Christmas 2011
So this is Christmas and what have we done ...
Casting our minds back to winter 2010, notable highlights were learning to ski and the party in January.
We had a busy, exciting summer: two weddings in the UK, one in Germany and three weeks on the east coast of the US. We visited New York city for the sights, the Florida Gulf coast for the beaches and Washington DC for the museums. Nearer to home, we’ve had a couple of lovely treks along the River Isar, with bikes on a freezing cold morning and a day’s hike from Lengries to Bad Tölz enjoying the Autumn shades.
Sabrina turns 14 this month. She is very busy with three dancing classes a week, hip-hop, jazz and ballet. She has started confirmation classes at church and we went to a lovely Advent concert at her school with lively musical content, including the school orchestra made up mainly of wind instruments and percussion. She has restarted piano lessons and went to Phil’s work for “girl’s day”, which attempts to show careers which are traditionally more for boys, but she is not much into IT and facebook, which has its advantages.
Eve in contrast is quite a technophile. She got her first mobile phone (the last girl in her class, as we’d held out as long as possible) and a decent PC: Intel i5-2500 4x 3300Mhz, 8GB memory, 1TB hard disk and trendy matching keyboard, mouse and speakers, which seems to keep her off Sabrina’s iMac at last. She reached 1.52m tall in the spring (nearly 5 feet in in old money) and has been in secondary school since September with two endearing friends, one from Bosnia, the other from Serbia. In Biology recently, the intrepid threesome got to grips with dissecting a pig’s eye about which she enjoyed telling us the gory details. Her violin playing is improving and at some point she gets the chance to play in the school orchestra, which is made up mainly of string instruments. The increased workload has been a shock but she seems to persevere. She learnt to in-line skate and has been ice-skating this winter already.
We’ve had 2 sets of visitors, the first resulted in seeing a concert by Mike and the Mechanics, together with a day’s cycle around Lake Tegernsee and the more recent visit resulted in a trip to watch football at the Allianz Arena between Munich 1860 and Eintracht Frankfurt, followed by a trip to the Hofbrauhaus and tours of the ubiquitous Christmas markets. We enjoy having visitors, so please get in touch if you want to pursue this.
Katie intends now to enlarge her world as both girls are becoming more independent. She has joined an improvisational dance group and loves it, self-expression without words! She is also giving piano lessons to one of Sabrina’s friends and helps a 16 year old, originally from Hungary, who is having a few difficulties with English.
Phil had a change of role at work, now making fewer visits to the old stomping ground of Stuttgart and more visits to grimy but glamorous Berlin; working on some interesting projects in cable networks and TV technology. He had a brief stay in hospital just after Easter, nothing serious, but it meant being able to recover at home watching the Royal Wedding on sick leave. The hospital visit put paid to a couple of Triathlons around that time, but the Karlsfeld one was completed again in July, as well as a couple of reasonably fast 10km runs. He has decided to take up barefoot running, not literally but using specially developed socks from “leguano” and so far the feedback is positive: there is still some pain but in other areas as the forces get absorbed (naturally, is the argument) by other parts of the leg and foot which are more geared for this. It has led to a bit more fun and pace, so he is looking forward hopefully to some faster times and maybe three Triathlons in Olympic year, dream on ...
Another year over, a new one about to begin ...
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