This Little Mexican is a Tortilla Making Machine!

Remember for Michaels birthday I was wanting to make some homemade tortillas but couldn't find shortening so bought a replacement ingredient? Well I finally gave it a shot and made them, and wow, they turned out pretty good, can hardly even tell its not shortening in them! I couldn't stop eating them so had to wrap them up in cling wrap and shove them in the freezer. So now, NO MORE STORE BOUGHT tortillas for us from here! Thats a reason to celebrate! (Store bought tortillas from here are especially not good and especially not authentic oh, and are expensive too!)

Things here are good. we had a little more snow this morning but nothing like last week. That stuff is all mostly melting due to rain, but there is still a lot of it on the ground. Yesterday I resigned myself from Danish Classes as well. I was starting to feel really guilty about still attending two more classes knowing I was going to quit. I felt like I was leading Marie, Our teacher, on.. :) We start brand new classes next Tuesday and we are both REALLY excited about them. The school is called, "Babel" and is conveniently located in the same building as TI!! How crazy! We will have our lessons in a private room in the lobby of the building. We get to decide when the classes are, and the day can change weekly as we want. Apparently its not only the language that they will be teaching us but also an integration into the culture (which we are pretty familiar with, but will be nice to learn a little more!) Also after taking a test the decided we don't need the full 90 lesson course but that we know enough to enter on the 60 lesson course! We will start with afternoon classes. It will work out perfectly as I will simply meet Michael up at work , we will have our lesson, hit the gym and come home :) Another great thing about this class, is that they will move on when they feel we are ready to and we don't have to worry about keeping up with other people in the class or getting bored by being stuck and not being able to move on. In the class we were in, everyone had different goals and reasons for being in the class and I think it was difficult for the teacher to incorporate all those goals into a single lesson. Thankfully Michael and I have the same goal making the classes more suited for our needs. And the BEST reason these are going to be so much better is they are providing coffee and tea for us! Its the little things that I appreciate the most... Mary can vouch for me on that one. Wow, I didn't mean to talk so much about the Danish classes! But I suppose saves me the trouble of doing so later!

Michael is still doing good. His side trip to Osaka was canceled (which is a good thing) because a design review was postponed at another company for tomorrow which he HAS to be at! Then he can FINALLY come home. During the days I feel like he is just at work. It's so nice to go to the gym during the days, but I can see why its hard for so many people to keep going to the gym without a workout partner... It is definitely NOT as much fun to go everyday alone. And at nights, It gets a little sad to only be cooking dinner for 1, or having to recork the wine at the end of the night because I have no one to help me finish it. *sigh*

Michael Update

Michael made it to Tokyo!! VERY long story short, flights were canceled, others delayed but in the end, he got there. He is still in one piece but was pretty exhausted. I think he is ready to come home! His time in Dallas went well. He stayed incredibly busy but had some time on Saturday to do some shopping for us. He stocked us up on TONS of stuff (some stuff we can get here, but it's SOOOO much cheaper to by in the states) We sent him with an extra large suitcase so he could get it all back. Tuesday - Thursday for Michael are going to be absolutely insane. He has a HUGE meeting everyday. On Thursday he has to be up EARLY EARLY, hop on a train to Osaka with his 4 bosses go to a big 'ol meeting in Osaka, hop back on the train and head back to Tokyo.

As for me, I'm still good :) I had planned on doing some stuff on Saturday, but the weather was still a mess so I just bunkered down in our place all weekend and was a bum. And I won't lie, I liked it. It gave me a chance to finally get all caught up on "Desperate Housewives" Thanks to I-Tunes!

The snow turned to rain and slowly it's starting to melt away. I'm hoping that the weather on Friday is good so Michael can get back here a-ok :)

Yup, thats it from here ...

I'm FREE!!!!

