I hate winter. It’s been about the same temperature of the single coldest day I experienced in Albany for two weeks straight now. I was half an hour late for class on Tuesday morning because the roads were freshly coated with more snow and ice and the bus was driving slower than I could have walked. Not really though because if I would have walked I would have died of hypothermia. I wouldn’t have been the first person in Europe this winter. Insider every building the floors are coated with melted dirty snow. I would love to just hibernate but I can’t.

Tomorrow I’m taking a test to see if I can skip a level in my German class. It’s not that I think I speak German especially well, but I have learned the language before. Just about everything in B1 is a review. It’s a much needed review, but ich langweile mich when I’m in a class with people who are processing all the information for the first time. And there’s a chance that this next course will be my last. It’ll probably last until about May, and after that I don’t know if I’ll be able to take another one that finishes before I go back to the States on July eighteenth. So if I can be done with the Mittelstufe classes before I go to law school, then I can feel better about adding to my resume that I speak German.

It’s been decided that I start working next Thursday, February sixteenth, which is also my last day of class. And then it’s exactly a month until Ader comes to visit. I’ve taken my vacation days and booked our hotel and he’s booked his train. This time we’re doing a proper long weekend, unlike when he came in November and only stayed for the two shortest days of my life.

Speaking of adorable international couples…I know February is a little early to start thinking about what I want for Hanukah 2012/my twenty fourth birthday, but I went to a book reading last Saturday for The Globalization of Love by Wendy Williams and now I really want to read it. If you google Wendy Williams you come up with the talk show host—the author I saw is a different Wendy Williams. She’s a Canadian who married an Austrian and wrote her book based on her own experiences plus interviews she did with other ‘glo-lo’ couples (her term).

It got me thinking it might be interesting to try and write a non-fiction book that way, maybe about the experience of being an Au Pair? At least then I’ve found one use for my German.