Aussiedog

Excellent idea! Can you come around tomorrow to help me carry my BBQ into the kitchen?

Gas for me hands down. Easier, cleaner, quicker and as all good cooks understand, more important than all of that , you can control the heat. No contest.

My garden is looking tip-top. Never had the vege patch ready to go this early.   Still putting off all the little (and bigger) painting jobs though - I'm guessing there will be time for that.   Surprisingly, our teenage kids have willingly joined us for cards in the evenings - who would have thought.   Still somehow feel that I'm not using my time as productively as I should. Although I did manage to work out how to adjust the gears on my mountain bike. Thanks YouTube!

And don't forget this:   https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erbschaftsteuer_in_Deutschland   (There's no such thing as a free lunch - well, not in some countries at least.)

I'm halfway through this book: We Are The Weather, by (the brilliant) Jonathan Safran Foer.   According to him, there are 4 areas we could and should all look at if we wanted to decrease our personal carbon/greenhouse gas footprint.   1. Have fewer children 2. Fly less 3. Drive less 4. Eat less meat   (Read the book for why this would help!)   I'm not vegetarian, and don't eat a lot of meat anyway, but have started to monitor just how much I do eat each week with the aim of cutting down my meat consumption.   Flying less will be the hardest personal challenge - I just can't help wanting to escape from here to warmer climes when I feel like it.   I don't drive much really and don't see how I could cut down significantly.   The cue has been back in the rack for a long while now, so the not having more children is no issue.   Anyone else thinking about these issues and consciously changing the way they live?        

  Just how many shades of gray, exactly? 50? For your "living room"? Sure. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink...   I'm clearly missing out living here in Karlsruhe.

  All sounds familar to me! I also faced that kind of choice (Sofie's choice to some extent). Certainly sucks, I know.   There's a ton of advice here - some of it actually useful - on how to meet people/make friends. Use the search function.   Good luck, for what it's worth.

  You are super fit, your diet is very good etc. So, don't worry. You'll probably live to be 98...or you'll get hit by a bus tomorrow.

This post was inspired, in part, by having seen some guy proudly wearing a 'Bayern Munich 5X Champions'  (or something like that) T-shirt this morning. I think he had just sprung sprightly out of a black BMW convertible.   I like watching soccer on the tele every now and then. I find the Champions League games worthy of my interest. What I don't understand is why anybody would seriously follow the Bundesliga. It is clearly dominated by the club which has the most financial resources behind it. This to me makes it, as a competetion, a complete farce. Some games are indeed beautiful to watch, but the result... Who cares? Interestingly, where I come from, the controlling bodies do everything they can to make the competition (AFL is the name of the league - Australian Rules Football, the game) as equal as possible. A team can only spend the same amount of money as each other team to pay their players (called a salary cap) and teams that end up down at the bottom of the ladder one year are given the first picks of the young and talented players in the next year's draft. Etc. Excitingly, a team which had not won the premiership in over 50 years came from nowhere and won it last year. This year the competition looks even more even and at this stage there are about 8 teams who could take it out. This system gives a supporter of of a traditionally 'weak' club a reason to go to a game other than to get pissed and turn off for a while - his team might actually win! Does anyone else give a stuff?!  Is this just another topic that is off-limits in Germany?