After the gym I dug out Michael's old ski pants, put them on, cracked the door open far enough for my little body to squeeze out of grabbed the shovel and dug and dug till the door could open up all the way.. then.. I MADE A FRIEND!! :) I've named him "Michael 2.0" ... I kid I kid. He has no name... and no mouth because the chocolate chips didn't want to stick well like his eyes did.
It started snowing again and already his nose is building up snow and his eyes are slowly disappearing. :( He will be blind by morning.

Holy Moly!!

Forget the little sideshow I posted here last night, check out what I woke up to!!!

This is as far open as the door would go!! I'm stuck!! But if I can get that door open, I'm totally making a snow man on our balcony.

To get an idea how tall our wall usually isI really wanna get one of our two doors open to get out there and measure that pile of snow on that table.

Man digging out his car

There is still snow falling from the sky. It's not heavy snow right now, but its tiny flakes that are falling fast. I am not sure I have ever seen this much snow at once. The most snow I had ever seen was the winter we lived here the fist time, but I don't recall it falling this much at once. Wish my brother was here to play in the snow with me! I'd take Michael too, but he takes some convincing to do so. I also wish Michael were here to see it all! Pictures just don't do justice!

Two Different Worlds

First, Michael made it safe and sound. About 5 minutes after I woke up at 7:30 this morning my phone rang and it was Michael telling me he just got to the hotel and was exhausted and was going to bed. It was just after midnight in Dallas. This morning I checked the weather in Dallas and was jealous to see that it said:

"79 and Sunny"

That is BASICALLY 80 degrees...we haven't seen weather above about 45 since we arrived on November 30th!

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what it looked like here today

This is directly behind the other side of our building. SHOPPING!!! :)

This is the most snow we have gotten since we got here. It is about 10:00 at night and last time I measured (with my trusty ruler with a picture of Einstein on it) I had almost 6 inches piled up on our table outside and 11 inches on the ground of the balcony, and it is still coming down hard and fast. I wonder what it will look like in the morning. I took a bunch of pictures to make a slide show for Michael to see what he was missing, so I am posting it here as well.

EDITED: It is now the next day and I came back and looked at the slideshow I posted and the picture quality was just really really bad and you couldn't see much, so I re-did it, took out the music and just uploaded some pictures. So go check them out! These are pictures of Lyngby and stuff we see daily....

Lyngby Sne

Good Luck Michael!

Ok, let me get this straight. My name changed back to Negrete AND my husband just left me in a foreign country by myself... Does that seems strange to anyone else besides me? haha.

Michael is on his way...well kinda. He left here this morning at 11:00am and is at the airport right now. His plane doesn't leave for another 3 hours (3:35) but we have a habit of getting to the airports ridiculously early. So, I guess he will be hanging out there for a while. I actually have a really busy day today,since it didn't really start till after he left at 11. I have some work to do around the house, do Danish homework, then go to the gym, come home take a shower, eat a quick dinner, then out the door to Danish class. Then back home and we usually go straight to bed when we get back. Maybe I won't even notice Michael isn't around today!! ok, thats pretty doubtful! ;) We realized a couple days ago that this will be the longest we have been apart since I went to Russia in 2001 for 2.5 weeks. We could hardly believe it. I've been getting a lot of what will you do while he is gone questions. Seems like most people think my life is going to come to a screeching halt while he is gone. I suppose with not working I portray myself to a lot of people that I am completely dependent on Michael, which I am in a way, but I wear a good mask to the incredibly independent and tough girl that I really am and always have been. I suppose thats why I never get bored doing what I do. :) I have a ton of stuff planned to do while he is gone. Several things its really hard to do with him around, which includes organizing the heck out of our place. It seems I can't get things meticulously organized the way I like, without creating a huge mess as I move along, and that's hard to do with two of us trying to move around in here. There are a couple places I want to go to that Michael doesn't have much interest in seeing so I'll probably hit up those places up as well. I have a Tai Chi lesson early next week and 4 Danish classes while Michael is gone. Also when Michael gets back we are starting private lessons here in Lyngby and will drop our other classes. I'll talk about those more later.

