I did forget someone!

We have five cats, still. We adopted Mitzi and her son, Felix, at the end of March. Felix ran off about six and a half weeks later, which was very upsetting as he was the more affectionate of the two.

Mitzi is fifteen, Felix was fourteen. He has tattooed ears, but no one has ever contacted me to say they've found him. I hope he is safe and well somewhere, but I fear the worst. He'd been going out for about three days when he disappeared, so he may have become disorientated and lost his way. Poor wee man...

Mitzi has taken a long time to settle in. She is a very individual old lady, still pretty spry. Very pretty little face. She doesn't like to be petted too much, but she does like it until she remembers she's meant to be a mean old baggage. You have to read the signs to know when to stop, or she will scratch and try to bite. I lost count of the scratches I received in the first six to ten weeks or so. Things are much better now, but she is still a solitary individual. We discovered in mid-May that her kidneys aren't working too well, so she is on the renal diet food.

Wanda is now, too. She also had to have her thyroid gland removed, both halves of it were hugely enlarged, and now the poor wee soul has to have thyroxine! Trust her to be different; usually there's enough thyroid tissue elsewhere in the body that they don't need any help. The enlarged gland went unnoticed for a couple of years or more because instead of being in her throat, it was deeper in the chest and couldn't be felt on an external exam, so our vet assumed her weight loss and poor coat condition was just one of those things. We do have a fabulous vet, though, he and his wife are both excellent.

She's also having a few neurological problems, but seems to be doing a bit better now. Nowadays she sleeps most of the time, waking to eat and that's about it. While she is still happy and enjoying life, we will do our best to make sure that that continues. The vet is at a loss as to what has happened. Further investigation would be expensive, and pointless as there is nothing they could do to help her. The thyroxine has made quite a difference, though.

A busy seven months

Wow...I really must update my Blog a little more frequently!

Let me see, what's happened since the last time? Let's start with the sad news first of all. On July 9th, in the early hours of the morning, I went out looking for Loki and Kit as they'd not yet come in. Loki had gone out quite late, around 10.30 pm, and usually would have been back in to go up to bed with us much earlier. D asked me where he was after we went up just after midnight; the first time I looked, I couldn't see him anywhere. I went out again half an hour later, and found his body in front of our neighbour's fence...to say that I was hysterical would not be an exaggeration. My precious, beautiful ginger bear boy had been hit by a car and must have died instantly.

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the Eifel to a camping ground that one of D's friends goes to most weekends during the season. When we returned home, we found that Tigger, our 18 and a half year old Wiener kitty, had died in her sleep. The strange thing about that was that on Sunday night, without saying anything to each other, we both felt very strongly that something was wrong at home with one of the cats and that we should leave. We both dismissed it. There was nothing that we could have done had we been there, she was very old and very sick. I'd said on the way up that I wanted to take her to the vet the next week. I'm sad that she is gone, but glad that she didn't suffer and that she was able to die curled up on her dad's chair in her favourite spot (or one of them) and went peacefully.

And now for some good news! I received my exam results for course B1 about a week after the last update. I got a grade 2, scoring 86% overall. 83% for the reading, writing and listening comprehension part of the exam and 97% (!!!) for the spoken exam. Woot! All thanks to my classmate Nicole, who was my partner for the spoken exam and has fantastically good German. She got 96% overall, and I reckon had it not been for the orchestral accompaniment during the grammar part of the exam she would have aced it totally.

After losing Loki, we'd decided within a couple of days that we needed another ginger bear of a Norwegian Forest Cat. After much scouring of the internet, we found two possibilities, one about 90 minutes away and one almost three hours away. There was a mix-up over the first possible, so I got in touch with the second lady who had not one, not two, but three ginger boys! One was already adopted, so we went to meet Roxy and Quin in mid-July. We couldn't choose, so D put the money from the sale of the classic Mercedes towards both kittens, and I chipped in with the rest. They're four months old this week (Roxy is four days younger, but is Quin's uncle as well as his half-brother; Quin's mum is the daughter of Roxy's mother.) They are two mad bundles of fluffy energy, on the go every second they are awake. They are already about the size of our old lady cats in length, but still recognisably kittens. They're going to be big boys when they finish growing around the age of five! We are madly in love with them both.

My gorgeous nephew turned one on August 10. He is almost walking; he decided not to bother with crawling and is still shuffling everywhere on his bum!

