My Life as a Mennonite......**

Hey Stranger,

Weather Report from NEVER NEVER LAND: For several weeks it has been clear sunny and frigid cold.  But the last few days have been more bearable.  I find many similarities in NEVER NEVER LAND to Alaska, the way the sun rises and sets, how cold the cold is and how liberating it feels when it reaches 40 Degrees.

I do not have internet yet.....but I am going on my third week of no internet.  I have had many requests for the return of my blog so here is a short excerpt of the highlights of my two week internet detox, part 1 (the early part of my internet detox.) 

The first day in my new house.  

I hear the city church bells at the center of the town we live in.  Across the street, the neighbors have chickens and roosters, so through out the day the Roosters crow periodically and no matter how many times I hear it, I always smile.  We live in the country so seeing tractors on the road is perfectly normal.  If we open the windows or step outside it smells like manure.

The stairs in our house are antique, they were probably the original set of stairs placed in the house during the 1950's.  So they are steep and Karmella has a hard time navigating them.  They also creak very LOUD and A LOT which I don't mind because nobody will be able to sneak up on me in the middle of the night.  

Based on the structure of our house it was built in the 1950's.  The first owner's were a older couple, when the husband died the wife sold the house to the young girl we now rent from.  The girl we rent from completely re did the inside of the house.  

We have been told that after WWII and the Cold War, the Germans collected up the rubble of the leftover bases and used them to fill the walls of their houses, so as creepy as it sounds we probably have War ruins in our walls.  

I have been busy baking cookies and delivering them to the neighbors to make a good impression.  We have been told that the older Germans love Americans because they remember how bad it was before we entered WWII, but we have also been told the Farmers do not like us because the helicopters have been associated with killing certain livestock.   


My reception has been mostly positive.  One lady right across the street gave me a bottle of bootleg schnapps she personally brews when I brought the cookies over.  They seem to adore Karmella, but LEGS and I work very hard to keep her from barking.  My cookies have been rejected twice, nothing more humbling then a German telling you NEIN when you offer up cookies with a big beautiful smile.  

I have found it to be incredibly frustrating, embarrassing and have felt completely awful for not being able to speak GERMAN.  I have mad old ladies litterally curse when I tell them I can only speak a little 'Duetsch.' Everyday I am learning more and more vocabulary, and am ambitiously trying to learn- this is also nearly impossible without being able to reference the internet. 


I have also felt like I have lived like an Amish or Mennonite these last few weeks.  I found a broom downstairs in the cellar of the house, its a very old broken broom and I have been using that to sweep our house.  I have no telephone or internet so no outside influence of knowledge of the world.  The only pot of I have is issued from the ARMY, the bottom of it is so warped that I have to hold it steady on the stove and literally watch the water boil. 


My internet detox has gone smoothly and has mostly been annoying.  At first I was just aggravated that I couldn't look up the weather, or how to do a certain stitch in knitting, or quick reference Fahrenheit for Celsius.

Most of my days are spent in silence, knitting in my own thoughts.  I thank God for Karmella because she helps me feel less alone.  

Just another day in the life of an unlikely military wife.....**