So, if you could for the next 10 days send out strength and recovery vibes to Michael we would both be grateful. :) When he left he told me he was really nervous about this trip and how his body and mind were going to handle it. He will hardly have a moment to come up for air between the all the traveling, preparations for big meetings and the meetings themselves. Plus he has a bad habit of forgetting to eat when I'm not around to remind him... that's never good.

My Little Traveler

Michael's all better, but before he got better, he got worse. He basically had an off and on fever from Tuesday night until last night. But today he has felt fine all day and its already 3:45. I think its safe to say, he is over whatever it was. We both have our fingers and toes crossed that I don't catch it too. When I catch something from him, I always get it much worse. So here's hoping I stay healthy.

Michael got his itinerary for his little whirlwind trip of the world. He will be leaving here Tuesday afternoon flying to Chicago to Dallas. He will leave Dallas on Sunday (he made it so he had an extra day there so he could do some shopping for us) and fly back to Chicago, then onto Tokyo. He will get to Tokyo Monday at about 3pm and will be there until noon on Friday. He will get back here on Friday afternoon. Turns out, while he is in Tokyo a second very big company wants to talk to him about a different chip that he worked on almost the entire time we were in Dallas.He isn't very happy about having to go all these places for such a short time, but hopefully it won't happen often. While he is gone he asked me to start looking into going somewhere at the end of March, even if just for an extended weekend. So I can spend some time figuring out where we need to/want to go for a few days. Any suggestions on a destination?? :)

A Sick Hubby on Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentines Day!!! :)

Michaels birthday went great. Well mostly. He had an up and down kinda day. Sometime during the middle of the day he said he felt like he was getting sick again. Achy, stuffy nose and sounded like what he just got over about a week ago, was starting to come back. We will get back to that in a moment. We are on spring break for Danish lessons this week so it was nice we didn't have class on his birthday and got to stay home.

For Michaels birthday he asked if I could make fajitas. Sure thing! So I spent the day running around to about a billion different grocery stores, and markets looking for all the ingredients I needed. I have found that Cilantro is near impossible to find here, and I didn't find it yesterday. I also was going to make homemade tortillas but couldn't find shortening. Michael asked some of the guys from work what it was called here and no one seemed to know what it was. They looked it up online and found that Denmark was the first to ban tans fats (which we knew) but all shortening is, is basically a big blob of trans fat. So outta luck. I was trying to use illegal ingredients. I did find a substitute, but I didn't have time at all once Michael got home to get the tortillas made too,so we had store bought ones. But I was able to manage to have enough time to make the guacamole and Spanish rice and of course the fajitas marinade from scratch.

Monday night we made a bunch of brownies. They seem to do things backwards here, but you know, when in Rome! Apparently it's customary to do your birthday like your in elementary school . You have to make the cake and bring it for everyone else instead of being giving a cake. We made some espresso brownies that Michael always loves so he could take them to work on Tuesday. We saved some so we had some to eat at night with ice cream. yum. Also on people birthdays they tend to decorate with the danish flag, so, I did too! I got the sun room all decked out for a party :)

Michael came home and I had to run out to get some chili powder (and had to go to two stores because the first one, didn't have any) because I used it all, came home and spent about 2 hours cooking while he laid on the couch, watched tv and tried to feel better. He started to and we opened a bottle of wine, ate and had fun.

I think when we pull down the shades in the sun room it makes it feel like we are in a tent like a party tent..

