Kickin' It Old School: '81 Style

Note to self:  remember that I have a blog.  Sorry folks, it's been a whirlwind, and I've just returned from another trade show, this time in Salt Lake City (no, I didn't attend Sundance; that was in Park City).  I've said it before, but it bears repeating:  as an exhibitor, a person routinely faces sleep deprivation, malnutrition, dehydration, mental and physical stress, and (given the Salt Lake climate) exposure to extreme heat or cold.  In short, trade shows violate most of the Geneva convention, yet I sign up for the damn things to the tune of at least 2 appearances per year.  I'd also like to point out that my rather dubious streak continues-- I always manage to get sick going to trade shows (it's 21,000 people from over 40 countries in a sealed room for 4 days-- do the math), and this time I got bronchitis for my troubles.  A few too many fever dreams and some lovely antibiotics later, I'm on the mend.

So while I'm gearing up for more blogging tales, I'm going to give a quick throwaway.  In honor of the Ferris Beuller teaser commercial going apeshit viral right now (spoiler alert: it'll be a Honda Super Bowl commercial), I figured I'd take a trip to my past and post a distantly related song.  The song fragment heard in the commercial  (and made famous by Ferris Beuller's Day Off) is "Oh Yeah" by Swiss band Yello.  Yello are an interesting band-- they are still active, and comprise of musician Boris Blank (cool name) and lead singer Dieter Meier (the third guy in the video, Carlos Perón, left the band after this album, and has enjoyed a very prolific career as a solo artist).  Meier has a varied CV-- millionaire industrialist, professional gambler, one-time member of Switzerland's national golf team and artist.  Yello have had a few club hits here and there in the States, but are pretty influential in electronic music circles in the rest of the world.  Anyways, that's a v-e-r-y long setup for this video, 1981's The Evening's Young.  It's skittish, jumpy, never quite settles into its groove, but still makes for some fascinating listening.  And the video is, well, a product of its time-- glossy neons, glowsticks(?!), and a budget less than a weekend bus pass.  But I recall as a lad being absolutely transfixed by this vid when it aired on the late, great Night Flight TV program which showed all sorts of oddballia like this.  Take special note of the vocals-- this cat can give Tuvan throat singers a run for their money.  Enjoy the weirdness, Oh Yeah:


Knowing that the YouTubes sometimes do not allow videos to air in all continents, if the screen comes up blank where you are, EU readers can (hopefully) see this either here or here.

Happy Holidays Everybody!

Well, lessee... last year at this time, we were sipping wine in a Paris cafe, and 2 years ago we had a singularly crappy experience in a faux Scottish bar in Rome (as I recall, our Italian waiter was incensed we tipped him "only" 20% that evening for his gag-awful service). This year we're back in our hometown of Portland eating take-n-bake pizza, cracking open a $10 bottle of wine, watching A Christmas Story and enjoying this view from our balcony-- that's Mount Hood which you can see from downtown Portland (look to the Northeast, and you may even see Mount St. Helens on a clear night too).

B and I would like to thank our readers (and all you lurkers too-- hey, why not subscribe?) for stopping by over the year.  It's been a dynamic one to be sure-- we really were not prepared to head home quite yet, but hey you gotta play the hand you've been dealt.  We'll spend our post-Christmas rekindling an old tradition with our friends-- heading out to the rugged Oregon Coast, and planning our first "real" getaway for 2012.  Not to jinx it, but look out Canada!

We wish everybody a happy holiday season and a great 2012.

Computer Problems, Please Stand By

Not much happening here at ExpatUSA HQ. Well, actually there are, it's just that I haven't been chronicling very well. The biggest news is that my laptop died in a spectacular flame-out, and I've been struggling to pick up the pieces.

