Cold as ice

This title refers to several things.
1. My toes. It's freaking cold in my room, although it's only September. I'm really excited for January...

2. Germany. It's 20 degrees Fahrenheit colder here than home. Well, I do come from the South... but really? It feels like late October or November to me.

3. The girls. Luckily Dana doesn't dislike me quite as much as she did the last couple weeks. But, as little toddlers often do, Jilli watched her sister and took in her example. She's finally hit the terrible twos, although her birthday is in a week. You should have seen her when I had to put her shoes on so we could go get Dana from Kindergarten. Actually, lieber nicht.

4. The strange sizing method for pants here. Ok, so it's not exactly cold, but nobody bothered to tell me about it. There are three methods (as far as I can tell): a S-M-L-XL one for things like jeggings (an ugly word for an ugly idea), inches (WHAT?!? this is Europe. We use metric here! Or so I thought... but that's what a sign at H&M said, so I guess I'll go with it), and some weird two-number system that I can't make heads or tails of. It doesn't help that the latter two systems both use numbers around 30, but in different ways. Lets just say that my search for a pair of jeans after the Reißverschluss AKA zipper on my favorite pair of jeans went kaputt was rather frustrating. I did find pants, but not blue jeans. That's ok though, because I've wanted red pants for a while and I've been meaning to replace my khakis for forever. Forever= since about last summer when I had to make the old ones into shorts because they got ripped on my bike gear thing.

5. The lack of thrift stores in this country. I miss hunting for cheap clothes, especially awesome vintage stuff. Go ahead, Brand Me as a Hipster. This isn't helvetica font, for the record. I'm only half a hipster.

6. I think this country forgot all the good music that came about before the 80's.  Don't get me wrong, I LOVE 80's music, but there was a lot of good stuff in the previous two decades. And I don't like the vast majority of what's popular today.

7. Smoozies. This is how they pronounce the word "smoothies" and it makes me smile. Maria got a blender for her birthday last month, so she's been trying out different combinations. They call the thick ones "Eis" as in "ice cream", which also makes me smile, since it's definitely not ice cream...

8. I have to go alone to open my bank account tomorrow morning.

Well, now that I'm finally all toasty, I've run out of things that are cold. Makes sense, na?