Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Moving Day

Well, it's finally here. We are moving out of Michener today, after 3 and a half years. Looks like it is going to be just me and my Dad loading the trailer in the balmy weather. We hired some piano movers so we don't have to worry about it and hopefully they get their act together and get the piano out before my Dad gets here with the trailer. I don't want to have to mess around with them when we are moving. Here goes!
Jeff

Monday, January 28, 2008

3 Nights Left...

Only 3 more nights and then we are out of our place. Good riddance. We had Erika's birthday party yesterday, and I think it went pretty well, considering our place is in shambles. The Build-a-bear thing went really well, and all the kids seemed to enjoy it. Of course, Erika picked the pinkest bear with sparkles, and then dressed her pinky bear in pink underwear, pink shoes, pink dress, pink purse and pink wings. Apparently she likes pink. Jodi's cake was a masterpiece, as always, except the sparklers we used on it created some shrapnel on the icing. I also had a timely battery change for the camera right when we were singing 'happy birthday'. Typical. Ryan and Elyse were up this weekend too on Saturday and we ate and played some Wii sports. Erika took off this morning with Grandma Snyder to stay there until we move our stuff into storage in Medicine Hat on Thursday. It's going to be pretty quiet without her around. We also offloaded a lot of stuff to Tim and Lesley, Dallas and Kory and Kim and Shane, so we will have less to move Wednesday. By the way, the weather forecast looks spectacular for moving: a high of -30°C on Wednesday for moving out, and a high of -29°C on Thursday for putting the stuff in storage. Not to mention the -48°C wind chill we are supposed to have. Delightful. Thanks in advance to my Dad, Kent (haven't really asked him yet) and Tim for bearing the cold weather.
The piano problem is fixed, thanks Megan, who diligently found a home for it, and we don't have to roll it out in front of the BFI or down the road for that matter.

One more thing, for those not comment inclined (i.e. Lesley). If you want to make a comment (apparently, Lesley did, I don't think she even tried), you click on the link at the bottom of the post that says '0 comments' (well, they pretty much all say 0 comments, Chris broke our streak), and it opens up a new window. From there, enter in your message, then complete the word verification. After that, at the bottom, you can select to sign in as a gmail/blogger person, or you can pick the next little bullet and it will ask for a nickname, which can be anything and you don't need some kind of account to do it. Then enter the nickname and click 'publish your post' and then you are done. Enjoy Lesley.

Ahhh... goodbye Michener. Here's a nice picture from the back.

I'll get some party pictures up when we download them to my home computer.
Jeff

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Yes I am Involved

How can I be attached to this place.... Today was my last day with just me and kids hanging out in Michener Park and I find myself feeling sad about this. Erika is heading off to spend a few days in Medicine Hat with Grandma Snyder after her party on Sunday so it's just me and Reesey as of Monday. I have dreamed of the day we would pack up and head out of here but now it's time and it dosen't seem like i pictured it. Maybe because Jeff still is not fully finished and we aren't moving into my dream house 10 blocks from here. Don't get me wrong this adventure is amazing to me and I know we are going to make a lifetime of memories as a family. At the same time we are a family of 4 now and with that comes so much responsiblity....so my adventuresome side can't run quite as free as it has in the past. Once we are out of here and freeloading off of family i'm sure I won't even remember my posh life in Michener and will be able to wrap my mind around this next time in our lives.
Well, that was definatley the feminine side of this blog. Alot of rambling about feelings. Sorry to the guys who visit, but hey the girls had to read about all the technical question/issues posted earlier.
Jodi

Friday, January 25, 2008

Moving Plans

So, my Dad is bringing a trailer from Medicine Hat on Wednesday the 30th, and we are going to load it all up hopefully that night. Then we have to stick around until 10 on the 31st for the walkthrough of our apartment. I am not looking forward to that. When we moved in, the person we did the walkthrough with marked everything in 'good' condition, with assurances that the imperfections in our place were actually 'good' compared to other units. Of course, being the trusting citizen I am, I signed the walkthrough form, even though our last rental in Edmonton tried to steal our damage deposit because of walkthrough sheet problems. So what I am saying is, now for the walkthrough, they could say "well, this massive hole in the wall wasn't here when you moved in," not like we have massive holes or anything. But maybe they will be really anal. Anyway, then we are going to move most of our stuff we are keeping and not taking to Germany into storage in the Hat, and hopefully have the trailer back to the rental place by the 1st. The first test is fitting all the stuff in the trailer, and then we have to fit it all in the storage unit which is even smaller. Arghh. Yes, arghh.


