Scoring 1,5 on the optimism scale

So, now that I have your attention, I wanted to share a couple more interesting differences between our life here and in the States. First off, hanging around kids all week has brought Michael his third cold of the fall/winter season. Now, under normal circumstances, I might get a cold or two between September and April, but I have discovered that I have a deficient immune system when it comes to being with children every day. Don’t get me wrong, we love them dearly, but they are little germ factories. I disinfect the keyboards and mice every day and have a big bottle of Purel on my desk (Thanks again Mark and Jan!), but I just can’t seem to keep up. I presume that this will moderate over time as my body continues to get used to this new environment…

One of the very noticeable differences in Europe is how they write numbers. When looking at numbers, Europeans use commas where we use periods and periods where we use commas. For example: 1,234.56 (US) becomes 1.234,56 (Germany) – crazy huh? I don’t know the origins of this variance, but there it is. We see numbers all of the time, shopping, on advertisements, etc, so transposing is not that difficult – in fact we hardly notice it at all anymore. We just have to be careful when we pay our bills online that we don't mix up the commas and decimal points or our bank account might become overdrawn!

One thing we did notice recently is how we scale things differently here than in North America. Question: what is the GPA of someone who makes all A’s at university? Answer: 4.0 – right? Well, in Europe, that would be a 1,0. One of the students interning at RIA just got a 1,5 on his teaching review which is a really good grade. I don’t know if this stems from the American ideal that bigger is better or whether the origin comes from elsewhere, but it can be confusing. They have a German company that is the equivalent of America’s Consumer Reports called Test. I was looking at a couple of different products that had been tested, one had a score of 2,2 and was rated “Gut” whereas the product that rated 1,8 was rated “Sehr Gut” – it took me several moments of thought to recognize that they are using a 1 to 5 scale with 1 being good – 5 is bad.

This is not to say that the “smaller is better” rating works universally. Hotels and restaurants (anyone see “Ratatouille”?) are rated where 5 stars is better than 4 stars – makes you go hmmmm.

So, why did I title this entry: Scoring a 1,5 on the optimism scale? Because just like the glass, I always view our sink as “half-full”. Let me explain: we have a sink at our home that measures 34 x 37 x 15 cm. This works out to approximately 13 x 14 x 6 inches. I mentioned before that our dishwashers all walk on two feet, so we are constantly washing dishes (or so it seems). Why, just a bowl, spoon and two coffee cups after breakfast makes it feel like we have to do dishes again… When we went to visit our cousins in Bohlsbach I commented on how nice and big their sink was – nothing like the big Kohler we had in our old home but much bigger than the one we have (and they have a non-human dishwasher to boot!) Not that I am complaining – we truly do love that we are here, even if we are getting dishpan hands…

Pray please for our health – I have given my cold to Delynn over the last week. We have a church retreat coming next Saturday at which I will be helping with worship team, so I need to be back to 100%.

On a sadder note, my maternal grandfather, Monty McMillan, passed at the age of 95 on January 6, 2008. He was a U.S. Army veteran of World War II, worked as a miner and a rancher and most importantly, brought my mom into this world. God speed Monty.