I'll Be Back

And so I return to the low lands after frolicking in the hills of Austria. But counter to what you may think, I have very little to say right now, if only because I wish to say it all first to my husband as I recount to him the adventures of my weekend alone.

Well, my weekend alone, with a girlfriend.

I will give you one hint though: Glorious.

And I will tell you, dear friends and readers, and readers who are my friends, I missed you. I actually had a hankering, an actual craving to get at a keyboard to blog. Yes, I recognize that makes me an addict indeed.

But if I am, then certainly so are you.
You came back to check on me while I was away, admit it.

My desire to blog or to at least check in on my commenters was quickly dampened when I realized that the only computer available to me for a good portion of the weekend was *gasp* a dial up connection. (Anno, my deepest sympathies are yours.) But beyond that the computer was outfitted--and rightly so, since I was in Austria-- with a GERMAN keyboard. Should you think that is not a challenge in and of itself, I direct you to this passage from an email I tried to send to Jennifer over the weekend. I just wanted to ask her a simple question and put a simple question mark behind the sentence and yet it took positively FOREVER to find the key with the correct symbol. And from there it just went completely downhill. Look, I will show you.

"okay, see? that took me like 2 minutes to find the dang question mark on this keyboard. Also I have to go back and fix every y since the z is in it´s place... and where there should be the apostrophe is this: Ä... and don´t even ask how long it took to find that colon!)"

I also sent an email to my sister in which I gave up on the backspace key almost entirely. With the z/y misunderstanding fiasco problem thing tripping me up I decided to type uninterrupted and uncorrected. As a result, most of the email looked something like this:

"...zou should reallz scope that out and see. Well, onlz if zou want to.
okaz, I alreadz miss zou. Where are zou going for familz trip? I love zou Mindo, more than I can saz.
hehe. that all looks funny with z´s where y´s should be.
(it took me a long time to type that last sentence)
Love,
jenn "

After that, I didn't send any more emails.

But I took photographs--lots of them, I sampled Austrian cuisine, I learned some German words.
And I--dare I admit it here? I relaxed.

Amongst the smattering of Austrians I met this weekend, the first response upon learning that I was an American was a decided 'cool', spoken in English and accompanied by a thumbs up gesture. Venturing further into conversation the second--mentioned with a mischievous grin--was 'Don't you agree that Arnold Schwarzenegger would make a very good American president? He's Austrian you know'

That there must be what they refer to as National Pride.