We're legal!

Once again....wrote this yesterday....always a day late and a Euro short...

Not that I had any doubts or anything, but this morning we went off to the immigration office again to pick up our residence permits.

Remember how in the Netherlands mine was only good for a year, yet Gabe was good for what? Two, three years? Well, turns out we have to do the whole thing all over again in a years time.

Both of us.

Such fun.

At least this time we didn't get a parking ticket, since I made sure I bought us a couple hours worth of “Parkscheine”....(pre-paid parking for Vienna)

Oddly enough, the look of these residence permits is very similar to the ones we had up north, except it's all in German instead of Dutch. Same pretty pink. Sorry no picture, you'll just have to rely on your memory, or search back in time for whenever the heck we got the first set.

We're now a week away (we hope) from getting our internet. I'm so not counting on that. And I'm so not signing anything until we're “up and running” so to speak. Took the silly buggers a couple months to figure out if their hind ends were bored or punched, so I'm not going to be in any hurry to let the installers just run along.

I'm just saying.

Oh, and I did also reach a slight milestone yesterday. (Monday, in case I don't post this right away) Finally broke down and bought a tank of propane. It was a little pricey.

Here's the thing. It's seems that the “EU” has mandated that all gas containers are now no longer made of steel, but some sort of polyester. I'm not kidding. Sort of along the lines of kevlar or what have you, and much more indestructable than steel. So what that all meant to me was, my tank of propane was somewhere in the neighbourhood of €85.

That's a pricey neighbourhood.

Turns out they don't want to lose these new tanks, so the gas itself was €32,90 and the deposit for the tank was €53.

Jumpin'!

I was toying with the idea of going electric in the grilling department, but hadn't been able to locate anything that was remotely acceptable.

Here's the way these things always work: Bought tank of propane Monday afternoon, then found a perfectly acceptable electric grill in Cosmos Tuesday afternoon for €119.

I could just spit.

See, just outside our balcony door there's a receptacle that is NOT hooked to our breaker panel. (One fine day I'll explain how I know that).

I could be grilling on the cheap!!

Hey, I could be drying my laundry on the thing, dammit!!

Hm...I just had this image of laundry going up in flames. Maybe I needn't get upset about that particular missed opportunity.

I'm going to attempt to upload at least one photo so you can see the thing. It's rather spiffy looking, but I'm not sure it's worth €85.

You can see it sitting here in front of my "propane transportation device",  otherwise known as a cardboard box....

Even though I sometimes feel that my German is a tad shakey, I do seem to recall reading in our lease that the apartment Gods frown on bringing gas canisters into the building. So I just figured I'd truck along a big ole cardboard box, just in case there are any Gladys Kravits types around. Plus I was bringing it from the parking garage, so the dolly was kind of necessary anyway.

I guess that's it. I'm empty.

Oh. Should mention.

For some mysterious reason, the dvd drive in this machine decided to take a little rest a couple days ago, and after flipping the thing over, taking out the battery and removing a whack of screws, at which point I completely chickened out and put them all back again, it is now working just fine. At least until tonight when we go to watch a movie. We'll see.

I don't know if this had anything to do with it, but there were actually a couple screws that had started to work loose, but what that would have had to do with that drive is a mystery to me. It probably had more to do with me turning it upside down if anything, since we had determined that it wasn't a software problem, but something along the lines of a loose plug or what have you.

I still need to get out and buy a player for divx, since I hate to tie up this machine every time we can't play something on the old fashioned dvd player.

Ok, that's really it, I promise.