The McCarthy Austerity Plan

I know I have not been up to my usual standards lately. I guess I've felt out of ideas or out of the groove or just out to lunch. Don't worry, though, there will be plenty of posts about mundane and quirky moments in my ex-pat life to come. There will not, however, be exciting tales of fabulous travels for at least a few months. That's not because I don't want to write about them; it's because we won't be going very far. Blame it on the McCarthy Austerity Plan.

You may recall me mentioning that when we got back from the U.S. there was a letter from the friendly tax office telling us that we owe them 718 euros.  We were expecting about 2000 euros in a refund, so this hurt. At the request of our good friend and loyal reader Nick Falk, and various other people who are interested in German taxation, I will write a whole separate post explaining why we owe the money and how taxes here work in general. For the moment, though, I'll just say that we found out there was no mistake and we really do have to pay Herr tax man what asks for. So if you add that to the extra money that we had to pay to change our plane tickets and return from the U.S. a week later than planned, it adds up to a lot of cash. I don't care which currency you use.

Hence we have established the McCarthy Austerity Plan, effective immediately. What does that mean? We traded our upcoming weekend in Barcelona for a weekend in Des Moines. That's not a trade that most world travelers would make. We, however, are not just any world travelers and needed to be at the funeral in Des Moines, so we made that choice. We kept looking for the Picasso Museum and Gaudi architecture, but somehow just found corn. Sadly, we won't get to hang out with our friend Erik in Spain but I did manage to reschedule the trip for February. Austerity measures should be lifted by then.

There was also supposed to be a trip to Regensburg, in Bavaria, to see the World Baseball Classic qualifying games and also drop in for a day of Oktoberfest in Munich. That won't be happening either. What other austerity measures have we imposed? Much of that is yet to be determined. We don't have a lot of other extravagant expenses to cut out, but it looks we will at least forget big vacations and embrace stay-cations for a while.

So, like our friends in Greece and Spain, we are tightening our belts in order to save the euro. Actually, the belts are already pretty tight due to all the eating and drinking we did in America.

Prepare yourself for plenty of posts about things I do around Hannover, because we'll be staying put for a while.