The short version is that my laptop computer (a Dell XPS, which was temperamental almost from the beginning and is now known to have inherent cooling and hardware design issues) destroyed its internal hard drive LITERALLY as I was scrambling to download everything to an external hard drive. Everything-- and I do mean everything-- from the last 3 years was basically lost. All photos of Europe, my work portfolio, bills, tax information, every document, and all the rest... gone. And the external drive? Well, despite backing it up on a semi-regular basis (but not nearly enough, natch) it was found out post-mortem that the last data it had dated from April(?!) and there was something inherently wrong with THAT as well. The good folks at Geek Squad told me that they could rescue the data from the toasted hard drive for the low low price of around $1700, then cautioned that they had zero idea of just how much they could find, but I'd be on the hook for the total no matter how large or small the recovery. Submitting the external drive for recovery will cost about $850 with the same non-guarantee of the amount of data that can be rescued. So folks... like an IT guy told me: data isn't safe until it is in 3 different places (the computer itself, external drive, and a third storage method like cloud data services). Word to the wise: don't be like me. Computers are not infallible, and the best way to approach them is to assume all will be gone in a puff of smoke.

So instead of paying in to my retirement accounts and buying a lot of Christmas gifts, more pressing concerns arose-- like getting a new computer, and salvaging the remnants of the "old" laptop. The "new" system was a relative bargain, but still more than I was wanting to pay (especially at this time of the year), and the old laptop was outfitted with a new $65 hard drive and is consigned strictly to light web surfing and entertainment duty. I simply do not trust it for anything else-- this is the computer's 3rd hard drive since 2008 (readers with good memories will remember this post from 2010). On the bright side, seeing as I work from home, I can probably get this new computer deducted from my taxes.

Regarding the old laptop, I decided to have a bit of geek fun and try out a more experimental web browser, one that wasn't a bloated pig (cough cough, Firefox) given the computer's temperament and annoying desire to destroy itself every 18 months. Into the breach, I downloaded the nerd-rific open platform Arora browser, which is really REALLY bare-bones, but just about right for the computer's current usage and second-tier status. All in all, it's an OK browser, and does almost everything that other web browsers do with a few quirks along the way (it doesn't recognize or load certain web pages about 5% of the time), but overall it's pretty good. Light and fast, plus its logo (pictured) looks like the bear is dirty dancing with the globe, so it has that going for it.

More adventures soon, including the unexpectedly long road to re-integrating back to the USA lifestyle.

Nuremberg Book Swap This Weekend

This one's for my German readers in the Nuremberg 'hood.

By all accounts, she's doing a bang-up job herself, but my ol' buddy Katherine With a K (and if you're not reading her blog, what's stopping you?) has picked up the mantle and is currently hosting the Nuremberg Book and Media Swap this coming weekend (November 20, 2011) at O'Neill's Pub in Nuremberg. Projected turnout looks VERY promising, which means the pickings should be really nice. Bring your pre-loved books, magazines and DVDs for exchange, have a beer and hang with the Nuremberg expat community. You can read more about it here.

Renters!!!

OK, so we're living in a condo here in Portland. The place is pretty small, but really really nice-- the construction materials are absolute top notch, our patio looks out onto the Willamette River (the body of water which bisects Portland), and from here we have views of Mount Hood and the impressive Fremont Bridge (pics to come). It's a tony kind of place, and we really lucked out on getting it-- our landlord sees the condo as something of a lucrative nuisance he doesn't want to deal with all that much, so he vets his tenants well and sets the rent at FAR below market value so he doesn't have to deal with a lot of turnover. And our neighbors? Well, we are amongst the youngest folks in the building, and (judging by all the Audis, Land Rovers and BMWs in the parking garage) probably don't make quite as much salary as these high fliers, but whatever.

