Now that we’ve gone I’m really starting to feel sorry for Oma that she is now alone again day-to-day. For the past 6 months she has had us (willingly I might add) do most of the day-to-day household tasks. Now, after 6 nice and relaxing months of comfort for her she’s back on her own and needing to do all those tasks that we just did if she asked. I know she’ll never be reading this unless we hand it to her on paper, but I do hope that she understands that we don’t really want her to need to do all these tasks alone and I hope she can on some level accept a small apology for this sudden flip back to her needing to do all the work once again.

I don’t think I ever had the time to mention that for the past few weeks (maybe months) Oma has had a small fox visit to get dinner every evening. The woods are her back yard so it’s clear how the fox has easy access to the street. Each night we’d give it a container of dog food cut up on a plate. On nights when we have left over bones from lunch we’d also give the fox those. The last night we were at Oma’s house Oma saw the fox marking it’s territory on the plate.

There’s so much dog poop all over the residential streets of Vienna (all the streets for that matter) that after a little while mary started to call it “Shoepoo”. This was primarily due to the fact that half of the dog poop was strewn from it’s original place of origin by human feet.

I just want to take the time to apologize for the bad overlap/ error in the time stamps of most/ all of my blog posts these last 6 months. The error is simply that my blog is based in the time zone of St. Paul, yet I was writing them in the time zone of Vienna. Usually this only hindered/ changed what the date stamp was for blog entries that I wrote in the morning (Vienna time zone), these looked like near midnight on my blog (thus sometimes one day behind). From here on out my blog posts will be written knowingly using the time zone of St. Paul, so the error will no longer be an issue.

I’m writing this from my seat on the Austrian Airlines flight. We made it! Though we’re not at all home yet (we will be by the time you read this) we’re at least going to be in the USA in a few hours. These next few blog posts will mainly be small stories that come to mind when I’m reflecting on this 6-month trip. I hope you enjoy them, Alex.

I was too caught up in the Apple Event yesterday to blog about the ending of our time here in Austria. I’m now writing this blog post at the start of the last full day. I can’t properly believe that within a day we’ll be really heading off to the Vienna International Airport. Today will be a fast and busy day consisting of us rapidly doing the final things we want to get done here, repacking, and simply enjoying our last few hours here. This evening I’ll be making a final backup to be sure that as recent a copy of my MB as possible gets packed into our checked luggage. After I brush my teeth this evening I’ll also be packing away my bathroom bag until Thursday evening (St. Paul time). Chance are quite good that I may be too busy to blog again until the plane, therefore this blog post may be marking the end of all blog posts I write from Huchkagasse 9. Enjoy your day while I try and enjoy me super-busy last day, Alex.

We have now packed so much that we essentially have only the exact amount of clothes needed and other low-level essentials still unpacked. These primarily consist of computer equipment (some of which goes in our carry-ons home). It’s really cool, yet creepy that so much of our stuff is in such a small amount of space. The amount of time it’s taking is quite scary because it’s not taken that long at all. Enjoy, Alex.

We’ve already done nearly a whole first run of packing. We know that we’ll be repacking at least 2 more times, but most of what isn’t packed at the moment is clothes and some electronic equipment of ours. We all are feeling much better being able to fit everything in our limited 8; 22 kg bags. Eric says that he is feeling much better and I’m also not as stuffed up as I was yesterday. Enjoy, Alex.

Today is the start of 3.5 days of rapid packing at the end of which we leave for St. Paul. Currently we haven’t yet begun, but I expect that within 0.25 hours we will have. The start will likely consist of Mary’s academic books and our school-related stuff. From there I don’t really know what we’ll pack next. I’ve gotten quite stuffed up (in my nose) and Eric is worse than me, but luckily we don’t have that much else planned aside from packing. Enjoy, Alex.

If there’s anything that I hate most about the internet connection here it’s the many times a week that the connections get dropped. These drop-outs aren’t the same as what the Airport Extreme Update 2007-004 is supposed to fix. I know because it’s happening to all of us and at the same time. We know that it must have to do with the fact that we’re using a (crappy) FON radio. What’s extremely annoying about this drop-off scenario is that it persists across restarts, and since the MacBooks are known (partly) for Airport issues one of the first debugging steps is to restart the mac. Then, we’ve terminated all the (hundreds) of running applications and background utilities that we then need to start up at login and all that for no good reason since the radio itself isn’t allowing the mac online though it. The fix is then to unplug the radio, then plug it back in.

My point is that one of the things I’m looking forward to in a week is having a slightly more reliable wifi base station to use for internet access. Enjoy, Alex.