The Saga of the Blue Bench

Well, I can finally say the front of the house looks very much finished. Click on it for an enlarged view.

Here is a nice image of the front of the house. Since the last image I have shown, you can see the addition of:

1) the house number
2) the outside light
3) the garbage house
4) the bench
5) the plant
The house number was one that Claudia found from a dutch store online. We wanted to keep the blue and white theme.

The outside light was also a long search, we wanted something modern, but not too crazy looking. This one was purchased from the fine people at Hornbach

The garbage house is a little shed where we store the two big garbage bins. One for actual garbage and the other for biodegradable food waste. This was built by Claudia's dad, the handiest man in the universe. I did contribute a little, it was painted by me.
The plant is one of those pointy ones in a big pot. Claudia saw something similar on another house and thought it would go well on our front porch. I can not remember where she purchased that one.

The bench is something that Claudia wanted for a long time. When we were planning the house, one of the first things Claudia said was "look, here is a spot for a blue bench." After a long wait for the rest of the front to be finished, we went over and bought the bench at the local Toom baumarkt in Tuebingen.

It was an unpainted bag of wood at the start and I took a ridiculous long time to put it together, it was more complex than anticipated and had very few pre-drilled holes. I have to say, Ikea does a better job of these things, but I managed to get it together after a while.

Then it was a couple of weeks to search for the paint. We wanted it to match the front door, and Claudia had noted the exact "code" for the colour of this paint. It is called purple-blue #5000 in the paint classification scheme. We had to go to a few shops on a few weekends to find it, but in the end it was again at Hornbach.

I spent last Sunday painting this thing. First there was much sanding, and I had to prime it with white paint. here is how it looked after that round...Next I cracked open the purple-blue #5000 and got to it. This was the painful bit. After two coats and more than 90 minutes, I had covered the bench in paint, but it was still showing way too much white through. At this point I started calling it "The Blue Bastard." I stopped to go and have a nice BBQ dinner. I looked down on the Blue Bastard from the BBQ balcony.After eating a nice dinner, I got back down there and put on yet more paint. After another hour of paint, I was done and it looked reasonable.It was going to rain that evening (as usual) and the paint was water based, so I brought this lovely blue bench into the basement to finish drying overnight.Now it sits in front of the house as shown in the first image. The saga of the bench ends here.

The Horror of Liam

Here is a nice image of Liam's burned little fingers. Look at the size of those nasty blisters, no wonder he was making such a big fuss.

This was a couple of days ago, the blisters have all since opened and the doctor took away all the dead skin and dressed the unpleasentness underneath. Liam is fairly much back at full power.

Gas Prices - ouch ouch ouch

For any of the North Americans reading this and think they pay a lot for gas...

Today I had to fill the big car.

Gas was 1.48 Euro a litre. this is $2.38 Canadian or $2.31 US.

Filling the car was 89,82 Euro. $143.22 Canadian or $139.28 US.

This is a big car, but not huge. It is an older BMW 5-series with a 6 cylinder engine. I am going to start working from home a couple of days a week just to try and avoid burning gas. ouch ouch ouch.
Here is a website with a story on how to conserve up to 30% of your gas consumption by altering your driving technique....

A Healthy Diet

Liam is a boy of limited and freakish tastes. His food intake can almost be covered 100% with the following list:

Toast with Nutella
Toast with Honey
Ham and Cheese sandwich
Tortillas with nothing on them
Noodles with "cheese pepper" (parmesan)
Rice
Yogurt (Strawberry only)
Gummi Bears
Milk
Apple Juice

That covers pretty much his food needs. The occasional cookie, chocolate or ice cream can go in there too. We were totally shocked the other day when he ate BBQ chicken. It could be that the BBQ season opening up will see some additions to his plate, but I am still thinking it was a freak occurrence.

Last night, he came up with a new dish that will most likely not be sweeping the nation:


As much as I like both of these things, I don't think they really go together that well.

Still, Liam ate it and demanded more sauce when he had eaten up the brown portion of the rice.

To be fair, I liked to eat HP Sauce and butter sandwiches as a kid. OK, I still eat them.

Be careful what you wish for.....

So on Friday I complained of having now news to post about, well the weekend certainly brought a new topic.

