Easter Sunday

We did wake up to snow on Easter Sunday but the day was mostly sunny and the snow was starting to melt a little. Although, it was still bitterly cold!

We woke up early to cook the Breakfast casserole that I made the night before. We gave up meat for Lent so I really wanted to break that fast! MK slept a little longer than the rest of us, surprise, surprise, but rushed down to see what the Easter bunny brought. Our Easter Bunny brought lots of chocolate for MK and Matt. And the "Enchanted" DVD to MK. We found out later at Church that the Easter Bunny brought "Enchanted" to a lot of little girls in Hohenfels. ("Enchanted" came out on the previous Tuesday).

MK wore a beautiful new Easter dirndl to Mass. MK loves the traditional German dirndls. She is obsessed with Little House on the Prairie and the dirndls remind her of what Laura and Mary wear in the shows. After Mass, all the children ran outside to play under the tall pine tree. All the little girls looked lovely in their pretty, new Easter dresses. So much so, that the little boys probably thought they needed to chase them and throw snowballs at them. That's what MK told us in the car on the way home: "All the girls had on new dresses and the boys kept chasing us and throwing snowballs at us! They were ruining our clothes!" Rightous Indignation! And as always, boys still continue to chase girls, and girls still continue to run and squeal!"

We came home to a quiet Easter Sunday. Matt and MK began dyeing the Easter eggs about 2pm. And we had dinner about 3pm. Our Easter dinner consisted of a beef brisquit, sour cream and chives mashed potatos, green bean casserole, and salad. As I said earlier, we gave up meat for Lent so the brisquit was too good for words. I think our brisquit leftovers were even better than the original!

The Easter egg hunt began about 4pm when MK went and got her neighbor friend. Matt hid the eggs the first time but the girls had so much fun that they stayed outside for about an hour hiding and finding eggs over and over again.

It was a quiet Easter Sunday. But a very peaceful day that this family really needed! Happy Easter to all of your friends, family, loved ones!

And it keeps snowing

Here is MK leaving for school this morning. It is still snowing Friday evening and will snow through the weekend. Can't wait to see where the Easter bunny hides our Easter eggs on Sunday!

I'm dreaming of a White Easter

It started snowing yesterday. The forecast calls for snow on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We will be hunting for brightly colored Easter eggs in the snow this year.

I love you too.... more than life itself!!

Celebrating St. Patrick's Day and Matt's Birthday!

The birthday celebrations began yesterday. It was a long weekend here in Hohenfels. I worked all weekend on our annual Hohenfels Community and Spouses Club Wild West Night. WWN is a casino/gambling type event we hold every year to raise money for our scholarship fund for the Spouses' Club. This year I served as the Country Store Chair. The event was Saturday night but required lots of setting up on Friday and Saturday and clean-up on Sunday.

Matt also had to work this weekend but did make it to the WWN for a few hours on Saturday night.

On Sunday, while Matt ran to get Chinese take out for dinner, MK and I wrapped his presents and wrote out our cards to him. I didn't let MK see the big present because I knew she would give it away. She's very good at that. All you have to do is ask her what it is not and she will tell you, "well, it's not a Wii". The Wii has a long story, I actually bought it before Christmas because I won a lottery to buy a Wii at the PX. Matt and I had decided to put it away for MK's birthday in April because she was already getting too much! Anyways, she is now very much into American Girl dolls and not so interested in receiving a Wii. About a month ago, I asked Matt if he would like a Wii for his b-day and we could get MK more American Girl doll stuff. He thought I was joking and was very surprised to open up the very heavy package! So, it is his Wii and he will let MK use it, too!

You'll note the picture of Matt and his teepee cake. I wish I had made it! I won the cake in the silent auction at WWN on Saturday. I decided it would be Matt's birthday cake since this was a crazy weekend with me volunteering and Matt working. The cake was all edible excluding the toothpicks used to hold the tent flaps together and a foil cone at the top of the cake. It was three layers inside, chocolate on top, marble in the middle and yellow on the bottom. It was covered with regular frosting on the surface before being covered with the marzipan layer on the top. It was truly delicous! MK couldn't wait to taste the fire pit and the bearskin rug which were also made of marzipan. We are not big marzipan people. Right now, we are all trying to get over our sugar-induced comas!

Happy Birthday, Matt! Your three girls love you very much, Suzy, MK and Mary!

