Just when you think it's safe to breathe......

Life hits the fan!  You would think we would know by now, or at least have an inkling when things go smooth not to think we're out of the woods LOL.

But..... we did, and Boy,weren't we!
We went on a quick trip into Germany last week to check out the newish Exchange on the base in Spangdahlem. We looked around and weren't all that impressed with the way the store looked, the employees, or the empty shelves, but we DID have an awesome lunch...... TACOBELL!  I know :-) but on a continent where Mexican food consists of tortilla chips, TacoBell is like a little slice of heaven. When we came out of base, we needed gas, so we went looking for the nearest town with a gas station, only to get the "CHECK OIL" light. We stopped, and checked, but it was full, so we sat for a bit, checked it again, and it still registered full, so we started the car, to be greeted by a really odd noise. So we turned it off again and called the insurance roadside assistance people. This was not an easy task. Not because the number wasn't readily available, or my phone wasn't working right, but because this girl couldn't figure out how to dial the number! LOL. You see, instead of 0 for international, and the country code, lose the first 0 for the city code and dial the rest of the number as given, they somehow managed to have a + in front of the number.......... I have looked at this since we came home, but I figured it just meant you needed an extra number if you called from out of country, never realizing that you actually DIALED the + and the number! DUH!

I sometimes really wished somebody would write a manual for people that haven't been here for a while. Since I speak the language (kind of) and grew up here, people assume I know these things! :-)

Well, once I figured that little bit of information out, we got a tow to Bitburg. Mind you, we called around 1, the tow got there at 4 and by 5.30 we finally got the ok to rent a car. At that time, we were told, it was not sure whether we would get the car home, or whether we would have to either get it there on our own dime, or had to turn it over to the insurance, in Germany. Mind you, we're now looking at walking 2 miles to the carrental place, 20 minutes before they're gone for the weekend, and a bunch of shit in the car that we're not sure of whether we ever see it again...... So we took my purse and Mikes tools out of the trunk and started walking. When we got to the carrental place, we found out that the car they had booked for us would cost us 150! Euro's for 24 hours. We also found out, that we would have to pay for it, because it was not covered in the insurance, even though it stated on the paperwork, that "repatriation of car and occupants" was a covered benefit. That was something we would have to clear with the insurance broker, we were told, but if we wanted the car we better decide fast, because it was already past closing. So we took the car, went back to base for more TacoBell, and started for home.
On the way, instead of smalltalk, we were figuring things out.... We would have to take the car back to Aachen, but we had transport home, because the train that runs thru our town, comes from there. We had no idea if the trip would cost 3 Euro's per person or 30, but we were in no position to check, so that went on the list of "to do's before the rental goes back"
We needed to go by base and pick up things Mike would have a heck of a time getting home on the train...... also on the list.
We needed to get cat-food (they don't sell the dry food here in town, and let's face it, me, carrying a 10 pound bag home on the train after which would come a 15 minute brisk walk, was just nog going to happen, so...... added that too.
There were a couple more things, so by the time we hit the house, we had a plan of attack for Saturday, and a train ticket for Mike to get to work on Sunday, and we would do more thinking when we heard back from the insurance (Which turned out to be Wednesday afternoon!)
Wednesday, we found out that the car would come home, but there was no indication who would pay for it. This needed to be decided by the insurance broker, who had left the office by the time the roadside assistants people called, and who will not be back in the office until TUESDAY! The Roadside Assistant lady did tell us, that it could take up to 3 weeks for the car to get here, so at least we knew that we would have to start saving our 1 and 2 Euro coins, so Mike could buy his way to work for that time frame..... (It's amazing what looks like progress, sometimes.....)
The paperwork from the insurance states that we were supposed to be able to get replacement transportation, but that question will have to wait with the one about who pays for things, until the insurance broker is in the office. I left a message on wednesday, didn't hear back from them, so sent an email on Thursday, and will call again on Tuesday at 9.30 when they get back in. (I have to make sure I call between 9.30 and 12.30,  or between 1.30 and 4.30 to catch anybody, but they usually just let it go to voicemail, and try to call back about 10 minutes before they close, so if you don't pick up, they're off the hook from calling back)  They've been good (as good as insurance will be) when we've had a claim, but it's unbelievable how much they don't know on things they really should, and how you have to hunt every little bit of information down, to get anything done. There's no volunteering of information, at any time, on anything. If  you don't think about it, you'll never know, unless you need to. This makes for some very interesting turns of events!

