I Knew It

My night at Theresa's was quite enjoyable. I got there around 10pm (this is how long this movie took including the half hour of driving to Dornhan). So let me tell you a little bit about this movie. It was concerned with the question of evolution theory being taught in Nebraska (as far as I know). One teacher just tried it out and therefore he got put in jail. And the movie was about the arguments that had been brought forth during his trial etc. It was quite interesting. I guess it was sharpened a little bit [maybe]. Now this discussion got kind of started again, because of the subject Intelligent Design. This is why we watched this movie.
So when I was at Theresa's house I did my homework, talked a little bit and helped her sister a tiny tiny bit with her preparations for her English Com. This is a big test they take in Realschule. Then I went to bed reading a few pages of my book. I advanced to page 550. So there is some progress noticeable :) I hope to be finished after Christmas holidays.
During English class we got our oral grades (from September until October). I was a bit disappointed, but I just knew it, that I would not get 15 points. I never do when I want it most. What did I do? I talked to my teacher about it. This is one thing I really appreciate about him, he accepts criticism and is also willing to think it over and maybe change a grade. Lateron I found out that a lot of people wanted to complain about their grades. For me the grade does no longer matter, because I have told him that I was not of the same opinion than he was and therefore everything is now settled. I don't think he will change my grade anyway. It has been too long ago to be able to have an objective view on the case. I just hope that in the future my grades will get better. The reason why I got sad was because English is my favorite subject (as you might know :)) and I am able to get 15 points orally in history and German.
I also practiced violin for about two hours, because I got this new piece of music, which I would like to perform on the Christmas concert from school. We will see if it works out...

Sleeping Over :)

There is not much to tell you about today except for I am re-starting to get sick. I hope this will become better soon. I almost threw up today, too.
Mr. Vogel returned so we did not get the pleasure of being taught by Mr. Kanus. Oh well. One thing I noticed immediately was that our homework literally doubled just for the sake of French. This is what I detest. I can't help it, so I better live with it.
Today I got my piece for the Chirstmas concert. I have to work extremely hard for it in order to be done in two weeks but I WANT to perform. I might embarrass myself, but oh well, I better embarrass myself before my auditions than during my auditions. My violin lesson was enjoyable. Tonight I will go to school to watch a movie with my English class, since it is in German we have to do it after class and the only time where everybody who is interested is available is in the evenings. Theresa then had the splendid idea that I could sleep over at her house. My mom said that it was ok and so I will not be home tonight. Finally I am getting to socialize a lot more than before. So this is enjoyable.
For the rest of my time remainig I will practice and maybe do some homework...

Chaos Once More

Several things happened during the last few days.
Friday was nothing special at all. I cleaned up my room, prepared myself for Sabbath School. I was in charge of the kids this past month. This took me quite a while. I was watching a TBN movie while working on it. So it was past 10 when I went to sleep. Usually I go to sleep around 7 on Fridays.
Saturday was an exciting day. We had church as usual. All my preparation was kind of not needed, because there were only two kids. Nevertheless I did my best. I had prepared a puzzle for them by myself, I had made 7 of those, but there were only two kids there. Anyway, after church the youths met. We were cooking together. This was so funny, because our garlic burned black, and there were not enough pots, so we had to wash one in order to be able to continue cooking. For not crying while cutting the onions we took a sip of water in our mouths and it actually worked. I think I will always do that from now on. I hate crying because of onion odors.
The youth group leader brought some desert made of noodles. Isn't that strange - sweet noodles? I thought it was, but it actually tasted good. Only after someone compared it to worms it wasn't a lot of fun to eat, because she was right :) it really felt like worms.
We advanced in discussing our Youth Sabbath program for march somthing.
On Sunday the outstanding event was the performance of all of our little students. They were all so cute and they did a magnificent job. This was just about awesome. Most of them were even better than they were in the lessons :) Since I had decided to play something on my violin I was nervous myself. I knew I had picked something really hard, something that I felt not ready to present, but I did it nevertheless. I practiced another two hours before going there in order to make sure I know the music and because of that it didn't end up completely horrible, but it was, in fact, pretty bad and I was ashamed. I am glad to have done it though, because I need to get started performing hard music which was definitely the case for the E Major Partita by Bach. I trembled during the whole performance, and my bow was extremely horrible, because my mom had used it before to play on her cello which mixed the two rasins up and gave a bad mix. This made it even worse. My dad explained me lateron that I had to concentrate for two hours straight and this was another factor making it worse. I believe that this is true, but I think I will have to do that as well, when I go to my auditions.
My music test which I took today went allright. I am expecting something like 13 points. The rest of my day was chaotic. (Oh yeah, my dad's birthday was today, I completely forgot about that as well :)) He is not going to be home tonight, therefore my mom and my sister can't get home with him from Böblingen. We figure that they would go by train, the problem is, that the train would leave at 10:30 which means they would be in Sulz by 11:30, which is way too late. So I needed the car and my mom needed it too. What should we do? Our solution was kind of interesting. She would drive me to my theory lesson and then go to the brass and choir rehearsal. Which meant that I had to go back home by train. The only problem was that I didn't know where the train station was. Alexandra went with me too. So the both of us, asked some fellow theory students to explain us the way. We got there in time, but we had to wait an hour as well, because the trains were only leaving every two hours. So we figured we might as well go and get something to eat. Since one way was about 15 minutes long, we ended up being outside for 45 minutes. We got ourselves some pizza, which was so filling because of all the cheese on top. The cool thing was that we also got something to drink without paying more.
Now I am finally home - really tired from yesterday. I will go to sleep now. One last news, we will have French tomorrow. We haven't had French for the past three weeks, which is why I could not complain at all :) We will see which teacher we will have, either Mr. Vogel or Mr. Kanus as a substitute. It was so nice with all the French-less time. So my life will get more stressful from now on.

