Negative, Negative, Negative...

I am extremely tired now. I am at the point where I say: I don't care about school at all, neither do I care about practicing more, I will just go to sleep now. I can't take it anymore. I was so proud to make it for three weeks without getting sick and without getting a lot of sleep. I don't want my health to go away, that means, that I have to go to sleep earlier.
I did practice my violin for about a half hour today, and I did horribly at my piano lesson (as usual). I don't know what is wrong with me. Everything seems to be all right at home and once I go to my teacher, I mess up everything possible (almost everything possible). Today my tiredness was also added towards doing bad. It makes me so upset!!! If I wouldn't have been silent, I might have started to cry. It is extremely disappointing to do bad, even though I put so much effort in it. I did not get better at all.
At least I have my violin. This is fun to practice. I got a new piece. It is the Kabalewski Concert C-Major. This is modern music, therefore it doesn't all sound so pretty, but it is a lot of fun to play, because it just goes. Maybe one day, when you are online, I can play a little bit of it, so that you have an idea of what I am talking about. If it wasn't for my violin, I would definitely say, that achieving the acceptance at a university would be impossible, but since I am doing ok in the violin I might still have a chance. I will try my best especially since I enjoy practicing most of the time.
What else happened today? I got my English test back. I only got 13 points on it, because I was too dumb to fill in one gap and unfortunately there were only 8, therefore this one gap cost me 2 points. I was kind of disappointed even though I knew, that this would be the result of my test. It is just that it wasn't worth all of the studying I had done to know all the sentences. I don't know how long it took me to learn them (since I was doing it while being at the wedding of my aunt as I might have told you before), and we didn't need them at all!!
Instead, there was this question, which is now clear to me, but it wasn't before. This test was important for me, because I need good grades at least in one subject. I know there will be others to come, but I wanted to have a 15 point average so that I can mess up in one of the class tests which won't be very easy this year either.
On top of that, I will not do great in French this year and I fear that I will lower my grades one point in each subject. I am probably starting to get depressed again. I will fight against it, but I am just not sure about what to expect and what to ask of myself. Do you think I am asking too much of myself by trying to get the best grades possible? I am sorry if all of this is a mess, but this is how I feel right now.
It already helped me to get better though. I am so glad to have the opportunity to type it all out.
This is probably everything interesting that went on today. It is 7 pm. I will now answer some of the blogs on reltalks as my Andacht for today and then I will finally sleep. Yayay!!

Unexpected Bible Lesson :)

My day was quite exhausting today, even though I ended up having only four hours. :) My PE teacher had to go to the doctors. Well, I did some French during my two hours that I had free. We got two pages of vocabulary, since tomorrow there is no French. I still don't understand why it has to be that much, but I am getting faster at studying and I write my vocabs while eating, therefore it is not as much time that I need. I am really glad to have found this solution.
Anyway, when I got home around 2:10, because I still drove to school since I didn't know. I started practicing my violin for about an hour or even more!! and then I slept a little bit, but just half way, because I had to pay attention to the time. At 4 Simone had her piano lesson. I showed her the stuff for her brother as well, since he forgot how to do it, even though he understood what to do yesterday :)
Teaching was a lot of fun today. I don't know what made the difference. Maybe it is my sleep, since I was able to take a nap before teaching. I just don't know.
By the way, it got a habit that I start my homework around 9. There is just too much to do. Oh one funny thing happened today, which was kind of inconvenient. Shortly past six, I wanted to go to take a walk and study my French vocabs, but the doorbell rang and Daniel (our pastor) came. We had forgotten about the Bible study lesson today. I had asked him a while ago, but he didn't have his agenda withhim, therefore I didn't remember when it was. We were talking for just over 2 hours. So there goes my sleep :( I think we came to pretty interesting conclusions, which were clear before we started talking about it, but there were some aspect that I did not think about before. For example: Adam and Eve got send out of the garden, not only because it was then impossible for them to eat from the tree of life, but also, because they would have felt extremely uncomfortable in the presence of God. I can agree with that, since they both hid from God when he was walking through the garden. Another interesting conclusion was, that Eve, when she looked at the fruit, judged it with her sense organs, therefore she gave in the temptation. Before she was answering the snake with the word of God => no act yet! I thought I would share those two results with you, since they were kind of major in the discussion.
We also settled this thing about Noah being 500 years old when he begot Sem, Ham and Japhet. It is how we said! He started having his first son Sem, or whoever was the oldest when he was 500 and then they just continued. So this makes sense, and we said before this was the only way, it could work and this is how it is. Also, one more thing, usually when it says "500 years old" it should have been translated as 499 years, because it means literally son of 500 years, which means that he has completed 499 years and is in the 500th.
That is about everything interesting that has been going on today.
Sorry, but I just remembered one more thing. My dad finally fixed the internet connection which has been retarded for over a week now. I am glad this is finally back to normal...

Short blog

My day was kind of lazy today :) When I came home from school I wrote my vocabs for today, but then after going to my violin lesson and teaching my kids, I did my photobucket, which took so long, because of internet problems and of course, before I could do that, I had to organize my pictures first. So therefore I have to learn all my vocabs and do my homework.
My teaching went great. I really like the lessons on Tuesday, but Wednesday is not that nice. Anyway, I hope that I get done with everything really quickly.
For dinner I only had a yoghurt and I will now eat an apple. It is already 9:40pm and therefore I will start now :))

My Aunt's Wedding

I don't know where to start, there is so much that has happened and actually there is no time to report on everything. Nevertheless I will get started now, because if I don't I will never finish catching up.
Sunday: I slept until 8am, and then I woke up. My mom came in my room to give me instructions on what to do with the clothes... I looked at the time and figured that 4 and a half hours are not nearly enough sleep, therefore I continued sleeping until 10:30. This was when my grandma called for some final instructions concerning my aunt's wedding, or whatever. The phone rang just too noisy to not wake up. You know I am very different from you in that point. By then, I had slept for just about 7 hours, which was not too bad. After waking up, I did the clothes and started blogging from last night, while eating rests of the food from EsTriDisk for breakfast :)
15 minutes before we had to leave, I got dressed and then we left to the place where the wedding would take place. It was really nice, it started with a show of eagles and vultures and some other birds like that... I didn't think it was too interesting, but oh well, it was free. The reason why I didn't like it that much, was because they made too much of a show of it, instead of informing the people more. The information we got was interesting though, I am always eager to learn more. After that we walked around in the "zoo of birds" consisting of eagles, vultures, falcons,... some of them were really pretty while others could be called ugly. In the next few days I will post some of my pictures on photobucket, but probably not today.
After the birds we made a tour in the museum of the castle. It is not a castle to "live in", but it is for defense, therefore it wasn't pretty at all. Some of the walls are up to 3 meters (9 ft) strong!! The lady who made the tour is living in that castle. Now you are asking yourself, why I said before it is not to live in, well, I should have said the reason it was built was for defense. This made the tour 20 times more interesting than the tour in Hohenschwangau :) or even more. Actually it was one of the most interesting tours I ever witnessed. You felt like you were part of the history of this castle and part of the life that is so usual for a castle. It was a cool feeling.
Then we continued to the restaurant in the castle. We were going to get dinner there. As a welcome they had prepared some special "Middle Ages Drink". It was meet - honey wine. Whoever didn't want to have alcohol got apple juice with spring water. This was served in the horns of rams. I thought that the horns weren't real, but my sister asked and they were!! Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures from the beginning, therefore I can't show you how that looked like. Now the food was really great, we had some bread in the beginning, which was so yummy that everyone ate more than one should have, not only more, but way more!! So after that we got a salad with mushrooms, tomatos, carrots and lettuce. The dressing was extremely tasty and I really enjoyed it. It continued with a soup served in a Brötchen (I forgot the English word for it, and roll doesn't seem right, since it was a quadrant). You had to hurry to "drink" it, because if not, the soup would have dripped through the bread. The soup was again very delicious, but the bread seemed a little old, only the parts were the soup made it soft were good in taste. After that I was pretty much full and the main dish had not yet come. As expected I couldn't finish my main dish, there was just to much on it. Three large pieces of zucchini and 5 large pieces of eggplant covered with eggs and cheese (even though I don't like eggs, it was edible :)) and some pasta. For this plate I can definitely show you a picture.
One thing that made the atmosphere really great was this hired entertainer in the manner of the Middle Ages. He was dressed like in the old days with those weird shoes and everything. His props were also thing used in that time. It was just hilarious sometimes to watch him. Everyone cracked many, many times. I will not type all of this out now, if you are interested I can tell you more about it, the next time we talk (if I won't have forgotten by then). The food including the desert that still got served took 4 hours. Therefore we came home at 11:30 and I was so freakin' tired.