Like I said, we rent. The Portland housing market is rather fluid right now and shows no signs of settling down, so we have made the conscious decision to wait-and-see before we commit to home ownership. I also said we rent in a very upscale condo on the waterfront. And because of this, some of our neighbors treat us like dirt. Interestingly, our previous place in Portland (6 or so years ago, and pre-Germany) was a similar situation-- the smallest house on the block of a fairly upscale neighborhood, and we rented that as well. In both situations, when the neighbors first heard we were bottom-feeding renters, you'd have thought I told them that that we were running a puppy mill with the proceeds from our meth lab. Hey folks, sorry we don't have crazy amounts of cash lying around to actually purchase these places, yet still have the gall to want to live in these nice neighborhoods. In the end, we proved to be excellent neighbors when we lived at the house, and it had better curb appeal than some of the other places on the block-- I made sure of that personally. I expect that our current neighbors will find that out as well. Eventually, anyways.

Dear Germany: How Can I Miss You If You Won't Let Me Leave?

What, you thought I'd given up on blogging dear reader? Nope, just trying to get our sea legs as we adjust to the whipsaw that is life back in the United States after a prolonged time away. Just think... free WiFi wherever you go, bottomless cups of (delicious) coffee, stores open past 8:00PM and all day on Sundays, re-acquainting ourselves to that wondrous thing known as "Happy Hour," and English... glorious, loud, inappropriately yammering on your cell, ignorant, wonderfully understandable English everywhere. Like I said, it's been an adjustment.

Part of that adjustment was living in a sort of enforced limbo as our belongings made their way back from Europe and living in a glorified hotel room for 2 months waiting for our stuff, all the while scrambling like hell during every second of downtime to find a permanent place to live, car to purchase, employment for yours truly, and reconnect with all our friends- some of whom we hadn't seen in 3+ years. It was, in a word, exhausting. But with the benefit of being mostly settled here in Portland, I think there's enough emotional distance to discuss just how botched this move really was-- it was comically awful in some bits, and as the title suggests, it's not actually complete. In some ways, we still aren't moved out of Germany quite yet. Here follows a less-than-comprehensive listing of our travails over the last 2.5 months:

- Our German bank lost several thousand Euros of our money-- we asked for a portion of our German savings to be transferred to our USA account, and it just disappeared into the ether. It was mistakenly sent to some account in New York state far as I can follow it. To the bank's eternal discredit, they were a lot more interested in covering their tracks, ignoring our requests to see the paper trail and shifting the blame than in, you know, actually locating the cash. It took almost 2 weeks for it to reappear.

- Part of B's Euro contract was that the German branch of a VERY WELL KNOWN accounting firm was supposed to file our US taxes for us. Whoops, they kinda didn't really do that, and when their local US offices heard from us upon returning two things happened immediately: (1.) they lawyered up, and (2.) we got treated like radioactive lepers. Understandably, they wanted to be well and truly clear of the blast zone from the fallout of their German cohorts who they all but admitted were incompetent. Taxes all paid up and a couple hundred dollars in late penalties later, we're all good but this could have been easily avoided if somebody had just done their damn contractually obligated job. We're still hashing out who ultimately should pay the late fees.

- B's German health insurance company continued to bill our account months after we left, stating that we hadn't proved that we moved out of the country to their level of satisfaction. Excuse me?

- T-Mobile Germany did not want to let us out of our cell phone contracts which expire in January, and insisted that they continue to bill our bank account monthly-- except that we want to close out our bank account. After a seemingly endless round-and-round, they made an exception to bill the account in a lump sum. They weren't terribly happy with it-- this was considered an "extraordinary request." Trust me, I wasn't happy with it either.