Liam the super genius has lately been Mr. Helpful in the kitchen. As soon as you start doing anything, he is pushing over a chair, standing beside you and demanding to help. Normally we give him a plastic knife and a piece of bread to cut up, or he pushes his little pots around the stove.

On Saturday though, his helpfulness brought on some trouble. I was making some delicious chili for dinner (yum yum) and Liam had helped by cutting up some peppers and pushing around his little pots. I took the chili pot off the burner and then Liam loudly declared "HOT HOT" and slapped his hand down on the burner.

Needless to say, this was followed by intense screams of pain and panic. After some calming words and running of the hand under cool water, we bundled up and drove over to the hospital.

The cooking genius has second degree burns on all his fingers and thumb. It was not actually that bad, his palm was not burned at all and the blisters all remained closed and it appears uninfected.

They bandaged him up and put lots of cream on the burns gave him a painkiller and sent us home. He quickly got over the shock and can now only proudly talk about his "mitten" I think that he probably sees the overall experience as awesome, since he got to have ice cream for dinner, and stay up late on mummy's lap watching as much TV as he wanted.

Here are the images of the tiny chef:

Close up of the mitten...
Liam staying up late showing off his wounded paw.Left handed toast for breakfast.
Train playing is still very possible

I got nothin'

Well,

I have not taken any new photos and I have really got nothing to talk about this week. I guess the biggest upcoming project is that we met with the garden builder to finally finish our back yard. If the rain stays off (big if) he could start as early as next week.

I will be very happy when the dirt hill is gone and we have a backyard we can actually use.

Of course, it is just opening up a world of yard work for me, but with a yard not much bigger than a typical living room, I think I will be able to manage it.

I have also been trying to come up with a place to have our little get together next month in Canada. I want a place where we can reserve a certain amount of space for our group, and that has food and drinks. I recently thought of "The Peel Pub" which we used for a party once in the past. However that was almost 10 years ago and I am not sure about what it is like these days.

If anyone has a suggestion, it would certainly make things easier on me!

To make sure this is not an image free post, here are some photos of rhinoceros.

Philips AJ300D.... a fine gift of ipod clock radio greatness.

This year, Claudia outdid herself in getting me a super birthday gift. She got me a piece of technology that is not only super, but is also the exact brand and model of something that I had almost myself purchased....

It is amazing, I had not prompted her or told her what I wanted, she came up with this one entirely on her own.

This is the Philips AJ300D ipod dock and clock radio. There are about a million ipod docks out on the market now and they come in all shapes and sizes. I was always looking for one with a nice sound, a small footprint and not too big. I think this one meets all criteria.

So in addition to charging the battery and acting as an external speaker set for my ipod, this device is also an FM radio tuner and clock radio. I can even have the ipod act as the wake up noise. I actually use my phone as an alarm clock now, but I have used this quite a lot as an external speaker.

here is the front view.
First, you place a little plastic plate in the unit that matches your particular ipod. I have the last generation of the Nano, so I dropped that one in. you can see around the dock the control buttons on the unit itself.

The only thing missing for me is a way to change playlists. You are limited to either playing the playlist that was last being used on the undocked ipod, or a no-playlist selection of randomness of the complete contents. Not a big deal, but it would have been a nice feature to work in there.

Notice there is also an AUX function on there too, so I can put a line in and use this as speakers for some other source... my computer for example.
From the side, you can see that it has a pretty nice shape, not too big. The buttons down the side are for power, time set, and the alarm noise.
From the back, you can see the sub-woofer, which is of course pretty small, as well as the power and line in ports.
Finally, here is the remote control. It has all the same buttons as the front of the device, as well as the power one.
Sound is very good and I am very satisfied with this product. I like being able to listen to my podcasts and music when I am using the computer or cooking dinner and other such tasks. I had wanted one of these for quite a while and I am extra pleased that Claudia chose this particular one for my B-day gift.

Way to go superwife.

The Last Post about cars... for now

OK, the journey through the Mercedes museum will end today as I post my last photos. I know I used up a lot of days, but I really enjoyed it there. I am investigating going to the Frankfurt Auto show in the fall, so you may again be subjected to lots of car photos.

