Off to Paris

Well, for most of next week I am off to Paris for "Marketing Training." It is a requirement for all HP employees in Marketing to attend a basic training course. Some selected people have to continue to a second round of training, but they have not really mentioned who will be selected or how.

It is a bit strange for me, although I work in the marketing department, I am an Analyst and Forecaster, I have no marketing functions at all. But if HP wants me to take a course, fine. I am disappointed it is in Paris though, I am not a huge fan of the city. I have already been there and seen the historic sites and such, and the Parisian people are not really the friendliest bunch.

I am planning to use the time as a sleeping holiday. I will leave my class, eat my food and then go right to bed for 10-11 hours of blissful uninterupted sleep. No "baby alarms." I think that is the best way to use my time. Claudia will stay an extra day or two in Augsburg with her parents, so she will not be all alone with muggins.

Hockey was off to a good start last night. Some team from Russia was visiting and we played them. I was a little worried at first, they looked very professionial in nice new fancy uniforms... Luckily, they were not just bad, but appallingly bad. I did not keep score as I lost count when we went up by about 3,000 goals or so. I was not even on my best form, I let by some very very bad goals myself, but in nowhere near the volume of my Russian counterpart. Ha ha, commies.

I also have my first minor injury of the season. I thought my finger was broken after a puck somehow sneaked through, but once the swelling went down, things look better. My nail is all black, I am just hoping it does not fall off. Typing is uncomfortable.

Hockey Season!

Good news for me, I just had notice that my Hockey is beginning tonight! Hooray for ice hockey and all the fun that goes with it.

I will be interested to see how many people show up this year, the team seems to have suffered from a lack of players last season. Hopefully there is a good turn out this year.

I am ready for some ice now, it has been hot long enough.

  

Sleepy Andersons

Ok, Liam the little clown has been giving us a ridiculous hard time the last couple of days. Last night he was up from 11:30 until 1:00, then awake at 5:20... He just freaks out, crys and crys, but there is nothing wrong with him. No fever, no cough, no sneeze, nothing seems to be hurting him, he is just crying like a madman. The ONLY thing that calms him down is sitting on Claudia's lap in the rocking chair. Not me, not standing, not walking, only Claudia, only rocking chair.

The strange thing is, after about 7:00 or so, I become the popular one, he wants nothing more to do with Claudia, but wants to hold my hand and walk all over the apartment.

Ohhh I hope it is a phase.

 

Super Fish

Please bear with my video experiments, I am still learning.

Here is a video I took last Christmas, when we gave Liam a fun little fish to keep him busy at the dinner table while we got to eat OUR food. Now of course, this no longer works. He simply pulls the fish off the table, then throws it at me and spends all his time trying to grab my dinner and throw it floorwards.

He was pretty cute then...

I'm from Barcelona - We're from Barcelona Video Goodness

Trying out something new here, I am linking a video to my blog for the first time.

Here is a band from Sweden called "I'm From Barcelona" They are a 29 person collective and they all look like huge geeks. I am sure this loser persona was done on purpose, but it was done very very effectively.

I quite like the song, the sound of the band is somewhat like The Polyphonic Spree.

I highly recommend giving the video/song a chance, it is good.

An interesting picture...

This is a photo I took in Tenerife a while ago, you have to look close, but there are some mountain climbers working their way up this big red rock. This is completely not relevant to anything going on at the moment, but I was flipping through my older pictures and I thought it looked kind of cool. As an complete and utter coward, I will not be climing any mountains like this myself.

I was looking at my google analytics page, and I was delighted to see that I have more people viewing my page than I originally thought. Check out this map overlay, there are mainly viewers from Toronto and Stuttgart, but I have some coming in from other places too... Click on the map below to see where all the traffic is coming from. Larger bubbles mean more traffic.

It would be great if you read this, to take a moment and write a quick comment on this post to let me know who you are and where you are coming from. It is fun to see who is actually checking this out.

I know of course most of the Toronto folks, Mike in Tokyo, the Joneses in Norman and the Vancouver crowd, but I don't think I know anyone in Australia or some of these US cities.

Camera effects

I was just playing around with my camera and I thought that this picture turned out kind of interesting. Ghost wife does some ironing. Not much else to say about it, but I like how the background and stationary objects are fine and Claudia appears to be ironing so fast that she is just a blur.

