Category Archives: Family

Home leave to Winterwonderland

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Time and time again when I come home, I am astonished of how beautiful my home area is. Meet lake Plansee, one of the larger lakes in Tirol. It’s not an accident that I linked to the german Wikipedia article – the english version is literally 3 sentences long, so I’d recommend to use some translating service like babelfish to get the information out of the german article.

Anyways, here are some pictures from a walk I took with my parents on Sunday, February 5th.

It’s cookie time!

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In December, there were two cookie baking sessions happening at my place.

This is – approximately – what we used:

2.5 kilograms of flour
0.75 kilograms of sugar (and vanilla sugar)
0.8 kilograms of chocolate
0.5 kilograms of almonds

Doesn’t sound like much? Well, we made enough cookies for a party with 15 people, a dinner of 5 people, getting me, Georg and my room mates through Advent, and we still had enough so Georg and I could take about 0.75 kilograms home to pamper our families 🙂

And here are some pictures:

By the way: last-minute deciding on which cookies you want to make can make baking slightly difficult. For example, as we did not have star shaped coookie cutters, we had to make cinnamon moons and boots instead of cinnamon stars. And Georg, lucky him, managed to get the last 2 packages of crushed almonds at the store, as well as one of the last packages of flour …

I will see that I get more pictures from our friends, because the really good ones are not on my phone. Georg also made a cinnamon man … and there’s a picture of him eating it.

Short visit

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My brother came to visit a friend in Vienna on Saturday and Sunday. As his friend had lame plans for Saturday (shopping and going to a museum – with the great weather we had!), he agreed on going to Lainzer Tiergarten with me and some couchsurfers.

The plan – which I had not told him fully – was to hike through half of the park, and then have lunch at Hirschgstemm restaurant. This would have taken about 5 hours, but Chris did not want to hike for that long, so we decided to cut it short and took a left back to the entrance where the others took a right. This way, we only walked for about 2.5 hours, but still had the chance to go for 2 geocaches I already knew.

Back at Georg’s place, who did not join because he had hurt his foot the night before, we changed and then went for lunch all together. Afterwards, Georg went home again and we continued to search for some geocaches. As I already found pretty every traditional geocache around Mariahilfer Strasse, we did not have much need of Chris’ new GPS.

Within another 2 hours, we had followed Mariahilfer Strasse until MQ, went on to Heldenplatz, from there to Rathaus and, following the Ring southwards, back to Museumsquartier. Besides of showing him all the geocaches I know in that area, I also had the chance of giving Chris a short sight seeing tour which he very much liked (at least he told me so). For Saturday evening he already had plans with his friends, so we parted in late afternoon.

Hopefully he will have lots of time to visit again during Winter, so we can do some more walks like this and also visit some museums together 🙂

My Dad’s song

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I just re-discovered the song text my dad’s friends wrote for his birthday.

This is the original song:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWreLLHMquQ]

And here are some nice parts of the “new”  (sorry, but only german) text:

Franz rück die Kohle raus, wir wollen’s heute krachen lassen,
dich ganz groß zu feiern, das ist heute unser Ziel.
Bekommst du die Rechnung, wird dir richtig übel,
doch das ist uns scheißegal,
denn deinen Fünfziger, den gibt es nur ein Mal.

Komm hol die Brettln raus, wir fahren wieder auf den Gletscher,
ob Pflug oder in Hocke, du schaust immer super aus.
Lass uns im Tiefschnee die Spuren ziehen
genieße jede coole Fahrt.
Komm hol die Brettln raus, wie schon die letzten Jahr’.

Franz hol die Flaschen raus, wir wollen’s heute krachen lassen,
dich ganz groß zu feiern, das ist heute unser Ziel.
Hast dich gut gehalten, hast Freude am Leben,
wünschen dir, dass es so bleibt.
Komm schenk die Gläser ein und stoße mit uns an!

These are three variations of the chorus. Throughout most of the verses, it’s about my dad working a lot, not taking enough time for himself, and, most of all, being a very good friend and an important part (not only because of his duties, but also being very active) in our ski club.

At the lines “Franz rück die Kohle raus”, everybody would wave a 50 Euro bill they printed themselves, and at “Franz hol die Flaschen raus”, they produced champagne glasses (made of plastic) out of various shirt and skirt pockets and my mom, me and my brother presented some bottles of prosecco for him to pour.

Everybody was really enjoying that song, and not only my dad had some tears in his eyes.

If any of the partaking people is reading this (thanks to facebook): Thanks again, it was great.

Holidays, Part 1

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Aaaaah … t’was great!

Unfortunately, my holidays are over already. One week is not enough, obviously.

The first days – Saturday through Monday – I spent home, alone. Georg arrived on Monday evening, after spending the weekend with his parents.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we tried to do something sporty – we did a short bike trip to Weißenbach am Lech (including some Geocaches) and a little hike on Hahnenkamm with my Mom.

On Thursday, we had to start thinking about the weekend – how many people would come, how much food would we need, how much beer should we buy?

We ended up with some meat, 12 liters of beer and some more food. For the first night, only 2 guests were expected, and they did arrive pretty much as planned: Stefan and Josef.

Of course, the weather was not perfect all the time, so the ground was wet. And as the guys did arrive a bit late, we arranged for a room in the house so they could sleep on dry ground (and matresses).

My “old” Dad

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My parents are quiet young, I know that. Me being nearly 25 and my brother turning 28 in August, our parents are supposed to be 55 or something, compared with friend’s parents. But they aren’t. Actually, my Dad only turned 50 around two weeks ago.

Having an “even” birthday is always something special. Being one of the executive committee members of the largest skiing club of the area, makes it really funny. In this case, my Dad received several poems, lots of nice parcels, and a song. Yep, the other members of the committee did rewrite a song (“Komm hol das Lasso raus”) so it would fit the occasion 🙂

Other nice things happening that weekend:
– several aunts and uncles coming to visit (some from Switzerland, some from other parts of Austria)
– meeting lots of my parents’ friends
– having lots of laughs because of those awesome poems they wrote
– a huge party, including food, drinks, songs, dances and comic mishaps (e.g. mistaking my Dad’s aunt for his mother)

Also, my Dad did hear one thing quiet often during the party and the rest of the weekend: “Take more time for yourself!”. He’s working hard, has always done so, and somehow he doesn’t seem able not to work. 2 weeks off, that’s already too much for him. But we’re trying to get him to calm down and sit back more often. Lots of the presents included hotel vouchers, e.g. in Styria and Vorarlberg, but also vouchers for mountain pass roads so he could go on motor cycle tours more often. Now he has the means, he’s only missing the time. Let’s hope he starts taking time.