So that's been our week..............
Saturday, I turned Grump, and scrapped all day. Mike was looking for cars (IF we need a new car, I want my KA back!) and I got a lot done on the kits I was running behind on, so I will post those below. And than............ there was dinner! I'm not a bad cook, just a clueless one, obviously LOL. I have been wanting to make a quiche, ever since my sister bought me a springform. So yesterday, I felt brave, and started..... The spinach didn't work out, because between the paper and rocks that were in the frozen package, I knew, if I put it in the quiche, I wouldn't eat it anyway, so I unceremoniously dumped it in the garbage, and happily soldiered on with the rest of the recipe. I am a grown-up, I can adapt! HA! That thought only lasted until I poured the eggs in the dish, and it came out the bottom as fast as I poured it in at the top. Obvioulsy, you CANNOT replace a solid crust with potatoewedges!  So, it ended up being a not so bad ovendish, that had no particular structure what-so-ever. If I had just started out with throwing everything in a square dish, I would have been done about 2 hours faster LOL.

YUP! I'm done! Thanks for sitting thru this conversation, and if you  need a tylenol for that starting headache..... I totally understand! :-)

For the eye-candy and (hopefully) a treat after reading this far:

Final Day page of the Progressive Scrap over at The Studio.

This picture was taken thru a porthole at the aquarium. I was so happy it came out this way. One of the few that were completely in focus. I'll have to get some pointers from my sister how to get thru 5 Inches of plexiglass and still have everything clear in the pictures :-)

Boo's One Step Beyond kit #17. Coming out today.

This HAS to be my favorite picture of Jesse. There's just something about the whole thing, that makes me smile when I look at it. I'm sure you'll see it go by many more times......

Boo's kit Summer Whispers.

Two of my loves on one page....... Mike and Iris' :-) I'm not sure what happened to the color of the Iris when I merged the layers, but they were NOT this blue. They were more the color of the one on the bottom, but a little less bright. Sometimes, (and I'm sure its me "not getting something" about the settings) photoshop just seems to have a different idea what the end-page should look like than me. LOL

Because of You is the name of BooLandDesigns kit.

Boo's One Step Beyond #16, combined with page 18 from her  Photo-album series.

I hear a vacuumcleaner calling............... I wonder if it will stop if I don't react? Probably not! LOL

Don't forget to hug a loved one!

What do you feed your pet?

I was doing a check on petfood recalls, after seeing an article on "Recent recalls", which turned out to be "not so recent" by the way.......   Somewhere buried on the USDA Website, I found this little bit of information that scared the stuffing out of me........

NOT KIDDING!!!!
WARNING: If you are a "visual" person, and kindhearted, you  may want to skip this post. It is not a pretty picture! I just don't think it is common knowledge, and it shocked me into posting this, just in case you want to know/think you should know, but didn't. 

I have to admit, I didn't want to know, I'm not happy I know, because it's one of those things you can't "un see" and I wish I could forget, but for the sake of our fuzzy roommate..... I needed to know!  For those not wanting to read past this part, let's just say this: Perky is a  V E R Y   finnicky eater, but I think he's going to have to get used to homemade.....

