Kinderparadies

We were at "Wohnland Reutlingen" yesterday to pick out the new kitchen cupboards and stuff that we will put in the new house, and furniture stores happen to be one of Liam's favorite places in the world. So many drawers to open and close, so many stove buttons to push, so many exciting shiny things to touch.

Also, they have a room full of balls. It is supposed to be for kids three and older, so I have to go in with him. That is actually a huge bonus, because it means I get to play in the balls as well. Since it was a Monday morning, we were the only ones in the ball room and we had a fun time. I had my camera in my coat pocket as we had just been by the building site and it was a good thing, I think he looks pretty cute in the sea of balls.

 

Less than ideal conditions

So last weekend we played our first game of the season and it was not exactly the best conditions. This is what happens with an ice rink that is 3/4 outdoors and the daytime temperature is 20 degrees celcius. Fog Fog Fog. I could not see past our own face off circle, whenever the play left our end, I just had to listen closely to try and tell which side would have skaters returning on it.

To make matters worse, we were undermanned and outclassed by this team. As far as skills go, I have no illusions, I know exactly how good a goalie I am and what I am capable of. The other team was in the State league last year and their goalie was in the German equivalent of the NHL (albeit as a backup) two years earlier. We did not have much of a chance, but we put up a good fight. Final score was 11-5 for the Esslingen Eisbrecher. It could have been worse. I still think I played a fairly good game overall.

I always say, I would rather lose 11-5 and face 60 shots than win 1-0 and face 1 shot. I am there to play, not to watch.

Beginning to take shape

Now the front wall of the house is up and it is a bit easier to visualize what the general external shape will be. It is not so easy to get a picture of the house since there is a crane and a stack of building supplies directly in front, but this is the best I could do so far. There will be some more over the weekend.

I am a bit sad that I will be travelling for a week and a half, I will be missing some of the more exciting photos of the house, like the second floor and roof. The external walls and house should be all standing by the time I get back from California.

Anyway, first picture here you can see where the entrance will eventually be, to the left of the front door will be the downstairs bathroom and the window on the right will just look in the corridor.


From this Angle you can see the indent where our driveway will go, and then the kitchen window, which will overlook the driveway. The driveway is sunken a bit, so the kitchen window will not be obscured unless we one day buy a very very tall car.

One more of France

Since I have no other new pictures, here is one more from Paris. this is out of my hotel window in the evening, I was overlooking the "cite of musique" which is some big concert hall sort of thing. I only saw it briefly and did not have a chance to go inside. If it was full of modern classical music and the like, I probably enjoyed it best from the outside anyway.

Today I am full of anger, I took the car to have the oil changed, and when I picked it up, the gass gauge was broken. Then of course the car place denied having damaged it. It is not easy for me to argue with a mechanic in German, however it seems that the word "bullshit" is basically universal.

I am still waiting (5 hours now) for the phone call to tell me it is all fixed and working normally. This is the SECOND time this place has fixed something and damaged something else in the process. Needless to say it is the last time I will be getting anything fixed at AUTO TEILE UNGER (A.T.U.) I only go there because it is within walking distance of my office.

Bath Boy

I forget if I already posted this photo of the bath boy, but it is funny looking anyway.

Not a lot to say today... tonight is another hockey game, I was going to post some pictures from the last one, but it was so foggy they really came out poorly. Perhaps I will put one up anyway to show the crap conditions. We actually played on an outdoor rink when it was 15 degrees in the daytime. No wonder there was so much fog.

The current dilemma with the house is what kind of wood to get for the floor in the living/dining room. The problem with having sub-floor heating is that many many types of wood are not ideal with it. The woods that are good for this heating AND are hard and durable tend to be very dark in colour, and $$$$$$. The darkness is not ideal since it makes the room feel smaller and darker, and the $$$$ is not ideal because HP pays me poorly. Right now, it looks like the main choices are Red Oak, Ash, or possibly some magic tree I will discover in the next days.

Basement walls are in.

Here is the rainy view of the newly constructed basement as seen last evenening. The walls all went up pretty darn fast, one day earlier it was just that concrete slab on the floor. now it looks a little more house like.

First picture is a view from the front. The indentation closest to the camera is where the parking spot will be. The room on the front left will have the laundry and heating, directly in front of that is the stairwell, and front right is the storage space.

This photo is from what will be the back yard, the two large spaces will be the big double door/windows into the office and guest bedroom downstairs. It is not totally evident in this picture, but the ceilings in the basement are normal height, not lower like a basement. The nice part about building on a hill is that we get another "ground floor" in the back.