Being a Bad Girl

I know it has been quite a while now since I have written my last blog. But I just couldn't write before. As you might know I had my chemistry test on Wednesday. It went allright when you look at the effort I put in it. The only thing that I want to criticize is that I could not finish all of it, so I will have a worse grade just because my time wasn't sufficient. My bio test on Thursday (today) went much better, because on Wednesday my mom and I studied for it together. My mom did that for me because I would not have studied on my own because I didn't feel like it.
After my mom had to go and continue her work I went to practice piano. I ended up doing it for two hours. It was a pretty good time. Now I am still off to do my homework so I better get started.
This evening we had the dress rehearsal for the perfermance on Sunday. This took another two hours. We got through everything "in time" but I had to interrupt because I had to pick up my sister from the train station. I hope that everything will work out on Sunday.
I just watched a movie, pretty tough stuff. It was about some chess players and killing women etc... interesting happening.
Well, now I definitely got to get started on my homework.

Adventus Domini Concerts

Sorry I will report tomorrow. I got sick :(
On saturday we went to church in Holzhausen because we had to leave the house early, since we had to be in Freiburg by 3:30 and we didn't know if there was any snow on the roads there. We got there without a lot of problems. While being in the car I commented on chapter 11 and saved it in word, so that I could post it once I got back. The director was very surprised that we, the Schneiders, got there half hour early :). Actually throughout the whole weekend we were one of the first to get ready and leave. After waiting about 20 minutes the pastor of the church in Freiburg came to let us in. The room was really small. A lot of people were a little disappointed, because we imagined this church to be bigger. Well, we had our regular dress rehearsal and set up everything: the lights, the risers,...
Changing into concert dresses was very tough. There were only two stalls (or howevery you call that) to change in and we were about 35 women who needed to change. There was a huge line in front of the women's bathroom, some even went to change in the men's bathroom, because the women's was crowded. Everyone got done just in time. I tuned my violin before going on stage, because I knew it would take me way too long, because my A,D and G strings do not have the fine-tuners (the little screws at the end of each string). Overall we did pretty good this evening, but the problem was that the narrow church swallowed up a lot of the sound and therefore the audience did not hear every pitch sung or played. The effect was still great. Our final extract of the Messiah was the Halleluja. Some people of the audience knew that this was a prayer and that the tradition therefore is to stand up. It was overwhelming to see all the people standing once we finished. I have never experienced something like that. I think it is hard to imagine. On top of that I didn't even know about this tradition until then. It got started by the English king who, when he heard this music for the first time, jumped up from his throne because it was so amazing. After the concert we went to the youth hostel and I finished chapter 11 in bed with my laptop on my lap. I was in a room with Marion, Miriam and Deborah (the last ones are the two daughters of Günter Preuß). They finally went to sleep at 11:30. In the morning I ate so much that my belly hurt, because I knew from my sisters that the cook who was going to cook lunch for us does not make yummy food. The food turned out surprisingly good, but it looked really gross. I will not go into the details of the look because you might lose your appetite :) Anyway, at least it was really healthy. It was vegan, too. No cheese, no milk no nothing.
Oh on sunday morning we had a concert especially for children, where we showed them, how an orchestra works and they could go into 5 different groups looking at different instruments: strings, brass, voice, woodwinds, key-instruments (piano, chembalo, organ...). It seemed like a huge success. The funniest part for us, was when they composed the beginning of the Halleluja themselves. Some of them got played on different instruments and sounded weird to great.
I even went for a walk, since Lilli, one of the members of the orchestra, had to go to a bank anyway. It was really cold outside. My nose was running and the bank was really far away. Maybe this is the reason why I got sick, who knows.
The second concert was at 5 pm and I was so tired that I could hardly concentrate on the music. I messed up way more than the day before, but still it was better, especially the dynamics. I missed some entries and I got some accidentals confused but other than that it went allright :)
Oh one important thing is, that the project that we support in North Korea will soon no longer receive our money, because the government throws out all the relief organizations. So far all of our money went to a chilren's hospital and we are praying that we can continue playing for this particular project, but only God can help. If you don't mind, maybe you can pray for it too. Children are the future of every culture and therefore they need help the most.
On our way home, my belly felt so strange. It rumbled and continued feeling really weird. I thought it is just because of my dad's driving style, but apparently it wasn't that. I got sick :(( even though I figured that on Sunday, I still went to school on Monday, but after having such a hard time during math, I decided to go home. I stayed home on Tuesday as well, having twinges of remorse as usual. I still don't have a lot of appetite and I feel really weak, but I will go to school tomorrow, because I have to take a test in chemistry. I did not really prepare myself for it either. I will do that tonight.
Guess what, I am so freakin' hungry, but I don't have appetite. It is strange. I didn't eat breakfast, I hardly had something for lunch and my dinner was half a bowl of apple sauce. That was all I ate today and therefore I am so hungry, but I don't know what to eat.
Oh yeah, I still wanted to talk about my knee and chemistry. We had to present our group work yesterday and some of my sheets dropped and I tried to cath them with my legs, but I forgot about the wooden shelf under the desk and hit my knees really bad. Now I have two big bruises on them and they hurt all day yesterday.

