I jumped on the bandwagon. It’s Friday, and I have a bunch of short stories to tell, so I’m joining the other bloggers who do “Seven Quick Takes.”It turned into about 3 stories separated into 7 points, but oh well. I wanted to tell these stories!
1. Last weekend we headed to the furniture store on post in Mannheim with the intention of checking the price on a leather couch we spotted several months ago. Our old couch is well…old. When we got to the store, we still loved the leather couch; however, the potential for scratching and rapid wearing made me nervous, so we tried out a few other couches and found another that we both liked. Another benefit? It was about $200 cheaper! Although we did not set out to actually make a couch purchase that day, we ended up leaving the store with a new couch.
2. If you are ever in Germany and want to get strange looks, tie a couch to the top of your SUV and drive home. Yes, we had to do this. The couch was about 2 inches too tall for the inside of our SUV. Luckily, John had some really strong cords with which to tie it down (parachute cords – nice, right?). That didn’t make it any easier on my nerves during the 30-45 minute drive home, though.
3. We knew our old couch was not in the best shape, but we did not realize how bad it was until we got the new one and had the two sitting side by side. Eesh. I took photos, but the photos really don’t do the stark contrast any justice…
Old Couch. It deserves the blurry shot it got. (I feel bad about saying that - it was a great couch for 6-7 years.)
New couch! Ta da!
4. In the past week, the fall colors have really gotten bright. This is both incredibly enjoyable and saddening. It’s enjoyable because it’s so pretty, but it’s saddening because I know winter is just around the corner. Once the colors reach their peak, they only stay for a short time before the trees lose all their leaves. Argh.
Example of the current views:
5. Normally Béni has dinner between 6 and 6:30. Today, we got home at just past 6 which threw off our schedule a little. Unfortunately, that affected my memory when it came to keeping Béni’s feeding time on schedule. At 7:30, he came and sat at my feet and started whining. Once I realized what was wrong (which took all of 5 seconds), I felt awful!
6. This weekend is the Heidelberg holiday bazaar on post. This is the same event where we bought our antique dining room hutch last year. We did not make any big furniture purchases this year considering we just bought the couch. We did, however, buy 3 different types of Dutch cheese (1 peppercorn Gouda, 1 Rotterdam sort of cheese and 1 soft pesto cheese — it’s green!), 1 French wine (a Fronsac from Chateau Hauchat) and 5 different ornaments.
7. I wanted to share the ornaments with everyone, so here they are. Sorry they’re kind of blurry. I’m weekend-lazy now and didn’t want to find more light sources when I snapped the photos.
This one has a nativity scene inside the bell, which is all carved out of wood from olive trees in Bethlehem. How neat is that?
I have that wooden bell ornament! I think it was my grandma’s. Maybe they got it in Germany, no idea! (We are German and they’ve made many trips over there, so it is possible.)
You new couch looks comfy!!
That’s so cool that we have the same ornament.
And the new couch IS comfy. Ahhhh. It’s so much better than the old one.