Diversion requests will be handled on an ad hoc basis. The *Center* will consider the requests for diversion of food considered adulterated for human use in all situations where the diverted food will be acceptable for its intended animal food use. Such situations may include:

a. Pesticide contamination in excess of the permitted tolerance or action level.

b. Pesticide contamination where the pesticide involved is unapproved for use on a food or feed commodity.

c. Contamination by industrial chemicals.

d. Contamination by natural toxicants.

e. Contamination by filth.

f. Microbiological contamination.

g. Over tolerance or unpermitted drug residues.

Some general policy issues to be considered while evaluating proposals for diversion of food considered to be adulterated to animal feed use are:

a. A seizure action and a voluntary request for diversion are two separate processes. A seizure action and a request for diversion cannot legally be processed simultaneously. No diversion request submitted under this guideline will be considered once a seizure recommendation has been forwarded to headquarters. If a seizure recommendation is withdrawn and if the requirements of this policy are met, a diversion request may be entertained. Naturally, a diversion-based means of reconditioning seized articles may be an appropriate means of meeting the requirements of a court-ordered consent decree arising from a seizure.

b. Diversion may only be allowed where there is a legally enforceable assurance that the subject foods will not be placed into interstate commerce before the request is approved and the products appropriately diverted (i.e., meats not under USDA detention but nevertheless containing illegal residues would be appropriate for seizure or state embargo but not for diversion if the meats were already shipped in interstate commerce). Accordingly, this policy will primarily apply to embargoed goods or bonded goods to assure adequate control of the adulterated goods.

c. Where diversion is legally appropriate, data are required to demonstrate that the diverted use poses no safety hazards to the animals consuming the diverted food and to the public who may be exposed to edible tissues of such animals.

d. The diversion policy does not sanction or authorize the blending of the adulterated foods, i.e., the policy does not authorize the diluting of an adulterated product to below a tolerance or action level.

*Material between asterisks is new or revised*

Issued: 11/1/81
Revised: 3/95

This is just as scary as the article I read a while ago, where "It is a general practice in the petfood industry to use cremains of pets not returned to the owner or euthanized at a shelter, as part of the mineral content in both dog and cat food"  This means (at least in my mind) that the "necessary" ash content in petfood, might just be Fido from next door........

HELLO!! that is cannibalism, and did that same "general practice" not orchestrate Mad Cow Disease?  I don't want to be an alarmist, but what the hell are we doing here? 

I have tried to be accepting of the labels that have "animal byproducts" and "ash" as their main ingredients, because, let's face it, you can't find petfood without it, but if table scraps are not good for our pets, how can something that's NOT good for us to the point that it should be destroyed, end up in their "USDA approved pet food"?!?!? 

I didn't want to ruin anybody's day, and if I somehow offended you by writing this, I sincerely apologize, but, like I mentioned before..... it scares me that, not only do we not know what's in our food, any label can be manipulated so it looks like there's nothing wrong, and it's perfectly legal to disguise things that way...... If it can be done in petfood, what do we not know about ours?!

More than ever, if you have a fuzzy roommate.......... Hug it tightly tonight!

This is the link to the petfood article that started this: petfood

In case you think it's a only a European thing......US link
This is the USDA article.... USDA

A little slow.....

I was just wondering about a friend of mine, who hasn't posted on her blog since May 28, and than I noticed, I hadn't posted since the 21st ! LOL
I think (not sure though) this qualifies as a "DUH!" moment. At the very least the pot and kettle come to mind. But..... I have a little bit to catch you up on.  I should be "doing chores" but for starters, it's 84 Degrees inside the house and I do my best work around 65 :-) plus, I also started a different schedule. Monthly goals, attached to daily chores. With Mike coming home at unscheduled/odd hours, and my problem of not wanting to do housework when he's here, unless he's working too, there was no way I could do what was on the schedule for any given day, and I'm behind again..... So I'm trying something else.