This morning, it was very hard for me to get up, but after I made it, everything went all right until I came home. The good thing was, that I had two hours less in the afternoon, which gave me the opportunity to take a nap. This felt just great and this is the reason why I can stay up this long. I even practiced one and a half hours of violin and I did some French vocabulary.
Oh, yeah, I got my French test back. As far as I know (this is what Anna Theresa told me) I got the best grade, and it is "only" 12 1/2 points. I wonder if there is someone better than me. For example Alexandra could be better. Actually I don't care about the others, I am just glad, that my year didn't start out too horribly, even though I wanted to get 15 points. I hope that my daily studies in French will pay off. Other than that, nothing really interesting went on today. Oopsie, I forgot to tell you that the renovated our Mensa and we even got new furniture. It is now very pretty and clean. I hope it stays that way. The threw away all the nasty couches and tables. I will take a pic of it in the next few days if I remember.
This has to be it for today, since there is still homework awaiting me and it is already 11pm.

EsTriDisk

First of all let me explain, what EsTriDisk stands for: Essen Trinken Diskutieren. Eating, drinking, discussing...
There is always one family in charge of the food. This time it was us (my mom :)) So yesterday, she prepared all kinds of food: Some salad which she called autumn-colored lettuce. It contained of 5 different types of lettuce in different colors: One was "red" (the color of red cabbage) another one yellow or light green, then dark green, red and green mixed and one more time light green. They have all had different shapes and stuff. For decoration issues there were three tomatos, some cheese and walnuts. It actually looked great. Then there was the soup with semolina dumplings. They were each about the size of a table tennis ball. My mom had prepared 126 of them. As a main dish we had two different types of quiche (don't ask me how to spell it :)) one with zucchini and one with leek (the stuff my used for the lasagna). The last thing missing was the desert, which was a cherry soufflé (oh man, I am missing so many words that I have to go back on my dictionary the whole time as you might notice).

Now let me tell you a little bit about my day. I went to church as usual and I happened to get into the lesson study group led by my father :( therefore I didn't say one word during the conversation. It was interesting to listen to, though. The second our a pastor that works for ADRA ( I don't know what all the letters stand for but the first on is Adventist, then I believe Development, R (I don't have a clue) and the last one is Agency, I think). It was weird to listen to. He seemed not well prepared. What he said, or tried to say, was interesting though.

After church we went back home and had lunch. I was done at 1:45, checked my email really quick and decided to take a nap. I wish, I could have slept more. It took me sooooo long to get warm (my feet were freezing), that I guess I only slept for a half hour :(

At 4:30 it was time for me to get ready, because of EsTriDisk. I got all the food together, got dressed of course, and piled the food up in our A-Klasse. When my mom came she gave us final instructions and then we left, the three of us. My parents went to the concert that they had booked tickets for, since I don't know when. Last week we talked about how this would work out, and my mom said that I should go instead of her, but then I thought about it and said, if everything is prepared I can do it, too. So I sent my mom to the concert.
Anyway, I drove really slowly on the Autobahn, because of all the liquid in the car, and because of the high gas-prices (yeah, I know it is not as bad as in some parts of the US right now) sorry for all my parenthesis.
Back to EsTriDisk, I got all the food ready in time, except for the energy that turned off several times, which kind of produced a little problem. My two sisters were waitresses, who took down the orders of the people. I think there were 30 persons or more. So they were really busy to serve the food, and I was really busy to prepare it :) It is like a little restaurant, except that the waitresses and cooks aren't trained (hee hee). The food had to be ready by 7 and the people were finished with eating around 8:30. Now it was our task to clean the kitchen up and wash the dishes. Most of it fit in the dish washer, but since it was so late that we started it, we decided to do the rest by hand. We were really done before the dish-washer, I said we because I had two helpers in the kitchen. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to make it. Just before we were done drying the washed dishes all the lights turned off, so we had to finish everything in the dark. Luckily it wasn't that much and the car was almost loaded as well.
My sisters and I got to leave at 9:45. Once again I drove really slow to save gas, and therefore it took us until 10:30 to get home. My mom actually wanted to come to help clean up, but I told her that we would manage it all. Now the funny thing was that my parents called us, when we were just about home. Guess where they were??? They just got out of the concert. Therefore there wouldn't even have been the chance for them to help us. I thought this was funny.
At night, I made Andacht online with Marion and one of her teachers. It was really cool. We are reading Markus. So now, I will continue Romans, whenever they don't do Markus. That will give us the chance to advance in similar speed. I also have to catch up blogging on reltalks.
After that, my sister found out that you were online. I blogged at that time, but unfortunately my computer turned off. I lost everything I had typed. I was so sick of it by then, that I decided to just write a little note, to have the date of Saturday but I would type it on Sunday, this is what I am doing right now.
I have to leave in 15 minutes and I didn't even get dressed yet. So till later...

free day

Today I had a lot of free hours, I will write more about it tomorrow night.
Well it didn't quite work out with tomorrow night, I am writing about it three days later now. There was too much going on.
Anyway, as I have said, there were a lot of free hours. Our principal wasn't in school, therefore second hour was free as well (first one is free every week, as part of my schedule). After that, we had two hours of history. The first one was real work and the second one was looking at books (from which we could pick some as a preparation for the Abitur). Since we had a meeting for the group Abi-Gag, we still continued talking about that, instead of caring about the books. We knew that our teacher would be gone for the next week and as long as one does his or her work it doesn't matter, in my opinion. The following hour was French, but our teacher was still sick, therefore it was free as well.
The last lesson for the day was English. It was fun as usual. By the way, religious ed. was fun, too, since we played this game dealing with third world children raising. It is extremely hard to decide on what to do, if you try to be a "real mom" and a "real dad". You have to decide whether you want to get into debt and make sure your kid gets good education or you will save the money, but your children will have no future. It is tough, but it was fun. For the rest of the day, I cleaned my room and I don't remember what else I did.

short and lazy day

Today is my first lazy day in the new school year. I came home from school with tons of homework awaiting me. Since I would have two free hours tomorrow morning I decided to procrastinate it till tomorrow. Therefore when I came home I went to sleep after eating lunch. I slept about a half hour, and I was in bed for two hours or more. I couldn't fall asleep because I continuously thought about waking up in time for my recorder lesson I had to give just before leaving for my piano lesson. As I already told you, I did really bad at it. I got so disappointed that, if I would have talked about it, I would have started crying!! Can you believe that. I practiced so much, I put so much effort in it and the result was close to zero.
When I came home I got online and I talked to you for the rest of my evening. Before going to sleep I will reread chapter 1 of Romans, since I took so long to understand the first paragraph that I couldn't finish it.
So my day was pretty boring today :)

Surprise :)

