Why Austria?

I'm not really sure how it's possible, but it's officially been over a year since I got back from Austria.  I mean, I understand the concept of time and whatnot (I'm not a total nimrod) but I just can't believe it's been a year.  More than a year, actually.  And since I get all reminisce-y around the anniversaries of my trips to Austria, I decided to write about why I love it there.  As far as I can remember, I've not actually written about this so I'm going to now.

None of this would ever have happened were it not for a friend of mine, Megan (or as I liked to call her, Wendy).  She worked at my family's bakery and was a sort of host for a group of Austrian students  that were studying abroad here in Omaha.  She mentioned that she was going bowling with them that night and asked if I wanted to come.  I said sure, and ended up going and having a spectacular time.  So spectacular, in fact, that I ended up hanging out with this group quite a few more times over the next couple weeks until they left.  (I would also like to take the time to say that I absolutely did NOT partake in any illegal activities and didn't drink any alcohol at all because I was not yet 21 and that would be ILLEGAL.  I would never have done that. *cough*)  Aaaaanyway, moving on.

I remember a few things specifically about this time - mostly at first that I had a vague idea where Austria was but I really knew nothing about it.  I remember going home after the first night out bowling and googling the country and reading up on all of this.  And then I remember telling one of my friends about what I'd learned which, apparently, amounted to the fact that Austria looks like a chicken drumstick.  I guess this was mildly offensive as my friend retorted back with, "Well...the United States looks like a steak!", which is totally true.

United Steaks of America.  Bahahahahaha

Please, tell me that Austria doesn't look like a chicken drumstick.  Seriously.

Aside from the various foods that these two countries resemble, the other big way that I was almost immediately impacted was my choice of language at college.  For some reason (probably because I'm really, really weird) I had decided that I was going to study Latin at college.  It was actually a logical choice as I, at the time, wanted to go on to law school and thought having a background in Latin would be beneficial.  And then I met the Austrians and they told me I was being absolutely absurd and that obviously, German was the far better language to study.  I guess I must have been really impressionable because I ended up switching my language at school to German.  My professor ended up being Austrian, which was awesome; and she was my favorite professor in college.  In the end, my not taking Latin worked out as I ended up not going to law school and really having absolutely no use for the language.

After studying German for a semester and doing better in that class than any class I've ever taken (I'm pretty sure I had a 98% for the class), I decided to study abroad in Vienna the summer between freshman and sophomore year.  Of course, that ended up not working out after I had a totally crazy professor that taught everything wrong (and it's not just me exaggerating either! I've told my native speaker friends what he said and basically their reaction is to say that he's a total moron) and also wore really baggy sweaters and glasses that made his eyeballs look 17 times larger than they actually were so that he looked like an overgrown Dobby.  Totally not kidding.

He looked exactly like this except with smaller ears, glasses, and pants.

Since my second semester German professor kind of destroyed my enthusiasm for Truman's German program (and also, as it turns out, I needed money to make it through the next year of school) I ended up staying in America and working all summer - still one of the biggest regrets I have.  (If you are in college and thinking about studying abroad, FIND A WAY TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.  You won't regret it.)

Eventually, after two and a half more years of college and getting my degree, I had the time during what would have been my last semester to kill before I got married.  As I was pretty much just hanging out in Kirksville, working, and doing more than my fair share of drinking (this time legally, thankyouverymuch) I had a discussion with my darling husband (who at this point was my darling fiancé) the fall before I went and told him that I wanted to visit Austria and I didn't know when I'd have this opportunity again and that it was really, really important to me.  As much as he really didn't like the idea of me travelling to a foreign country alone to see a bunch of people he'd never met, he conceded when he saw how important it was to me.

Aside from the fact that I was desperately thirsty when I landed and they apparently don't believe in water fountains in Austria, I was pretty much convinced as soon as we left the airport and got into the city that I was born on the wrong continent.  Maybe it's just me, but Vienna is spectacular.  I was there for five days, got the stomach flu, spent two and a half hours walking from the place I was staying to the city center when it should have taken me fifteen minutes, got lost on the subway and ended up taking six flights of stairs in one station not realizing that there was an elevator for a reason, and was there for the coldest part of the year and I wouldn't trade that trip for anything.  There's obviously something to be said for the fact that I was visiting people I hadn't seen in 4 years and their company was fantastic, but the city itself is magical.  I stood in a room that both Napoleon and Mozart had been in - which is in the palace where Maria Antonia, or Marie Antoinette as she's more commonly known, grew up.  I ate at a cafe Freud and many of his contemporaries frequented.  I stood on the Heldenplatz, which is where Hitler announced he was taking over Austria and then, fifty years later, Pope John Paul II gave a speech about peace.  It's kind of unreal to think about.  Obviously all of Europe has an incredible history, but Austria's history is especially fascinating to me.  It doesn't hurt that the city is beautiful - even in the dead of winter.