Final Meeting of the CBW Leaders

Today we were invited to Kontuschs to celebrate the ending of the Children's Bible Week. We got there really late cause my mom and I had to work until 6pm, after that we had to bring the car to the place where it would get checked tomorrow and then we got into a traffic jam (as usual). The good thing was that we had to leave the Autobahn anyway, so that is not too bad.
I ate so much pizza that I am not feeling to great in my tommy [tummy** :)]. Maybe I will also get sick, but I just don't aniticipate this because if I do it will surely happen. What did we do there? We looked at the pictures and then we talked with each other, also questioning if we should do it again next year. Everyone said yes, since they all said it was a huge success. Someone told us about that, because we got there late and everything has been settled at that time.
What else happened today? I got to read my English book, which I will have to do a book presentation over :( My teacher "forced" me to do so, because he thinks it will be beneficial for the class. I don't quite see the point, but I always love to talk, so I don't mind. Maybe I will also get and exclamation mark for it, who knows. I definitely enjoy reading this book most of the times. Some pages are kind of boring but then again it gets exciting. I think I just don't enjoy reading as much as I used to :(
OH yeah, I also took my French test today. It was a weird text. I didn't understand too much, even though I had the impression that I did. I can't really describe my feelings. What I liked most, was that I was probably the only one who was not upset at the teacher, because I no longer care about my grade in French. Whatever grade this test will have, I will accept. I wrote way too many words at the last questions, the others were just in the limit. This time I figured that I would not shorten it at all, since the error rate is almost half of the grade of the test. The more correct phrases and structures I use, the better my error rate becomes. Who cares if my questions don't get full credit. I believe that it was not possible to get full credit anyway, unless you could have written twice as much as you were allowed to.
I will let you know how it turns out to be as soon as I get it back.
Tomorrow I will probably get my history test back. This is the first test that I am REALLY afraid of. I think that I ruined my grade in history by me not studying enough. I will have more news tomorrow.

Mad Me :)

This day was a complete mad day :) or should I better say, I acted madly today? Anyway, my day started off not too enjoyable, since my German teacher asked me why I gave him a nasty look but I did not, so I defended myself. I thought this was annoying, but I guess he just acts like that sometimes.
Another funny thing is that we have not had one French lesson since the end of my vacations but we will nevertheless take the test tomorrow. So far I did not study at all, but I will review some vocabs before taking this test tomorrow. I do not care about my French grade any longer. I don't know if one can really call that mad, but I think it is :)
Oh yeah, I found out about my history test as well. The dumb thing is that I definitely messed up the second question. I tried to figure that out and asked my teacher about it, she misunderstood me and told me that it would not be so bad and then just before she left, that messing up the description of two historical events are just wrong, and this is what I did :(( I am not counting on more than 10 points, since my first question were only 11 points (this is what my teacher told me). So history will not be too great this year, which is sad because I really like this subject. But I admit that it was stupid to expect any better grade since I didn't study that much for the test either.
Why else was I mad? Because I practiced 2.5 hours of violin. This means that my shoulder and my wrist hurt an aweful lot now. Not only that, but from practicing so much I got blisters on my index and ring finger where the fingers get put on the strings. This kind of hurts too. At least this whole time was very productive. I practiced for the concert this weekend. So far I did not practice once, so this was very urgent. Not only did I do that, but also worked my way through some of my other assigned music. I want my violin to sound great and I think that I am getting better every week. I have hope that I will make it into the music conservatory or college or however you call that, at least for the violin part. The piano still needs an aweful lot of work and I have no more motivation right now.
I started listening to classical music again. I want to educate myself more over the different styles and composers, therefore I do one CD at a time and try to figure out what music is played and where it is from etc. Hopefully that will get my smarter. This is a great thing to do if you want to relax... which I also did today. I was laying in bed reading my English book and listening to music. I was so tired that I could not get myself to work on anything.
Now I will do a little bit of French.

