hitting "save" means that I'm done, content is posted, and it's checked off the list. If it gets saved to a folder rather than the blog, it gets checked off anyway, and I tend not to remember that I need to come back. This is bad for content actually making it onto the internet.

Plus there's the pictures thing. At the internet cafe, it took about an hour and a half to upload the pictures for the Peter and Paul post. That wasn't very many pictures, and it was really not very fun to sit and watch the little "loading" button flash on the screen for that long.

And then we got internet at home. I nearly danced for joy.

Then we tried to use the internet at home.

The internet thinks that we should learn to be satisfied with having and forget about using. Let's be nice and just say that it's slow.

That's a lot nicer than what I said about it earlier when it took me an hour to compose an email which then disappeared into the ether with a "page cannot be found" message. It didn't help that the email should have taken 5 minutes to write, except that it involved browsing to three whole webpages and downloading a very small pdf, which took the rest of the hour...

Anyway. Slow.

I think continents probably move faster most days.

We can't upload pictures from home, so Branden is ferrying the files to work with him and uploading them to the web from there, and hopefully I will be able to show you the things we've been up to soon. I hear that the Processing of Pictures might even be nearing completion, so they may someday be released from the Secret Folder of Mystery so that I can look at them and think about what to write. (Who me? Nag? Never!)

Ok, so technically I could probably access the Secret Folder of Mystery if I tried. But really? Panoramics don't look like anything until they are Processed.

On second thought, they look a lot like random pocket pictures. Except that they're not random and they're not of the inside of a pocket. But other than that? Totally like pocket pictures. Random bit of sky here, half a person there, crazy shot of nothing but pavement over there. Not much to look at, really. Unless you're a two year old and that random gum wrapper was really the most interesting thing in the palace. Then panoramic pieces might be fun. For the rest of us, it isn't really worth it until they are Processed, but then there's something to show. And it might even be worth waiting for.

So. There have been some adventures. Theoretically there will be pictures soon. And, provided that the ether does not return to swallow my writing the moment that I hit "publish," there will even be a blog post.

ETA: Miracles apparently do happen. There is still a blog post.