I'm probably the pickiest eater of all time, especially given that I'm 24 (there are two year olds who are more adventurous eaters than I am), and I have yet to find fault with the food there.  One of the things that I love about the food in Austria (but that applies to Europe as a whole) is that there are strict regulations about what you can put in food as far as food colorings and preservatives.  One of my favorite examples is that they actually have to make Oreos differently for Europe than they do for America because the processed crap that they load the Oreos with here won't meet the standards that EU has in place.  Everything there is much, much healthier than what we eat here.  Also, much more delicious.  Even my personal favorite thing that I've eaten there (and probably just ever, only excluding V. Mertz's pepper steak), Käsekrainer.  It's basically a giant hotdog (but better, because it's Austrian) filled with bits of cheese that melt when you cook it so that when you bite into it, the cheese melts into your mouth and there are approximately NO WORDS for how delicious it is.  We have something vaguely similar in America, I think, but it doesn't hold a candle to the deliciousness of the Käsekrainer.  Aaaand I am officially the only person in the world who would go from writing about being impressed by the incredible history of a country to writing about why their hotdogs are so much better than America's.  Yikes.

Maybe I'm crazy, but when I'm in Austria I never want to leave and when I leave I only want to think about when I get to go back.  For as much as I've written, there really are no words to describe how I feel about Vienna, and by association, the rest of the country.  It's a country like none other and if you ever get a chance to visit, absolutely go. :)

Time flies!

I have been working extra hard lately on my goals because it is only a few short days until it's been a year since I started this blog - eeek!  I can't believe how time has flown.

Slowly but surely going to the gym is becoming a habit.  Matt and I have gone consistently for at least three days a week if not more, and Matt just signed up for a personal trainer.  He's only meeting the trainer for one day a week, but he gets workouts scheduled for the entire week in addition to many, many other benefits.  And when he's not working with his trainer, I can do the workouts with him.  They may be a little much for me, but I'll try my best to hang with Matt because I'd like as much as he would to drop fat and build muscle much faster.

I think the most consistent theme of the past couple months is giving things up and making sacrifices.  We know what we want and not only have we been willing to give up things to get it, we have actually been giving things up.  With the exception of this past weekend going out to eat with Matt's mom while she was in town, I don't really remember the last time we ate out.  We've also been cutting back in a lot of areas (like television) in order to save money for the things we really want (like a personal trainer).

While my goal was always to get healthier and learn German, I have been about 300 times more successful since Matt decided to join with me.  I'm not anywhere close to where I hoped to be or thought I'd be when I started this adventure - I still have more weight to lose than I care to admit and my German is really not that great - but I have made progress and I am finally heading in the direction I want to be heading and getting healthier is becoming habit.  The German is slacking a little bit, but I have made a conscious effort these past few days to really bring that back into the forefront of my mind.

I think that part of the reason that I'm so motivated is that we booked the trip to Austria.  I now have a set deadline by which time I need to have met my goals: August 17, 2013 -- 296 days from today! I want to be down to my goal weight by then and to be comfortable speaking the German language.  I know I won't be fluent unless I have some sort of traumatic brain injury that magically renders me capable of speaking German, but I can increase my proficiency quite a bit by then.  I hope to finish with Rosetta Stone within the next couple of months (right now I'm at the beginning of Level 4-2 so I have to finish basically 3 lessons for level 4 and 4 lessons for Level 5) and then I'll probably go through my German textbook and through my German grammar book working on problems and making sure my understanding of the language and ability to write is where I want it to be.  In addition to doing that, I'm going to make sure to converse in German as much as possible with my native speaker friends.  It's something that for some reason I really struggle with, so I'm going to focus on that.

I am so excited to see where the next year takes me.  I hope to be in better shape than ever in my life and I hope to have made much progress with my German.  I am going to use every resource available to me in both areas.  And I think I'll add a few new goals as well.  I will definitely have a new post for my One Year Blog-aversary if not beforehand.

Tschüss!

Time Changes Everything

I've had a lot on my mind lately.  I've been thinking a lot about a lot of things; some directly related to my goals as far as this blog are concerned, some that are related to why this blog came about, and a lot about where my life is now compared to where it was a year ago.  Since these things don't seem to want to go away, I've decided to write about them on here.

It was almost a year ago to the day that I visited Austria (I left for Vienna on October 23rd) and looking at how my life has changed since then, I can't be happier with the way everything has worked out. 