THE ARNHEM ZOO WAS AWESOME!!!!! I was going to go by myself, than we were going to go by train, and since we wanted to leave about 2 hours before the first train would depart our little village, we ended up driving. It was so nice. We talked almost the whole way up. Mind you, this was 2 hours uninterrupted, 2-way conversation, no phone, no tv.... nothing  :-) We chatted like we used to on our midnight star watching trips in the dessert. That alone made the day great!

We were at the zoo 15 minutes before it opened, and about 50th in line, but not only were ALL the registers open, taking money, and handing out tickets, the gates were open to walk on in to the zoo as well. Not like some (the one here included) where the employees make their way to the register right at openingtime, take their time to open up, get settled etc, and THAN someone makes their way to the gate that will allow you to get a ticket, before opening the gate to the zoo itself........... Since the zoo opened at 9, and closed at 7, I was looking forward to 10 hours of zoo-time. There was just a little miscalculation in my fiendish plan....... my body!

We started out in the big greenhouse and thru there to the safari part, to the ocean part, where we sat in awe over the biggest aquarium either one of us had ever seen. There were various basins, that seemingly seamlessly  turned into eachother. We saw flat sharks (I know, they have another name, I just don't know it for sure, but I think they were sand sharks LOL) BLUE starfish, a fish that looked like a box, or as Mike put it, an early submarine, all squared. It was so cool. Even Mike was interested, and he has nothing with fish, normally. I did realize that THIS is what I remembered as being the cave aquarium in Valkenburg, which turned out to be a dingy, wet, freak-show, so....... Now I know that I didn't totally lose my mind, it was just discombubbled on the location. LOL. Than we went back thru the greenhouse, saw some more tropical plants, got strafed by a bat, and went into the desert. We were so looking forward to the TEX-MEX restaurant for lunch, and had planned the route so we would end up there between 11 and 1, and were sorely dissappointed. Not only was it not a restaurant, but the whole Tex-Mex experience consisted of Dos Equus beer, and tortillachips........... so we had coffee and a piece of apple-pie and called it good. After "lunch" we also noticed that we wouldn't make it till closing time, but we happilly kept going. I kept telling Mike that we shouldn't have sat down, but he wasn't buying it..... After the Desert, we went back thru the greenhouse, and on to the Rimba, where the non african big cats were. The tigers didn't like eachother very much, they were on opposite ends of the area they were in. They had a cat I had never seen, or heard of.... the Sri Lanka Panther. SOOOOO beautiful! It had a very nice habitat, with a little waterfall and "fool around in" pond, visible from 2 different sides.

I managed to actually get a decent picture of him to..... :-)

After the Rimba, we went to the Mangrove, where it seemed to be mainly birds, and to our surprise, wallaby's.

While walking around, we decided that they must be rebuilding a lot of the paddocks in that area, because about 1/3 was empty and it had all but disappeared from the sign posts telling you which direction to go :-)

When we discovered we had taken a sit down break about every half hour since lunch, we decided it had been enough, since Mike still had to drive 2 hours to get us home, and we called it a day at 5.30. 

A wonderful, tiring, relaxed, perfect day!

I've been building scrap pages with the pictures we took, and as soon as they are done, I will post them. It's so nice not to have to remember where the parts came from, because I'm only posting them here and they are going straight into an album after I print them :-)

I finally met a dear friend from the site that got me into Digi Scrapping, Deco-Pages in person. I met Helen in Venlo, and we hit it off, like I thought we would, but sometimes you just don't know what happens between "on line" and "in your face" and you end up losing a good online friend in the process. NOT so, this time, I'm happy to say!

I think I'm all caught up with you, so I'm going to quit for now, and see if the temperature in the kitchen is down enough to light the stove and start dinner. In my infinate wisdom (no laughing!) I decided to make a roast today, so after the browning process, it needs to simmer a couple of hours, for that fall-of-the-bone tenderness I like, putting that much loved (NOT!) humidity and heat in the house... as if 80-some degrees with 79% humidity didn't do the trick on its own :-(

Don't forget to love a hugged one! :-)