Strangest thing yesterday: I was taking the bus to an English lesson after work yesterday. I agreed to take on this group at some company on the other side of the city because a) I could use a little bit of extra cash, b) it's only 5 lessons and c) the company right across the road from the final bus stop of the same line that runs past my real job ( Read more... )

 The last job I had in the States was at a jewlery/clothes store in Annapolis. $6 an hour, cash. The store was very strange. It was run by this woman who seemed to just sell things she liked. It was much too small to really have both jewelry and clothes, but that's what she wanted to sell, so it was packed up to the ceiling with stuff.

I got 5% ( Read more... )

There's no work to do today, so I have eight hours to kill somehow without surfing the Interwebs.  Unfortunately for you, this is how.

Let's see... the next jobs I had must've been my workstudy jobs.   Working the front desk at our dorms (checking IDs and checking people in).  That was the world's easiest job, looking back.  The hours and pay were ( Read more... )

I'm feeling nostalgic today.  It's not unusal in Austria to spend your entire career with a single employer.  It's becoming slightly less common, but not anything like in the US.  My mother-in-law started as an apprentice at her company at the age of 15 and retired from it at 58 or so.  Lots of people at this company got their jobs straight out of ( Read more... )

It's been kind of a lousy week.  I'm just in one of those crabby moods, you know, the kind you just can't get out of.  I'm sure it doesn't help that the weather has been cold and wet.  I did manage to get some of my sewing done yesterday though.  I've had a pile of stuff on the sewing pile for... well, to be honest, the stuff at the bottom has ( Read more... )

Stefan had a hankering for pudding yesterday afternoon, so I went to go make some.  Come to find out we don't have any pudding mix!  Then Stefan wandered into the kitchen and happened to see the cornstarch in the same "baking" drawer where the pudding mix would've been if we'd had any.  "You can make pudding without mix", he said.

Like a complete ( Read more... )

I'm in the middle of a translation from English into German. Some guy in the company refused to write his paper in German and have it translated, claiming it would never be needed in German. So, you guessed it: now someone needs it in German, and I have to translate it going the wrong way. It's much much harder to translate something from English ( Read more... )

Stefan was out with friends last night, and I was in an unusually contemplative, maybe even melancholy mood. I think I've been spending too much time on Facebook, because I started turning the whole concept of "Friends" over and over in my brain. When I first got on Facebook, I friended virtually everyone I've ever met. Now I've gone back on that, ( Read more... )

I learned a lesson on babies this weekend. Some friends were visiting from Vienna and brought their 10 month old along. Now, I don't know the first thing about babies, other than that I'd like to have a few of my own eventually. But as it turns out, they're pretty simple things (superficially). They just need to be fed and changed, basically. The ( Read more... )

One of our staples here in terms of meals is "spicy spaghetti". It's super super quick, we cook it in about 20 minutes, and you only need a few ingredients. I think the most important part is having good noodles. We only buy De Cecco noodles, although I'm not sure if you can get them in the States. Barilla is good too. The main thing is that the ( Read more... )