My marriage was in a downward spiral when I started this blog.  My husband and I are two very imperfect people who got married rather young and were insistent that we knew exactly what we were doing.  We were kidding ourselves.  Our first year of marriage was wonderful.  I can only hope and pray, however, that we never have to go through another year like our second.  My need to control everything combined with my husband's very tumultuous emotional journey as a childhood sexual abuse survivor made both of our lives something of a living hell.  The "D-word" was brought up more times than I care to admit.  When I decided that I wanted to better myself, it was very much with the attitude that I was going to become better in spite of my husband.  Because I felt like everything else in my life was miserable, I wanted to do the things that would make me happy by myself without consideration to my husband, my marriage, or anything else.  What's truly amazing is that as my situation changed, the things that I'm doing now and the priorities that I set have become priorities for both my husband and myself.

A year ago, my husband and I were both in jobs that we didn't really like in a city that wasn't really conducive to our goals and desires and seemingly without a way to change it.  We'd both been applying for jobs elsewhere but hadn't really gotten anywhere.  Fortunately, a month or so after I got back, Gallup called.  This changed everything.  To say we were stuck in a rut in Peoria is probably the understatement of the century.  I spent an absurd amount of time looking for jobs but never found anything promising.  We'd discussed buying a house but neither of us were sure we wanted the permanency of buying a house in a city neither of us were crazy about.  The doctor Matt was seeing (and the counselor we were seeing together) were probably worse for us than seeing no one at all.  So the call from Gallup was like a seeing a sunrise for the first time after having 6 straight years of night.  I wish I was exaggerating.

(At this point I want to stop and say that there were a few positives to Peoria (mostly people) and it wasn't completely terrible - but with the emotional/mental position Matt and I were in, it was hard to appreciate the good things we had.)

When I say that moving back to Omaha was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, I'm not kidding.  All of the positive changes that have happened in our lives and in our marriage have occurred, I believe, as a direct result of moving to this city.  I was able to find an 8-5 job which has allowed Matt and I to actually spend a consistent and reasonable amount of time together, and he has a doctor who he respects and who actually helps treat his conditions as opposed to worsening them.  We've put our focus back on our faith, we've bought a house, we've done a complete 180.  A year ago today, I was probably bouncing back and forth between my utter excitement for the trip to Austria and my embarrassingly negative emotions toward the man who is my best friend, my soulmate, my spouse.  I don't know how we made it through this year, but we are so much better for it.

Today at the gym, we had a personal training intro session.  They ended up being overbooked and asked us to reschedule, but the trainer gave us some workout tips and had us do some exercises on the treadmill.  Normally, Matt and I do our own thing at the gym so we're not working out together.  Today, we were doing the same workout and it made me realize just how good of a team we are.  We were doing intervals and we had to switch to different inclines every couple of minutes.  It seemed like every time I lost track (or he did) the other one of us was on top of it.  

When I started working out and trying to lose weight, I didn't like it when Matt would work out with me.  I felt like he was holding me back from my true potential.  As things have gotten better between us, I've come to realize that his encouragement only pushes me farther than I can push myself and he makes me believe I can accomplish anything. Losing weight has become a team effort, and though Matt hasn't really tried it much himself, working on German is something he pushes me to do.  I've found that since MY goals have become OUR goals, I've been much more successful.  Instead of me forcing Matt to do things on my terms, he and I are enjoying the adventure that is becoming healthier.  At the same time, we're working out the kinks of home ownership and chores and dieting and - still, every day - our marriage.  

I can safely say that regardless of where I stand on my goals of learning German and losing weight when I analyze them in the next week, this past year has been a total, complete, HUGE success.  

Stuck

While everything has been going really great with getting to the gym and doing my workouts and whatnot, I seem to be stuck in a rut as far as my weight going down.  Every time I get down to a certain number, the next day I'm back up where I was the previous day.  I think I've lost the same 2 pounds over and over again for the last two weeks and I have no idea why I can't just break the barrier and keep losing weight.  While I'm as motivated as ever with the exercise, it's just so incredibly aggravating to be seemingly unable to break the barrier I'm at.

I have been running at least three times weekly, and for progressively longer amounts of time.  I haven't really been doing strength training because I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about it as I am about running.  I should probably start doing some sort of strength training, but I'm hesitant to do that because I feel like every time I do, I only gain weight.  Is there some happy medium I'm missing?

I am all ears and if anyone has any advice for me, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance!

Tschüss!

German Plan

While things have been going fantastically for my getting healthy goals as of late, I've been slacking as far as my German goes.  I would say that it's partially because we replaced my Mac as we've been having power issues with it for ages, but it goes back before then.  On the bright side, Matt and I are very close to booking the trip to Austria that we've been talking about for quite a few years.  Though I've been twice, Matt's never been and I cannot wait to go with him and show him everything I love about it.