A lot of things went on today. This morning, when we got to school I walked by the "Vertretungsplan" the most important piece of paper in a student's life :) and guess what it said: Mr. Vogel was sick today. Everyone who happened to have French first hour turned their frown upside down. Someone came up with the assumption that he might be out today, since the principal, which happens to be hour German teacher (I don't know if you remembered that there has been a change) talked to him. We complained to him the day before, because apparently Mr. Vogel didn't want to discuss this matter any further. I was just really happy over this free hour. Stefanie ( who sits next to me in History) invited me for a cup of tea. This was really nice of her and we got to talk a little bit. I was writing French vocabulary while talking, since I don't want to have to do everything tomorrow.
We also got 5 pages of English vocabulary due Friday. So I have to study a little bit for that as well, which will go a lot faster than French though, since I know most of the words already, I just have to learn with what specific German word they go :)
In the afternoon we had sports and it was magnificent. I enjoyed it so much. We were playing volleyball and we actually got to really play and not just do ping pong over the net :) As a matter of fact, we didn't even stop in time, we were playing longer since it was so fun.
After coming home I started practicing piano while waiting for my first kid to come. The weird thing was that no one showed up at 4pm. So I was wondering who messed up and came to the conclusion that it was Katja and Sarah, but after I called them, they said that I have told them it was 4:30, so I called Montha and she said I told her 4:30. I knew this situation would get difficult, so first of all I checked out what my schedule said and it said that Katja and Sarah were supposed to come. Since it was already so late I asked Montha if she could send Simone one and a half hours later which she did. She is so nice and flexible. The dumb thing of all that was that I was done at 6. This is incredible late. At least I had practiced piano for quite a while.
Since I had some vocabularies to study I wanted to go outside but I didn't make it before sunset. There were just to many English vocabs to write on flash cards. That is actually all that I have done so far, except for my History homework :(
I will do English tomorrow and hopefully I can do a great job. I know that it is hard and I know that usually I don't do so well on those kinds of homework. It is something about interpreting an authors point of view, and his political standpoints in an article dealing with New Orleans and the flood and TV coverage and so on... we will see what I can do about it. At least I will make an effort and that should count already.
I think I really start "strongly disliking" :D French. I am so happy that tomorrow is my French free day. It is not so much the subject but the teacher. Therefore I will try to get ahead with the pages tomorrow, so that I can get further ahead the weekend to ease my next week. I wonder how I will manage all of my things once class tests start.
You know what?? I feel like I got dumber over the summer break. The funny thing is that others feel the same way. Them and me, we can't study as fast anymore. Maybe it is just a feeling, and I am exaggerating things, but those are my feelings.
I didn't get to practicing violin today so therefore I have to practice even more tomorrow. There is a huge pile of music ahead of me, with which I will have to be finished by the end of this school year.
Now I will prepare to go to sleep. I will reply to reltalks ASAP. Probably Saturday if you don't have much time to talk...
P.S.: Check out my pictures and there you will see a really cool flower that is blooming in our dining room right now. It is beautiful and very colorful.

Teaching is fun!

My day was quite normal. I got a lot of homework, especially French and of course math and so on. I didn't know where to start. So I decided to do math. Then I had to bring my sister to school again and I had my violin lesson, I didn't do a very good job, but that is normal, because at home I am not intimidated at all, but I am a little bit when I am with my teacher, therefore it is good practice for me. Whenever I am at home it is better :)
After I came back home I taught my kids. They all are doing so well. I am proud of them. Especially Simone understands very fast. I think whenever she goes to the lessons for recorder unprepared and sight-reads all the time and she does a magnificent job. I might be wrong though. Her brother started taking piano lessons and he had his second lesson today and he is also doing very well. He practiced a lot. I am anxious to see how he will understand more and more of music. I love teaching so much. You know what I am always running out of time and before I didn't know how to fill the half hour. I think this is has to do with school being less important in my life. I feel much better.
After that I started going for my 'French walk'. This took about one hour. I used the last few minutes of sun, but it was still cold.
My dinner was very good. I had Bretzeln and some apples. When I was done I practiced piano and violin for about 2 and a half hours and now I am starting with my homework. I hope I will finish enough so that I can do the rest tomorrow during my free hour :)
I have to do French, English and German tonight, so I better get started. French is a lot as usual. I don't know when I will get to go to sleep. The dumb thing is that I don't have a free hour during my lessons, therefore I have to do everything tonight and I am already so tired...

Last Few Days

Hey I forgot to mention something funny. When I went to this baptism I was so bored, so therefore when they started putting away the dishes, I offered my help. I cleaned about 4 or 5 tables and then this boy walks up to me, without me noticing it and he said, wow that is really rare, that someone helps cleaning up. It is really great that you do that. Let me help you as well. So we cleaned a little bit and another boy joined us. Then we just stood there and talked for another 30 minutes even though they wanted to leave. I think I have found a new crush now. He is about 22 years old, he is blond!!!, had blue eyes!!! isn't that funny? I think he is also very intelligent. He is definitely into religion and he is in the youth group in Freudenstadt, which I will probably join at least once, to try it out. Who knows what will happen. As soon as I noticed that I forgot to tell you, I wanted to write you about it, but I am so sorry, that I didn't make it before.
Let me tell you a little bit about yesterday:
I went to vote before I went to the rehearsal in Stuttgart. A funny thing happened to me. I was so intimidated, because I didn't know exactly how everything works, and I told my parents that they will probably laugh at me. They answered that they would never laugh at me. They would rather be happy that I am coming to vote. Exactly that happened. I was the first New-Voter for Holzhausen so they clapped, when I entered. They explained me what I had to do and then, when I threw my sheet into this special box they clapped again and said that they wondered how many New-Voters would show up. I thought this was funny. Nothing like that happened to my classmates. At least I didn't hear about it.
Then we left for Böblingen to drop off Tabea for Pathfinders and continued driving to Stuttgart. We rehearsed until 4:30pm. We had a 40 minute lunch break and got ourselves some Kebap at a Turkish "restaurant". It tasted really yummy. There was not that much time for me to study French, even though I did do a little bit on our way there and during lunch. When we were done, I also continued. I was so tired though, that I hardly remembered what I read. It took me forever to learn just one line of vocabulary. The reason why I say line is, because we had to learn: German translation and synonymes and antonymes as well as an example sentence. This is, why I decided to go for a walk when I got home. It was very cold and I immidiately got a stuffy nose, that didn't matter though, because I got to be outside. When I returned home, I was so cold and I didn't feel well either. I decided to study in bed. My mom made me those warm bags :). I continued for another two hours or something like that (including dinner) and then I almost fell asleep studying, therefore I set my alarm for 4:50 to wake up and study. I woke up!!! And I felt much better. Everything went a lot faster. Oh, I forgot to mention that my mom wrote me the rest of the vocabs on flash cards so that I wouldn't lose so much time. This made it possible that I didn't fail. I think I will be able to get a B or at least a C+. At least I hope so. The test was extremely hard and we complained to the teacher, not so much because of the test, but because of the way he treats us and the way, he thinks we work. We have so much to worry about and now he isn't even announcing the test dates anymore. Every single test should have been over 4 pages!!! I said, that it took me 10 hours to learn those 7 pages over the course of last week and that four pages are too much. He made it seem like I am stupid once again. He said, then there must be something wrong. Fact is, that I know that must students took exactly the same amount of time and this is what i answered. So he cut it down to three, which is still enough. Every single day is a possible test day. Now I am definitely back into stress of school. Oh well, I didn't think it would turn out much differently, I just thought that I would be stronger.
Because of all the studying I did, I didn'T do any homework. Luckily I had finished math on Thursday, so that was all right.
I will continue later, I have to go eat and then I have another four hours of school. Geography and Music...
Now it is 10pm and I just finished practicing piano and violin which I did for the past 2 and a half hours!! Before that I started my homework, because there was so much. As I already told you, my French test didn't go as well as I hoped it would, but I can't change it, so I have to accept whatever grade I will get. The next page of vocabulary and a lot of other stuff was part of my assignment today. I also have to make my assignments up for yesterday, since I didn't do anything. So I will still be busy for another hour at least. I think I will stop then, because I also have to sleep and I will have one free hour tomorrow during which I can do some homework as well.