Chaos

Today was an extremely chaotic day :) We got to school with no problem this morning. School overall was allright. I didn't have French one more time. I wonder if I will have French tomorrow. On Wednesdsay I will take a test :) I hope I will be allright. I am not expecting anything over 8 points, so I should be fine taking this darn test.
Anyway, when we got home for lunch everything started and who's fault was it??? mine :( I was really disappointed in my sister, since she promised me yesterday she would learn her English vocabs, but the fact was that she did not learn at all. She wrote some of them, maybe half, but she didn't learn a bit, she just chatted and watched a movie (the one which we have watched before her). Admitting that she worked on her vocabs by writing them on flash cards while watching the movie, I was still extremely disappointed... I have fulfilled my part of the "treaty" and she had promised me to do her part as well. Now I am allowed to assign her 4 hours!! of vocab studies during this week. I know that she probably won't do it, but maybe she will see that I got a point.
I annoyed her so much that she slammed the door and went upstairs, and then for some reason (I forgot what it was exactly) my little sister started crying and I told her that she is a crybaby, which made her upset at me. I was just not being sensitive towards my little sister's problems...
The thing with Mari got settled while driving to school. She was forced to sit in the car, but she didn't want to sit up front so she just joined Tabea in the back seat :/

This were not all of the happenings of today though... you know I always have Theory class in Rottweil after I finish my music class in the Gymnasium and therefore I can leave 10 minutes early. Marion tried to do something good and therefore she asked Mr. Vogt to drive Tabea and her home, her friend got driven home. The problem was that she didn't know, that my mom and her had to go to the train station because my dad wasn't home, which means, that my mom would have gone to Sulz and no Marion and no music would have been there. So I decided to go home once more (which I would have had to do anyway) I just saw my mom driving around the corner of the street, which means that if I would have been 30 seconds later I would have missed her... she was surprised to hear me hunk at her. I told her what the problem was and said that I would drive her to the train station. We went back home, but Marion was still not there yet. After waiting for about 2 minutes we decided to just leave a message for her and leave. I looked at every single license plate of the cars who headed in the direction of our home. We finally saw them close to the first roundabout, so I quickly turned to go and get Marion to drive my mom and her to the train station. It was already extremely late, I had no chance of making it in time. My mom had the splendid idea of asking Mr. Vogt to drive them to the train station, since that would give me 7 minutes or more. He said yes, so my sister went to get her trumpet and I left as fast as I could. On my way there I was speeding :( Fortunately the Autobahn into this direction has no speed limit so I went 150 km/h which is not too bad at all. I made it in 20 minutes. Usually it takes about 25-30 minutes depending on the traffic and the mood I am in.
Now I will go ahead and practice my beloved violin. I miss practicing a lot if I don't have time for it. I hope it will be a very productive practice time. I must prepare something for the Christmas concert at school, because I have to get used to perform things in front of an audience. I haven't done that in such a long time. I mean music that I am currently working on. I don't remember when the last time was that I did such a thing. I will probably use the recorder children's performation as well. I have to and I hate doing it, but I need to get used to it.

Youth Group

What was special about today, was that I actually enjoyed the youth meeting we had today. A woman from India joined in, since she visited our youth group leader. She preferably spoke English, really good English I must say, so I went ahead and practiced a little bit. Sometimes I made stupid mistakes, but I didn't care as much, since that just happens...
Our food was ok, a little greasy though. We had potato fritter (I looked that one up :)) and someone poured in so much oil that it got very greasy in the beginning. Fortunately we only got some of the last ones (we meaning the ones who cooked, Marion, Sylvia, Adriana and I).
Another point that made youth meeting enjoyable was that we were very productive. We will have to organize a youth sabbath in March. So we tried to pick a topic for our service. From lesson study over announcements to the sermon everything will be done by the youth group. We also want to decorate the room in an appropriate manner. So far we have picked a topic and we found several biblical stories that match. This Sabbath will be over aceptance and tolerance and as a result of that compromises.
My mom and Tabea went to my grandma in Breisach and my dad went to a concert. Therefore Marion and I had to go back by train. This was quite interesting, because we wanted to pay with a twenty Euro bill, the problem was that the machine did only take bills up till ten Euros. So we had a big problem paying our ticket. We finally found a way out. I had some change, well not just some but a lot of change and my sister found a five Euro bill in her wallet and so we were able to pay for it. Otherwise we would have had to ask someone if they can change a twenty Euro bill which would have been annoying. On top of that we didn't have much time, since we left the church a little late.
On our way home Marion remembered that someone still had to go with the dog, but she had no time since she is going to some sort of concert (Christian rock, I believe :( ) so I said ok, when she asked me to go with the dog. Guess what I did, I went there by bicylce. On the way there it was no big deal, since it went downhill the whole time, so I didn't have to move the bycicle by myself :). I forgot to mention a little detail: by the time we had walked home it was completely dark outside. Now I am always scared in the dark and therefore I did not turn on my flashlight, because I thought "If I turn that on, people can see me way better and they are in advantage if they want to do something to me." I was glad to have the dog with me. Something really stupid happened to me when I tried to unchain the dog... I took out the wrong part, so when I came back, the chain no longer had a top to cling the dog in. I searched for it using my flashlight and finally found it. The embarrassing thing was that one of the family members came outside to see, what was wrong with the dog since he would not stop barking :) He finished chaining the dog for me (if you can say that).
Now I am home, I have finished watching my cleaning up movie from Friday (Mulan II) and I ate dinner. I will continue reading my book now and maybe also talk to my best friend lateron.

