{houston, we have lift off}

a call just arrived from my mother-in-law in germany... good and bad news. the bad news is that the loaner fridge and oven from friends will not work even temporarily for us since the apartment no longer has a gas outlet and the stove is gas, and the fridge has problems so it will not work either. i was hoping we'd have a few loaners to use until i'm there to purchase new appliances, but for now we have nothing in the kitchen. not sure how we'll eat for the first several weeks, but my mother-in-law lives next door so i'm thinking we'll use her kitchen until ours is all set. it's like living with parents all over again! {insert pretend smile here} now for the good news... we have lift off. the most important thing in our new apartment is working - the phone and dsl. our new photos, vacuum, and iron arrived today and our friends put the packages from amazon.de in our apartment and removed the phones to test the outlets. everything works. we are super pleased about this. the last thing i want is to arrive to our new apartment with no phone/internet in place. we're bringing our german cell phones (called handys), we already have 02 wireless and german handy numbers, so that is all set as well. so happy.