Time for Lance to come home

As Cari said, I have been in Germany this week. We went to the AMD fab in Dresden, Germany. I actually came here to help them in November of 2006 too. Luckily, this time I got some time to run around and be a tourist during the day today. Of course, then my camera battery died right when I found a beautiful courtyard. I even managed to not get lost (I can say that because once I was "lost" I found my way without any help) driving around Dresden and Freiburg.

It is kind of sad. I took German in middle school and don't really remember anything. I do remember some basics, but every time some one starts talking to me I have a small panic attack. All I can think is to say "Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut" -> "My German is not good." Even that I hesitate to say. I know a lot of the greetings, yet I act like a timid little kid. I feel like this statue I found.

I fly home early tomorrow morning. Lets all hope I don't have to go straight from the airport to the hospital like I had to when I came home from India. For those who don't know, I went to India in October to visit our Chennai office. I called Cari from the Denver airport right before I boarded and she was getting ready to leave my parents house
(girls were bored so they wanted to visit Grandma and Grandpa). When I got off the plane in Salt Lake I had a message to call my dad. Cari and my mom took Lainey to the emergency room because she fell down my parent's stairs (if you ask my mom she says it is her fault and she pushed Lainey). I got to Cottonwood hospital just in time to pick up Cari and take her and Lainey to Primary Children's. Lainey broke her elbow and needed a pin in her arm. We ended up spending the night in the hospital. Anyway, Cari is a bit nervous to go anywhere tomorrow night while I am flying home. I am going through Frankfurt and Denver again so we don't want to push our chances.... I'm sure you all can relate with superstitions like this.

Sorry, I'm verbose - it's what I do - an interesting tid bit about Dresden. It was actually almost completely destroyed during WWII. The English bombed Dresden to smithereens. Buildings that survived are black with soot from all the resulting fires. A large majority have been sand blasted, but they haven't done all the buildings and for some buildings sand blasting would ruin the building so they haven't. In some other cases the rebuilt the building using some of the black rubble from the original. This Protestant Cathedral was rebuilt. As I understand it the large black portion remained standing (it was the only part left). The rest of the black spots you see are stained black blocks from the original building. My camera died so I didn't get a better shot. Check out some pictures of the inside of this building (it is huge - and very tiring to hike to the top of): http://www.frauenkirche-dresden.de/. Give the site a second it will load some music and it will show some different pictures.