Auditions at Universities of Music

I woke up early in the morning so that my dad wouldn't be late, but then my mom told me that he didn't look correctly yesterday, therefore I woke up too early. It didn'T matter though, I played a half hour of violin.
We went to church as usual, and nothing special was going on except for the special welcome for the new first graders. They were so cute with their school bag and their little "Schultüte". They got a Bible from the church as a present for them finally going to school.
My mom had some pizza prepared for lunch so when we came home we ate. There are also still tomatos and cucumbers in our garden. They are so yummy. When we just started to eat my brother called us to let us know that he needed to be picked up from the train station. Since Tabea was at our neighbors and Marion ate with her friend I decided to go instead of my mom. I finished eating when I came home and after that I took a half hour nap.
The baptism ceremony took about one and a half hours and the two teenagers got baptized in a pond with pretty cold water. I bet you it was around 15°C!! They said they didn't feel it though. It was really nice and afterwards we went to the church in Holzhausen and there were cakes and coffee and tea prepared for those 100 persons who attended the baptism. I got home around 8:30 and my parents came home even one hour hour later!! My sister Marion is still not home yet.
When I got home I checked out the different universities of music that we have in Baden-Württemberg. This took me quite a while. There are only about 6 universities throughout the state. The auditions are even harder than I thought they were going to be! I am definitely positive that if I will get accepted at all, it will only be one university :( It is extremely hard and therefore I have to practice even more. Especially sight-reading in piano. It is required by most universities and you know that I am horrible at that. Karl-Heiz, the director of the brass ensemble, who has been a music teacher for 35 years or more said, that with what he knows right now, he wouldn't pass the test. He himself says that it is extremely hard, and he doesn't understand this at all. Well I just take this to tell myself that I have to work extremely hard for the next year if I want to make it. I will try to be around for the audition dates for the winter semester if it is possible, because I fear that I have to try again a half year later anyway, so if I will start auditioning for the sommer semester 2007 I will lose even more time, because then I can start Winter 2007. If it is not possible then it isn't possible, but if there is a possibility I will try to make it happen. I noticed today, when I was playing a violin song in church for the Sabbatschlussandacht that I get extremely nervous and my ability is only half of what I have at home, which means first of all I have to practice presenting hard music, and I have to get better a whole lot as well. We will see how it goes. I will let you know :)
Now I will go to sleep... my head aches and I have rehearsal tomorrow. I also have tons of homework and 7 pages of French vocabulary as I told you yesterday.

Finally Weekend

Today was a great day, even though I had school in the afternoon. I finished all of my homework in time. The one thing that annoyed me extremely today, was my French teacher. Maybe it is just me, but he is treating me like I am stupid and I am sorry, I don't think I am. This might be a wrong feeling of me, but that is the way I feel. I wish I wouldn't care as much. I don't even want to participate anymore since he seems to always point out whatever I do wrong in a way, that it makes me feel stupid. I am glad he corrects me, because I always want to learn, but I would appreciate it if he could just do it in a nicer way. Whenever I have to write some French text I think in English and write English-French, if you know what I mean. The funny thing is that most words I am missing and I remember in English are also usable in French (of course with a little bit different spelling). Well, sorry to always keep talking about this.
When I got home I had to send Theresa a file of English, but my dad borrowed my laptop and did something weird with it, therefore internet didn'T work anymore. So I had to bring this file to F-Share, because I can access this folder from a different computer. So I sent that file from my dad's computer :) I also wanted to blog during my lunch, but because of all those troubles there was no time left. So now I am finally blogging.
Religious Education was really great. We were talking about justice. What is just? Is there a possibility to be just for everyone. And in the second hour we played a game. This is morally extremely hard to decide on. It is a simulation of a family living in the third world. You have basically no money to start off. And you have to decide if you want to sent your children to school, so that it gets some education. We had to form couples. I was playing with Jonas, the boyfriend of Maren, I don't know if you remember him. Anyway, during the first round he died of AIDS leaving me behind with one son. The sad thing about this game is that this is REALITY for a lot of people. Next week we will play the whole thing (we didn't have enough time for it today). I think this opens a new point of view. I am thinking about buying it for myself, but right now I am thinking, with whom could I play it. Wouldn't that just be a waste of money. I can always buy it when I need it.
When I got home I straightened up my room. Quite a mess has accumulated over the past week. I will also vacuum the floor still. I will do that as soon as I am done with blogging :)
I have about one more hour till sunset. Also, I have to try to go to sleep early today. This Sunday there are elections going on, but we have a rehearsal of Adventus Domini, and I really didn't practice enough. I don't know how we will manage to vote, but I am sure it will work out, well it has to!! I want to take part in elections, so that I have a right to say, this was my fault, or this shouldn't have happened or whatever...
There is a lot of homework awaiting me this weekend, so it is a good thing you won't have time. I will busy all the time. I didn't plan with the Adventus Domini rehearsal. I have to study 7 pages of French vocab for Monday and I want to get 15 points to get a good start. All the tests together are one fourth of our grade!! So imagine what it would be if I would get a 25% 15 points average. This would help my grade an aweful lot, but I doubt this is going to happen. I always mess up at least one thing.
This is pretty much all that was going on besides picking up my sister from school. I fear I won't time to answer reltalks today, because we will have dinner in 15 minutes and this is not enough time for me. I am sorry that I have kept procrastinating my blogs. I apologize. I will do this as my sabbath evening activity.

Sore Hands :)

Yay, our test is not going to be tomorrow. I would have never been able to learn it all today. Out teacher agreed on Monday, which is even better, because we will not talk, and therefore I will have some more time to study. Well that is pretty much all that went on in school today. At least I don't remember anything else important. When I got home I was so tired that I decided to nap for 30 minutes before my recorder kids would come. Also our English teacher offered us to get some books today at 5pm. I wanted to go to see if there is anything better than Death of a Salesman. Therefore my piano lesson got changed to a later point depending on when I would be done. So after my recorder kids left I started practicing piano because I haven't done anything at all, except for yesterday. When my hands hurt so much that I could hardly continue I did the same thing as yesterday, namely changing to violin, after a half hour or so I continued with piano. I am sore in my hands! I never had that before. It is really weird.
Shortly before 5 pm I got ready to leave. My dad was supposed to be back at 5 so that I could go to my teacher. I waited for a while but my dad was in a traffic jam and therefore he came 25 minutes late. I was extremely angry, I am not as advanced as Joseph who had to wait for his appointment for two years! But I calmed down and I was pretty normal when I returned from my piano lesson. I am just sad that I couldn't go. I really wanted to.
This was also the reason, why I did some more violin because that always helps me to feel better. It also worked today.
I just finished eating dinner and now I will start with my homework and hopefully I will be able to go to sleep at a decent time. Around 10 would be awesome.

Great Practice

My last school year will probably be extremely busy. Today there was a lot going on. In French our teacher told us that our first test will be on Friday. Everything is going so fast :(
In German we watched the movie, that we started last school year. It is really funny, but it is short. I suppose it was about 4 minutes long... if I can get it I will show it to you.
This was probably all of the intersting parts of school life, except for sports. It seems like this year will be much better due to the new director, or whatever :) it won't be stressful though, since he understands that there is a lot of stress. Hee hee.
When I got home after sports, I taught for three half hours. After that I practiced the piano and the violin for 2 and a half hours!!! I will have my piano lesson tomorrow and I didn't practice for 7 weeks or more. I continued until my wrists and hands hurt. Then I went to violin and after one hour I did some more piano. There are still three pages that I have to study tomorrow. It was about 8 o'clock when I could start with my homework. I finished all of my math and I will do French tomorrow.
I am very tired. Therefore I will go to sleep now.

