My Weekend in Pictures

midweek holiday grilling

arrival of the coffee table!

spring from the balcony

gold spray painting (again)

brewing a pilsener

high-tech hockey watching

sunshine

We have midweek holidays last week and this week, which are always a bit funny but nice in the fact that, it basically feels like a long weekend even though you have to work in between. So I can't complain.

We kicked off the pretend long weekend - after I finally recovered from a random and obnoxious cold - with a grill evening on the balcony before joining the first of May festivities in Kreuzberg the next day. After a couple days back in the office, we spent the real weekend taking full advantage of spring and the warmer temperatures and sunshine it finally brought. We spent a morning on the balcony repotting plants and getting crafty (ok, that was just me), a day in the park with friends and beer, an evening at Schalander catching up with another friend, and the next day watching the hockey WM while brewing a new batch of pilsener with Kai, cuz we've got to get in as much brewing as we can before July.

Oh and in the biggest news of all, the new coffee table arrived! Aaaagh, I can't wait to share it with you because I'm guessing you, like me, had basically given up hope that this day would ever come. :)

My Last Couple Weekends in Pictures

Plant bath time

Springtime repotting time

New balcony plants

Someone's turn for a makeover

So handsome in gold

Steaks for three

Warm temps and a balcony dinner

Beers and hockey

Celebrations for the DEL champions (once again)

Beer brewing prep

Brewing progress

The braumeister (and his serious face)

Brewing protocol

Spring arrived slowly and with a couple false starts, but I took full advantage and joined the rest of Berlin in filling my shopping carts with flowers and soil last weekend to beautify the balcony, which is sadly lacking in tomatoes this year (there is an explanation for that...), as best I could.  We also enjoyed our first grill evening outdoors with Kai after I happily spruced up seasick gnomey's look with a shiny new coat of gold spray paint (he was in dire need of less green).

This past weekend, we got to celebrate the Eisbären's third championship in a row (and seventh total) on Sunday, which would have been more exciting if it weren't so expected at this point, after having spent Saturday brewing a fresh new batch of Summer Ale, just the two of us. I'm told I make a darn good brewery helper and I'm pretty freaking proud of it. Also, this batch is already showing signs of being awesome and we haven't even put it into bottles yet. Not that I'm biased or anything...

Happy Weekend!

Just as my final work day of the week is coming to a close, the rain (that drenched me so badly this morning on my bike ride to work, I had to take off my pants and wear my gym pants around the office half the day) has conveniently disappeared and the sunshine (that I'd almost forgotten how it looked) has made a very welcome appearance. This can really only mean good things to come.

 I was not nearly as cute in the rain this morning as this guy...

We have a bit planned for the weekend: some beer brewing, some triathlon training, some Ikea plant shopping (did you know the Ikea garten center in Lichtenberg is the largest in all of Europe?! It's magical...), and some new recipe trying.

So along those lines, here a little food for thought if you find yourself lazing on the couch with your morning coffee over the next two days:

Hanging planters are the perfect way to spring-ify the apartment, I say.

This pasta definitely deserves the chance to try and steal its way into my heart.

I love the idea of thinking of your living room as an awesome library.

This table would look pretty perfect in basically any and every room.

I cannot wait to own this book! (Clearly, I'm obsessed...)

Kerstin and I need party hats for a hats-required wedding this summer (yes, seriously), and this adorable one just made it to the top of my list.

My Weekend in Pictures

We started the weekend off with a Friday night movie and friends, I cannot recommend the movie highly enough. We saw The Way with Martin Sheen and it was so touching, and sweet, and funny, and sad...and just all around enjoyable and very much worth the watch (bonus: I love the fact that Emilio Esteves not only played the son in the movie, but also directed his dad in it, too!). It also made us want to pack up our giant backpacks and hit the road... but I suppose that will have to wait a while (le sigh).

On Saturday we headed to another awesome pool party for Matthias' birthday, which I'm sharing pictures of later because there are just to many good ones to include here! Ok, fine, here's a sneak peek:

Aron looking mighty dubious of the water | You can never have enough beer cooler floaties

And I'm proud to say that on Sunday, we really did tackle my biggest to-do of the weekend and hung up the frames on the sad wall! And I think it looks freaking fantastic. (I think Micha does, too, but he's a man of few words and so I take his conciliatory nods for great withheld exclamations of enthusiasm.) Well, one picture is still missing - a canvas print I ordered that I'm picking up today - so that will have to wait too, but look, here's proof!

That's his "really? You're taking a picture now?" face. Also, yes, the lanterns from the baby shower are still totally there. Hanna will get them for her room, eventually.

And since I was feeling so productive, I went ahead and got a couple more home projects done, too. Cuz these moments are few and far between.

