There has been so much happening here that its crazy. 
Emily came to see us and the past week has been a flurry of day trips and dozens of pictures. (will blog more on that later)
Also at the same time we’ve been SO worried about the upcoming
layoffs.  Some of the floor supervisors started hinting about
layoffs back in Jan. Then about 3 weeks ago they laid off over 70 GmBh
workers. So we’ve had the axe over our heads for awhile now.  Me
personally I know we could get jobs quickly back in the states but we
had plans, we had goals people and they aren’t met yet!!!  I like
living in Germany and really want to stay awhile longer.

On the kind of cool front our 25th anniversary is Monday. 
Everytime I think about that, I think…. good lord who would have
thought it?  I’ll post pictures of that too. I made reservation
for Sunday night at a restuarant where you cook your own chicken or
steak on hot lava rocks and they are reported to have fully load baked
potatos and amazing salads. So I am really looking forward to going to
Ladenburg at trying Der Kartoffel. 

This is really short but were getting ready to take Em and some friends
of hers that just happened to be stationed at Spangdahlen on down to
the technic museum in Speyer.  Like I said busy, busy.

Sorry I haven’t been around the last couple of weeks. It is so boring
in Liz land,  even if I had written it would be drivel. For the 4
faithful readers still out there, I have one exciting thing coming
up.  I’m going to go to Holland.  Lisse to be exact. I want
to see the Keukenhof gardens and take a thousand pictures. And if at
all possible I’m going to go from there to Amsterdam so that I can go
to the Van Gogh and Rijks museums. I think I will more than likely end
up riding the train over by myself.  Bear and Mike had glazed eyes
by the time I finished telling them what I wanted to do.  Not that
I expected them to be thrilled at spending all day looking at tulips
and then all the next day looking at paintings, but sheesh, I at least
expected them to stay awake while I talked about it,  I guess not
everyone appreciates Van Gogh the way I do.

My external hard drive crashed last week. Every picture we’ve taken
while here in Europe was on that hard drive. As well as almost 3,000
songs and tons of important paperwork. Like our resumes, which could be
re-written but most of the hard copy data from that kind of stuff is
back in the States. But the pictures and songs could never be replaced.
  Bear went to a website called file scavenger or something like
that and bought a recovery program. we ran it and overnight it
recovered virtually everything.  It recovered the files but for
some reason it didn’t recover all the file names.  For the last
week or so I’ve been wading thru one file at a time and re-naming it
and then putting it back where it belongs. ie: Germany pictures in the
Germany folder, Prague in the Prague folder and they all have sub
folders. After I get the file as close to original as possible I make a
hard copy, that way if for some inexplicable reason the new hard drive
crashes it won’t matter. This time I’m making extra Cds. I’m giving
Mike a copy since he was there for most trips and I’m sending a set to
my daughter Em.(triple redundancy)  I cried when I thought I had
lost all my pictures.  Sure I have a lot of them here on xanga and
we’ve printed some out but the majority were in the original un-edited
form and no-one but me has seen them.  So I was fairly devastated
at the loss.  As soon as the recovery program ran I took a double
layer dvd and copied all the photos onto it, ( it took 5 hours just for
that) I would rather have my pics messy than not at all. So that has
been my latest 10 to 12 hour a day effort. And get this, I haven’t even
started sorting thru the music.  Gah!  My back is killing me,
I really don’t know how computer tech can sit at a desk 8 hours a day
all year long.  So if you wonder what I’m up to and what exciting
thing living in Europe has afforded me, now you know. lol.

My nose has noticed that Spring has arrived, even being stuck in the
apartment all day my eyes are itchy, watery and red and my nose is
stuffed up and I’m sneezing. Yay, for Spring. Time to get ready for
Holland! I love the flowers to much to worry about the pollen.
Go to google and type in keukenhof.com, it will bring up the gardens
homepage, there’s a small British flag at the bottom of the page so
that you can read it all in English,  you’ll see why I want to go
so bad. If this really is our last
year here in Germany it would be a crime to not go when its only 4 and
a half
hours by train.  Wish me luck!