Weather – Sannipanni

Life’s in Fall Swing

October 31, 2012 3 Comments

“Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower” (Albert Camus)

As many north of here are dealing with horrific Hurricane Sandy (or post tropical cyclone as she’s now classified), fall is in full swing in Charlotte. Nature is sporting her beautiful dress of red, yellow, ochre and orange and I get to sport my cute fall outfits. Yay boots!

Pumpkins are everywhere! We’ve already carved pumpkins (and they’ve already rotted nicely and are decomposing somewhere on a landfill now). Zee boyfriend masterfully carved his college letter and I free-styled that pretty cute pumpkin face y’all can see on the left. After all that hard work we sure deserved that pumpkin ale! Prost!

Speaking of pumpkins, a handful of my girlfriends and Zee BF and I went to a local fall fest and ~~got lost in~~ walked through the corn maze and took a tractor ride to a pumpkin patch. Was a great backdrop for fall photos and we succeeded in protecting our tasty ciders from those evil yellow jackets. NASTY BEASTS!

So we had premature pumpkins and alas an early Halloween party seemed appropriate. I had received a very kind invitation to attend a swanky houseparty uptown. The decoration was awesome and appropriately creepy for a a horror movie producer. Babies in jars! Eeeeek! Giant spider chasing a cute caterpillar! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!!!!

My costume of choice this year was the Pretzel Wench, which I suggest to include in a future installment of 50 shades of grey (still haven’t read the 1st). Artsy-crafty jewelry maker that I am, I made the accessories myself. And here is how:

Easy-Peasy Edible Pretzel Jewelry Tutorial
Find a piece of string that is long enough to tie around your neck (Advanced: find string in a color that matches your outfit and is long enough).

Select an uneven number of pretzels that have not expired yet (Evil: use expired ones and feed them to someone you dislike. Muahaha) (don’t try this at home!). 5 are pretty but 3 work, too. Don’t use chocolate covered pretzels – they’ll melt!

OK now the secret to make it look awesome and not stupid: String the string through one loop of the pretzel and then out again through the other loop. Weave the other pretzels on in the same manner. Much prettier than stacking them (if you anticipate raging appetite at the end of the night you may want to go with the stupid stacked pretzel version for practicality).

As for the earrings I used looped earring wire that I have from my jewelry making projects. However, if you have any kind of loop earrings they should work just fine. Plop a pretzel on each and bam, you’ve made yourself some pretzel earrings! Now wasn’t that fun?!

Culture, Friends, Professional Life, USA, Visitors, Weather

Snow!

January 18, 2008 8 Comments

Yes that’s right, we got some snow this week! It only lasted 15 hours but it was fun while it lasted. I hope that was all of winter for me this year but I think the forecast said snow for tomorrow and temperatures on Sunday from -10 – 2C. Fun – NOT! I can’t quite believe that it’ll be that cold but we’ll see.

So anyway, Rich and I had a great weekend here in the Queen City. After a yummy dinner with Stefan at Fiamma’s (service took forever but the food was good) I picked Rich up at the airport and we spend the night chatting and catching up. Good times! To make his trip worth wile, we did a touristy thing on Saturday and checked out Historic Latta Plantation. It was actually really nice with a civil war winter camp enactment and we enjoyed the sunshine out at their lake (yes it was still nice and warm then). A huge pasta lunch warmed us up at home again and then we relaxed some before it was time to head out again. We took the light rail (so cool) to uptown and watched the Bobcats lose against the Detroit Pistons. The game was well worth the 15$ tickets we got but unfortunately the cats lost in the very last minute. :(. But we had fun and continued to Fuel Pizza for dinner and then met up with Giorgio and some other people at Feast and then went to HOM where we danced the night away. Max was in town and he was super nice and dropped us off at home after closing time.
Sunday we strolled through my neighborhood for a long time with quick stops to grocery shop and grad a coffee. It felt so European to haul around groceries and walk around on side walks. Haha. At home we watched The Man of Aran, which our tour guide on the Aran Islands had talked about in Ireland. Interesting movie… Sushi at Ru Sans was a nice grand finale for a great weekend and it was sad to drop of Richie at the airport on Monday.

