Time change

I lived in Luxembourg for 13 months, and managed to be in the country for three time changes. The first time change happened while I was still adjusting to European time at the very beginning of my time in Europe. I could barely sleep at night or wake up in the morning, so the time change was just one more hurdle, one more hour.

The buses from Kehlen to town run once at hour, except on Sundays, when they would run every other hour. We would try to catch the 9:10 bus into town for church on Sundays. There was one particularly cold day where we waited at the bus stop for almost 30 minutes before we decided that the bus wasn't coming so we couldn't go to church. We went home, changed out of our church clothes, cooked lunch, and then one of the girls suggested that maybe it was a time change, because her calendar said that it was the end of Daylight Savings Time in the States. So we were at the bus stop at 8:10 instead of 9:10. If there had been a bus every hour, we would have been waiting outside the church instead of at the bus stop.

Our last time change happened while we were on our trip, right before we left Europe. About lunch time, we noticed that all the clocks were an hour ahead of us, so we thought that maybe Germany was in a different time zone, though it hadn't seemed that way to us before. Then we noticed that our clocks were off when we got back to Luxembourg, too. So it took us close to two days to figure out we had missed another time change.

I don't remember the last time we missed a time change in the States. It seems like it's on everyone's lips, and we see it on the web, and in the papers, and on TV. To me, it was just one of the signs of how really out of touch we were with Europe that we didn't even know when the time was changing, didn't have any hint at all that it was coming.

The time change last year happened about the same time our furniture arrived. Though I was in Luxembourg for 13 months, our furniture and belongings were only in the country for four and a half months. It's just another reminder of how much easier things are back in the States.

Foreign Plates

Darin heard a story on the news this morning about a man who was having a plate removed from the bones in his arm, and when the surgeon got the arm open, he realized that he didn't have the right kind of screw driver. So he sent someone to the hardware store to buy one and then get it sterilized. The problem was that the man's plate had been installed in a foreign hospital. Darin thought it was a great story. It made my ankle hurt.

October's Beautiful Picture from Tennessee

Our valley runs east-west, so we can see the storms before they arrive. This storm makes its approach right at sunset. Awesome.