Small pleasures.

Everyone needs a small pleasure once in a while, but when you live in a foreign country, those small pleasures shift and take on new meaning.

Take, for instance, Oreos. Chocolate-stuffed Oreos have always been one of my guilty little pleasures. I used to eat them to celebrate good times and to cheer myself up during bad times. I have never taken those little chocolate frisbees for granted. Now that I live in Germany, Oreos have earned a new place on the list of small pleasures. Since they're imported, they are really, really expensive. A box of 24 cookies costs €3.79. That's more than $5! For 24 cookies! And that's just the ones with white filling. Beyond the high price, the rarity of oreos adds to the personal value of these chocolate sins. The ones with white filling are relatively easy to find. Once you know which stores carry them, you know where to look if you're in desperate need. The chocolate filled ones, however, only recently became available in Germany. Even then, it's hard to find them. Thus, they have taken a particularly high place on my list of small pleasures.

Now take Hershey's syrup, or rather, chocolate syrup in general. I used to enjoy the occasional chocolate milk, chocolate chip pancakes with chocolate syrup or an ice cream sundae with chocolate syrup on top. These things have never been really that important to me, so chocolate syrup would never have made my guilty pleasures list while I lived in the states. Now? Oh yeah. I went four years without a decent chocolate syrup (at least according to my American standards) until I found one at my local Edeka. Instead of being Hershey's, it's Nestlé. And it tastes just like home. It's inexpensive (€2.50 or $3.50) for 400mL, and I think I will have some on hand from now on.

So, things that used to be small pleasures become more valuable, and things that were never small pleasures before become small pleasures.

Eggs.

I'm so lame. Not even 24 hours after starting up my blog again, I have something I want to write about.

I want to write about eggs.

German grocery stores are different from American ones. You don't realize how alike American grocery stores are until you've been to a foreign one. Let's take eggs, for example. In an American grocery store, where do you look for the eggs? Probably in the refrigerators where you'll also find milk and orange juice. In Germany, the eggs are not refrigerated and are found either in the produce section or somewhere in the general vicinity of the baking goods.

So today, I walked into the grocery store looking for eggs, and even though I have lived in this country for four and a half years, I started walking towards the back of the store, towards the refrigerators with milk. I'm almost there when it occurs to me that, oh yeah, the eggs are in the produce section in Germany. So I turn around and go back. I searched the produce section high and low and did not find any eggs. So I decided to check by the milk anyways. And there they were. In my defense, the eggs were not with the refrigerated milk, but about four paces away and nearer to the H-milk, which is milk that doesn't need to be refrigerated, and comes in packaging more similar to a box than a carton.

Speaking of eggs, something I have learned in Germany is that eggs do not equal eggs. For moral reasons, The Boy (my German boyfriend of six and a half years) requested that I only purchase eggs from at least "Bodenhaltung" if he's going to be eating them too. Bodenhaltung means that the chickens who lay the eggs are not kept in cages, but are permitted to move freely on the ground. Even better is "Freilandhaltung", which means the chickens are allowed to move freely on the ground outdoors. I don't know if there is any sort of equivalent for this terminology in the US, because frankly, I wasn't old enough to buy eggs when I left the states. (I was 18. Everything I needed magically appeared in the refrigerator.)

However, I have discovered that the more freedom the mommy chickens have, the better their eggs taste. I know a lot of people think this is nonsense, but really, it's true. Eggs from happy chickens have a more delicious consistency when cooked and make for better baked goods. It took me a while to believe it, too. Then I accidentally bought the wrong eggs after years of eating eggs from happy chickens, and I was shocked by how unappetizing the unhappy-chicken-eggs were.

My chocolate-chip pancakes came out really good, by the way.

New pants... sort of.

I'm so proud.

Both my mother and my grandmother are avid seamstresses, so I grew up making things all the time, too. I'm not very good with a sewing machine, then again, I compare myself to my mother, so I'm probably not nearly as bad as I think I am. In any case, I usually come across all sorts of issues while sewing and more often than not it irritates me to the point of throwing in the towel.

