thom space

I finally found out what is wrong with my knee Patellar Tendonitis, all I can do at this point is rest. I am not a fan of resting, but I do like being healthy so I will.

If any one reading this is in NYC or will be there in the next month I suggest you see the Shining City, playing now at the Biltmore Theater, it was recently highly praised in a New York Times review as “as close to perfection as contemporary playwriting gets” , it also counts as one of its four cast members my good friend Peter Scanavino who in another beaming review, was said that he “brilliantly played” his part, and that it was “the stage equivalent of a piece of exquisite chamber music.” In the future keep your eye on Scanavino he is a good one, and in the mean time, go see the play!

Some times it is hard. Last week I was so excited about ordering sooo many new bike parts, and the company that I ordered them from has been so useless, first they couldn’t confirm my address because it was an apo, and then 4 days later they after they finally were able to post charges they posted the charges to my account 3 times! So now I have to go through the process of getting everything reversed I like it so much better when things are easy. Like a song I just listened to by the Spinto Band called “oh mandy” it was a nice and simple pop song, easy, I like it.

Something else that is easy and I am very excited about is the fact that I now have a new email address and it is of the @us.army.mil variety, I am now the man. The perks of the new address though are quite great, I now have full access to the Army Learning Online site which has access to full Rosetta stone language programs for more than 50 languages, not to meantion all sort of other certifacations. I am pretty impressed by how well put together the site is, the army has finally come into the 21st century. I think that it time for me to learn Farsi.

I was reading an article in NEON the other day on becoming german, it is a really neat project a grad student is doing after living in Germany for the past 15 years but always feeling left out of conversations with her friends when the topic turned to childhood memories, so she decided to put together a database of memories submitted via her website which would allow people, for example, who wanted to know what there favorite book would have been when they were five years old growing up in munich, mine apparently would have been charlie and the chocolate factory, and my favorite characters would have been the umpalumpas. ahhhh, if I had only been german, wait, no I think that that was my favorite book when I was five. But the web site also has the ability to only give results from west or east germany, which means that one can look into the different cultural elements that go into making the modern german. So if you are one of the 5 people in the world who longs for childhood memories of growing up in in the vaterland your prayers have been answered.

Knees are a very important part of my life. With out my knees I would be a sad person., no skiing, running, biking, climbing, NOTHING. Unfortunatly think that I may have hurt my left knee on a long ass run last week and I possibly might need an opperation. I am not excited about the prospect of an opperation at all, I am not a fan of knives at all, or rather i am not a fan of getting cut by knives, getting cut SUCKS. I really hope my knee is ok.

I am sitting here in Germany listening to an Austrian radio station FM4 (best radio in europe) and on comes Tilly and the Wall, a band from Ohmaha Nebraska, who when I went to google the first thing I came up with was the Daily Iowan the paper from the state that I was lucky enough to have spent a solid four years in. my only point is that the world is small.

and speaking of a small, I just recently went to Greece, on a trip through the islands starting in Athens, and then on to Mikinos, Patmos, Santorini, Crete and Kusadasie in Turkey. Here is a link to the pictures. It was off the hook.

I hope my Road bike is in the mail, I am soo excited for the up coming season. Yesterday I borrowed a friend’s touring bike and went on a very nice 100km loop from garmisch to Krun and then Kochel and back to Garmisch, it was only 3500 feet of climbing but it was a great taste of what’s to come. The roads were all in such good condition, they were perfect.

I just spent a ton of money on bike parts I have been putting it off for so long that my mountain bike just decided to protest and stop working. It will be so happy to have new every thing. I am very excited about the road and mountain bike season that is already upon the alps, my friends have so many miles in there legs that I am going to be hard pressed to keep up. I have had my priorities all mixed up so far this year, I had thought that I was going to do a bunch of mountain marathons and that I would just do a lot of running up the local peaks for training, my knees however thought otherwise and have let me know through near constant pain that they demand to be on a bicycle, and out of the direct line of abuse that I usually put them though, I guess they think ski season is enough, so new bike parts it is. I hope that they get here sometime in the next month, if there is one thing that I have grown to distrust it is the postal services ability to ship things to Garmisch in a timely manner, stupid postal service. Speaking of which I can’t believe that the rate is going ot increase to 42 cents! why I can remember when it only cost 25 cents to send a letter, and now it is making me feel old.

Today I went to Altengau to see the May poll raising ceremony, it was a very folksy experience. There were lots of people in Lederhosen and Dirdels drinking beer and eating braten. I had a very tasty slice of cake that I wish I had asked the name of, it was chocolate and some sort of cheese cake together in a deliecious combinataion. I need to get myself some lederhosen and calf warmers before I leave. I have a mission.