I thought I would include a picture of the city (Freiburg) in Germany we will be living in. Crazy.
Jeff

Piano Problems

Ok, so we have five more nights left at our place in Edmonton. Things are getting packed relatively well, and we are trying to pack all of our Germany stuff in separate containers. It's going to be tricky figuring out what exactly we need to take with us as all of our stuff is going to be coming with us on the plane, and you only get so many bags for the baggage allowance. There are lots of unanswered questions at this point, like how do we get from the airport in Frankfurt to our place in Freiburg (2.5 hours away), or how do we get the kids to Freiburg if we aren't bringing our car seats? I am assuming we are going to take the train, but do we need car seats for it?
The biggest problem right now is trying to get rid of the piano. Unfortunately, I had the bright idea of buying a piano back in the beginning of fall, and we thought we would be going to the U.S. for my postdoc so we could take it there. Good plan. Anyway, five days left and no bites on it, so if anyone in the Edmonton area (or anywhere else for that matter, if you've got transportation) wants a piano, enjoy! The rest of our bulky appliances like the washer/dryer, mini deep freeze, and dishwasher have been sold, so that's good. Oh, we have a microwave to ditch too, although if we can't get rid of it, it would be easy to store.
Erika's birthday party is coming up this Sunday, and we are going to Build-a-Bear with some of her friends/relatives. She's pretty excited about it; we'll have to post some pictures of the bears the kids make. Having said that, with all the preparation and having relatives in town this weekend, I don't know how much packing we are going to be able to do. Uh-oh.
Well, that's about it for now, I need to get Jodi on here for some updates too.
Jeff

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Computer Stuff

Since we are moving out at the end of the month, I will be somewhat commuting from wherever we are to the university for a couple of days a week. So, for the days I am not at work, I am trying to set up some kind of remote desktop so that I can work wherever. Apparently, this isn't the easiest thing to do. My laptop runs Vista, and the work computer is a Windows 2000 machine. Also, the medicine firewall at the university doesn't like connections from the outside world on the usual remote desktop port, so I have been trying different things, like using a program called UltraVNC instead of the usual Windows remote desktop. Still doesn't work. To top it all off, our network administrator left last month so there is nobody here that can really help. Anybody have any experience trying to do this?
Packing is coming along ok. We have Erika's birthday party on Sunday, so we need to get a lot of stuff out of the way before then. I hate getting boxes. It doesn't help that I am picky as to what boxes we want. Oh well.
Jeff

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Language

I guess one of the things we need to do before we leave is learn some German while we still have time. We want to immerse ourselves over there and become somewhat fluent before we come back to Canada. Jodi picked up a couple of those German/English translation dictionaries, so we can figure out some of the common phrases. But, that only helps us for ordering schnitzel and wild boar, and there is no way we would be able make out what people might be saying to us. I want to take some kind of crash course before we go, but not an actual course here at school. Anybody else tried this and figured out a good method? There are a couple of software programs that have voice recognition that are supposed to be pretty good, albeit quite expensive. I don't know how confident I am with a program like that, and I don't want to make myself sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger to make the computer think I am doing a good job. Reminds me of the madtv clip (this one is for you Tim and Kory), "of course he does, he's my clone baby!"
Jeff


Wednesday, January 16, 2008

First Entry

Well, it is official, we are off to Germany for at least two years for my postdoctoral fellowship. We will be living in Freiburg, which is in the southwest corner of Germany, about 30 minutes from Switzerland and 15 from France. At the end of January, we will be moving out of our place in Edmonton, which will be the end of a 3 and a half year era in Michener Park. For the most part I am happy to be out of the projects and the relative dump we lived in, but there are lots of memories for us there too, including bringing both of our children home and the death of beloved Borneo. We have lots of stuff to do by the end of the month, and we are slowly working at it. After moving out, we will be nomads and imposing on our relatives for a few weeks, so that should be a good time. I'll let you know how things are progressing for the actual move as time goes on.
Jeff