I love Germans... and other various happenings

It's 3:30am and in the past week I've had enough meat and beer to kill a small elephant. Seriously, I'm not trying to stereotype an entire culture, but the 5 Germans that I've spent time with this past week really do live on beer, bread, meat, and cheese. Like, woah. Just this weekend, we've gone through almost 7 or 8 pounds of London Broil steak, and 4 cases of beer(not counting what we had out at bars). If you're thinking, "wow, that sounds really excessive" you're right. It is excessive, but lucky for my body 2 have left already, 2 leave tomorrow, and that leaves only one German here until the middle of April.

Besides the 'blitzkreig' on my digestive system, it's been such a blast having them here. M has been home on spring break, Surfer just got back from a stay in costa rica(for surfing), and since almost all the Germans have been friends of GC's he's been around all the time too. The cool thing about that, is that all 4 of us took an extensive amount of German in high school (personally, German 1,2,3,4,and AP, as well as a 201 and 301 in college, while both M, Surfer, and GC have spent a minimum of 6 months in Germany at one time or another in addition to the classes in school) So we'll be sitting around talking, or huddling by a bonfire to keep warm(like tonight) and spend 70% of the conversation all speaking in German. I've used my German more in the last two weeks then I have in the last two years combined and the improvement I can hear in myself is quite refreshing. I know that I've lost sooooo much having not spoken it often, but it's also coming back much quicker than I expected.

In other, non-German related news... the Intranet I have been developing since November finally went live on Thursday!!! It's still a bit sparse and a little rough, but it's up for testing and the scores of suggestions that I hope to get for content. It wasn't without it's glitches though. So, one of the things my boss's boss (the one who assigned me this project) wanted was a way for the counselors to all communicate with each other and have an interactive calendar for events they want to let other counselors know about. So I did my research and found an module for the PHPBB2.0.23 bulletin board/forum program. Great, it does everything we wanted and we couldn't ask for more. Well, I get the message Thursday freaking morning, that the servers we're hosting the Intranet on, are not allowed to have the language PHP installed on them. That forum, is made entirely in PHP. About 20 minutes later, I have a 4 page sheet on my desk outlining all the languages and programs that are either preferred, accepted, or denied. Would this not have been helpful for me to have oh... say... back in NOVEMBER!!!! I told boss's boss that he can forget about his counselor communication method for the foreseeable future until I find something else that will work. Luckily for me, he's also a geek like myself and knew exactly how stupid it was for them to refuse to install PHP and didn't blame me for it in any way.

After work on Thurs my boss, MJ, and I all went out for a few drinks to celebrate MJ's birthday. It was a lot of fun even just the 3 of us. We all get along really well, both in a professional and personal environment. I'm sure though, that we looked like quite the odd gathering, a man almost in his 50's with kids starting college, a woman in her 30's with a guide dog, and a 24 year old just getting started. Personally, I think my boss just wanted to hear stories of MJ and I when we were in college so he had an idea what his daughters were actually doing while they were away at school, especially since I've spent weekends parting at the school his eldest now goes to.

Saturday(technically today), I'm taking my mother to see a play of Macbeth staring Patrick Stewart(Captain Jean Luc Piccard/ Professor X) in Brooklyn. It will be my second time going and I'm so very excited.... again. The first time was utterly amazing, and I look forward to any more nuisances that I can pick up on this time around.

Sunday we'll undoubted do our traditional hunt for plastic, money filled easter eggs. We've done it every year as long as I can remember, and I still find it amazing that my father can hide those eggs in the same room for 10 years and my brother and I still usually have trouble finding the last few. After dinner then I head back to Philly, just about for good. I've got monthly train passes for April from Philly, basketball and indoor soccer leagues(kickball was canceled much to my dismay) start in just under 3 weeks, and I'd like to actually spend some time living in my apartment and city. Wednesday E and I are headed to a 76ers game and at some point the last German and GC are coming in to hang out and see the bars... I mean... sights :-)