My Uncle

My Uncle Steve's Dad died this past week. I wish I could have been there for the funeral. I didn't know him very well, but my Uncle Steve is a great guy and I wish I could have been there with the family. One of the downsides of being across the ocean, I guess.

Instead of being there, we were here, in Stuttgart for the weekend. We were all settled in Friday night for a quiet night at home when one of Nate's friends/coworkers sent him a text message. Would we like to go out for a glass of Gluehwein? Well, sure. So we headed down to the Schlossplatz. In a few weeks the big Stuttgart Christmas Market will open up in that area. But for now there are a few huts selling food and wine, and a small ice skating rink. We huddled around in a corner, sipping the hot spice wine and chatting for a couple of hours.

We spent most of Saturday getting ready for our visitors. Peter, Bettina, and Sara came to our house for dinner. Nate made his famous Chicken Tetrazini, and I baked cookies for ice-cream sandwiches. We also had salad, for all those Moms out there wondering if we got all of our vegetables. After dinner we chatted and Bettina helped me to figure out my voicemail. We've had this telephone for about five months, and I've never been able to figure out how to make an answering machine message, or listen to the messages we receive. We had several old messages, which I deleted (two from Bettina, which was kinda funny)... but now I am ready to receive phone calls! Finally!!!! Nate also taught Sara the finer arts of running through the hallway and jumping onto the bean bag. She was delighted.

Today we've also been lazy. We did our usual 'listen to a sermon online' thing [For those of you that might be wondering, we are waiting to go to a German church until our German is better. It was very hard going and not being able to understand a thing. So for the time being we are listening to English sermons online. I think in a few months we'll be back at the church we were trying before.], took a nice long walk, and are planning to go out for dinner. I'm not sure where. I think I might try to get Nate to surprise me. We'll see what he choses. I'm banking on a place where we can get out of there for under 20 euros... : )

Nothing too exciting, but that's all right. I'm getting ready to fly back to the States, and so a nice quite weekend with my husband was perfect.