The system is a little strange. Mostly because the characters are a strange cross between a postman and a inquisitor in the times of the wild west. More specifically you are a young man (or woman because we are rather modern in this one regard) who was chosen to leave his village and graduate as dog in the capital. After a 6 week crash course you get a horse, a ton of letters, a route, a copy of the book of life and some nice companions who have as much clue about how to lead grown men and women back on the right way as you yourself, but who have faith — more or less — that they will manage.

It’s really fun to play in this setting however it is quite hard to uphold the high morale standards of the community when faced with a poor woman who has a very bad conscience because she actually thinks of leaving her extremely bad behaving husband who she was forced to marry in the first place. That aside definitely something worth trying out, too bad summer is almost over.

The site offering the most TV series (in Germany) seems to be lovefilm. I went for a two week trial of the one DVD flatrate and so far it’s extremely comforable. However there is a little downside. The round trip time for DVDs seems to be at least 4 days because the shipping center is somewhere in the far north of Germany. This is a little more than I expected especially given that they don’t ship on weekends which more or less makes it one DVD per week. This is actually fine for feature movies but too slow if it comes to TV series and definitely not what I had in mind when I read “flatrate”.

To be fair the German post service issued a press release stating that letters might take a little longer durring summer holidays, but given the location of the shipping center I don’t think it’s going to get much faster, so I’ll just have to see. Maybe taking the 2 DVDs flatrate option is a viable way to go because then I can at least have one here at all times.

Round trip time aside this is a great service and I will definitely keep using it.

However there was a kind of training that was only available to premium members – or was it a service module, I don’t remember – but I wanted to give it a try without spending extra money back then and now there was my chance. They have two bodytec units and people training at the units kept telling tall stories about how intense the training is and how bad their sore muscles hurt afterwards, so I talked them into giving me a test session with one of those.

Bodytec is a new and somewhat disputed form of electric training. You put on a vest and a few bands around arms and legs that deliver electrical impulses to those body parts making your muscles contract. While this device shocks you gently, you get into various positions where you use the muscles to be trained. Nothing is for free, not even fancy electric training. The incredible thing is after five minutes you are sweating like you have just been in a treadmill for 50 minutes. This only being a test session we did all the positions 4-8 times and finished after 15 minutes of semi-intense training.

I have to say it felt pretty good and a real training session would sure be nice someday, however I really doubt if it’s worth the extra spending for the supervised training (we are playing with electricity after all). As a side note I liked the feedback of being able to take on more weight after a few weeks of training. The only feedback from this machine is your own exhaustion which is simply not that satisfying.

Then I realized that the contract for my mobile was due to expire and that there are quite a few mobiles that come with an inbuilt GPS unit. So I decided to wait and last week I finally got my new mobile and have been on a few geocaching trips since. Unfortunately we were not that lucky thus far, mostly because we started out too late and a GPS unit does not help you that much when you’re in a dark forest during the night.

Anyway, we found a few caches and I’m definitely going to geocache a few more times. On one of the weekends to come we want to try the “CSI Stuttgart – Murder in the red light district“-cache recommended by Renate which is a multi cache involving a fictional murder case. The stages of the cache mark the clues found on the crime scene and the final cache promises to reveal the murderer. Sounds fascinating don’t you think?

1. There is a children birthday party and
2. there is a party with his family.

So this weekend we first met on Saturday afternoon, with a bunch of ten year olds. There are two sides to this event. First I really love the two brothers and they usually invite a bunch of nice kids that are funny, rather enthusiastic and kind of chaotic but on the flip side they both have difficulties deciding who they actually want to invite and (surprise surprise!) end up inviting 20 friends.

No matter how much you love kids. 20 kids at there best can be a little bit of a challenge if you are adults trying to coordinate a program serving cake and settling the occasional dispute, so I was kind of relieved when there where only 14 kids. As a side note I remember Stefan talking about some strange rule saying that there should be only as many children as there are years of age to celebrate but normally he manages to enforce that there are not more than twice as many invitations of those years. (Did I mention Dominik is now ten years old.)

This year we took them to the very small street fair in Botnang, ate some cake and took them bowling or rather the German variant of bowling which was a lot of fun although bowling added a little to noise already present.

On Sunday there were aunts and uncles which renewed there respective political discussions which had not changed that much since the last family gathering and are not that much disputed but rather agreed upon. They discussed soccer and the infamous model train topic I really can’t get to like or even appreciate. However I had the chance to play with the two boys and thus had a lot of fun and the possibility to flee the political conversation (I happen not to agree with a lot of the opinions brought forth) without having to anger anybody or having to struggle to keep my mouth shut which made me luckier than the boys parents. All in all another very nice day.