Check out this bad boy... This is a prototype car that was never built, but was being designed to go for land speed records. It was theorized to do about 600km per hour. That is very very very fast. Also it is huge and looks like a space ship. I want one.


The last great great thing I saw in the museum was actually in the gift shop. Here you can buy all kinds of toy Mercedes vehicles and this one jumped right out at me...

It is a crappy looking truck loaded with goods and Arabic looking people all sitting on top. It is more of a "model" than a "toy" priced at around 60 Euro, but I was blown away that they would produce something like this. Surely the lawyers in Germany are not as worried as North American ones as far as lawsuits are concerned.

Is this toy racist? Is it a model representing some particular aspect of the Mercedes experience? I am not sure, but I was certainly hypnotized by this. If it was 10 or maybe even 20 Euro, I surely would have bought it. But at 60, that is a little too much out of my computer fund.

The Race Car Exhibit

Sorry if everyone is getting sick of my trip to the Mercedes Museum, but too bad. I enjoyed it and want to show all the neat stuff they have there. Otherwise I don't really have a lot going on at the moment...

I am not really wanting to start writing tirades about angry work moments I have had. This has been a rather nasty week in the office and I am a little bit on the super angry side with some folks there.

Anyway, near the end of the Museum, there is a really neat display showing a bunch of the various Mercedes race cars through the years. They have the outside wall all set up like a race track and the cars look a little like they are zooming around you. I thought it looked pretty cool.
I am not really a car racing fan, but it is hugely popular in Germany. Look at this snazzy car, I can really imagine driving it down to the grocery.I personally like the older race cars. I think I could have had a career as a race driver in the era when cars only had a top speed of around 40 miles per hour. That is something I could handle.
I only have one more post about cars coming up... so I better find something else going on around here to write about. I guess I can fill at least a few with how excited we all are for the impending Canada visit in May.

The fun of analytics...

One of the things I like best about doing this web page is running analytics on it to see who is having a look. I know that is a geeky sort of thing to enjoy, but I have always stood by my belief that most things in life can be made better by adding charts.

I also have come to learn some interesting things about the internet... how putting some uncommon words, especially regarding product names, can result in people finding their way over from google. Back when I purchased my exciting new HP phone, I generated all kinds of traffic since there was not a lot out there on the internet at the time.

Here is a breakdown of the traffic to this page by country.

Now, what I have learned about the sources...

Canada - Clearly fueled by friends and family. Thanks dudes. There are still a few surprises in there too though... like the 9 hits from North Bay. I have no idea who that would be, but rock on northern types.

USA - I was a little surprised to see USA ahead of Germany, but combining some extended family with some friends with a huge amount of google users ended up putting this one here. Interestingly, I seem to get the most hits from New York City, where they are 100% new visitors and they never return. So New York Googlers seem to like search terms that resonate here.

Germany - This is what I thought would come second, again due to friends and family, but they only generate 50% of the hits that the US does.

Switzerland - Thank you Joneses. Although, apparently someone in "Worb" is a returning visitor. A place I have never heard of until just now. Hello Worb.

Australia - This is a great one, since 97% of the hits are from search engines and they never come back. Amazingly, I share a name with an Australian singer and a New Zealand born Rugby player. Even MORE AMAZING... The Rugby player played for the Brisbane Broncos... I play hockey for the Stuttgart Broncos. Sorry googlers, you want to go here.

United Kingdom - More friends and Family here.

Japan - I will go out on a limb and guess it is just Mike.

Netherlands - A mystery... I know nobody here....

Spain - or here...

Italy - or here.... There are still lots of little places that pop up with just one visit here and there, Brazil, Iran, Turkey, all kinds of places, even one from Iceland. A place I always wanted to go visit, hello Reykjavik!

Anyway, that is all the self indulgence on the fun of maintaining this site that I can manage today. I hope everyone learned something about New Zealand Rugby players.

Even more at the Mercedes Museum

After the brief hockey interlude, I return to my batch of nice automotive photos from the Mercedes museum.