Back to busy school life

Today was extremely stressful. I didn't want to get up in the morning, my body was shaking because of lack of sleep, I don't remember that every happening to me, this also happened to me yesterday. I felt really uncomfortable. But it went away after a while. I got up and got dressed. Then I read the Bible and did my lesson study as well. It is really cool to wake up in the mornings, even though I am so tired all the times. I already started procrastinating things :( This is horrible, but I couldn't help it. This is because I really did set my priorities differently, which should make me happy, I guess.
Oh yeah, back to me getting ready for school. We left the house at a decent time, I think it was 7:07. I got to drive slowly, therefore I could save some gas. That is really great, since the gas prices are so high right now...
The first hour I had today was French. I only had half of my vocabs learned. They were so tough for me. Everybody seemed to not have had a problem with them, but I was really slow in studying them. I think something in my brain is changing. I am much slower in most things, except for math. I kept up with math today, I was really surprised. Anyway, the reason why I say that, is because our teacher checked on us today, just orally. Luckily I remembered the word he gave me, but it took me quite a while. Who cares. It seems like my teacher thinks that I am stupid, or something like that. He treats me in a very weird way. It is possible that it is just me, but I just have a feeling. We will see.
During my hour off, I finished my math homework and studied some more French vocabs. It took so long that I hardly learned anything during those 45 minutes. During biology I started writing the blog for last night. My teacher didn't catch me, I also found a great site of what we were supposed to find. Oh, one funny thing happened during biology. We were in the media room and Mr. Fendrich said, that we can only print 2 or 3 pages, if they are good, and then 5 minutes after we started looking around in the internet someone sent of 34 pages to be printed out... The teacher got really upset and when he asked who it was, no one raised his hands. I still don't know who it was. I just think it was funny, because no one felt enough courage to say it was him or her.
When I got home, my mom told me that my violin teacher has called to organize my sister's and my violin lesson. The best thing for right now, was right before I have my piano kids coming over. So Tuesday will be very stressful for me. I was so glad that I practiced yesterday. It would have been horrible if I wouldn't have done that! So my lesson went ok. It didn't sound as good as yesterday, but that is normal.
After finishing teaching my students, I started working on my schedule for every weeks use. I don't know if I will do the homework exactly at that time, of if I will practice at the assigned time, but this is just a guideline for me to know what to do and especially when to go to sleep. Now I am writing this blog not having done ANY homework for today. I am pretty bad with my homework already. It is not that I have none, it is just that I don't feel like doing it. It is so much, even though it is the second day of the school year. I have Chemistry, English, Math, French!!!, History, that is about it. So I will see to getting to it soon.

First day back in school

Today I woke up really early. Around 6 am. So therefore I could finish my Bible readings in the morning. I still had some time left, therefore I checked out your blogger and my email. Then we left off. When we got to school we could hardly find a parking lot, since all the parents of the new 5th graders went to school as well, to bring their little kids to school for the first time. Luckily we were early and therefore we found one of the last ones. During first hour we got our schedules. I have one free hour every day and on Wednesday I am off for the last two hours in the morning. I think that therefore I will go shopping in that time, I also have to pick up Montha, since she doesn't have a license herself.
I thought that school ends in the fifth hour on the first day of school, but I was mistaken :( At least I remembered correctly that the afternoon is free.
So what I did in the afternoon was organizing my extra schedule for the recorder and piano kids. This took me quite a while, since most people weren't home. The bad thing was that I had to leave at 6 for the brass thing at church. I got everything done 5 minutes before we left. ( I am writing this blog during biology :) so therefore I will stop here...
Ok, let me think, what elsewas there, oh yeah, after I went to brass and it was really enjoyable because I had almost enough sleep the night before. After brass (during chorus) I practiced my violin for about 1 and a half hours!!! It was really great. When I came home, I decided to not continue study for my French vocabulary... instead I read my bible and went to sleep :)

Last day of vacation

Wow, I think today was an awesome day. I woke up really late, since I went to sleep late as well. If it is possible for you, maybe you could think of my time as well, when we are talking. If you can't it is ok as well. I just have to try to remember more often. It is very unhealthy for me. I am really glad that we agreed on not talking during the week. Blogging will take enough time every day, especially since we have two different blogs to take care of.
When I woke up, I checked all the blogs and responded to reltalks. It took me about an hour and a half. Then I went downstairs to eat breakfast. Once again it wasn't very much that I ate. Hold on, I will check right now if I lost any weight :) No I didn't :( Na ja, it doesn't matter. After we ate breakfast I started organizing my pictures that were left over from three years ago. There were some nice pictures left. I glued them in my photoalbum. Even though there were two events that I had left this album is not yet full. I hope that I can fill it one day, but I doubt it since we are now in the time of digital cameras. When I was done with that, I thought of something I could do. I decided on playing through the new piano music for my little kids. It is just awesome. This seems to be almost perfect for them. Hopefully they will improve a lot next year. This took me about another hour and then I finally did my stamps. They have been waiting for me since last Christmas!! I never took the time to do it, but now I finally got to it. Guess how many different stamps I have now: 4189. I am really proud of my collection.
Another thing I did was finishing the letter to Anna, my Italian friend. I bet you, she thought that I would never write back. It really is about one year ago. I will try to do a better job writing on a regular basis. You know I am horrible when it comes to letters and all that kind of stuff. Everything with the computer is fine, like emails or blogs. This is much more fun and doesn't take so long.
Oh yeah, I also played the recorder with my mom. She got some new music. It was a collection of classical master pieces. The Moldau was included as well. I really like this piece and of course Mozart, Bach,... we played for a while and then Tabea joined in. Some of the pieces were so fast that we failed to sight-read them. Even after going through them a second and third time we couldn't do it. It was fun though especially because of all the mistakes we made on our way through that book. It even comes with a CD for accompanement and has two parts.
In the early afternoon we went to play volley-ball on the beach volley-ball field. Tabea, my mom and I. It was tough since we were so little people and it wasn't that much fun, but towards the end it was fun. At least I got to be outside and run a little bit (we missed pretty much every single ball :(
At one point we ate dinner. It was ok, healthy as usual, but it was definitely not what I would call good food. I ate it anyway, but not that much (hee hee). Luckily there was some cake for dessert. The cake was very yummy. So I got kind of full.
Tomorrow I will be back in school. I will be in 13th grade. Ahhhhh. I am sure this year will pass by very quickly. As soon as I have my schedule planned with all my recorder and piano kids and my own lessons, I will send it to you, so that you have an idea of what is going on here in Germany.
May God always be there for you and bless you exceedingly...

Chaos on Sabbath :(

This Sabbath was not very enjoyable for me. Church service was good. I had the kids. I prepared myself really well, but since they listened to me so fast and they weren't talking as much as usual I was done faster than I should have, so I let them repeat the story that they heard. We even played it so they can experience biblical stories themselves. I think they liked it. Then we had Eucharist service today therefore church took about 30 minutes longer. We ate at church so that we don't have to drive as much and save ourselves about an hour.
We kind of had an argument about how to have our Andachts, and why it is always not working out the way it is supposed to be. I hope that if I will have children myself, I will do a better job. We will see. I got my involvement in church brass settled. I am definitely not doing chorus next year. It will be too much. I am glad that the brass leader is so understanding. I will only have to go every other week. This will save me a lot of time. Maybe I will even take my laptop with me sometimes when I have to wait for my parents, so that I can blog in church while waiting for the rest of my family to finish chorus rehearsal. If not my laptop I will definitely take my violin and practice there. This will be really great. I hope I will have a lot of time next year for practice.
At 1:45 we left the church to pick up my sister from Diepoldsburg. All the parents had to pick up their children from there. I think there were about 40 kids participating in the KiSiWo this year. This seems to be a really great opportunity for children to get involved with their talents and abilities. I saw them playing the recorders, drums, trombones and trumpets, violins, celloes. This was the enjoyable part of it. Not so enjoyable was the fact that they didn't have all their props ready yet, so they needed to paint this, set up that and they rehearsed on Sabbath! This annoyed me a lot. It also made me sad, because I realized where all of this is getting. I pledged to myself that, no matter how inconvenient it is going to be for me, I will not practice on Saturday afternoons anymore, not even for Adventus Domini. Playing for fun is fine and I will gladly participate in that, but not in practice. God has made the 7th day -Sabbath- for the humans to rest and he made it HOLY. Are we keeping Sabbath holy, by having so much stress to run through the program, practicing this and that over and over again? No, definitely not. Therefore I will not support this anymore. I am still counting myself as a Seventh-Day-Adventist and I strongly agree with keeping the Sabbath, therefore I have to do it right. If I do it just half way, I might as well forget it completely. I am sorry for all the times that I failed to keep it correctly as far as my understanding was... I am glad that God forgives failures as long as we regret them.
The performance was ok. They did a really good job even though they were nervous and forgot their text several times. They only had 5 days to learn all of that. None of them knew the music or texts before.
After the performance I got to talk to several people which was kind of enjoyable and then we finally left. yayay. We got home around 8pm and then I started talking to you.
And now I am writing this blog to finish up this day.