Or maybe it is not a trick and Claudia just moves at super human speed... I may never reveal the truth.

 

Cool Sunglasses

Check out the coolest guy in this picture.

This was in riverside park in Guelph, Ontario around 1982 or 1983 I think, riding around in that little train was so very exciting. This park also had my first exposure to paddle boats, which was fantastic. As I recall, we got in trouble for driving our boat out of the designated area and over a little "watterfall" which essentially ment that some poor park worker would have to haul the boat back up again. Oh well, I had my fun.

I have to keep digging into the older pictures for the last couple of posts because I have not really loaded anything new off the camera onto the computer lately. I think that starting in the next weeks or so, I will have a HUGE new supply of exciting material. The house will begin construction, I have a business trip to Paris for a week, and then a week in California.

Groovy.
 

Orangeville visitor...

Well, the visit was brief and pleasent. Yesterday Markham Breitbach, my childhood friend from Orangeville swung by for a visit on his extended trip across Europe. He currently resides in Yellowknife where he has a job "building the internet." It sounds pretty neat, his company sets up the infrastructure and services so that the remote communities of northern Canada can get internet access via satellite. Markham has obviously changed somewhat in the last 15 years or so, he is a beard wearing-long hair having-wildman of the north type now. There was a lot the same as back from the childhood days, still a techie geek and laughing a lot. He was a lot more soft spoken than I remember, Markham was quite a loud guy back then, he seems much more calm now.

His wife was very nice too, Tracy. She works as the organizer of a big music festival in Yellowknife called "Folk on the Rocks." Rather than do it the injustice of describing it, I will just put a link to the website, it is well worth having a look:

http://www.folkontherocks.com/home.php

In honor of an ex-Orangeville reunion, here is a photo I took there a few winters ago.
 

Funny Man

So, Claudia started working again yesterday, so the little man is off to day care three days a week now. After day#2, he seems to be doing quite ok, but they have said he refuses to drink anything while he is there. This is not really news to me, Liam never really wants to drink anything. He just has his milk at dinner, but otherwise he gets all of his liquid from food. Clown.

Today should be interesting, I am going to have a visit from Markham Breitbach, who is travelling across Europe on his honeymoon. I have not seen Markham in about sixteen years, but we were very good friends back in the before high-school times. Now he lives in the Northwest Territories, should be interesting. I hope he has some stories about Polar Bears and Walruses and stuff.

This is Liam in his little Roots jacket, which was a gift from Tova and Ryan in Vancouver. It fits him just in time for this fall and I think he looks like a gnome or an elf in it.

 

Cookie Monster strikes

I am not really sure how he does it, but Liam can detect cookies from miles away. If you give him normal food, pasta, potato, rice... he will sniff it, lick it, play around as he tests it out, and then hurl it floorwards.

However if there is a cookie of any kind within a kilometre, he can sense it. He need never have seen this type of cookie before, it can be a totally new colour, shape, smell. But he knows. The cookie will be snatched up and then crammed into his mouth as fast as possible while the "nummm mmmmm mmm " noises come out of him. Then of course, at the end he makes his rocking back and forth indication that more cookies should follow.

Some of the best things in life

Ahhh, good old Pirate-Monkey-Robot. I cannot even remember where I located this image, but I remember just how happy I was to see three fantastic ideas rolled into a single picture. I really don't know why monkeys and robots are so great, but they always bring a smile to my face.

I think Pirate was an interesting career choice for this particular monkey-robot. I suppose many vocations are closed to the monkey-robots of the world, I can't really imagine him as an accountant or car salesman. Although I would certainly buy a car from him.

Liam the wordsmith.

I have now heard with my own ears, 2 distinct new "words" that Liam says.

"Moo" when he sees pictures of cows in his little book. He will actually grab the book bring it over and open it to the cow pages, saying moo the whole time.

"Ball" If I give him the ball and say ball, he usually parrots it back at me. I suppose his "L" is not that well defined either, so "ba" is close enough for me.

He also calls Claudia "mummm mummm mummmmm" and occasionally refers to me as "bweah"


 

Doris the Champion

Here is a moment of victory for the Doris.

