Snoggletog with Toothless

Well, now it's up to me to return the favor ;)
Yeah, has been a long time that I contributed here, but university and lots of my other occupations take waaaay too much of my time to post here frequently.

Alright. Last year, we intended to send each other some gifts for christmas. Since our gifts simply just had to be HTTYD-related, we said, that we'd rather celebrate "snoggletog". Both of us sent our gifts early in december and we hoped they would arrive in time for christmas. Well... Obviously parcels from Germany to the U.S. arrive much faster than the other way around. We learned that, when my gift was perfectly in time for christmas. (Just for further reading: when I write "my gift", I mean the gift I sent to Toothless) and there was no sign of his gift. Well... We also learned, that I can be really patient. In fact... I had no other option than to be just that, but we also agreed to open our packages the same day. Now guess what... His package hadn't arrived on the 5th of january, so I wrote him, that if it wouldn't be here on the 12th, he could open my package while I was still waiting for his.
Now another week passed and just that saturday morning on the 12th, my doorbell rung and I finally received his package! That way we set the date for Snoggletog to the 12th of january.

Now this year, we knew we would wait for the 12th. We also sent our packages in early december and my package was faster again. Now the last post revealed most of the contents of my gift, so just let's look at his gift here.

Warning that the package must not
be delivered to the receiver, but
only to the main customs office

It was wednesday, the 8th of january, when I returned home at quarter to 6pm. I had another appointment at 6:30pm, so I put my bike near the main entrance of my house because I had to leave in a couple of minutes again anyway. Now I checked my letterbox and found a letter of the german parcel service "DHL". It was a notification, that there was a parcel for me waiting in the local main customs office to be picked up. Then there were some options listed: Either I could pick it up myself or... I just skipped the rest. I just looked up the address of that main customs office and raced there with my bike in minutes! There were plenty of other pepole waiting to pick up their parcels, so I had to wait. Finally I got that desired box with my address on it! Obviously the content was stated too valuable to be shipped to me without a duty. It didn't matter to me, so I asked for the price. The officer took his calculator, converted dollar in euro, subtracted the allowed limit and then calculated 19% of the rest. Fortunately the amount was below 5€, so they decided not to charge me at all.
From there I cycled straight to my appointment and when I returned home late that night, I told Toothless about it. Unfortunately I was forced to read the table of contents on the package on the customs office, so I basically knew what to expect. Bummer. But anyway. I finally had it.

When it was midnight over here the night from the 11th to the 12th, I skyped with Toothless. We both opened our packages and now look what I've found:

Two super cute Toothless-toys with revolvable heads

The original birthday drawing with Toothless reurgitating
my birthday cake (before he lit the candle ;) )

A drawing of one of my favorite kind of dragon: The Changewing

A letter that had the same line in it as my letter to him!
(Thanks for being such a great friend!!!)

Not just any DVD...

...but a special Edition with a very, very special 3D cover!

Last but not least: The greatest gift of all of them:

I got the workbook as a present, when I was visiting last summer, but now I also got the DVD-set added.

Man, that was quite something! As he already stated in his latest blogpost, we skyped for more than two hours. This way I only had very few hours left to sleep, but that was totally worth it. Now I just wait for the exam period to pass by and then I'm going top start working through the Behold your God devotional companion once more, this time enriched by inspiring videos with words of famous men of God.

So thanks a lot, Toothless! Everyone who can call you his friend is really really lucky. I can't thank God enough that he crossed our ways.

Dragonific greetings from Dresden, Germany!

