Hallelujah!

Big news everyone! After the Xbox troubles detailed in my last blog, we sent back the faulty European Xbox power supply, and we received the replacement yesterday. This time, everything worked! We cautiously plugged it into the wall in the kitchen first, because the kitchen and bathroom are on a different electrical circuit from the other rooms where we have clocks that needed resetting every time we caused power outages. After the power supply worked in the kitchen, we tried it in the living room. After it worked in the living room, we plugged it into the Xbox, hit the power button and woohooo!

Marlene had the first session, playing the classic Civilization Revolution. If you can believe it, Marlene has been looking forward to having a functioning video game system at least as much as I have. She's got Civ Rev along with The Sims 3, which she's been waiting to play since Xmas. Here's some photographic evidence of how happy she was!





In other awesome news, my soccer team started training again yesterday. It was pretty freezing cold to be playing outdoor soccer already, but it'll be good to have more opportunities to exercise. The competitive matches start in a couple weeks, until then we have friendly matches against other Vienna teams to get back into real fitness. I'm really looking forward to it because I was starting to get some decent playing time with the first team at the end of Fall, and I had a great time playing indoor with my teammates over the Winter.

First post in a month!

So again I've gone quite a while without posting but it's definitely not because of a lack of subjects to blog about. Earlier in the month, my grandpa unfortunately died so I made a quick trip back to the USA in order to attend his funeral. It was a sad time but it was actually really nice to see my family and friends who I haven't seen since the summer. During that time, I did some thinking about job and decided it wasn't something that I'd like to continue long-term since, even though my job title was "IT-Administrator", my boss had me doing more secretary work. When I came back, my boss had been thinking a similar thing so I stopped working there last week. I'm not really sure if I was technically fired, since I didn't want to stay on. I suppose it doesn't matter too much except for I liked keeping the record in my mind that I'd never been fired from a job, kind of like how I've never had a cavity (sorry for the dental hygiene bragging!).

My last day was on Jan 27 and I've already had an interview yesterday, Jan 31, which went awesome. They said they'd be contacting me back this week and I could be starting as early as next week. I also have another interview tomorrow where I think I've got a great chance at getting a job offer so I feel like I'm in a good position which was not the case a few months ago when I felt like I hit the lottery by getting a job offer.


Here's a pic for everyone in Austria. This is from my week in Minnesota so you can see how much snow they have there, it's well above my head (in a parking lot). In Vienna we get snow every once in a while but it always melts pretty quick. So far, I have not been missing the Minnesota winter. It's fun to brag about living through it in the past but I'm glad to not be in the middle of it now, my soccer team will be starting outdoor practice in a couple weeks, that's definitely an example of something that would never be happening in Minnesota at this time of year.

Returning from my visit to the USA I brought back my Xbox and several games so you'd expect by now I'd be a gamer again but it's a little tougher than that. First, we tried plugging in the Xbox power supply using a cheap travel converter (which works for laptops, cell phone chargers and other electronics) but that just caused our apartment's power to go out. We did a bit of research and found that a step-down converter was required so we ordered one and when it arrived had a little bit more luck. We plugged it in and it looked like it would work except when we plugged the Xbox power supply into the converter, nothing happened... So we returned the step-down converter and instead ordered a European Xbox power supply which had the same output voltage as my American Xbox power supply but it arrived today and when we tried plugging the European power supply into the wall, it caused the power to go out again! So we don't really know what the problem could be, it looks to me now that there might be something strange with the electricity in our apartment, but of course now when we try plugging in the European power supply nothing happens, so that means a fuse blew out in the power supply itself. It's all very frustrating and I just to want to play Oblivion again while Marlene is dying to play The Sims 3.