Busy Day

Today was a day that was supposed to be busy with math. But I didn't do a single page today. In fact, I didn'T even try to get to it. When I woke up this morning I saw that I skipped one of your blogs acidentally. Commenting on that took me quite a while.
I think it took me close to two hours :) Reading and proving, understanding and writing down,... I enjoyed it a lot though. After I finished, I turned off my computer, since I had to bring my brother to the train station. He got his ticket, but he didn't get the last station of his journey but the second to the last, therefore he lost 2 € :( I never saw that he cared losing money as much as in this moment. I felt so sorry for him. I got to drive my dads car to the train station so that we can save some gasoline and therefore money. New Orleans and the other flooded areas affected our gas prices as well...
After that my sister Tabea, my mom and I left to go shopping in Trossingen, because I needed some more music for my little piano kids and new shoes for church. Oh yeah, so first we went to Oberndorf (do you remember that Real we went to, it was in Oberndorf) and since all the shops were closed for lunch we continued to Trossingen. They still had lunch when we arrived so we ate some Kebap. It was really yummy and not too expensive at all. We bought three regular size Kebaps for 6,80€ That is really good. If you go to a Restaurant you pay that for just one pizza. After we finished eating we finally got to go to the music store. They had so many piano schools that it was really hard for me to decide which one I should take. I got myself two. One that has a little theory in it and one with big notes so that my kids don't have any troubles reading the music. The theory one is for me for additional teaching :)
Then we went to the shoe shop that we saw on our way there. All the shoes were so expensive that we left pretty soon. My sister didn't want to leave because she liked the shoes but then in the car my mom explained her, why we had to leave.
We went to Bergfelden, the town next to Holzhausen at the roundabout, if you remember. There is a pretty good shoe store. They actually had a few shoes in the manner I was looking for. So I decided on a pair on sale :) Even though they were on sale they were still expensive, but I also realized that I wouldn't find anything cheaper with my list of requests...
Now we are finally home and I am writing this blog. When I am done with this I will prepare myself for tomorrow.
Something really important: I won't be home tomorrow afternoon. My sister Marion has her presentation of the Musical she practiced for at the KiSiWo (Kinder Sing Woche). I think I will be home around 7pm, so 1pm your time, then I will turn my computer on and IM you. If you are available you can call then and we can talk for a little bit. I hope you read this blog before you start your Sabbath tonight :)
I reorganized our reltalks website. Sorry if you didn't finish reading my last blog. But I think this way, we can even go back to it later. I did it in a chronological way. Tell me if you like it or not. I am eager to hear your opinion.

Eww Eggs

My day was starting late today as well. I fear that I will never make it to 7 am in the morning. When I woke up at 8:30 I read my lesson study for today and then I went to paint my balcony. It was already pretty hot outside even though it was kind of early. There was very little paint left but it was just enough to finish the balcony. Yayay. Afterwards I started math. It wasn't that hard, but I still didn't do that much since I was watching movies while doing it and I guess I will only get to page 6o which means I only did about 50 pages of math during those two weeks.
Oh and then I cleaned the kitchen for my mom. It didn't take me that long. One disgusting thing went on today. Just listen! When I went into our Speisekammer I smelled this weird smell that I smelled yesterday. But yesterday my mom said that she had farted close to it, so therefore it could have been her fart. It didn't go away over night so I tried to figure it out and I came to smell the eggs. One of them was extremely rotten. It smelled like the worst farts you ever smelled or worse!! So we threw that away. Guess what stupid Kerstin did... Instead of throwing it away outside I threw it away in our kitchen garbage. My mom told me that that wasn't smart so I went in the garbage and got it. Finally I threw it away outside. It was disgusting.
That is pretty much all from today. Oh yeah, I also took a shower which I haven't done in three days. Don't worry, I washed myself though...
Now I will go to sleep after reading my chapter for tonight.

Money arrived!

My day was ok today. I woke up at 8:30. That is very late. I guess I have to try harder to go to sleep early. I did three pages of math today which is not too bad. During some of it I even managed to watch movies. I am having a really relaxed time. This is very enjoyable.
Oh, I got my money today. It was more than I thought. So I payed more for my tithing to give a little more to God what is his anyway. I was so grateful to get work. Then I tried to transfer the money to my dads account to pay of my violin and I discovered that the special kind of account I have can't deal with more than 500€ per day. So I have to wait until tomorrow to transfer the rest...
When my mom came home from picking up Tabea from my grandma's house we played a little bit of Federball outside.
There wasn't that much interesting going on today.
Oh one more thing. I just ate cereal today. Nothing real. One cup in the morning and two for dinner.
I felt really dizzy the whole day and I will try to go to sleep early tonight so that I can wake up early tomorrow. But I doubt that it will work out...

Finally outside!

I started ironing the rest of clothes that were left from last night. While I was doing that, I watched a movie. After a while I felt like going outside, especially since I didn't do that for a real long time. I took my camera with me to take some pictures of scenery and the flowers in autumn. They are really pretty, in my opinon. I used my moms sunhat, because I thought it looks neat. I felt like a coolie head. The problem was that there was a lot of wind outside therefore my cool hat flew away a lot of times and I had to bend down to pick it up. I will insert some of them. I didn't walk for that long, but I stopped several times to take pictures and I had to build myself something that I can put my camera on to take self pictures as well. When I was at the field and tried to take pictures without that much grass in it, I built myself something like an altar with dry soil. It looked really funny. I wish I would have had another camera with me, just to take a picture of the places with the camera. For the pictures at the old tree I used the little branches and bent them in a way that it could hold me camera. It was a lot of fun. I think I was outside for more than 40 minutes. I walked up until the big tree. Do you remember it? Well, I know it isn't that much, but I also saw something like a hay horse that makes noise. I don't know what the English word for it is. I think I spent about 10 minutes or more watching this little animal.
The reason why I took my camera with me, is to show you how Germany looks like now. And of course to have pictures of myself as well. I want to document as much of my life as possible.

Afterwards I painted my balcony. Not all the parts of it, but the bad parts that needed it. Before I could put the paint on I had to use sandpaper to make it a little rougher. When I finally started painting, I behaved like a dumby. I painted the top first which made it harder for me to go to the bottom. And then at one point, I wanted to get new paint on my brush and I turned toward the paint when I saw this really big spider. I was a little shocked. But it crawled back under my door and I didn't see it another time. All of the balcony painting took me about two hours. So that means I have been outside for a decent time. It was a real good feeling to be outside for that long. Afterwards I unloaded the pictures from my memory card and uploaded them on photobucket. Oh, and I finally got myself a little educated over Jeanne d'Arc. I don't know what to think about this movie though. It seems so contradictory. I hope that one day, I will find out what really happened according to history sources.

Now I am writing you this blog...

no topic yet

Man, I can't believe that I actually got up one hour earlier. It was still kind of late since it was already 8 am. But that is a very decent time for me, especially in vacation time. I am satisfied with that. Tomorrow, I hope that I can get up at 7:30, so that I will be at 6 o'clock, once school starts. I don't have that many days of vacation anymore. Oh well, everything is over sooner or later. I am glad that I could have some freetime though.
My money hasn't arrived yet. I think I will get it in the middle of the month. I remember something like that from the time my brother used to work there. So I shouldn't get worried. I am just curious how much I made. I hope that there will be left enough, after tithing, so that I can even start pay of my computer. I think it will, because I already have some money on my bank account again as well.
Finishing later...