This is a car that Warren was particularly interested in, the gull wing fancy pants sportscar. I will admit that it has a certain charm.
I am not sure if this car would be on my list of cars to own after my lotto win, but I certainly would not say no if I was presented with one for my birthday.
I also quite like how these photos turned out. It is clear that I should be fairly much ready to leave my job for my calling as a photographer for automotive magazines. Not bad for a little point and shoot camera anyway.

Last Hockey of the Season

Well, I had my last hockey game of the season on Saturday and I am delighted to say that it was a complete triumph.

Stuttgart Broncos : 12
Wernau Losers : 4

I had a very good game myself, allowing only 4 goals, and one of those was scored by my own defence on an unlucky bounce.

Here are some photos from the game to enjoy.

The puck about to be dropped, Stuttgart are in white, Wernau in blue.
A save by the Wernau goalie, he started off alright, but I think his other players just got too tired by about halfway through the first Period. After 20 minutes, it was Stuttgart 4 Wernau 2.
This was a much more common sight, the puck in the net behind him...
Here is some action in front of our net. The small guy in the white shirt is Willi and he scored 5 times in the game. Although one of them was the own goal...
A little blurry, but my sweet glove save was captured for posterityOne more of action in front of me.
All in all a good game for us, it was amazing that we got 12 goals, none of our "big scoring" players even turned up... There was just some very good performances from the whole bunch. It is a shame that the tournament was cancelled, but since a tournament is usually a bunch of 30 minute games, replacing it with one full 60 minute game means I played just about as much hockey as I would have otherwise.

A fine finish to the year.

More Mercedes Museum

Here are a few more nice things I saw at the Museum...

This was a hot looking race car on a "high speed transporter" I think I would like to drive that truck almost as much as the car on the back. This may have been the greatest vehicle of all time.... the mobile post office. I cannot believe I only took one photo of it!!!!! It is about 30 feet long, and contains desks for mail clerks, a phone box that can make international calls and a complete mail delivery system. wow. just wow. It is a huge beast of a vehicle that was made to service areas of Austria that could not support permanent post offices.

It is very very great.
Another of my favorites was the world renowned POPEMOBILE. YES! The actual Popemobile of John Paul II. My only disappointment was that you could not hop up and get a photo of yourself inside. Surely that is the main appeal of this tremendously ugly safety vehicle.

When I become emperor of all reality, I will commission a car combining the Popemobile with the mobile post office. Then perfection will have been achieved.
Side view of this awesomeness... Look at the majesty of the gold wheels.

Mercedes Benz Museum

An Orangeville friend of mine paid a visit this past weekend. Warren is living in England for a couple of years and there are many quick and easy ways to get between London and Stuttgart. Since Warren is a guy who enjoys a nice looking car, I thought it would be a good opportunity to go and see the brand new Mercedes-Benz Museum. This was just finished last year and has a lot of good press about how nice the exhibits are. I will have to say, it was one of my most enjoyable museum visits, and I am a BMW lover.

The building itself is already quite impressive looking. We had wonderful weather, blue sky and 23 degrees...
The museum is arranged to lead you through the history of the automobile, and also show some context of what was going on in the world around it. The first things displayed are the earliest motors and some of their uses. Here is one on a motorized bicycle. They did not call it a motorcycle, but I am not sure why.
Then there were some old cars and the blah blah about how Daimler and Benz invented the car. After a floor or two, they finally get to a question I had wondered... where did the name "Mercedes" come from. Well, it seems that some Emil Jellinek, a board member of the Daimler company, designed a "modern" car, specifying that it must be named after his daughter, Mercedes. This new car was a big hit, won lots of races and was loved all over the European motoring scene.

After two years of great success, the company decided to brand all cars with the Mercedes name.

Here is the first one.
I thought some of these cars were pretty amazing. Despite the antique look of this one, it could apparently do 160km/h. Of course, there were only dirt roads at this time, so I don't think I would have liked to try driving it that fast.
I think that is enough of a car history for today. Overall, I found the museum very interesting, so there will certainly be some more of my wonderful photos appearing in the next days.

I also think that the photos I took mostly turned out pretty well, I was just using my little pocket camera. I am more convinced that it was a good purchase to replace the Liam-destroyed HP camera. I can fully recommend it to anyone in the market for a cheap digital camera. The Canon 720is.