Meine Klein Welt

Summer Recap and Back to Work

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I arrived back in Vienna on August 9th, narrowly and thankfully avoiding the whole British liquid explosive situation. The summer was good, but busy, taking me across the Atlantic four times.

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing many friends and my family during the brief periods I was back in the US, including my little brother’s wedding. In between my time in the US I spent a month in Plymouth, England (about 4 hours WSW of London) starting in on a Master’s degree in Educational Technology. I really enjoyed year one of the program and met some really great people along the way. Afterwards I was able to enjoy a little downtime at my parent’s home in Florida before heading back to Austria.

I spent my first week back in the deathgrip of jetlag, tossing and turning through many sleepless nights, trying to grasp my current time zone. After two weeks, I think I’ve caught up on enough of my sleep to function properly, so that’s good.

I’ve also enjoyed getting to know some of the new staff at school this year. They all seem like really great people who bring a lot to the table and I’m looking forward to getting to know them more as the year progresses. It’s always amazing to see how God blesses VCS through the people he brings here.

It’s hard to believe that school starts up again on Thursday. There’s still a lot to do before then, so please keep me in your prayers.

Elfreth’s Alley

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So VCS has a new secondary secretary who had been to Philadelphia before. So she was appalled to find out that I had not ever been to, and had never heard of, Elfreth's Alley. Sad, but true.

So I made one of my friends accompany me down to Old City to take in this wondrous site: The alleged oldest residential street in America.

I liked it so much I went back a second time. See, I thought it would be funny to send a postcard back from Elfreth's Alley, and while purchasing said postcard, set my camera down on the counter. It wasn't until later that evening when I wanted to take a picture that I realized it was gone. The problem being, I was flying out the next morning.

Fortunately the good people who run the Elfreth's Alley Visitor Center found my camera and even answered my phone call and gave me my camera before opening hours. What a great place to lose a camera!

Filipino Spelling Bee

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My 8th grade class was working on a project to create awards certificates, and one thing they needed to find was an appropriate Bible verse for each award they made. This spawned the following dialogue:

Jannica (from China): Mr. Klein, how do you spell Philippians?

Me: Why don't you ask Marvin (he was finished with his assignment). He'd be happy to help you.

(a few minutes later)

Me (to Jannica): Was Marvin able to help you out?

Jannica: Yeah. It's easy for him to spell it because he's Filipino.

Me: What? How does that help?

Jannica: Because, you know, Philippians/Philippines; it's almost the same thing.

The Da Licious Code Continues

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Two more "murders" took place today. The first one happened during homeroom in Chad Elwell's Science Lab and left poor Jar Jar with his arms detached and impaled with a compass. The ketchup blood was a nice touch. On the back of this "bloody mess" was a code in transliterated Greek. Actually, someone probably wrote some text in Word and then changed the font to Symbol. In any case the code translated to "Priority of Klein." Interesting.

The second murder took place just before lunch in Megan Tice's office and involved a banana with raisen eyes and a raisen belly button(which some people said was a bit too low for a belly button). It also had wooden popcycle sticks for arms and legs. One thing to know about Megan is that she hates bananas, raisens, belly buttons, and wooden things. The "Greek" above is transliterated "Sucka!"

So far all our leads have run into dead ends. Seems the usual suspects are innocent this time, but that doesn't leave too many other options…

And just for the record, I didn't eat the banana. SICK! 

The Da Licious Code

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So after lunch today, I found this disturbing object on my desk. Apparently someone really didn't like the frankies in blankies we had for lunch today.

I'm not sure if this is a code or just Greek gibberish. I can't make any sense of it…and is that a Euro symbol in there?

Can anyone help me crack the code?

And just in case you're wondering, yes I did eat the "murdered" frankie after documenting the crime scene. Da Licious!