We replaced our previous hallway picture with this fabulous one I gave to Micha for his birthday (I got it from 20x200, which I also can't recommend highly enough - that place rocks! Two of the pictures on our new frame wall are from there, too.). In case you can't tell, he's a bit of an airplane fan. :)

I also got around to improving the front door cork-/chalkboard calendar I'd previously DIY'd. The chalk lines I'd had on there had made it rather tedious to update and as a result, the calendar still said November. So I wised up and used some colorful washi tape to make the lines instead and, bam! new, much more usable calendar! Now I just need to hang a big sign above it that says "Don't forget: KEYS! PHONE! UMBRELLA!" and our door will have all the daily reminders we need on it before leaving the house.

And since I love adding chalkboard touches to things, I whipped out my new chalkboard paper (contact paper? Whatever it may be called...) and relabeled a bunch of our spices. Just because.

Apparently, we hoard dried Italian herbs

Some random plants that weren't so happy on the balcony got a new home in our kitchen hanging planters, which have been used for many things over the years, but now for the first time for plants. On the left is the mint that I oh-so proudly grew from a cutting!

I swear the kitchen isn't really that intensely green... The lighting in there is crazypants.

So obviously I now have six new cuttings (including four from Anja's garden, since she had some different varieties) growing...

But most of the day was spent enjoying the rare and very welcome sunshine on the balcony, reveling in our wee little forest, and grilling tasty large steaks for dinner on our new portable grill (again, just because).

The babies are growing up nicely!

Thanks for the fun napkins, Emily!

Why do the weekends ever have to end...?

My Last Couple Weekends in Pictures

All right, it's about time to get back to normal in these parts, so let's start off by catching up on my last two weekends. Cuz weekends are fun and summer weekends are always worthy of a blog post, filled with sunshine and fun as they tend to be!

Last weekend started off with some very necessary replacing of some of my unsuccessful balcony seedlings with some more colorful, and living, flowers.

And we began to realize that our balcony is, in fact, a crazy wild garden surrounded by proper German orderly balconies filled entirely with perfectly tended flowers. (We think ours is way cooler, though.)

We paid a visit to the exhibit on empty and "ghost" subway stations in the DDR at Nordbahnhof and then wandered across the street for a beer in the sand and some beach volleyball viewing at Beach Mitte (which totally made me want to learn to play volleyball - those chicks had asses of steel!).

I scored on some gorgeous pink end-of-season (so it seems?) peonies.

And we met little baby Hanna! A preciously cute little monkey that Kerstin and Hendryk are lucky enough to call their own (more on her and all her adorableness to come in a separate post next week - there's too much cuteness to fit all in here!).

I swear I'm not crushing her head here, just showing how ridiculously tiny she is!

Finally, we enjoyed a long overdue visit to Dr. Pong after watching the EM - Euro Cup - game (was it Germany? Could have been, they all blend into one for me...) at Prater (as usual).

This past weekend we started off right with a grill evening on the balcony...

...before the crazy, intense thunderstorm forced us inside (but not before we had to rescue the tomatoes from the perch and place them all safely on the floor of the balcony before the torrential downpour and hurricane-like winds threatened to blow them away!).

And somehow, I got a picture of the sky lit up with lightning!

We spent Saturday in the 'burbs at our friends Anja and Matthias' new house where they threw a housewarming pool party (the best kind!).

I never show up empty-handed to a party, so this time I whipped up a couple batches of my all-time favorite (though seriously labor-intensive) blueberry-mint cupcakes, this time with some raspberries thrown in cuz that's what the grocery store was offering.

How cute are the wee munchkins? In a rare moment that Mia agreed to share her boat with Aron.

Micha played soccer for the first time ever with a naked girl (Mia is nothing if not properly German - meaning happily naked)

Mmm, grill goodness. Notice little Aron in his swanky robe in the background. This picture exemplifies why he earned the nickname "Hef" this weekend.

Boys will be boys if you give them a pool and lots of toys

Sunday we headed to one of my favorite events of the year - the Staatsoper für Alle (opera for everyone) concert in front of the beautiful (and sadly, still under construction for an insanely long time) Staatsoper on Unter den Linden.

Well, little girl, it wasn't too loud for me!

Where's Waldo? I mean...Micha. :)

It's so freaking awesome how they just hang that giant TV screen from a crane for the weekend!

And finally, we cheered on our friendly neighborhood bumblebee (did you know those giant bees - called Hummeln in German - are called bumblebees?! I literally just had to Google translate that and am a little blown away to find out that a bumblebee is just a kid's word but a whole different creature than a regular bee...) while he paid our tomatoes a visit. We also recently found out that tomato plants need bees and their pollinating techniques to, as Micha says "get [their tomatoes] born", so this guy is our new best friend.

And now that the weekend's over, you know what that means, right? BIRTHDAY WEEK!!!