Tag: local (to us) stuff

Partly due to some New Year’s resolutions, and partly due to some personal goals related to our upcoming travels, and partly just because it’s good for us, we joined a gym today. Our pals Tammy and Matthias have been members there for a while and they gave us a much better orientation at Fitness Company than the staff there did (thanks guys!). It reminds a heckuva lot of Lifetime Fitness in Troy/Macomb Twp. We figure that, combined with our weekly yoga classes, might actually yield some visible results sometime…if not in time for our big Easter trip, then maybe our formalwear sizes in October will have dropped a number or two.

There are some things here at Fitness Company that differ greatly from my experiences at Lifetime Fitness, though:

1. The sauna. I don’t have a lot of sauna experience under my belt (for various reasons, not the least of which is that you don’t wear clothes in the sauna), so it was hard for me to judge objectively. But doesn’t 90° C (yes, that’s Celsius, people!) seem a little close to the boiling point of the substance that comprises about 70% of my body by mass?
2. I figure even in the U.S. most sauna-users take a shower afterwards. But is there a big ol’ waterfall of cold water in which to do it, too? Nothing like that following a session under the conditions mentioned above to shock the system.
3. Nudity. Even in the somewhat limited envelope of cultural privacy in the U.S., I was pretty much OK with same-sex lockerroom nudity. Having been through a gym class or two in the Michigan public school system and then my membership at Lifetime Fitness prepared me for that. But I’ve never taken a shower with my friends before, especially after spending 15 minutes purging my pores with them as described in point #1 above. Maybe it just worked out alright because they’re from California. Either way, not as big a deal as I’d imagined it.
4. After all the physical (and for me, somewhat emotional) tension of the above points, Fitness Company offers a Ruheraum — a sort of an indoor deck where you just chill out after that ice water cascade. I gotta remember to bring a book with me tomorrow when we head back.

I can see how you can easily spend a couple hours there every day — circuit training on the weights machines, elliptical/treadmill/recumbent bike cardio stuff, and then a sauna/chill-out session or two can add up quickly. The real bummer versus Lifetime Fitness that I can see immediately is that they’re not open 24 hours, making it harder for us to work a gym date into our schedules. They open at 7:00 a.m. three days a week, but I used to love arriving at Lifetime at 5:15 (both of those times).

I only worked a half-day today, but it was a duesy.

This morning the weather was not very conducive to easy commuting by bike into work. There had been substantial snowfall overnight. This wasn’t the stuff that melted as soon as it hit the streets like [the previous snowfall I reported](http://www.regensblog.com/2005/11/21/criminy-its-not-even-thanksgiving-yet/ “first snowfall of the season”), but rather the kind that stays in the form of real snow if it’s on grass or sludgy slush if too many cars run over it. Like a trooper, I stuck it out and left early and made it there a lot faster than most people who tried to arrive at work today in their cars. Traffic problems, accidents, and yes, even German drivers also appear to forget how to drive as soon as those soft, fluffy flakes start gently floating down from above.

I had to bawl out one of the guys on my team at work (let’s call him Mr. X) — whom I consider a service-provider — for (repeated) sloppy workmanship and an especially bad follow-up on root cause tracking yesterday, so I was already feeling a little gunshy when I got into work. However, I thought it couldn’t get worse today than it was yesterday, at the very least because today Sarah and I started our yoga course at the [*Volkshochschule*](http://dict.leo.org/se?lp=ende&p=/Ue0E.&search=Volkshochschule “what does that mean?”) with our good pal and esteemed doctoral physicist [Tammy](http://www7.nationalacademies.org/policyfellows/Fall_2005_Fellows.html “who’s that?”). Yeah, you read right. Our yoga instructor is an astrophysicist — how cool is that? Anyway, I’d asked my boss for the next 9 Friday afternoons or so off so that I could get make at least an honest attempt at keeping my overtime hours in check. That’s when Tammy’s course is offered, so it works out perfectly with my schedule.

