My Big Idea

Well, big for me at least! I have been playing around with the idea of making a scrapbook. If you knew me personally, you would know that this is not really my thing! I have lots of friends who are great at scrap booking and I always love the way that their finished products look. It is just a little on the cutesy side for me. Plus, I have never thought I’d be all that good at it! However, I think I have decided to start one. My idea is this….I’d like to dedicate one or two pages for each trip that Deaner and I go on over the next three years. For each trip I would pick a few of my favorite pictures and use them along with our ticket stubs from buses/trains/museums ect. I’d like to have the name of the city on the page and the dates that we were there. The end product being a chronologically documented timeline of all our adventures. What does everything think? Any advice from those seasoned scrap bookers out there? I don’t think that there are going to be any really great scrap booking stores here in Wiesbaden so I was thinking I would probably have to wait until I go home to hit up Michael’s. I won’t have to buy everything at once because I will be creating the pages as I go. I’ll just buy enough stuff to get me through the end of the year. I’d love any tips that anyone can offer me!

Today is another dreary day in Wiesbaden. I am assuming that my friends got here safely but I haven’t heard from them yet. I am sure that they are exhausted! I’m just guessing but I know the flight from Atlanta to Frankfurt is approximately 9 hours. The flight from San Francisco to Atlanta is about 5 hours. That makes for a VERY long flight with two adults, one 1 year old, and only 2 airline seats! Ugh! I am sure they are sleeping some of the trip off right now!

I have a question for those of you in Germany. This happened to us twice this weekend and really annoyed me. Deaner and I always carry cash when we go anywhere in Germany. For those not familiar, Germany is really behind the times and it is never a sure thing that a store or restaurant will accept credit cards. This has been a HUGE adjustment for us! Anyways, we always have cash to pay restaurant bills and we typically leave a tip for our waiter or waitress. Saturday night we went to a restaurant we eat in often and when it came time to pay the bill Deaner gave the waitress 2, 20 euro bills. I honestly don’t remember what the cost of the dinner was but the bottom line was that the waitress couldn’t make change. She asked me if I had exact change which of course I did not. So, she gave me back a 5 or a 10, thus shorting herself over a euro on the bill and making no tip. Deaner said “oh! Well we were going to leave you a tip” and she responded with “you can do it next time”. Of course we both felt badly about it but I wasn’t about to give her a 5 or 10 euro tip (which is what she would have gotten if I hadn’t accepted it back)!! What is up with that? Then at lunch the next day it happened to us again somewhere else! Geez! Deaner paid for our 11.50 euro meal with a 20 and the guy was only able to give us back a 10, shorting himself 1.50 euro. At this point I was really irritated and didn’t feel bad about it. If a restaurant can’t make change for CASH I sort of feel like it is their problem! It isn’t like we are paying for things with 100 euro bills or something! These are 20’s people! If you want to be paid for your WHOLE bill, have some change handy!! This never happened in the States. Probably because everyone used plastic!

Anyways, those are my stories for this morning. I don’t really have anything to do today after lunch with Deaner. I did all my ironing like a good Haus Frau yesterday. Not sure how I will fill up my afternoon ! I hope my Sookie Stackhouse books don’t take too long to get here! I hope everyone has a good Tuesday!