- Despite moving out of our German apartment on August 9, that hasn't been closed out yet and we still have not received our hefty deposit back. The jackhole who was responsible for the shoddy construction of the apartment from 3 years ago was now the rental agent, handling the move-out protocol for our landlords who live several hours away. This struck me as quite odd seeing as our landlords are still trying to sue this guy to repair his construction errors but whatever. Long story short, replacement renters weren't found, so by law we were on the hook for 2 more months of rent and HOA fees-- then the tool rental agent thought that since we weren't in the country anymore and couldn't defend ourselves, he could get us to pay for his building errors (remember, our apartment walls were never properly sealed from moisture and steadily leached saltpeter), insisting that we had to pay to repaint large portions of the apartment with a special-- and quite expensive ($1000!!)-- sealant paint. When this brazen cash grab was shot down cold by the landlords themselves, he then re-entered the (empty) apartment and cranked up the heat to approximately 90 degrees (in August!) in an attempt to tamp down the moisture in the walls. Despite photographic evidence that we turned off all thermostats upon leaving, we are now expected to pay the utility bill for these 2 months ($200 or so) and the landlords have chosen to sit this argument out. Cowards. We have exhausted all other avenues of mediation, and the idea of getting a lawyer to haggle over $200 in order to get back the rest of our deposit seems pointless, so if we want our deposit back this decade we'll have to suck this one up. The HOA-type fees are another matter with a different person (the building Super), and because we actually have been owed a refund since July, he has shown little interest in settling the bill.

If we're really lucky, we may be able to close out all of our remaining German accounts and contracts by Thanksgiving (late November to the non-American readers). I'm not sure that's a realistic date, but that's the goal.

Time, distance and the glacially slow resolution of most of these issues have removed most of the bile in my system. I tried to blog several times before, but the posts were rather venomous-- I was absolutely stunned that we just could not resolve anything without the aid of no less than 2 different relocation agents, multiple phone calls and a flurry of correspondence. I mean, surely people have attempted to leave Germany before, right? But anyway, that's all behind us for the most part and I can devote some time to talking about Portland's food scene (I've easily gained 10 pounds since returning), posting some more pics and trying to figure out where exactly to take this blog.

The photo up top is none other than comedian Mike Meyers in his recurring role of Dieter, host of a fictitious German chat show named Sprockets as seen on Saturday Night Live. As I recall, this character was based on a real person, a hockey-obsessed German waiter in Meyer's hometown of Toronto. For a taste of this classic skit, check out here, or for a rather abbreviated version of the same, try here.

Glad to be back, and more posts on the way!

Time's Up

So damn true-- sing it Jimmy!

Well, that was quick. The movers come tomorrow morning, we do the official walk-through and handover of the apartment on Thursday and we're flying back to the USA early Friday morning. I attempted to write a few blog entries throughout this process, but they all came across as rather bitter and angry, so they never got posted-- I've moved enough times to know that this move wasn't handled especially smoothly, but then again I'm not paying for the relocation, so I'm not really in a position to complain too much. But we weren't quite done with Germany or Europe to be honest. Yes, Portland is our home and there is nowhere else I'd rather live in the USA... but we still wish we had more time to do... well, all those things we wanted to do, from my silly "Teeny Tiny Country Tour" of European microcountries (Luxembourg, Andorra and Lichtenstein), more Spain for B, seedy second tier French cities like Marseille and Toulouse, London, maybe give Berlin a second try (because the first time we found it borderline revolting much to everyone's surprise), and so forth.

I'm sure I'll give some better analysis and insights as my head clears, the stress ebbs away and the place doesn't reek of cleaning fluid and cardboard boxes. But I really do recommend living abroad to anybody-- it does widen your horizons, gives you an appreciation for other cultures and points of view and generally makes you appreciate just how good America is. One other thing: It also makes you want to live abroad again. I'd like to think that sometime down the road-- maybe not in the immediate future, perhaps closer to retirement-- we'll update the passports, sell off the home furniture, dust off the big suitcases and hit the road.

More thoughts soon, as well as the future of this here blog-- maybe I burn off the remainder of the embarrassingly large number of photos I never got around to posting; perhaps I shift this over to a Portland-based blog; perhaps start a new one. I'm sort of undecided at the moment.

B and I would like to thank all of you who stopped by this little outpost on the interwebs-- it's been a fun ride, and we're not quite done yet. Stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy the linked video-- it's an old favorite of B's, and perfectly sums up our feelings right now. It'll be great to go home, make no mistake-- but we still wouldn't mind lingering for just a little bit longer.