Lazy Day #2

It has been about time that I have a lazy day again, which I definitely did. Of course I wasn't lazy for all the 13 hours I have been up so far. My conscience would kill me if I were. But it was definitely a day without one single excercise for math!! I can't believe what I have done. But I am kind of glad that I did it. It made me feel like a human. So therefore there is not much I can say about today. I woke up in the morning, feeling a lot better than last night. I got up and checked blogs and emails and I was really surprised in a positive way to find some really nice message for me in my email account... thanks to you. Then I got started with watching movies. I think I watched a total of 4 movies. Isn't that crazy. They were good and I could actually enjoy them.

Around 6 I went downstairs to cook, because my mom painted the balconies. I made rice and vegetables. It turned out ok. It is not my favorite food, but who cares. At least it is something. There is a lot left, since my mom does not eat for dinner anymore and my dad went to his massage appointment. So we can eat it tomorrow again. I made myself a big tomatosalad as well. We have about 10 pounds of tomatos right now, so that means we have to eat a lot. The dumb thing is that our tomato plants got a disease, therefore we won't have that many tomatos this year as we had last year. I don't know what is wrong with them. At least we had some. They taste so yummy...

Then I ironed some clothes to help my mom a little. Oh, by the way, my brother was really not so nice to me today. He said that my parents always protect me. He tells me I am lazy. He doesn't recognize what I do. He says, oh you are lucky, you get to watch movies, while I have to paint. My mom had to have an argument with him so that he would start and on top of that, he didn't even work for very long. About 3 hours, maybe 4. But, oh yeah, Kerstin always does whatever she wants to, she does not need to help. This is true, but I do help sometimes. And when I do it, I do it out of my free will, or because I want to.

Oh another thing I did today, was going shopping for my mom. I bought some cheese, cereal, juice and several kinds of fruit. My driving was horrible today. I almost killed the car. Isn't that funny. It was a little weird for me to drive, but I think this is just temporarily.

I also got to play the violin for about an hour today. I enjoyed it too. It was tought though, because I had to realize that I can't do it :( Oh well. Something is wrong with my bowing for the Bach piece.

I will go to sleep now...

Math, Math, Math...

It is almost like a bad dream that will never stop! Today I will probably make it up to 5 pages for today, which isn't too bad. If I continue with this pace I think I will be able to finish in time, but I won't have done anything about my English. Oh man, there is so much to do. But I won't complain, because I know my chores are nothing compared to yours. I will try to relax as much as possible.
Thank you for the time that you gave me today talking over the Bible. This was really nice of you. I would like to do that more often.
Hey did you know that you can have the scroll option on your touchpad. Well you probably knew, but I just found out about that today and I think this is just cool. You can also add functions to the corners. I did that too. I don't know if it is really that necessary. I just think it is cool that there are these options.
I did not change for the entire day. I just didn't feel like it. Tomorrow I will take a shower though :)

Once again, my yahoo messenger is messed up. Finally I have an idea why this could happen: I am listening to music about 10 hours a day, maybe this is too much, therefore it gets retarded. Luckily I have the option to listen to music while doing math. This makes it more fun.
Man, I even watched a movie today. It was such a cute movie. My mom and I enjoyed it a lot. It dealt with a small boy and his little brother. They were just cute. You would have loved the movie as well, the way they talk, act and move...

Questions...

First get me let to the several questions you had. It is interesting how you thought about some of the topics, because I pretty much got the same questions :)
I will try to answer them according to the bible and my own understanding, but let me tell you in advance that those are some extremely tough questions:
1. For the burial place for Sarah I would like to reask you something. Was it the burial of Sarah that was so important or was it the place, where she was buried?
I think this is dealing with the burial place. For Abraham it was a big deal. He wanted to own the place where is wife is buried. I mean, when the sons of Heth would have given it to him as a present then he would have still owned it but it would have been different for him obviously. Otherwise he wouldn't have insisted on buying the land.
I think this is what it is dealing with. Even though you aren't in your homecountry, you should still bury your dead in a place that YOU yourself own. I think this is what it is supposed to tell us.

Another interesting thought I just had is, why did Abraham come to mourn for her and weep for her. Were they not together? (23, 2)

2. Why does God send signs to some and not to everyone?? Good question. In my opinion it has a lot to do with the faith one has. Is one open minded to receive a sign and also being able to notice it as a sign, or is it that one asks for a sign just because he wants to.
In my opinion the servant didn't ask for a sign because of himself but because he wanted to be a true and faithful servant. "show kindness to my master Abraham" (24,12). This was the reason why he wanted to have a sign. Honestly, I have to admit I didn't ask myself those questions before, but I think it was really cool of you to bring them up.

In that matter, do you know the parable of the servants and the talents?? I don't know if that really goes here, but I think it is worth discussing at that point. Not everyone got the same amount of talents, but what was important is what they made out of it, not for THEMSELVES, but for their master. I think when you ask for a sign not for yourself, but to do a good job at something that you feel like you might mess up, then God will be there for you if you trust him.

Another point that might go along is in 1 Corinthians 12. The subject is spiritual gifts. Now the question is still open if a sign is a spiritual gift. I think it is possible but I don't know. Maybe you could let me know what you think.

How do we know when God is sending us signs, I don't know...
One weird thing that I thought of immediately when you were talking about signs (maybe it is stupid) is that you said, all I care about is that I can have a memory of the place where I was standing, I do not care so much about the pope in person. Isn't it so funny, or even weird that the only pic saved is one with your position but without the pope? This is just an idea that popped up in my head. Maybe this picture is a sign and a gift from God. Because I used this card before to take other pictures, since I didn't know and there was just ONE picture left that has not been written over...

3. Jewelery is always a hard topic to talk about in my opinion. I will try to point out a view things that I have thought of myself while reading this chapter.
I colored all the passages where it talks about jewelry. There are exactly three passages where it names the following, and then there is a fourth just in general:
1. 24, 22 - golden nose ring, two bracelets
2. 24, 30 - nose ring, bracelets
3. 24, 47 - nose ring, bracelets
4. 24, 53 - jewelry of silver, jewelry of gold, clothing AND precious things to brother and mother!

Something really interesting happened to Laban when he saw the jewelry on his sister (verse 30ff). This was the time when he went out to greet the servant. This seems like the reason for the nice welcome he gave him. He knew exactly that this all stands for wealth. He seems very selfish in his actions. Of course he also heard the story of his sister telling him what the man said to her, but how much was that at that point. Isn't it that he tells the whole thing of his story, the blessing of God lateron? What do you think? One more reason why I think Laban does it out of personal interest is, when Jacob flees to him in chapter 29ff, Jacob said to Laban, "you have changed my wages ten times" (31, 7) He did, that because he wanted to keep all his wealth for himself.
Another text passage that one should keep in mind is, what jewelry was used for in Exodus 32, 2+3. This is bad but there are also good examples: Exodus 35, 22. So I don't know what to think of jewelry. Especially since nose rings were a pretty big deal, as it seems. Just let me know what you think. I am really undecided on this topic. Even though I still think that God has created us exactly the way he wanted us to be and therefore we do not have to make ourselves 'prettier', because this is saying, we don't like the way we look without those things. I think we shouldn't decide on it yet, but see what further things happen to the question of jewelry. There has to be a clue somewhere but I haven't found it yet. :)

4. Why was it necessary for Isaac's wife to be of the same house? Interesting question. I think this has to do with the fact that Abraham is chosen to be the father of Israel. A sacred people. The Cananites didn't believe in God. They had their own Gods. I don't know if that is even correct what I think. I just thought of all the house idols Rebekah steals a few chapters further back. So this can't be the clue to that. Therefore I am left with no solution...