Observations from Matthew

I sit and watch the news a lot. As I take in the days events and thank the good Lord for all my blessings (ie. walking away from another flight), I wonder and many times stew about how people can really suck. The cynical aura that is so pervasive in our nation and the 5 year old mentality of the news and people who make the news. No wonder our kids are so disrespectful. They see it every day not only on TV but in their towns in how adults interact right in front of them. I find it comical to see grown men and especially women who still act like its high school forming their power cliques and socially bullying those they think they can either manipulate or intimidate. Women are definitely their own worst enemy in that sense. But, y'all know me... I don't give a flippin' tinkers damn. I've gotten old enough and senior enough that I can control my existence for the most part.
When we moved to Hohenfels my wife was so relieved knowing that at least for the next 3 years I would not be shot at... at least on a daily basis. We both took stock of our lives and we did not complain about where we lived or what we have had to deal with in our daily lives. Yet we see many who constantly complain that their husbands work too many long hours and are not home at a decent hour and on and on yadda yadda. Many have avoided combat or have forgotten the ordeal of deployments and the affect on the family and they exude such a pessimistic and negative persona that it eats like a cancer at everything and everyone around them. This is not so unlike the country today. Everyone expects something that they think is an obligation of the government to provide. We have become so offensive toward each other. Examples you say? I can buy that 300,000 dollar home and new car and Uncle Sam will bail me out. Parents running on a ball field to attack the coach for a bad play call or another player that smacked his kid. Candidates for public office who act like a couple of 3rd graders on a playground. Kids are self explanatory. Parents who refuse to discipline their kids or hold them accountable. No one can have a simple disagreement without being compared to Hitler, be called a racist or you are derided for being a Christian. (When I was in Iraq it was well known that the small Christian minority was being systematically exterminated. Not one story was published about it.) Those who scream racism have become the racists and those who are expected to fight tyranny and crime have become stupid pacifists.
I guess my point about all this is that in my humble opinion we don’t have a lot of time here. There are forces in this world that are out to completely destroy us. I don’t just mean diminish the USA. I mean annihilation. In this case alone I think it will be our own fault unless we snap out of it. The problem is that the serious times we live in have not really touched the population of the country. We are so focused on political correctness and what has transpired over the last 5 years that we are blinded from what’s right in front of our ugly faces. Can anyone please ask the freakin' question that if/when we pull out of Iraq what next? Or, we know that you want to negotiate with rouge regimes but do you have the nuts to actually fight them when the time for war comes? Can anyone honestly tell me that we won't have to go back in after we pull out due to the simple fact that Al Qaidea IS THERE NOW regardless of the calendar day they actually arrived? Who cares? Am I really the only one that sees this? Remember the sentence above that we are blinded from what's right in front of our ugly faces? How can a society move forward when we are constantly walking backwards concentrating on what we already passed by? There is a movie quote that I like to use in these situations. It's from The Two Towers and it goes something like this... There is a scene where the two mischievous Hobbits, Merry and Pip, were trying to get the trees to fight against Sauroman the wizard and were unsuccessful and Pip says: "Merry, lets just go home. We'll always have the Shire." Merry quickly responds with this profound statement: "Pip, there isn't going to be a Shire!" I think that the American people are totally in the mindset of Pip. We can just go home and live our lives but I think in this case we don't realize that all that crap WILL come to our shores. Those who do not believe that are just extremely naive or they are a waste of my oxygen. Ladies and Gentlemen, the phrase “we support the Troops” is nothing more that a cliché… empty rhetoric from hacks when the camera is on. People, pundits and politicians say it so much that it has desensitized the folks and the Troops for that matter. Almost everyone in the Federal and State Government is so on the take that the prison system is going to have to have an early release program so we can just govern the country. Where is the leadership and the attitude of polls and pundits be damned and why is there such a problem with the people who are supposed to be leaders working to solve problems instead of creating nonexistent problems for the sake of a campaign issue? My guess is that this desensitization has caused almost the entire population to lose its moral and ethical compass and we better figure it out damn quick. The way I have seen things work in our government is that we don’t even attempt to fix a growing problem until it has spiraled out of control and then we are fighting on our backs. And who pays the price? Furthermore, if there is one thing I know it’s this: The US Government is the worst custodian of your money that it is given to run it. The more you give it; it just wants more so it can be spent on another “good idea fairy” program that redistributes it to someone that will just waste it ensuring the job of a politician that believes the government is better at taking care of you than YOU are. I know this because I work in the government. We need to get over ourselves and realize that life in our Country is really pretty great, worthy of pride and definitely worth fighting for. We have so much that we have become fat, lazy, self loathing, impatient Britney Spears clones. Stop blaming your own country for the worlds problems you moronic nincompoops!!
Ahh blessed satiety. If we could only hold our heads high and let ourselves enjoy our success and prosperity and be satisfied with it. When you have a spoiled rotten kid, how do you fix him? Super Nanny says you must pay attention, give them rules and boundaries, enforce them consistantly and give the proper reward for the proper behavior. Our problem as a society is that we have lost the boundaries of societal norms that we used to have in years past. Anything goes and the more shocking the more betta.
What the hell... make me king for a day and I'll fix it. Remember, I'm always right and it's such a burden sometimes!!
Sleep well America while rough men (who don't give a crap what you think of them) protect you!!