Finally this is looking into the guest bedroom, you can se the doorway going through to the stairwell and through all the stuff you can make out the doorway to the laundry/heating room.

 

Strange Park

Another picture from Paris. This was a strange little park across the street from my hotel. Apparently it is for children to enjoy on tricycles if I understood the sign correctly. As you can see, it is very very popular.

I thought it did look like kind of a fun thing, but I could not find a tricycle to fit my generous frame.

Basement floor is in

Well, it is not just a hole any more, now the basement floor is in and you can actually see the shape of the house to come. It is still not all that exciting to look at, but I like it all the same. The indent in the lower right of the photo is where the car parking spot will be. We would have actually preferred the house without this indent, but the municipality was insisting that the house could not be greater than a certain square footage. This indent is to appease them. I guess it is ok, we would have otherwise had no parking spot, but would have had to use the road.

We went to a second flooring place today to see if the prices were similar. They were identical for material, but the installation was slightly less there. Because we have floorboard heating in the whole house, it actually puts a LOT of limits on what kind of floors we can pick. We need to take something relatively thin, otherwise the heating will never get through the floors.

It seems that we are leaning towards some kind of wood for the ground floor (oak or maple) and then probably cork for the upstairs. I think we will not be doing the basement at this time to save on the cost. The downstairs is not super urgent, we will not be needing the space for a little while at least.
 

Visiting the Hole

Here is a lovely photo of Claudia and Liam visiting the Hole. We have not actually been there for a couple of days now and I am quite curious to see what has happened now. The basement should be standing according to the building plan that we have. Claudia is watching this build plan like a fierce hawk and she is ready to call the builder the second they fall behind schedule.

It is a VERY aggressive plan so we are a little nervous that they were just telling us a crazy fast date so we would sign up, but I have complete confidence in these guys. They have given me no reason to doubt them yet...

Happy Little Farmer

I posted this yesterday, but it seemed to not work. bummer...

Dave Crawford made the comment that Liam did not seem so happy to be dressed up in this square dancing outfit, so I thought it was needed to put a picture up where he was his normal happy little self. He is of course running towards me at full power ready to jump on me and try to grab the camera or whatever else he can get his hands on.

Today we went to the bathroom fixtures store and picked out the sinks, bath, toilets and such for the new house. It does sound dull, but imagine trying to do that while Liam runs berserk through the store, throwing towels into toilets and then yelling at them.

Favorite Book

Liam's latest fun is to look over and over again at "The Wheels on the Bus" which is a big colourful book where you can spin a wheel and make things happen in the pictures. He brings this book over to show me about 500 times a day. Then he turns to either the first page (spinning bus sign) or the last page (blinking bus lights) and then makes me spin the dial over and over and over again.

I also thought he looked pretty cute in this outfit. This is one of those pictures that he can pull out in 30 years and laugh at how mummy dressed him up like a little doll. I said he looks like he is in "Farming Formalware"

Brown cords and a checkered shirt. Yes please.
 

A Whole Lot of Hole

So the house building is really officially underway now, and here is the first stunning picture of our home to be. It is a glorious hole, brimming with magnificence. Surely as you gaze upon thing in all its hole-like amazingness, you will be able to fully visualize what the house will eventually look like.

At the bottom of the image will be the front of the house, encompassing the hall, kitchen and downstairs bathroom. at the rear will be the living room and dining room.

It may not look like much yet, but this is MY hole.

KISS rocked

Like most small boys in the late 70s and early 80s, I thought the greatest band in the world was KISS. I do not think that I could have told you the names of any song or album, but they dressed like monsters and had lots of explosions on stage. This was more than good enough for me.

So at some fair or other in Orangeville, there was of course a cool face painting booth and I remember that the Face Painting operators had 2-3 KISS albums sitting there with them to reference as 9 out of 10 small boys just showed up and pointed to the albums. Make me look like that one. I think most guys picked Gene Simmons (the demon looking one,) and as I recall, I originally wanted Ace Frehley (the spaceman,) but they had run out of sparkly silver makeup. So I went with my second choice, Peter Criss.

 

Wackel Elvis

Going back to the dawn of camera technology, I found this lovely photo of our dancing Elvis in the old car. This was taken on a 640x480 (0.5 mega pixel) camera which at the time cost me 50 marks. This is about 25 Euro, I did have a good time with this cheapo camera, and also with Elvis.

These Elvis toys were a huge fad in the early 2000-2001, I believe they got popular because of an Audi Commercial. I still have this, but there is no place to put him in our car now. Because we have a hatch back, I can't hang him in the back, and the front dash does not have nearly enough room, so he is living in the glove compartment. Our car is getting older though, and I am quite sure that when we one day replace it, the new car will have to have a spot for Elvis.