This is especially good though, because I swore the last time I was there that the next time I went to Austria, I'd be able to actually speak German.  I sincerely doubt it will be anything close to fluent (that's a lot longer away than I thought it would be) but if I can order food or check into the hotel using correct German and doing it comfortably, I will be where I want to be with the language.

In order to get to this point, I definitely need to find the time in the evenings to work on German in addition to going to the gym and taking care of chores.  Working on Rosetta Stone is a little more difficult because of the new computer, but it is really helpful for the types of situations I will encounter while in Austria.  It is also important for me to use all of the books and websites that I have.  My plan is this:
- Study my old textbook at least four times a week to help with my understanding of pronouns/prepositions which are two of the things I struggle with.
- Use Rosetta Stone two to three times per week for at least 30 minutes to have a chance to really use the language and to hear it spoken by native speakers
- Go through flash cards to help build vocabulary at least once weekly.  (I have a TON of flash cards so going through them once per week should keep me fresh - and I can add new words from my book and Rosetta Stone weekly.)

I'll start my new schedule tonight when I get back into my German textbook.  I love the language and it will be nice to dive back in! :)

Tschüss!

Making progress!

Before I say anything else, I would just first like to take the time to say that working for the State of Nebraska is pretty fantastic.  The list of paid holidays is kind of ridiculous, but I definitely don't mind having a 3-day weekend in order to properly celebrate Columbus Day.

But now onto the actual point of this blog: how tonight could have ended drastically differently than it did.  At about 7:30 or so, Matt decided that he really wanted something sweet and the cupcakes in the fridge weren't enough to satisfy his sweet tooth, so he was thinking about going to get ice cream.  After a little back and forth that consisted of, "We really shouldn't, but it sounds so good!" we decided to head to the store to get a cartful of delicious treats that we really didn't need.  As Matt was changing out of his loungewear back into real people clothes, he mentioned how he had intended to go to St. Pius for adoration of the Eucharist.  At that point, I decided to say what I was thinking - that it was probably a terrible idea to get ice cream as it is the last thing that we need and there are other things we could spend $3.00 on.  Matt agreed and decided instead to go to adoration.

I probably should have gone with him, but I elected to stay home and finish the laundry whilst watching Love Actually.  Apparently I'm not the greatest decision maker of all time, but I'll get there eventually.  Aaanyway, as I was folding all of my workout clothes I was reminded of the fact that we hadn't gone to the gym at all this weekend though we were planning to go all three days.  Instead of going on Saturday, I was baking cupcakes and on Sunday we made an impromptu trip to Humphrey (my dad's home town) for the church's annual bazaar there.  It was totally worth the trip and a lot of fun, but going to the gym needed to happen.  So I shot a message to Matt for when he had finished at the church that I would like to go to the gym still tonight.  When he got home, we got ready and went to the gym.  It was a pretty exciting workout too, because I finished the run that I was unable to finish the last time I tried it.  

As we were heading out the door to the gym, I commented to Matt that I was so proud of us for actually stepping up and taking the things that should be priorities in our lives but hadn't been for quite some time and making them priorities.  We've been pretty consistent about getting to the gym (not every day, but at least 3 times a week), we've made church a priority and couldn't be happier with that decision, and we've continued to eat at home instead of going out.  We are very excited about the changes that we've made and look forward to seeing where they take us!

With that said, I think we've both realized that sometimes you have to treat yourself.  Today, for example, we were down in Papillion trying to resolve the issue that is my engagement ring (long story) and after dealing with the situation we decided to go grab lunch at one of our favorite places (Azteca - super delicious Mexican food that is definitely worth a try!).  We could have driven home and eaten there, but we've been pretty fastidious about not eating out for the last month and we decided that since we were out and about and we've been so good otherwise, it would be okay to grab lunch.  It was a nice change of pace.

And one last (group of) thought(s): I can't remember if I've said this already or not, but my end goal is to have people I haven't seen in awhile have to do a double take before they realize it's me.  Matt and I are headed across the pond next year and we are currently trying to get all the details finalized.  Thinking about that has my motivation about as high as it's ever been.  I've gotten to see my friends in Austria in 2010 and 2011, but about 20 months apart.  It'll be 22 months since the last time I've seen them when we go next August.  I don't want them to recognize me.  I want my friends over there to be open-mouthed when they do realize it's me they're looking at.  The trip's not even been paid for yet and I'm already over-the-top motivated.  I hope it just amps up even more once the trip is booked.

And on that note, I should get to bed.

Tschüss!