5. Did Isaac marry her. It just says, he took Rebekah and she became his wife, and he loved her. Don't you think she became his wife because of the fact that they loved each other. Maybe I am mistaken and I am really not so educated over the customs in the time of Abraham. This is, I guess, another thing we have to keep in mind. Maybe something I said inspired you of another solution. I am eager to hear about all of your thoguhts.

One point I want to make is the reaction of the servant who bows down to the earth and worships the Lord twice in chapter 24, because he has shown mercy to his master!!

The ten commandments:
Something really interesting happened to me, when I looked at Deuteronomy 5, 5-21. It was organized in ideas!! Isn't that funny. On top of that the ideas are a little different:
1. I am the Lord your God...
2. You shall not have other gods before Me
3. You shall not make for yourself a carved idol (this idea includes the bowing down, which we saw as a different aspect)...
everything else is pretty much the same.

Then I thought that this is probably not the same in your Bible, because then you wouldn't have been so enthusiastic. So I looked for something that changed in favor of your understand of the ten commandments...
I found something at least in vers 21. There it names the wife first and then house, servants and everything else. But for me this only strengthens the equality of the things belonging to your neighbor. I did not say possesions on purpose, because I just thought that this is probably not what God intended it to be. I think the tenth commandment is to be understood as something that your neighbor has a right over. I mean, when you are married you belong to your husband and your husband belongs to you. If anyone takes that away, he took away your belongings. This is not talking about literal possesions in my opinion... So I tend to say that for me this is ONE commandment.

Interesting is, what God puts emphasis on if you continue reading Exodus ch. 20. He only talks about not having other Gods besides him. So I think that this is really important in the ten commandments as well.

I would like to have a Catechism myself, because I think it is always good to know what the religion says they believe not what people think the religion says. :)
I can buy myself one though. I think this is cheaper. So you don't have to pay for it in the first place and on top of that pay for the shipping fee...

Hopefully you got some inspiration and can help me :)

Tiny Surprise (hopefully)

My parents and I had a really nice and relaxed talk today. It was extremely enjoyable!! Yay. We talked about religion and other kind of stuff. It was pretty interesting. I think that I can consider this conversation one of the most relaxed conversations I had with my parents lately.
Let me go in order though. After trying to take a nap (which didn't work out due to a phone call :)) I got downstairs, because my parents were playing music and I wanted to do the same thing. Oh wait, that is not correct. I ate the food my mom brought to my bed. This was so nice of her. She had made some bread and brought an apple, grapes, and plums. She even brought something to drink. So I finished all of this first.
So now I went downstairs to play music. I chose to do some violin, since I really love playing right now. My dad came to accompany me and my mom listened for a while. It was very nice. My dad and I tried out several pieces, just for fun. Some of them didn't sound to great due to my incapability of playing them or because the composer had some weird harmonies going on. Oh well. Most of them sounded acceptable.
After we had made Sabbatschluss we got to talk over World Youth Day for whatever reason and also that I lost your pictures. My dad told me to bring him the memory card, because the files don't get deleted until you have new ones on the card. So I told him, that I already took new pictures on the card. We tried anyway to maybe be able to restore some of your pope pictures. If only I would have known before. We could have saved them all. :( I don't know, there is one picture that seems to be of the pope but the thing is that you can't see him. I will post it on here, and you can go to photobucket to see if it is the pope. This is the only one that we could save, all the others got written over,... I am sorry :(
Hopefully this is one of them. At least one can see where you were. I wish I would have known before so that we could have saved all of your pictures.
I have been looking at all of the 130 files that have been saved for the past hour. So now it got late once again.
I am eager to hear how you spent your day today.

Music, Math and More...

Today I woke up pretty late :) ... no wonder one could say, I went to sleep late, too. I think it was about 10 that I finally got up. I woke up several times, cause my mom walked in, and I wake up so quickly when there is noise in the morning. When I got up I started my math after reading my chapter and of course check out blogger and everything. I was pretty good with math today. I got to page 30 finally, which means that I did about 10 pages! This is only because they went faster.

At 4:30 I didn't feel like doing anymore. So I went downstairs to play and practice my violin. It was really cool. I practiced until my wrists hurt me a lot. My dad even came for a few minutes to accompany me. I enjoyed it so much. My new violin sounds awesome. I wish I could play like the really good people. Something really cool happened to me a few days ago. I was watching a great movie and one of the main characters practiced violin for a little bit and it was the Bach Partita in E Major which I am practicing right now. I felt the urge to get better! This is one of the reasons that I have practiced some times this week. I hope this will last.

Now I am writing my blog for today. Oh I forgot to mention, that I went to sparknotes today and there was some pretty good stuff. After reading most of it, I decided that it would be a great idea to read Death of a Salesman at least once more and notice the things that were described in there. I want to do a really good book presentation. Therefore I really have to know my stuff, I need to not get lazy on it. Usually I tend to get lazy soon after I started doing something, because I feel like I should be able to have some freetime as well, but the fact is that deep down I don't want to have freetime now. I want to make my life easier for later on. My focus is towards the future not the present or the past which is a good and a bad thing at the same time. Sometimes I am very dissatisfied with myself. This is probably when I get depressed. So the thing I have to tell myself is, that God created my perfect in his eyes. I shouldn't be dissatisfied with myself. I have to make the best out of the talents and opportunities that I got.

I still have to prepare myself for tomorrow. I will teach the children, the group of Tabea. This group is tough. I don't even know how many kids will be there, because we still have vacation. Oh well, I will just try my best.

Tomorrow is a great day. I am looking forward to it. This will hopefully be an amazing experience. Maybe we can pick a song each, that is our favorite and share it with each other. This is just an idea. I want to do some special things each week. Maybe you can think of something better or different...

Crazy World

Today was a good day of work, and of math, too. Even though I didn't get to do as much as I hoped to. I think I did a total of 8 hours of math, which isn't bad at all. This is a full day of work. All that I got done were six pages in my book this filled up 16 pages in my math exercise book!!! This is just about amazing. This equals about 14 assignments in math. :)
I thought, since I write so much about my math studies, I might as well, show you a little bit what it looks like. The good thing is that I have the solution right at hand. I hope that I can finish in time. I thought that everything looked pretty good at the beginning of this week, but I didn't realize, that some pages take three to four times as long as others. This is really not cool. So far, I only have done 17 pages in 4 days. Isn't that horrible? This is an average of 4 pages a day. Oh well, if I don't finish then I don't.

For lunch I made myself some pizza. My brother was hungry as well, but we didn't have another pizza, therefore we shared one. Which means I haven't eaten a lot today either. I am so hungry, but I don't feel like preparing something. I am actually looking forward to live by my own, so that I can just do whatever I feel like doing. I always don't want to do something more difficult, because I might mess something up. I don't want anyone to eat my messed up things and I know my mom would. This will change when I live by my own.

This movie I watched today was dealing with the Iraq war. It was pretty saddening. Granted, that there are a lot of movie addition, as there always are, it is still horrible what happens when there is war. I think one can only be grateful when one doesn't have to live in such an affected area. We live in peace and we are still not satisfied. Isn't that amazing, we complain all the time not realizing that we have actually nothing, NOTHING, to worry about. We have food, shelter, even cars to drive places and money to make sure we don't lose any of these things.
Our mind is occupied with getting the best deals, when people in affected areas such as New Orleans right now, or Asia, just look for drinkable water and some food to survive. Aren't we pretty selfish creatures? Aren't we saying to ourselves, oh that is pretty bad what happened there, but luckily it didn't happen to me. We don't even bother thinking about ways how to help those people, and if it was only to donate 10 bucks. Crazy...

Man, I finished Death of a Salesman. I can't believe it. It got kind of late though. Instead of going to sleep at 10, as I wanted to, I went to sleep at 12:30!! Oh well. I am glad I finished another part of my 'assignments'. It felt so good to be able to close this book and say: I am done reading it the first time!