 

Low-Tech

Well, I was just trying to get a picture up here, but it seems that blogger is full of internal server errors preventing this.

Let me tell you, this picture was great. It was life changing, anyone who saw it was so amazed and happy that they basically gained a whole new outlook on the world and everything in it.

But sadly, Blogger is not working, so I deleted it.

Your loss, rest of the internet.

Oh another thing, I got a Hallowe'en card from the Jones' in the USA, featuring Ryan's Brother's Band performing a spooky Hallowe'en song. If you would also like to partak in some musical Spooky fun, Click Here

Show some love

Today I am feeling a bit nostalgic for the good old days of hanging around with my foolish Toronto friends. Here are two of them sharing a moment of true affection. Dave Crawford and Mike Ponter. I am sure if they see this picture, they will have many fond memories of this evening in the parking lot next to the Keg Mansion.

Now Mike is getting married (or may already be married, no clue) and Dave is married to World of Warcraft. I have always enjoyed video games, but I never could see the big appeal of World of Warcraft. From what I have seen, it looks like an endless repetative grind for very little gain. That combined with a monthly bill. The retail price of WoW has recently dropped to about 15$ over here, including the first month of play, so maybe I will pick it up and give it a try, but I think it is not one for me. If I have to spend lots of hours playing a game, i would much rather play something like Civilization, where I can build up my own nation to crush the puny weaklings surrounding me.

Liam and a Book

OK, trying the videos again. This time I re-did the file size down to around one megabyte. This is Liam playing around with a cookbook, he is very very interested in books these days.

Strange goings on

So, I made a post on the weekend, and it seemed to work ok, but now when I look at the blog, my saturday post is gone... also, some older video posts seemed to have popped up mysteriously. strange strange. It is probably all coming from my own stupidity in web page maintenance, but oh well.

This is a nice picture of a happy wife and a happy baby. This is a stark contrast to the picture I would have taken in our home yesterday around 6pm. That would have shown a screaming baby, and angry mummy and an angry daddy. The little man decided that rather than eat any food yesterday, he would just scream and throw it at us. I have no clue how the little energy ball can keep going when he does not eat any lunch OR any dinner. His whole meal plan was 1) cheerios 2) a Banana 3) some Yoghurt. Not nearly enough it would seem, to fuel the fireball of destruction named Liam.

Somehow he found the power to still rampage around the apartment, throwing and smashing as he saw fit. I hope that Claudia is having an easier time with him at home alone today.

Oh, they should start digging the hole for our house in the next day or two. So pictures from that excitement will follow.

 

I was cool

So, my mother mailed me some more old pictures and I thought that I could put some up for fun. The first batch of excitement is another fashion extravaganza from 1974. Clearly I was enjoying the bouncy horse ride, and I was clad in the official horse riding outfit of the 1970s.

I really hope that Liam will not one day be posting pictures and laughing at how we dress him. I think that fashions today are not quite so crazy as they were back then. At least I know that I am not alone, almost everyone I know of this age has some very nice looking pictures wearing questionable outfits.

 

Back from Paris

Well I have left all of the wonders of France behind me to return to wonderful Germany and my normal day to day work. yay.

Things I learned in France:
1) France has lots of black people. living in Germany, you can quickly forget that there are black people in the world, since I only see one here about once a month. The big non-german population here is either from eastern Europe, or Turkey, and they are all basically white people. France was much more diverse, with lots of africans, arabs, asians... It was very different to again be in such a cosmopolitan city. It was most evident in the variety of restaurants to choose from. Germany is lagging far behind.

2) French people are not as horrible as I recall. I was on my own for 3 of the 4 days in paris and my French is very very basic, but I had no trouble getting around and interacting with people when it was needed. If you start off with one or two words in French, the were very willing to help me out.

3) My brain has two languages "English" and "not English." When I tried to speak any French at all, I found myself liberally inserting German words here and there. This reminded me of when I moved to Germany in 2000 and I inserted French words liberally.

here is a picture of Notre Dame I took:
 

Still Cute Now.

Now he plays with a little phone, still a pretty cute boy.

These videos are annoying, I cannot seem to figure out why the margins sometimes work and sometimes not..

Paris WIfi

Check it out, there is free WiFi all over the place here. Starbucks, Haagen Das, even these non-descript little cafes have free WiFi goodness. This is much more progressive than Stuttgart, I don't know of any free spots there...

Paris Paris

Well, I am in Paris and I am bored. We finished today at 4:30 and it was a "free night" so I just walked around. Here are some pics of Paris.