First Movie on TBN

I watched The China Cry and I will report on it tomorrow night. I strongly recommend it :) It dealed with a woman who lived in the communist China and was treated extremely badly. Even though she was pregnant, she still had to lift heavy stones, and do hard men's work.
As a little kid she was sent to Christian schools, which gave her a lot of trouble later on. She had to confess that she was a Christian and was about to be shot when a miracle took place. God promised her to lead her out of China. She did not get killed by the bullets of the rifles.
Before being able to watch this movie I had to install realplayer on my laptop. This took quite a while.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

Today was a pretty normal day except that two of my hours didn't take place, which gave me the opportunity to do my math homework in school. Yay. I also read some more pages in the English book. I am glad that I am advancing with it. I still don't have half of it read, but I am almost at page 300, which is good and it finally turned interesting. I really enjoy reading it now. Sometimes I don't approve of the language used, but this is to make it more authentical, so I understand why certain words get used in some places. Other than that it is really cool to read, and I can review on a lot of once learned vocabulary, I still don't know all of it, but I understand the main action :) this is what counts for me. I hope that my style of writing will also improve by reading English books.
When I came home I got so tired all of a sudden, therefore I took a nap until I had my piano lesson. I got to drive there with my dads car, therefore I didn't have to drive gas saving. My piano lesson went allright. I hope that I can prepare myself well for studying music in case I decide to do so. My teacher had her right hand burned. Poor her, but it will get better soon, she said.
At home I turned my computer on and my best friend was online, so we chatted for quite a while and now I will start my homework.

More Good News

This morning I got to class kind of early, because we left the house in time. I enjoyed it and I thought I might as well use the time to read my English book. After a while I started wondering why no one else came. I looked at the time and got a little scared, because I thought I was in the wrong classroom. I left to look at the "Vertretungsplan"...yes it is true our French teacher was sick for another day, which meant I had an extra free hour. I also saw that Mr. Umbscheiden (sports) was not in school today either. This means that three of my six hours of Wednesday didn't take place.
Now what did I do the whole time? This is a good question. I would say that I kind of "wasted" my time, cause I read and I talked, but this time I talked to Jan. We had real nice talk on religion, addicts, smoking, etc. I enjoyed talking to him. I did this instead of reading my book. I didn't realize that I have quite a bunch of homework that I actually need to do. Tomorrow I won't have the last two hours, so I will get a chance to do my homework then. I want to do a really good job on those homework, cause they are the best preparation for the ABitur I can get.
When I got home I went to sleep after reading a little more of "the bonfire of the vanities". I woke up kind of in time for my lesson, the problem was that Simone didn't show up in time. Unfortunately I didn't have the chance to make the lesson longer than 5 minutes over her time, cause I had kids after that as well. We got through everything pretty good though.
Hey guess what, I forgot to mention it before, I got my German test back and I have 13 points. I am really satisfied with this result. To be quite honest, I didn't expect 13 but 12 points. This means I have a chance to get 14 points, if I continue to be as active as I used to be during last year.
What really made my day cool, was that I now earned so much money that I only have 60 € to pay back. So I can start saving from December on. Hopefully I will get quite some money to spend on either an America-trip or an Europe-trip. I will also try to get some more work at the Heinrich-Kipp-Werk.
Today I got to practice violin for almost two hours and it made me feel really great. It made me feel like I accomplished something, cause I haven't done that in such a long time. I didn't practice at all during my vacation as I mentioned yesterday or the day before.

Enjoyable Day

Most surprisingly I only had two classes today. All the other ones weren't held because of teachers absences.
Anyway, my math test made my day extremely happy. I did get 15 points!!! Can you believe that. I couldn't. I mean, I had a good feeling about it, but 15 points means that I made no mistake at all. My total of calculations was seven pages :) Theresa was also very good and the both of us celebrated our grades during the last hour (which was canceled, because the teacher had to take care of a class which wrote a math test). I couldn't believe it at all and I still can't.
Tomorrow I will probably get my German test back. I wonder what I got there. My homework of reading 4 chapters of the book is due tomorrow, I hope I can still do it tonight.
My violin lesson was ok, even though I didn't practice that much. What was astonishing for me, was that my teacher understood me not practicing these vacations. You can say that she almost approved of it. I liked her for that, cause it made me feel better about not practicing and I am also greatly motivated to practice more this week. I have tons of time right now compared to the weeks before my vacation. I hardly have any homework and this is because I don't have French. Soon, namely tomorrow, it will start though :(
I am thinking about studying music again. I think that I have a chance to make it into some university and I also think that I actually would enjoy studying music. We will see how long this mood of motivation will last.
After finishing teaching my kids I practiced piano myself and then watched a movie with Tabea and my mom. This was it for today. I will now go to sleep.