Towards the end of May - the 21st, if you want me to be exact - I decided I had to do something about my weight. It's been up and down so many times over the last few years and I was frankly sick of being in pain and feeling semi-disabled by the state of my knees. I had a hard time getting up off the sofa, and last year during the walk in Diekirch I couldn't get off a low bench for a good five minutes because my knees just did not want to lift my huge weight off the seat. The heaviest that I know I reached is 21 stone 8 pounds, but that was the August of 2008. When I joined WeightWatchers online for the umpteenth time (sixth or seventh, I think), I had been weighed at the doctor's here and came in at 135 kg or 21 stone. As of yesterday morning, I was 116 kilos or 18 stone on the nose.

It's a jolly good job that I did embark on a diet, because three weeks ago, D proposed! We're getting married next February in Inverness. Today I am going to try on some wedding dresses with the help of Nicole, to get an idea as to what suits me and how my body shape might look in five months' time. Not sure what will look best, which is the reason for going to try on frocks. I can say right now I don't want a strapless dress (too busty for comfort) or a sleeveless dress, but that may go by the wayside when I try some on.

Life is good...still struggling through the latest German course, with an exam in November and the next course starting about a week later. That's if I stick with the VHS in Schwetzingen and don't say 'sod it!' and decide to do C1 in four weeks in Heidelberg. However, without knowing the result of the B2 exam, I can't start that class, and getting married may get in the way of taking a four week course, so...

My soon-to-be niece Nicole is getting married on November 27 in Florida, and is expecting a baby in mid-March next year! She doesn't hang around; she met Tony, was pregnant and engaged to him in about six weeks! She seems to be blissfully happy, and we both wish them all the very best for the future.

One of our other nieces, Dawn, had a fourth baby, another boy, Max, earlier this year. He is a big, bouncing boy, full of smiles and very handsome. Dawn and DeAnn, her sister, have the most gorgeous children!

I think that's all the news; I've probably forgotten lots, but never mind!

Poor, neglected Blog!

Well, it's been a while. How've you been, Blog? Keeping well? You're looking a little sparse in terms of the number of posts of late. Guess I'd best update things, hey?

So, what's happened since the last time we spoke? Well, first and foremost and most wonderfully of all, Aiden Norman Parlett made his entrance to this life on August 10 2009. He is gorgeous, of course, and stole everyone's heart as soon they set eyes on him.

Another cool thing that's happened is that I actually made a friend. This is a rare enough thing that it should be written about. Marilyn was born in Nigeria, is married to a German guy called Wolfgang, and they have two gorgeous boys, Andreas and Martin who are - let me get this right! - 12 and 11. Marilyn and I were on the same German language course at the Volkshochschule in Schwetzingen last year and usually get together one day a week to go walking or swimming together. She stuffs me full of food, entertains me - my word, is she funny! We have each other in stitches, and she has one heck of a laugh on her.

Wolfgang is a sweetheart; he drove us to our exam in January at the VHS in Heidelberg. Well, first of all, he drove me home again because I Forgot My Passport, and the letter from the school said we HAD to have ID with us. I was in such a state I didn't dare race home in the snow, so Wolfgang drove me home, I ran into the house and grabbed the passport from my handbag and ran back to the car, whereupon we drove hell for leather back to their house in Oftersheim, grabbed Marilyn and raced off to Heidelberg. We still got there almost an hour before the exam started!

Let me say first of all, that I have never ever before sat an exam to orchestral accompaniment. Imagine, then, my horror, when halfway through the most difficult part of the exam (a lengthy text all in German with a series of multiple-choice questions pertaining to the text, followed by two letters with blanks that need to be filled in, one multiple-choice and one with ten blanks and fifteen options which you need to sort through and choose the correct word for the relevant space), first flutes then violins could be heard. The orchestra was in the room directly above us, rehearsing what sounded like a rather nice piece of Mozart. It was lovely, but it did absolutely nothing for our concentration. I did ask whether we had to just put up with it, the invigilator merely shrugged and apologised.

Come the mid-morning break, myself, Marilyn and our friend from school Nicole were standing outside in the freezing cold, me and Nicole chainsmoking, swearing our asses off and jittering like mad as we bemoaned our fate and bitched about the stupidity of sitting an exam with an orchestra playing overhead.

Luckily the noise had stopped when we went back in. Good thing, too, because we had the listening comprehension test next, followed by a letter-writing exercise.