Hey, Culligan Man

So, if you bust open a 5 gallon bottle of water in your house, exactly how much water is that in surface area?
Ask Matt.
Today was Culligan delivery day and I asked Matt to make sure he changed out the water bottle. The new bottle was wet because it was stored outside and it's been raining for DAYS! As he lifted it up, it slipped out of his arms and busted on our kitchen floor. Our water stand is by the kitchen door going into the living area. The water spread about 8 feet into the living room, soaked our dark red oriental rug and completely covered the kitchen floor about one inch in depth. We used six beach towels and a mop and had to pull out the refrigerator, stove, dishwasher and floorboards. We also have a very heavy china cabinet/hutch full of Polish Pottery. On Monday, I have to empty all the Polish Pottery to the table so we can move the hutch and get the water out from underneath.
Ironically, the cleaning lady was upstairs doing the bathrooms. When she came downstairs and saw all the mess we made cleaning up, she said "no need for mopping today!"

They won't be offering Matt a job delivering Culligan water anytime soon.

Coupon Clipping Ladies

Check out this story about elderly ladies who clip coupons for military living overseas. At the entrance to the commissaries, there are usually piles of coupon flyers and boxes of clipped coupons. Sometimes I go through and pull the coupons that I know I am going to use. I didn't know where they came from but I do now. What an uplifting story! And thank you to all the dedicated, loving ladies who suffer cramped hands and carpal tunnel to send us coupons!

follow this link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23571516/from/ET/

The other lap top

Here she is; our other lap top. We met Suzy when we were living in Schweinfurt. She was a stray in the bushes around our apartment and she decided that we must need her. So she came to stay. At the time, she only spoke German but now she is bi-lingual. She rewards us for being such great people with offerings of headless mice and an occassional bird. I have learned to keep the door closed and check her mouth before letting her back inside.

Oh, the life of a feline, she sleeps all day and decides to join the rest of the family in the early evening. The first order of business is dinner which must be served at the first meow. After that, she must have some lap top time. Preferably, Matt's lap. Suzy will sit at his feet and meow until he moves the real laptop, or she will meow at me until I make him move his laptop. Or she will just make herself comfortable on top of the laptop. At anyrate, noone gets anything done until she has had her laptop time.

And like any cat, when she's done, she's done.

Job Shadow

MK's school held a job shadow day recently. For the last two years, she came to my job when I was working as the Catholic Parish Coordinator at the Chapel. Pretty boring stuff. This year, she got to follow her dad around his work. I remember a statistic out there when I was pregnant with MK that most pilots have girls. If you had been at Matt's work on job shadow day, you would have agreed! There were 12 daughters and 1 son running around the hangar and following their dad's.
The kids had a really great time. I think the dad's did, too. They got to go up in the tower and watch a helicopter take off and fly by. What a sight it was when it was lunch time and everyone headed to the DFAC (dining facility for all you civilians). The dad's pulled together one long table and filled it full of girls and pilot dads.
I drove up later in the day and all the girls were outside on the runway washing a helicopter. Yes, it is the beginning of March and March came in like a lion and the girls were outside with long brushes and the power hoses having the times of their lives. I think job shadow day for the Falcons and their daughters was a success!

...Note from Matt...
The helicopter you are looking at is one of our OPFOR (Opposing Force) aircraft. It is used to replicate a HIND which is a Soviet era attack aircraft. Yes it is a Huey but the paint scheme is old Soviet bloc style. It is equipped with offensive laser system that allows us to play. We also use it to insert OPFOR troops on an objective during high intensity rotations. It's great fun!
Around 2010 the Huey will be replace by the new UH-72 (EC-145) Lakota, otherwise known as the LUH. The Grand old lady UH-1 will be gone from the Army inventory around that time.

Welcome to our First Blog!

Welcome to our First Blog!

Thanks to a friend at Church, I am figuring out how to create a blog and hopefully stay connected with friends and family.
I am looking forward to publishing my thoughts and sharing pictures of our family happenings in Europe.
I have been trying out Myspace but I get a little offended by what some people put on their pages. I guess Matt and I are a couple of ultra-conservative, ancient, stuck in the mud, old fogies!
Let's get started!