Oh, you're in my brain giving all my reasons for not working on the language, right? Unfortunately, I think in much the same way you do. I'm lazy, I know :(. I have a few workbooks for Czech, and I tend to think that I should actually... you know, use them sometimes. But whenever I look at them, I just end up randomly reading some passage of text, and focus on what I do understand from it - not that much on actually learning what I don't. Also, music? Reading lyrics out loud to practice pronunciation used to work very well for me, but now I've not done even that in forever. I would do that even when I had little or no idea what the lyrics said, btw - for me it was mainly about having fun saying these cute words, and teaching myself to wrap my tongue around unusual letter/sound combinations.

As for Johannes - aww, I love that you made him a nickname :) That's lovely! As far as I know, he doesn't have one.

As for packages, I actually wrote on your card that you probably won't get yours from me until the new year, so you see I didn't trust our post much either :D. Let's see when these packages arrive. It'll be great even if it's not for a holiday! :)