Long story made short with regard to the office: one of the guys I work with, let’s call him Mr. W — whom I consider an internal customer of mine — has had it up to here with Mr. X. He dropped a nastygram on the whole team, but we really all knew for whom it was intended. The thing with my job is, I’m the glue that holds together the fragile relationship between my department and the IT department. My department hates to have to talk to IT (and indeed, when they do, stuff invariably goes wrong), and IT doesn’t really like to talk to everyone and their cousin from my department. They’d rather have one contact person (i.e., me). Mr. X and Mr. W have a rocky history between them, and it’s never been good, and every now and then it blows up completely, and they never really heal. Who has to play referee? Who has to go hold everyone’s hand and say “there, there, I know how you feel, with the big, bad, mean Mr. \[X|W\]. He’s just got to learn how to deal with people…” Yeah, that’s right — I get to do that. Whoopitydoo. Now I have meetings with Mr. X’s direct supervisor and that guy’s supervisor to try and do a post-mortem on the whole situation, although the whole situation is relatively clear. If Mr. X and Mr. W refuse to work together, that means we have to have a go-between who takes the specification from the customer and gives it to the engineer. Yeah, I’ve become that paranoid guy from Office Space.

So that whole thing had me in a crappy mood as I flew out of the office in a mad rush to make it all the way across town to get my our yoga class on time. The weather had improved, but the street conditions were actually worse than on the morning trip. But you know what? An hour and a half of controlled breathing and interesting stretches and a little meditation (or at least some quiet time alone with your thoughts) near the end of it really makes a big difference.

That, and [*Glühwein*](http://dict.leo.org/se?lp=ende&p=/Ue0E.&search=Gl%FChwein “what’s that?”). The *Glühwein* (of which there are several interesting varieties) really help the mood a lot. Yesterday, the *Weihnachtsmarkt* (OK, I know you’re getting sick of looking up all those words — it’s the Christmas Market) got going into full swing. At night, the bigger town squares in Regensburg are positively packed with people until about 8 pm when most of the food/*Glühwein* stalls shut down. Here’s what it looks like when empty:

After that, you go find a bar to hang out in. In our case, we met up with Tommy and Natasha and a couple other friends from the VHS (that’s the abbreviation for *Volkshochschule*, for future reference) and had a ¹/₂-meter sausage (mmm, in a nice crusty baguette with all the condiments you can think of on it, include horseradish), and a couple of mugs of *Glühwein*, before heading off to a little courtyard at [Haus Heuport](http://www.heuport.de/ “fancy-schmancy restaurant right across from the Regensburg Cathedral”) to continue the drinking and snacking. I had a crepe filled with Bailey’s Irish Cream. That was weird, but very good. Sarah described it as sort of a boozy pancake.

Right now, she’s snoring next to me pretty loudly. The poor thing is all worn out from speaking German all day today. That was part of her warm-up phase for the big test tomorrow. Ideally she should be speaking German all day to everyone everyday, but in most cases we’re just too lazy to do it at home, too.

I’m sure she’ll do fine on her test, but I know there is a fair amount of stress involved in it for her. Let’s all wish her [*viel Glück!*](http://dict.leo.org/se?lp=ende&p=/Ue0E.&search=viel+Gl%FCck “what does that mean?”)

Last week on Friday we had some freaky weather — it was sunny, first of all (which was very weird since it feels like we haven’t seen the sun since October), and then dark and cloudy, then rainy, then came big fluffy snowflakes, and then rain again. Just my luck, I was on my bike headed to/from work during both rain sessions.

But I still wasn’t expecting full-on snowy rooves this weekend. I snapped these pictures a couple of minutes ago. I’m hopeful that all this stuff on the tops of the buildings isn’t indicative of the street conditions below. Slush makes for an unpleasant bike ride.

It’s more than 3 feet, but I don’t think it’s rising any more.

Y’all heard about this? We’re not nearly as affected as places further South, like Garmisch-Partenkirchen, for example, but these are still some drastic changes in the landscape

Normal levels:

Levels today:

Yikes.

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