Actually, it started off kind of bad because I had to try to finish some last-minute German homework before my lesson. I couldn't quite get it all done (because I felt compelled to take a shower before leaving the house), so I had to go to my lesson without everything completed. However, Carmen - my teacher - actually seemed impressed (surprised?) with the amount of homework I had actually done. The lesson went well. My favorite quote was when she told me (in German of course) that she doesn't know how I do it (huh?!?!?), but my German actually improves significantly every week. I'm done with the second level of books, and now I'm officially in the home stretch of intermediate German. So the lesson was good, and I left my German school feeling pretty damn good about myself.
After my lesson, I went to pick up the watch that Mrs. TBF bought me for my birthday. We picked out a beautiful Breitling watch at Spinnler & Schweizer - one of Basel's many fine watch stores - this past weekend. The name of the store always reminds me of the "Spinner Olsen" joke my dad tells me, but I'll leave that one for a future blog entry. And yesterday, I went back to the store to pay for it (they give you quite a sizeable discount if you pay in cash). I told the lady who helped me (Frau Pflugi) that it was a birthday gift for me from my wife, so she gift wrapped it for me. Wasn't that nice of her? Then, she gave me a gratis Breitling baseball cap which was completely unexpected. Free handouts are so incredibly rare in Switzerland that it made the watch shopping experience all the more enjoyable. I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I told Frau Pflugi the story about how when I was a kid in Little League, my father had to slit my baseball cap and sew a piece of fabric into it to make it big enough to fit my gigantic head. Frau Pflugi gave the slightest hint of a chuckle (the equivalent to choking with laughter in North America), seemed a little bit uncomfortable with my small talk, and then I left Spinner Olsen...I mean, Spinnler & Schweizer with a warm, fuzzy feeling about having had worked my schtick on Frau Pflugi.
Now, you might think that that would be all that one could handle for one day. But NO!!! When I made it back home, I found that our full SKY satellite subscription had been reactivated!!!!!!!! We haven't had the full SKY package since May due to the fact that they somehow manage to catch people who have SKY outside of the U.K. (which is technically illegal). But, Phil (the guy from the U.K. who installed the system for us) managed to get our subscription back. So now we can, once again, enjoy our M*A*S*H reruns, the U.K. Food Network, Kerrang (heavy-metal/hard-rock music videos), laugh at Fox News' incredibly biased right-wing propaganda, etc. We were up until 11:30 p.m. watching T.V. Although I'm sure it won't be long until I'm once again complaining that there's nothing to watch.
So thanks, Phil. I take back all the m---------ers and as--oles I called you over the past few months. You're my hero! At least until the next time the satellite goes out.
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