Climbing machine

Liam is a climbing machine. He can get on and off the couch, rocking chair and sometimes, the coffee table. He can not quite manage to get up on our bed, but it is close. I think climbing things is currently 2nd on his list of favorite things to do after opening containers and throwing the contents all around the room. 

Junior Couch Potato

Liam loves the remote controls. I have heard from other people that all kids seem to like playing with them. As soon as he sees one, he make a bee line for it, then has a seat and presses all the buttons. I am not sure why this is fun. It is not like that there is any sort of feedback from the remote. No noise, no lights, and there is no way he can connect what is going on with the TV/DVD/VCR with what he is doing...

Oh, the cordless phone is also a favorite. My colleague's kid made a 7 hour phone call recently. ha!

 

Worst brand name ever

I forget if I posted this picture or not. But I still think it is funny.

I was not reassured to be in a hospital where they use "maimed" brand gloves.

 

I like ducks.

I was looking through my pictures and I seem to have a lot of pictures of ducks... when I think about it, I do like ducks a lot and I feel compelled to take a photo of one whenever I see it in a park or what not.

I believe that for the next while, I am going to include a "duck of the day" along with whatever else I post on this site. Just to see how long it takes me to run out of unique duck pictures. This family of ducks was in a park in Stuttgart. It would have been early June when I took it.

 

good bye summer

So summer seems to be essentially over, bringing the standard german weather back. It has been cold, grey and raining for about a week now. At least we have some pretty impressive rainbows in my area. This is out of our upstairs window.


 

Hello up there

Liam likes to climb everything now. He is also starting to take a couple of steps without holding anything. As fun and entertaining as this is, it is resulting in lots of falling and head bumping.

He looks pretty funny when he tries.

 

Meeting of the minds

Yesterday my Canadian colleague (from Montreal) came over with his son Julian. It was pretty interesting to see the two little guys play around. This is the first time I have seen Liam play with another kid, normally he just plays by himself in the same area as other kids. This time they were racing around the house following each other and playing together with the toys. It was pretty funny.

I like when they 'talk' to each other, basically mimicing the wierd noises the other kid makes.

bweah... beh... mummummum.... beh.

 

Farmer Fritz

Our Neighbour Fritz has Chickens. These are some of those chickens.

bock bock bock.

 

Living the Dream

This is an old picture, showing the time that Claudia was able to realize her life long dream of driving a tractor. It is of course, Mike Starr's tractor and as an added bonus, Randy the crazy dog rode along. It should be pointed out, that the evening of this ride, Randy ate an entire roast beef that was supposed to be our supper.

Randy was banished to the garage to live with his shame. I forget what we ate, but it was some sort of pizza or fast food. Bad dog.

 

Simcoe Day at Last!

The waiting is finally over! it is SIMCOE DAY in Ontario today.

I have been on the edge of my seat, counting the days to my favorite holiday. Commemorating Lord Simcoe, discoverer of Lake Simcoe (I think.) I really have no idea at all what he did other than that, but it was certainly enough to have the "civic holiday" renamed "Simcoe Day"

Lets all join in our thanks for the majesty that is Simcoe day. I will celebrate tonight with the traditional Simcoe Day feast of left over spinach and cheese pie.

Uncanny

I think it is amazing how often Dilbert accurately captures what goes on in a large company. It certainly reassures me that most of the other corporate drones have the same daily problems I do.

This particular one is very close to my heart, as a business analyst, I am regularly asked by people for reports that very often have 50 thousand or more data points. Then I am asked to summarize the data in to a single sentence or so... just before a meeting... hooray!

Opinions please

Ok, so I was playing around with photoshop and the picture I posted a day or two ago and I ended up with the following two versions. I thought that since there was not all that much colour to begin with, it may look interesting as a Sepia (or maybe even B&W.)

Otherwise, I just cropped it and fixed the perspective, and then removed the electrical outlets and some other background crap.

I invite opinions on which looks better.

Amazing picture

OK, I can take no credit for this at all, it is blatently stolen from another part of the internet, although I can no longer find the original. I just thought it was way funny.