Admin-comrades on the wiki

Well... It was sort of unexpected, but what just happened on the HTTYD-wiki somehow caused me to end up being an admin.
While being at work, I received a notification via facebook on my smartphone. I just had lunch break, so I looked it up. It was a fellow wiki-user, who told me: "so is someone trying to mess up with tooth in his talk page". I hadn't much time to check the page, but later that day I was able to take a look. There was an argument going on about that someone got downgraded for some not further explained reasons on a different wiki, that someone from our wiki kicked off. Altogether, three pepole were mad at each other insulting and accusing themselves and so I started typing a long comment to sum up their problems and extract the facts. My words didn't miss. The main pepole arguing put aside their differences and agreed to work together again. Someone even laid down his admin status by his own decision. That was pretty impressing for me.
Next thing I did was to start typing an email to Toothless about my day, what happened on the wiki and so on. Just usual stuff. Suddenly, I received tons of mails in my inbox. Pepole were writing on my talk page, some rights were readjusted and so on... What happened?
Someone who is called "The eye that sees" registered only to write a comment on the talk page of our main wiki-admin. In his comment, he pointed out, that someone who is admin on our wiki misbehaves on a pretty big scale. He also added some links. When I followed those links, I was really shocked about the words that were used on that page. This comment also caused our main admin to take a look at the most recent events, especially the argument I arbitrated. He put a very nice comment under that and suddenly promoted me to be an admin! The other person was downgraded and suddenly everyone left congratulations on my talk page.
I'm pretty confident I can care for the wiki in a good way so that it remains a safe and informative place for everyone, especially younger children who just like the movie.
Now there is one more thing, I have in common with my great friend Toothless. Now we are admin-comrades on the wiki. What I included in my "Dear Friend"-video some months ago just came true. I created this video, when Toothless became admin. It sais: "It's really cool, that you're now one of the chiefs of the "Viki". Who would have thought that? As you know, if you need a hand, you can always count on me. Plus it would make me perfectly happy if you wouldn't mind to let me help you. Maybe one day we both might be running it together.".

I'm looking forward to guard the wiki with one of my closest friends.

Cheers!

Greetings from Dresden, Germany

How it all started

Hi there,

Now that my friend Toothless contributed some blogposts, I’ll throw something in myself. Yep… First of all, I’m going to start with how we met in the first place. As you can see in the right column, both his and my HTTYD-wiki-accounts are linked. That’s where we met. I was uploading several high resolution screenshots from the movie and this way, his attention was attracted. He asked me to upload a picture from a certain scene and I granted this favor. He asked, if he could do me a favor in return. Well… I didn’t hesitate to ask for some pictures of his self-drawn leather journal and he uploaded some. I was really amazed by his drawings and started deciphering the runic script he used to write notes next to his drawings. I noticed a few mistakes and politely asked him, whether he wanted me to point him to those. He gladly accepted and I started to list those mistakes in a text file. I didn’t want them to appear on the wiki, since every single edit can be found, even if it is deleted, so I decided to upload it on pastebin. I sent the link, but unfortunately he wasn’t able to access this site. I tried another one-click-hoster, but that wasn’t working either. Anyway… I wrote down the link to my facebook-account in runic font to a piece of paper, took a photo and uploaded this one on a photo-sharing website. Now he was able to access this picture, but not facebook. Honestly I was really annoyed, but I then told him to pick the last digits of this link and add a trailing “@gmx.de”. That worked, so I received an email a little later. That was on the 8^th of November 2012. Since then we started writing emails to each other on a daily basis. I found out, that he could easily be my twin. We share a lot of common interests, we both love HTTYD like crazy, we both are Christians and counting all this together, a great friendship was about to form. On the 8^th of April this year, we exchanged our 1000^th e-mail! We helped each other on different things several times. He encouraged me to start drawing (No teacher in art class ever managed to make me enjoy drawing like Toothless). Our best idea was to send each other snoggletog-gifts. Snoggletog is actually a holiday, the Vikings from HTTYD celebrate annually. It appears like a mix of Easter and Christmas. We agreed to open them the same day, but it took quite a while for his parcel to arrive at my place. Finally we’ve had our presents and we both were really pleased with what we got. One day I found myself looking for flights. As you must know, I’m from Germany, while Toothless is living in the U.S. To cut a long story short: We’re going to meet this summer personally! I’m super excited and I’m already counting the days! (90 from today)

Yep… This blog was actually his idea. He came up with it yesterday and I like the idea too. After a little testing, we just kicked off this very blog. I hope you enjoy it!

Dragonific Greetings from Dresden, Germany