School Again - First Day of Research

I woke up in time this morning. I still have not set back my alarm, because I think it will do me good in the future. This way I might work faster seeing that it already got late :) and in the morning I will wake up faster cause I might think that I am extremely late... anyway I woke up in time today. I wanted to be in school by 7:15 cause we were allowed to start our math test at that time. This was a very nice idea of our math teacher Mr. Lämmle. For that reason I woke up my two sisters so that they could get ready in time as well, I checked my email and then I went off to school. Even though I got there a little late, my math teacher wasn't there yet, so I didn't lose any time! Despite the mistakes I made last night, while working my way through the examples of previous Abiturs, I felt really secure during the test. So far I did not find one mistake, so I can say that there is the chance of getting 15 points. I would be very pleased if this would happen to me. In my opinion I would even deserve it, because I was the only one who did math during summer vacation and I studied for almost 12 hours on Sunday too.
I got to read some pages of "The Bonfire of the Vanities" since my French teacher was sick and will be sick tomorrow as well. Those were the extremely good news of today. Mr. Peiker, German teacher, will be out tomorrow as well. This means I have to go to class at 10:10. I never had class this late before. I warned my sisters to better not wake me up tomorrow cause I can sleep in... maybe I will also practice some violin in the morning.
During my lunch break I was talking with my family and because of that I forgot the time and was a little late to class. I have to admit that I sped on my way to school, I am really sorry for doing so, because I actually don't want to do that anymore. There are two reasons for this decision to be right, my license is not in danger anymore :) and it saves a lot of gasoline.

My hearing capacity is very low right now. It is so hard for me. I would need someone to practice with me, but there is no one. Our assignment was, after hearing a little cadence (1st, 4th, 5th and 1st position of a scale) to figure out any pitch on the keyboard of the piano no matter how high or low it is. The problem I have is simply that I can't memorize the base pitch which happened to be G in our example. I always remembered the pitch that the person before me had to guess :( this is something one can learn though. I am glad I am participating in this course. I would have failed the theory part for sure. Of course I don't know if I will take this test at all.

When I got home I did a little Religion research over SDA beliefs and I found that the correct abbreviation is Adventist (because one always needs to know where it comes from ;)
I had a hard time finding the "28th" belief that got added a short time ago. And when I finally found a page that had all 28 fundamental beliefs I had to figure out which number the belief that got added had. It turned out to be number 11. The English websites are probably better maintained than German websites. I printed them out in German and English for understanding and conversing issues. Ellen G. White appears in one of them, but for some reason (duh) I was relieved to see that her word does not count more than the Bible and that she even encourages readers of her scripture to go back and prove it wrong (if possible), well this is not the way she put it, but the essence is the same.
Since I recently heard of Seventh Day Baptists (as opposed to Seventh-day Adventists[this is the correct spelling of both religions, weird right?]) I tried to find out about them as well, just out of curiosity. In the USA there are only some 4000 memebers, can you believe that?? There does not even exist a church in Germany. If I will convert to this religion, I don't know what to do, but I guess I have to be a missionary first and convert people to "my religion" in order to establish something. That is kind of tough....
Anyway November is the month of Seventh-day Adventism. I wonder what new results it will bring. Maybe I will find myself to no longer be a Seventh-day Adventist as well :)

Summary of CBW and Youth Meeting

Thursday nothing extraordinary went on, it was just the same as always. We got up kind of early in the morning to go to the Children's Bible week. The pastor stayed for quite some time to help with putting the strings on harps. This was hard work if you wanted them to have a little bit of sound. The food was really good on that day. We had "Quarkspeise" which is quark with fruits in it and a little bit of sugar added to make it sweet. mmmmh. One of the cooks made some baked stuff, I don't know exactly what they consisted of but they were yummy. In the afternoon I talked to my bestfriend for quite a while, which was interrupted by Tabea and Natascha, the friend we had over for the past week, since I promised them they could watch a movie. This movie was about baseball and how poor players actually made it to the top. It didn't end with a happy ending though. They didn't win the trophy, but this is why I actually liked it. It is more realistic. It portrayed good morals as well.