By the end of the evening Michael felt all better. We went to bed and the alarm went off at 5:00 (we were suppose to go to the gym this morning) Michael said he really didn't feel good again and that he felt really hot, but really cold at the same time. uh oh.. I was a little warm from the blankets so touched my neck first to feel my temp so when I felt his I had something to compare it too. I felt his chest, neck and head and I am surprised my hand didn't catch fire. He was burning up! And I could hover my hand above his body and feel the heat coming off of him. I know he had to have been at about 100 or slightly over. Unfortunately somewhere between Lubbock to Allen to Plano to Denmark we have misplaced our thermometer, and there is nothing open at that hour here so I couldn't go get one. He took some Tylenol and reset the alarm to 9 and said he would go to work late if at all. He woke up and felt surprisingly better. OK good! But I had a sneaking suspicion that the Tylenol was masking the fever and any pain. He took it slow this morning, but had a meeting with the other language school at 11:30 so had to leave for that. His skin felt cooler this morning right until he was getting ready to leave and then he was starting to get warm again (just about the time the Tylenol would have been wearing off) So he took some more and then out the door. He was going to come home early too. Poor thing. I feel bad for him.

Oh, also Michael found out he is heading to Dallas on Tuesday-Saturday then to Tokyo from there from Saturday-Tuesday then back here. He isn't looking forward to all the traveling and doing stuff he could do from here. The only thing he is excited for is to be present during a design review in Tokyo with a big wig from a big big Japanese corporation where he will be drilled about this product. I know he will do great, but he will be a MESS when he gets back home.. Jet lag in Dallas...jet lagged from Dallas and new Jet Lag in Tokyo to jet lagged from Tokyo to jet lagged again from Denmark. He isn't going to be a happy camper when he gets home.

He's Finally My Age Again!!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MICHAEL!!!!

Not that you are going to read this, but I hope you have a fun day!
Thanks for everything you do for us. You are more then I could have ever hoped for in a husband. :)

February 13th 1980

I Love that he still has the exact same hair line from when he was born.

Updated Pictures

I realized the only pictures of our place I posted soon after we got here with no everything really set up yet. So here is what our place now looks like.

Entry way

Bedroom
Bathroom

Kitchen

Kitchen again

Living Room
Office Area

Dining Area

Sun Room

Friday Night Fun

Last night was our get together with The Møltoft family. To refresh your memories they Jørgen and his wife Agnus use to call themselves our surrogate grandparents our last time we lived here. We would never have survived a few things here without their help. Anyways, we got to know their kids and grandkid first time we were here and so the whole family got together last night with us. When we walked in the door they even had a brand new 4 month old grand baby. She was adorable. We had a really great time. Drank wine, drank beer ate good food and had a lot of fun. We have always said that Agnus is the best cook in the world. We use to get so excited when they would cook for us because she cooks these meals that are just AMAZING, and last night was no different. Started off with some appetizer that I can't really explain, then we had pork, duck and potato's (VERY typical danish food) and for dessert we had fruit and homemade ice cream and coffee. YUM! I had never eaten duck before we went on our cruise back in August, but we have both quickly come to love it!

We don't have much planned for the weekend. It is nice not have to run around trying to find things we need for our place. We will go to the gym in a few minutes, come home, shower, change, eat lunch, then maybe just go out for a cup of coffee.

Yellow Banana's

A couple nights ago, Michael was watching something boring on TV, so I made art.
Exciting huh?

Lyngby Sunsets

“Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk.”
~Jack Handy

That always makes me laugh...

I'm a firm believer that the best sunsets in the world are seen in the desert. Never seen more beautiful sunsets then in El Paso and New Mexico. That being said, recently Lyngby has been trying to prove me wrong. I don't remember the sunsets here being particularly memorable last time we were here. The past few unclouded days though, its been lovely!

This is one of many reasons I love our sun room! I love that we can sit there and watch nature paint us a picture in the sky.

I'm looking out the window and it is starting to snow ever so gently with big giant fluffy flakes. They are so fat it is easy to see them dancing around in the wind on their way down. It's always odd to see seagulls flying around as the snow falls. We are just a few kilometers from the beach so quite often seagulls come and pay us a visit. I suppose while it is still calm outside and before the clouds might dump massive amounts of snow/rain I should go ahead and head on out to the grocery store!