We had lunch in a swish bar/restaurant just up the road from the school. The afternoon held the delights of the spoken exam, and Nicole and me were partnered up for that. Marilyn had a stranger for a partner who hadn't shown up for the morning's papers, so she was rather nervous. We sat and talked for a while, then Marilyn set off to find her partner and Nicole and I ran through a few things.

The exam was a little different to what we'd expected. We were shown into a room with three people in it and sat at two tables well apart from each other, and allotted letters A and B. We each had a different photo, which we had to describe to each other, and I wasn't really expecting that so it kind of threw me a little.

It is never a good idea to speak English when you are being examined on your ability in German. So of course, I at some point opened my mouth and said 'I mean...', clapped my hand over my mouth in horror, sneaked a glance at the invigilators and muttered 'you didn't hear that, right?', to their great amusement. I lost a couple of points for that, but still managed to get 73/75. Yeah, that's right. 97% or so. Me, who lost it so totally during the last spoken exam I sat in German back in 1991 that I flunked it absolutely.

I passed the whole exam this time around, with an overall score of 86%, giving me a solid 2 pass. That's pretty good going, I think. The lowest scores were for the parts where we had the orchestral accompaniment; comparing results, Marilyn and I both did our worst during that part of the exam.

So, that was pretty cool. The next class starts on Wednesday evening. Just the two evenings each week, Wednesdays and Fridays, from 18:15 to 21:30. That means I will have the daytime free, and as I now have some degree of competence in German I can think about maybe finding a job of some kind.

I can also hopefully continue to get the house in order. We have one of the upstairs rooms decorated and that has become my study/library/entertainment room/guest bedroom and somewhere I can escape to if I need alone time. I like that.

Lots more still to be done, though, and I am planning on starting that tomorrow. Well, today, given it is currently around 4 am. Not been sleeping too well lately, I think mostly due to the stress of waiting for the exam results over the last five weeks.

What else has been happening? Oh, we bought a motorhome! A huge American one, thirty feet long with a bedroom, shower, toilet, kitchenette, dining/living area and two huge captain's chairs in the front. It's about fourteen years old, so not in the first flush of youth, but has very few miles on the clock engine-wise. Needs a new gas bottle, a new mounting shock on the generator, a new oxygen sensor and a bit more fiddling with the electrics and then it should be grand! I plan on investing some of my pennies in helping to get it fixed up - that seems like a good, solid thing to do for the two of us.

As we now have a motorhome that will sleep 8 people, we have the ability to take guests to places they might like to see. It also gives us somewhere to relax and sleep when we go off on Volksmarches. A great idea! We did Diekirch together last year (just the 20km/13 mile trail) and it was cold and wet despite being early June. We were supposed to pick up a tent at the Ramstein BX en route to Luxembourg, but they'd sold out! So, we wound up sleeping in the back of the Toyota for two nights. That was just miserable. So narrow I had to wake up to turn over, a big ridge across the middle where the rear seat was folded over, and cold. Oh, and we were in a car park across the street from the start/finish line.

Did you know that the Dutch army had a pipe band? Michelle knows...and they're very good, but not at zerostupidhundredhours!

We still have all four cats with us. Tigger is very nearly 18 years old now, and continues to do well. Her kidney function last time we had her tested just before Christmas was within normal limits on all results, which was fantastic news! The renal diet has really helped her, although it is hellishly expensive at around £1 a pouch - she can get through three or four in a day, as she still has the squits most of the time. Nothing wrong with her there, though. No parasites or viruses or infection that the vet can find. (Believe me when I say, though, that scooping catsquit into a wee vial is not a very pleasant task.)

Loki, Kit and Wanda have really taken to life in Germany. They love having a big house to run around in, even though the garden is a postage stamp compared to the five acres they became used to back in Elkesley! Kit has become a beachball with feet, even though she seems to eat very little and we've had her on diet food for a year now. Wanda is thin these days, she lost a lot of her excess weight once I got her away from Butthead and she no longer had too many treats and too much food. She's still a very solitary girl and doesn't spend much time with the other cats if she can help it. Always to the fore at food time, though! Loki is a delight, as he ever was. He likes to sleep with his people, either on my tummy or on Dave's, curled up around my head on the pillow, on top of the pillow Dave pulls over his head or up on the bedstead bookcase.

So, that's my wee update! I will, as I always say, try to update more frequently. See how it goes! I have lots to keep me occupied at the minute, so we'll see.