Friday:
Now it is time to report on all the activities that took place during the Children's Bible week. First of all there were T-Shirts that everyone could paint. They had the three basic colors and green, black and white and a lot of little cups to mix more colors such as pink and brown. It was interesting to watch the children pick things they wanted to paint about. The first day it was mainly nature stuff like butterflies, trees, flowers, etc. The second day a lot of children were impressed by the story of the first day so that they drew the mascot animal which represented the essence of the story. Every single participant got one T-Shirt which they wore on Saturday.
The next activity was the harp that I have mentioned before. Detlef, our only male leader, helped the children with that. They had four pieces of wood. Into the bottom piece (a 4 in. trapezoid) they had to screw special screws into the little prepared holes. Those screws had a circle at the end, so that you can make knots into the string. They were supposed to not be screwed in too much so that you can fasten the strings a little more in the end. The other three pieces of wood were for the frame. I will post a picture on photobucket so that you can have an idea of how that looks. My explanation is not very depictive. Anyway after all the screws were screwed in into the "body" of the harp, the four pieces got put together with screws as well and then the children were off to paint their harp in any color they wanted to. Some of them came out really pretty. [Because of all the dangerous coloring that went on the whole floor was covered with plastic.]
After that they were able to make a crown out of clay, similar to the one I used for my dolphin. They shaped it in a long thick line (in german we call it sausage) and then they put it around their head to measure the diameter, even though it didn't really get circular in the end. After they finished measuring the form they made the sides narrower so that it did no longer look like a long sausage but like a crown. The clay dried over night and the next day silver and gold glitter could be put on the crown along with "jewelry". The remarkable thing, was that even the boys had fun doing that.
The last craft activity was to make a lion maks for the face. This was a dirty activity. Your fingers got sticky really fast. Ok, let me explain how it worked. The first step was stapling two ears on the face. After that the face got turned round and the annoying part started. There were five layers of crepe paper that needed to be glued on the back side of the lion's head. They represented the mane, therefore there were cuts in it to resemble the hair of the mane of a lion. The first layer was yellow, the second one brown, the third one white, the fourth one yellow again and the last one brown. That was not it yet. When all of the 5 layer were successfully glued on the back side the mask got turned around again and the missing places on the front got colored and the borders of the colored parts were lined with glitter glue so that it got shiny and pretty. Christine Hertz, who was in charge of that, and I figured that we should do some more, since there were a lot of kids who didn't get to it. So while the story was going on, we made another ten of those masks. Our fingers were really dirty and even though I showered yesterday there is still some glue left on my thumbnail. Oh well.
After all the children had left (except for the ones of the leaders) we started cleaning up for Saturday. All the tables were wrapped in plastic to protect them from constant stains, so they had to be removed as well as the plastic that covered the whole floor. All the chairs had to be put in the room where the church service would take place. The decorations on the walls we left for the other church members to look at the next day. We also left the deco in the church service room (camp fire, tent, plants, tree branches etc.) all the things the children had made over the course of this week were displayed, which means there had to be room for 30 harps, for 30 lion's masks, 30 crowns... we made and got home around 2:30.
When we were home I started working on the pictures for the presentation. This took me quite a while because I wanted to make sure that I have every single child on the presentation at least once. After that I cut out the lion which was Saturday's mascot animal. And then my sister and I prepared the stuff for the children's lesson study, it was once again my turn. I really like doing that a lot... by the way, I went to sleep really early since it gets dark so fast in winter time.

Saturday:
I woke up in time and I wanted to leave early to make sure everything is ok with the projector etc. Since I didn't announce that yesterday evening (my sister and I had made Andacht by ourselves again) it caused a lot of problems - only for my dad though. He is not very flexible in the mornings and he does not think that the need of a family member has more importance than his morning preparations. Even though he said, he hurried up, I don't believe him. I let him know that I had to leave 12 minutes before I wanted to go. He already was in the bathroom for quite a while. I know it was short notice, but a woman would be able to get done within another 10 minutes, and women are always said to be the ones to take longer in the bathroom. 8:45 was the time that was set as the leaving time, and this is when we left, even though I wanted to leave 8:30. We were telling our dad that we would leave without him, if he doesn't hurry up, therefore we hid the car after waiting for 5 minutes. This way, my dad explained us lateron, we lost another minutes, because he was calling the car to let us know he wouldn't come to Böblingen, but go to Holzhausen instead, even though he was in charge of the lesson study from the fron today... my parent's were yelling at each other in the car. My dad concluded that he is always the one who gets blamed, if the family does not leave in time. I don't know if this is correct, but the fact is that he does not take care of his responsibilities. He does not even accept them. My mom has to do everything herself, load the car, prepare the food for those who didn't get to eat breakfast, etc etc. We got there 15 minutes before church service started. We still got to try out everything. But it was important to have checked it before since I am working on two screens at home. The projector worked on the wrong screens, so we had to reset the control panel to one screen. It worked out. yayay. All the sudden another problem turned up. Detlef told my mom how he was going to bring the scanned songs that we were supposed to sing during the church service, but either he said it wrong, or my mom understood it wrong the fact is, that he brought it on a floppy disk and my computer can't read those, since there is no drive for it. My mom heard CD and therefore I thought everything was fine. Fortunately Natascha had her laptop there as well who had a floppy disk drive. Her laptop was so huge. I never seen something like that. It was about 15-20 pounds heavy and twice the size of a regular laptop, I guess. I don't know how to descirbe it. It was huge. It worked so freakin' slow though, we only had three minutes left to save it on the computer and then put it on my card reader, which I brought as well, because I thought I might empty up my pictures...
This laptop definitely has a virus. Something this slow is incredible. We got done just in time. The service was a succes, but since I was occupied with technical stuff I couldn't follow everything that has been said.
At home, we ate French fries with ketchup, vegetables and salad. I was so full after finishing my plate, I just wanted to lay myself down for a little while, but after turning on my computer I did something better than that. I talked to my best friend until I had to leave for the youth meeting. I got to go with my dad's car to save our gas :) it was really easy to find. Well what did we do there? We talked a lot, because Kontuschs want the youth to get more active and participate in church activities. Some people in church had the idea to have a youth service next year meaning the youth will do the sermon on this day. I don't know if we are going to be able to do it, since this requires a lot of ideas. We can turn the regular schedule upside down if we want to. I would like to do something like that, cause it gives the youth the chance to tell the older church members what they still don't like, or what they appreciate...
After a while we ordered pizza and ate some chips and apples. We did not go to the movies though, cause one of the boys said, he has seen everything interesting already. Therefore we just rented a movie and watched it in their home. They had one of those large TV's. The movie was interesting. I don't know why, but I got a headache after a while and I just wanted to go home. We left around 10:30 so we were at home by 11. I didn't blog because of my headache. This is why I am taking my time now. But I will get started now. I have all of the math studying ahead of me today and I really don't feel like doing this the whole day. We will see how it goes.