Oh, before I go though, I had my Tai Chi lesson yesterday and it went very well. This guy seems like he is going to compliment and build on everything Chris has already enlightened me with and rather then really teaching me a completely new style and form, he will go in to a lot of depth on the principles that are Tai Chi allowing me to incorporate his teaching into my current style but with new perspectives, as his main style of Tai Chi is not the same as the one I currently practice. Don't know if that really makes much sense to anyone but, it was the easiest way I could explain it and well it makes sense to me!

The 24 Hour Vegetable

See anything funny about this picture?
Lets have a closer look shall we???












Oh, there it is!!!

I bought these tomato's on Friday, this is what this one looked like on Saturday!! When we left Denmark and moved back to the states the first time, I couldn't stand that everything had preservatives in them. All of a sudden, I appreciate preservatives (though I know when we move back one day, I won't be able to stand them anymore again) Its been 2 months since we got here, and it is still not super easy to try to remember not to buy a ton of fruit and vegetables in the store because I sometimes forget that they will go bad by the time I use it! I am still so use to buying a weeks worth of produce. At least we go through milk really fast, because I know that goes bad quickly as well.

Our little get together on Friday was a lot of fun! Everyone showed up and we chatted for a while, ate, and sat around and had a really nice time. It was kinda cool to see all the guys that have been through the program (minus 3) all together. For us it was especially nice because when Michael did the program he was the first one through and at the beginning everyone was unsure if the program would last, or even work for that matter. Seeing that it has lasted 4 years and 8 students later was quite wonderful.

Roland (current student that just arrived about 2 weeks ago), Klaus (everyone should know who he is) Michael, (Everyone better know who he is), Austin (current student that arrived in June) and Jens (Danish student that just finished in the states in December)

5 Orders of Buisiness

Danish Classes
- Umm they are.. Oooookaaaay... besides being inconvenient they kinda seem like a waste of time right now. I think it's a little difficult because we seem to know a bit more Danish then everyone else in the class so it seems to be moving really slow. We have gotten some clarification on some pronunciation and thats good, but still makes it boring. and did I mention inconvenient? ;) I actually found a couple places that offer basically one on one classes or one on two in our case. Michael was going to contact them and see if perhaps we could get private lessons if you will. TI provided us with 10,000 US dollars a person for language training for 1 year.. THATS 20,000 BUCKS!! WOAH! so, we could afford them since TI would be paying for them. Hopefully that will be good, because I can't see us keeping up this schedule every week for the next 2 years. *sigh*

Michael Sick - Michael was a bit under the weather this week, but seems to be better today. Nothing serious, just a yucky cold type thing. Cross your fingers I don't get it. I have a habit of when I catch something he has had, I get it 10 fold.

Laundry Machine - Remember when it was broken? Ya is broken again. This time it is spewing water out onto the floor when we turn it on.. thats always fun. Hopefully our landlord will send someone soon. Our pile of clothes is just about to start growing big time :(

Party - Tonight we are having a little get together at our place with the past and present students from the Texas Tech/Denmark Technical University exchange program. Besides Micheal and Klaus, there will be one other Dane named Jens(and his girlfriend Sarah) and two Americans here currently studying named Austin and Roland. We just thought it would be nice to have everyone get together. There will only be 3 people missing. 2 other Americans who are both in Dallas right now and one Dane whom I believe is also in Dallas right now.

Mom/Sharon Blog - I've been meaning to mention this, my mom and her best friend stated up their own little blog and today mentioned some of my loyal blog commenter's! So look, you guys are famous! ;)

http://mrspeepsandnursiepooh.blogspot.com/index.html

While I'm at it, either though I know only about... oooo 5% of the people that read this actually post comments but I wanted to thank all my loyal readers for letting me know that you read this. I always get a feeling of satisfaction when I hear you tell me you have read it, or tell me via email or even via myspace!! It lets me know this isn't a waste of time! ;)