Finally, my boyfriend and I finished moving together! And I can tell you, that move was one single horror trip. Murphy's laws seemed to apply everywhere they could; everything that could possibly go wrong did so.
The weather was crappy and we had to postphone the move twice because there was too much snow.
We found out that our telephone company sucks and needs almost three weeks of continous anger from our side to finally set up a proper internet connection or to even manage to get a technican over here when he was supposed to come the week before.
We had flooding. Twice. The first time, the kitchen sink wasn't connected properly, the second time, the washing machine had a leak. We need a new one.
We experienced the joy of removing wallpaper painted with latex or varnish paint in my boyfriends former flat. We're still not entirely done there after five days of work and the trips to Bochum are expensive and time-consuming. To make things even better, his toilet flowed over and the company the flat belongs to still didn't send someone over to fix it, so we had to go medieval and pee in a bucket.
We got stuck in the elevator, which isn't funny in the least when you're slightly claustrophobic and your boyfriend is, too.
I almost got a tenosynovitis from painting the walls and removing wallpaper and we were both bundles of nerves for more time than we were not. We were and are exhausted.
In addition to that, we had also a lot of smaller mishaps happening. Everything seemed to go wrong.

But we kept on going, and now we're practically done, despite all the problems. Take that, Murphy!

And it's really nice living together with my boyfriend and not only seeing him on the weekends. So it was totally worth the effort in the end.



Even before our move, on the weekend before Christmas, Moema passed away. She suddendly got very sick (I'll spare you the ugly details here) and since there was no hope of her recovering, we released her on the same day. It was a very sad moment, but I think I gave her a good life, and even if her end wasn't pretty, she was a happy gerbil and didn't need to suffer long.

Here's a picture of her I recently found on my hard drive which I haven't uploaded yet:






Since Kiona didn't deal well with being alone (she had had her sister with her for her entire life, and gerbils aren't made for solitude) we got her two baby gerbils as company as a christmas present. The three of them are getting along great, I had no trouble getting them used to one another.
In fact, while we were celebrating Christmas at my parent's, Kiona managed to climb over the wire frame that was supposed to keep them apart for the first time - gerbils are more creative at crossing obstacles than you might think - and when we returned, all three of them were peacefully cuddling and sleeping in their nest.
It could have ended very differently, so I'm very glad they chose to like each other instead of starting a fight. I think Kiona was just happy not to be alone anymore.

And the babys are super cute, too, even though the've already grown a lot. The older one is already almost as big as Kiona. They're two females (I certainly don't want to have even more baby gerbils ) and my boyfriend and I named them Ling-Ling and Lemmy.
Lemmy is the older one (she's almost three months old now) and pure black with only a narrow white strip under her chin. Ling-Ling is two weeks younger and platinum colored, which means that she has a light, silvery grey fur with pink skin and ruby red eyes.

I promise to post photos of them (they're already taken) as soon as I figure out where the heck the USB adapter for my camera is hiding. Which could take a while, since all I know about it's whereabouts right now is that it has to be somewhere in this flat. Errrr ...




Since I was talking about gerbils so much in this journal, I think they make a good subject for this entry's features.




I hope you all had a merry Christmas and a good start into the new year!
-Aisling