This week has been good so far. Cooked and watched National Treasure with Giorgio and then went to P.F. Chang’s with Vanessa and there should be more fun coming my way this weekend.

Work is going well. I love the combination of all that creative marketing stuff with the technical machine stuff and I’m learning so much. And good news, my boss wants me to stick around after my internship (yay)so it’s back to working on visa crap. Yugh! So seeing that I might be here for a few more years (let’s hope) I did some credit history building today and opened a savings account as well as applied for a credit card. Not too sure that they’ll give it to me but the lady insisted that we try that first before getting a secured credit card. OK then. What with my student ID good until March that might actually work. We’ll see.

Travel, USA, Weather

First Snow and I’m Still Here

November 14, 2007 6 Comments

Yup, we got the first snow today. It’s only a very light drizzle of tiny snowflakes but still. Never thought I’d still be here when that happens. Looks like I’ll be here a bit longer as my company pushed back my flight to the end of next week.

As for the blank fields in my visa forms, I called the super expensive consular customer service line andgot thrown out of the loop after 5 minutes… Grand! The next time I was smarter and pressed 1 for English so I got to talk to someone rather quickly. Turns out I can’t just walk up there and ask for them to fill the 3 tiny fields in. He suggested sending it in but I didn’t have time for that. So then he finally gives me some general email address (think Berlin@officialsomething). I emailed them from my gmx account but don’t hear back from them. So then I email them from my never in use gmail account because gmx sometimes is considered spam (*gasps*). Today, more than 24 hours later I get an automatic system reply that my message didn’t get through. I mean, what the heck am I supposed to do when I can’t get in touch with these people?! Grrrrrrrr!
I mean I knew that getting the visa was not the end of it, I’d still have to deal with the people at border control but all this stuff in between is just totally unnecessary and oh so frustrating. I guess I’ll call the 0900 super expensive hotline again today and ask them how the mail in process works because now I have enough time to do that – though I’d rather not give away my passport with the visa right now… with my luck… yikes….. *grumble*

Family, Friends, Travel, USA, Weather

Byebye Oma Auguste

August 26, 2007 7 Comments

Yay first time that I got to go online from home this week… our neighbor’s unsecured wireless signal is really NOT strong… It works for my roommate’s new macbook but my crappy old Microsoft wireless card is not digesting it well.

Overall this week was really nice but it was overshadowed by my paternal grand-ma’s passing over. After three weeks in hospital (which I didn’t know she was because my dad tends to not tell me things like that….) she died early this week. Good timing I dare say as at least that way I’ll get to go to her funeral when I’m back in Germany. I’m sad she’s gone and I feel horrible for my dad – I’m basically his only close family left – but I think my grandma is happy that she’s passed over to the other side and in her believes close to her daughter again. So not too much mourning, I think she’s had a great life and made the most of it and that’s the most important thing. Unfortunately death is part of life as much as birth and I think after 79 years it’s alright to die. But still… 🙁

Other than that, I’ve been busy socialising with a birthday party, bar time during the week, chilling with the neighbors, visiting old time friends in their house and BBQing, pool time and then today my German friend Siggie and his family invited me to go out to the lake with their boat. Of course today is the first day that the sun is not shining. Oh the irony. Though it might actually be nicer that way and definitely better for my skin ;). We’ve had temperatures from 90-105F every day that I’ve been here. I thought the pilot was kidding when he said “welcome to Charlotte, the temperature is 46°C” uhm no and that wasn’t even the hottest day…

Well, time has definitely flown by these past 2.5 weeks and I can’t believe I’m back on the plane on Wednesday night. Wow! I’m just hoping the visa process will go smoothly and semi-quickly cause even though I’ve been super busy every day there’s still so much I wanna do.
Anyways, hope you’re all doing alright, I havn’t really had the chance to read many blogs lately….

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