Right Time and Right Place For a Walk

Just for people who don't know, moving across an ocean is quite difficult.  The whole distance thing you can get over, I mean that is what college is for.  The biggest adjustment is to try and find something to do.  Back home, no matter really where you live, there was a few things that you could do almost anywhere, go to a movie, go out to a restaurant with some friends, maybe go to a bar, golf, you get the idea.  Here you have to not only find new things to do, you have to dig really hard to find stuff that you can do in the U.S. too.  Sure the bars are easy enough to find, but movie theater, talk about a 30 minute adventure for me and Whit, a restaurant, easy enough but find one that is affordable, golf, have to have a handicap card, plus take and pay for a test to make sure you are GOOD ENOUGH to even step foot on the course.  So I guess the first step is to just start off slow, and do something I always do, take Miki on a walk.

A walk may not seem like much, but it certainly did help.  It also helps when you get to walk in a countryside that is straight out of a movie.  In the small town Blickinsdorf there is a hill with a few walking paths strewn about.  I needed to take Miki out more and that is definitely a good exercise for both.  But it should make living here that much easier.  Before it was a bit depressing because I would only get out to pick up Whitney and go to the grocery store, not the kind of life I'm used to.  So with some help from Whit I was able to get out during the afternoon and do something as simple as walking, and it felt great.

Now I just need to continue this trend of getting out more everyday.  So that I have to schedule time to fit Miki's walk in, and not the other way around.  It may take some time but this first part will definitely be the hardest.

I also plan on taking the camera up with me the next couple days to grab some pics so everyone can see what this hill is all about. It will definitely turn into a place where I take people when they come to visit.

Miki can be a little terror

Titles have a way of being misleading sometimes.  You can look at a newspaper article and expect to read that the President wins a Nobel Peace Prize and when you actually read the article....wait he did win one? Anyway you know what I mean, well this title is in every word not misleading.

Miki, our dog, is an Alaskan Malamute.  He was bred to be a sled puller in the Iditarod.  If you look at a sledding team, his breed will be at the back of the group doing all the hard work.  Getting the sled initially moving and then keeping it flying over the snow.  In this capacity Miki would be the best sled dog ever, he has amazing strength at 16 months and he is quite fast.  Too bad we are not training him to be a sled dog, we want him to be a house dog.  Unfortunately either Miki hasn't figured that out yet, or he just never will.

On our walks Miki is constantly trying to go in one direction or the other pulling us along for the ride.  If he wants to walk on the left hand side of the side walk, he will pull us over to that side, even if it is just for a minute and then we go through the same process on the other side of the walk.  The worst part of it is when he takes off in a sprint after catching the scent of something.  I swear my arm has been pulled out of its shoulder socket many times while trying to rein him in.  He goes from his sniffing position to top speed in one stride, no joke.  It is quite hard to figure out what he is going to do.

At 16 months Miki is still counted as a puppy, but he is a puppy in a grown ups body.  That means that he begs, he whines, he nips, he jumps up on you; anything that you can think a puppy doing he does.  With his frame and weight it makes it almost impossible to keep that in perspective.  I don't know how many times I've lost my cool with him because he is just acting as any puppy would, its just with his size and strength, sometimes his antics physically hurt.

Now don't get me wrong, I love Miki.  Sure there are some times where I wish we would have never bought him, but those are few and far between the times in which I couldn't imagine life without him.  Between his puppy moments are the times where he does just lay there doing nothing, mostly sleeping.  Or when he is playing with his toy and he falls over because the floor is too slick, or he is just whining for us to goto bed so he can goto sleep.  You have to have some bad with the good, it's just that like anything else, you wish the bad was never there.

Primetime that Isn't so Primetime

People who know me would say that I like sports.  It doesn't matter which sport, except for NASCAR and is that really a sport, I will sit down to watch it.  I have even been able to muster up a liking for Soccer thanks to CNN, one of the two channels that are in English. I have been watching, Manchester City, who I took to the Champion's League Championship in Fifa 06, is sitting pretty in 2nd place at the moment in the Premier League and looking like they have a great shot at winning the whole thing.  But enough of that, I still hold Football as my favorite sport, although it is quite tough to actually watch the game.

Now I do not have a problem finding the games to watch.  Thanks to sites like justin.tv and myp2p.eu I have been able to find almost any game that I want to watch.  I also have to give thanks to the people who actually stream the games as well, not just the places that give the links needed to watch the games.  My problem lies within the time frame of the games I want to watch.

In Switzerland we are 7 hours ahead of CST.  So when it is 7 PM here, it is 12 PM in the Twin Cities.  That means that any early game I can watch without having to lose any sleep.  The 3 o'clock games (10 PM here) garner some trouble just because they seem to take longer then the early games and can last longer pushing between 1 and 2 AM here.  Games like this are not terrible but when you have to get up and let a dog out at 6:30 in the morning, you are feeling it.  7 PM games are utterly disastrous to try and watch.  I am a Steeler fan and when they played on opening night, I stayed up until 2 AM just to catch the beginning of it, and then went to bed at halftime which ended up being 4 AM here.  It hurt, physically hurt to stay up that late.

I bring this up because this next week is going to be disastrous for me.  It begins on Saturday when the Cyclones take on the Wildcats in the afternoon time slot.  Not bad easy to stay up for.  But then the Steelers play the Chargers in the Sunday night game.  The Vikings play the Packers, as if you didn't know, Monday night, and the Huskers play the Tigers Thursday night...AHHHHHHHH!!! People might confuse me for a zombie Friday at German class.

As you can see, Primetime television doesn't work for me.  It turns me into an insomniac that will have to start drinking more and more coffee, instant coffee that is.