Not this time.

I successfully took in a pair of jeans. And it doesn't look half bad.

The jeans were cheap ones I purchased during a good sale at an inexpensive store (Takko). They didn't fit then, either, but I loved how super skinny the legs were, and decided for €15 I could live with wearing a belt. It turns out I couldn't. It drove me so crazy, I stopped wearing them. Or rather, I wore them last because inevitably I didn't get around to doing laundry until I was forced to wear my least-favorite jeans.

I have never sewn jeans before, unless you count making shorts out of them, so I scanned through a bunch of tutorials online on taking jeans in, and then promptly decided to do it my own way. See, most of the tutorials recommended taking in the back seam. Just playing around with it, I could tell that that was not the right route for me:

See all those nasty folds? I would have had to take apart all of the butt seams to smooth that out. Furthermore, I would have had to do all the fitting on my own butt. I can't even tell you how many tries it took me to take a picture of my own butt, and I doubt doing a fitting would have been easier. Plus, all of those seams are so visible. There's not much room for mistakes.

So I decided to take in the side seams instead. It meant I would have to add a seam to the waistband in order to take it in, but I wasn't too concerned about that.

See that little pucker on the side seam? I had to take in the pocket more than the rest of the leg. I'm not quite sure what the point is to having more matieral in the pocket than everywhere else, but I suppose I should just be glad I don't need the extra space...

One other thing you can see in the picture above is a rivet. I had to take out two of them to take the jeans in. Since I'm just a college student, I don't really have all that much in the way of tools, so I had to use a screwdriver to pry them off. I think I spent about 45 minutes on each rivet. It was a good workout.

Even though I was all gung-ho about my new project, I was able to control my enthusiasm and I only took apart one side at first, so I'd have the other side to look at while I was making my changes. It was a good move.

So, without futher ado, I present you my altered, and perfectly fitting jeans!

Here's the butt, without any messed up seams:

And here's a closeup of my handiwork on one side:

The thread I used for the topstitching is actually too thin, and it's also not quite the right color, but I figured there's only one other person in the world who's likely to look that closely, and that's my mother. And she'll probably shower me with compliments anyways because she's awesome.

Although you can't really tell the difference, here's a before and after comparison:

I know it kind of looks like the waistband is too tight, but it's not. What looks like a fold of fat is actually my hip bone.

I didn't take any pictures of the inside because it doesn't look very good, but I also zig-zag stitched the seam I took in to make it resemble the surged edge the manufacturer had. You can't see it in the closeup, but I also staggered the waistband seams to cut down on the amount of fabric in one place. It lies very flat, so I'm happy with that choice.

Considering what difficulties I have finding jeans that fit, this experience will probably change my way of jeans shopping. I would never alter expensive jeans (if I pay $75 for a pair of express jeans, they damn well better fit), but if I start running low on jeans, I might go ahead and buy a cheap pair that fit in the legs and just take them in. One thing I have to keep in mind, though, is that I can only do an easy alteration like this on hip-huggers. As my mother and I found out with a pair of waist-high dress pants, if you take in the waist to make it fit mine, you have to put in a longer fly because I can't get them over my hips otherwise.

Yay for fitting jeans!!

I forgot my password.

How embarassing. I started a blog nearly a year ago, and have written three entries. I wanted to write a new entry recently when it occurred to me: "oh, I don't know my password." In fact, I only ever knew my password the very first time I logged in, because I let internet explorer save my password for me. Well, that's all grand and good until your computer dies and you need to buy a new one. Unfortunately, your passwords aren't already saved on your new computer when you get it. Funny thing about that.

And so, I've had to move my blog to a new account. And while I was at it, I went ahead and changed the name, look, and basic premise of the blog. This new blog will contain everything the old one did ("projects") but also blurbs about life as an American in Germany, and whatever else floats my boat.

So if you're interested in seeing my old blog, here it is.

The name of my blog comes from this song, which is currently played on the radio here over and over and over again. But I like it. :)