2nd Day

This morning there was nothing extraordinary going on. One thing that wasn't very good though, was that Simone had to cry since Tabea treated her poorly. I was very sorry for her. She has not yet found any friends. She thought about staying at home tomorrow, but just before we left she got a little better.
After we were done at church we went shopping at Real. I finally bought my black cartridge and now my printer will hopefully work again.
For dinner we had some pizza and before that we folded clothes while watching a movie. that was about it for today. Nothing really interesting.
Oh I forgot to mention that we got into a traffic jam twice. It was really annoying. I was the one driving to Böblingen, so that my mom could review a little more. We lost about a half hour because of this traffic jam. Luckily we still made it in time. We would have liked to be there earlier but as long as we were on time (I was just about typing online :)) it didn't really matter. I kind of messed up my part today, but it wasn't that bad. My part was the Wildhüter Max part where the children had to guess what animal they are dealing with.

Children's Bible Week Has Started

I woke up early this morning!!! Why is that? Because I went to sleep at a decent time. This has not worked out for a long time. I actually wanted to change to a morning person, but it never worked out. Yesterday I made it. I went to sleep at 9 something, after reading my English book for about an hour (even outside) and watching several short movies with my mom and my sister, while...doing math :)). Outside the weather was really great. The sun was shining and therefore it was warm (I could wear a T-shirt in late october). This is unbelievable. I also drank enough. My drinking habits got much better. I feel thirst now.
Back to this morning. Once I had finished checking my email and blog, I went downstairs to color some more, since I was not done with all of the animals. One was missing. I took my laptop with me to have some real pictures to look at. Maybe I can show you some of the drawings some day. I will save them. My mom was waiting for me to finish, because she wanted to prepare breakfast. I made it in time, since I promised her to be done in a half hour. We started and finished breakfast in time, packed the car in time and left our house in time. This is very unusual for my family. Therefore we were really glad. Driving was my job, because my mom still needed to review some of the stuff she had to have learned by heart by today.
Let me tell you a little bit, of what was going on today, during the different parts of the Children's Bible Week.
The first part of it was the Spielstraße (street of games). A vast variety of games was offered. You could paint a T-Shirt, that one can take home at the end of this week. The children who did that were really funny sometimes. One guy whose picture I put up on photobucket, had his whole shirt filled with color. He wasn't even done at that time. He drew cars and fire cars on his shirt :) The girls usually drew butterflies, flowers, a sun, ... with matching colors etc. They took their time, at least most of them. The next thing the children could do, was building a harp. Not a real one of course - a much smaller one. This harp has only 8 strings, and they are out of tune as well. The fun part of this project is the coloring of the wooden parts. Then there were different games offered and of course puzzles and table soccer...
A lot of songs were sung during the Lagerfeuer (camp fire) part. Even Patrick, who usually doesn't sing, sang. My mom was amazed by that fact.
Food was served for lunch. It was held simple, just different breads and vegetables. The decoration of the food was really beautiful though.
I was taking pictures the whole time, to make sure I have some nice ones. Some of them didn't get as sharp as I wanted them to be, but this is why I took so many. You know I am in charge of presenting them on Saturday.
When we got home we had lunch, a lot one, and after finishing our food we went for a walk with the dog. Marion was soooooo tired that she didn't even show up for lunch and of course would not go with us. I enjoyed the sun today as well. I hope it will stay like that for a little longer.
Tabea's friend who will stay with us for the whole week, Tabea and I started to play a game after that. It was a little bit boring, but I did them this favor, because I thought that I would enjoy it too, which I did. I joined them in watching a movie that i have seen about 5 times by now, and since it wasn't that interesting I prepared dinner for them, so that they didn't have to go downstairs to interrupt their movie :)
That way, I also helped my mom, cause she was going to do it herself. This is about it for today...