She has just conquered us all at Ticket to Ride: Europe. A very fun board game about trains. I really like board games, I have always really liked games in general. I am pleased that both my wife and extended family also enjoy them. I have to say, I am the main influence as far as games go, other people get sucked in.

Trying something out

Technorati Profile

I just tried something out with Technorati... don't worry about this post.

life size cartoon figures

Whenever I see a very large statue of a cartoon character, I cannot help but go and pose beside them. Notice that my earlier experience with barbapapa caused me to want to look more like him. My barba-belly has grown with careful cultivation thanks to barbabeer and barbachips.

I wish I could find more giant cartoon things to pose with, it would make day to day life a lot more enjoyable. I think I will start pushing HP to put some in our lobby.


 

Vertigo....

OK, I have no creative energy and nothing interesting really happend to me since yesterday... so here is a picture of my stairs.

Oh, I did go to the dentist this morning. My teeth are absolutely fine.

 

The Big News of the Day

OK, so the big exciting news is that Claudia and I decided to go ahead and buy a house. It is a row house, the middle one in a row of three and stragely enough, the outside two are already built. It is in a town 4km down the road called Entringen and it is a pretty great place. We will still be on a street that ends in the Schoenbuech national park, there is a GIANT playground about 200m from the front door and an outdoor pool about another 500m past that. So there is a lot for Liam and family to do for fun. It is also a much more child friendly neighbourhood, 2 of the neighbouring houses have kids Liams age and it looks like there will be lots of kids to play with.

A plus for me is that Entringen has a TRAIN connection, so I will not have to ride the dreaded bus at all if I don't want to. The town is about twice as big as Kayh, about 3,000 people and belongs to the Tuebingen municipality. So I will have to change my license plate on the car to a TU one.

House will start construction next week or so and our target moving date is the end of Feb. So if anyone is looking for an exciting holiday of painting and moving furniture, feel free to let me know.


 

Monsters of Communism, Marx, Engels, Anderson

OK, so this is another old picture, taken a couple of years ago when we went to Berlin for a quick holiday. Of course, I was in eastern bloc fairy land for a large part of the trip. Now that communism has collapsed it is funny how we can all look back and quaintly enjoy thier horrible architecture and monolithic monuments all over eastern europe.

I love it. I can not get enough of the horrible bad taste that permeated the east.

On another note, today I submitted an idea to HP for a patent. This is an interesting fun thing for me, if HP actually decides to patent it or make a product out of my idea, I will get some money for it. I cannot share what the idea is, but let me tell you, it is AWESOME.

 

Big boy´s first steps

Notice the motion blur brought on by his extreme speed.

OK, these are not actually his first steps, but they are among the first. They are the first where I actually had the camera handy. Liam can now walk from his room, all the way to the living room without falling or stopping for a break. Quite an accomplishment. I can almost get that far myself.

It is pretty funny how he can still only walk while holding both hands over his head for balance. I am actually beyond that phase myself.

 

Another fashion blast from the past

I am sure mum will not be too thrilled with this picture, but I have to say this... She chose this look on her own... I think I am actually the best dressed in this photo. My mother has the incredible make-up and matching neck scarf, my sister is in her flag of Sweden dress and I am fairly tame in my 70s hairdo and slick checkered overalls.

I think my hair is actually not that different today, I am very much in need of a cut. If I still had overalls that looked like this, I would wear them to work. I do hate turtlenecks now though and never ever wear them.
 

So much change in a short time.

Wow, time flys... Liam is much much bigger now than he was a year ago...

 

Bernd das Brot

One of my favorite TV shows over here is called "Bernd the Bread." It is about a talking loaf of bread who is very depressed. He is always bummed out because life is stacking up against him and also because his arms are too short.

He has 2 friends, a sheep and a bush (really) who are always making trouble. Seriously... this is a real show. I found it by accident while flipping the channels one day and I could not really believe what I saw.

The children's network goes off the air at 9pm. Instead of a test pattern, they loop a 2 minute Bernd das Brot program where Bernd is telling everyone to go to bed. "There is nothing to see here, go to bed now" "Why are you still watching?" "OK, then you can watch a bread standing and doing nothing then" It is genius.