Free Wednesday.

  Even though I don't find work physically strenuous, there is sometimes a mental breakdown due  to work overload. For example, yesterday its was the task of the entire crew, both conditor and baker alike, to make three thousand lebkuchen (pronounced LEB-Kuken). 

While these little cakes seem harmless and taste delicious, it is a delicate and furthermore LONG process that is done all by hand. There are no machines that can speed up this arduous creation. An ice cream scoop is used to portion out a topping made out of marzipan, nuts, and some sort of cookie dough mixture. Then the mix is put onto a round edible piece of paper called oblaten, the ball on the oblaten is then formed to fit and decorated with nuts, baked, and covered with a glaze or chocolate sauce. All in all three thousand cakes take about two and a half hours to complete. This work was done on top of the normal every day jive. Meaning, bread, rolls, endless amounts of pretzels and so on. The lebkuchen set us back an extra 2 hours and therefor, didn't leave until 4:30. I'm not complaining I just wanted to explain the stresses of work sometimes. :D

  After work I zipped home on my Piaggio Moped took a shower and relaxed. Then I got a call from Andreas (left) and Stephan Kraus, Krausey (right) who said they were headed to Günzburg to clean Krauseys van.

I agreed to help but knew it was no easy task. For the past three months we have been loading the van full of people and beer, then driving anywhere we pleased. I need to sidetrack a little and say that these two dudes in this picture are the craziest people I have ever met, and I have never been with these guys and had a bad time. This van has carried us to Hamburg twice, Austria, and many a time around Augsburg. without a single thing leaving the van.  Anyway, the point is, the van is full of trash, old food, beer bottles and God knows what else. After a good two hours of back breaking cleaning and holding our breath to fight of hoards of wretched stench, the van was clean (for now) and ready for another couple months of abuse.  

  The next morning, or midday I should say, today, I awoke to the sound of a three foot saw blade slicing wood for the winter. Jan was outside Cutting wood and I decided I could and should help. I said that I would stack the wood after he threw it down the shoot to the basement. Jan proceeded to ask me if I knew how to stack wood, I felt a little offended and with great confidence said I could do it in my sleep. After some time of stacking we were finished and the wood pile was stocked and ready for the cold weather to come. Then to my surprise the wood pile was very unstable and the next person to touch it is sure to get an avalanche of dried wood in the face. So I can not stack wood. As a matter of fact I am horrible at it. But they say Practice makes perfect, and its a long winter.