I wish that penguins could really be trained to do this. I think that zoo attendance would skyrocket.

Looking at the morning sunshine.

I thought this was kind of an interesting picture. This was a bright sunny morning and Liam was playing with an empty bottle, but I liked the way that he was all lit up.

My most exciting news is that I won an honorable mention in the HP Photo Contest for July. A little while ago I put up the photo of the castle/monastary in Bebenhausen and this won a prize. So I get the world wide fame of an HP internal contest, and they give me a new digital camera. Of course, I already have a better camera, so I am pretty sure this prize will be popping up on ebay fairly quickly.

Cruel parents of the 70s

OK, check this out... family photo from around 1978 or so. Check ouy how my parents dressed me in the 70's... in the last few years the 70's made a style comeback, but I have not yet seen anyone wearing the orange and brown with plaid super suit that I gor back then.

For an added bonus of style, check out the also brown and orange couch of glory. Accentuated with the brown, orange, and green cushions. As I recall, the carpet was also brown.

Dave Crawford Enjoying a cookie

Here is Dave Crawford in Vanier Residence, 1992, enjoying a lovely chocolate chip cookie.

Smilin' Gord Smith

Gord told me I should put a picture of him on my page. This is the best one I could find.

Cow on a hill

Moooo moo moo moo moo. Moo moo moo. Moo moo moo moo moo, moo moo moo moo.

Moo: moo moo moo moo moo moo, moo moo moo.

Moofully moo.

Breitach Gorge

This is the view from a bridge going accross the top of the Breitach gorge. It was a pretty neat place to visit, we walked all along the bottom and then climbed up to the top for the trip back again. This is now the 3rd gorge I have visited over here. I would rate this one second, with the best one being the giant one in France that you can ride a canoe and swim in. The two in Germany were just narrow, shallow rivers at the bottom. Interesting to look at, but not much to do.  

Nice Decor

The holiday apartment we stayed in last week is owned by the Catholic Church. Claudia's mother works for the church (her boss is the Bishop in Ausgsburg, ha!) and they have these places available to rent for a quite low cost. It looks very nice from the outside, but once you venture through the doors, you are swept back in time to 1970 or so.

This Lamp may be the crowning acheivement of decoration technology. By day, it resembled a sheep on a stick, but by night.... glowing sheep on a stick.

The furnishings are clearly original, in a few more years, this will be like a museum. I dearly wish I had taken some more photos of the apartment and not spent so much time on the mountains. Oh well, I can rest assured that if we go back there, the furniture will be waiting.

 

19th of July, ugh

Today is the anniversary of my Dad's death... kind of a sad day for me, this is about the nicest photo of him I have on my computer.
I was digging through all my older pictures lately and I went through the process of scanning in every picture I physically have over here. That covers most of University and some oldler ones as well. I think it is a very good thing that digital cameras were not so well developed back in the early 90s or I think that I would have a LOT more photos of people that they would not so much want to remember. Starting with this exciting group of men:

ahhhh 1992.

Ski Springen

One of the interesting things I did last week was visit the Ski Jumping stadium in Oberstdorf. This was about a 15 min walk from where we were staying, but then again I think everything in Oberstdorf is about a 15 minute walk from everything else.

As always, you can click on the picture to see it slightly larger...

There are 5 jumps of varying sizes, sadly the elevator was broken, so we had to walk up to the top...
The stairs were long and steep, and only went to the top of the seats in the landing area. Then we had to walk up a sort of steep dirt and gravel path to the base of the actual ski jump tower.


This is looking down on the stadium from about half way up, you can see the whole town behind.


This is the tallest jump taken from the very end of the ramp. Thankfully, the elevator on this tower was working so we did not have to walk up another 60m of stairs or whatever the actual height was. I forget.


And then the last image is looking down the ski jump from the top. This is what those fools see just before the big moment. I know now without question that this is not a sport for me.

Back at work

Ok, so I have returned to the wonderful office of HP after my week off. however, I have seen a lot nicer things up in the mountains the past week.

Weather was great, 30+ every day and we got to go on a very nice hike. From the bottom to the top and back down again, accross 4 peaks. 3000 feet verticle difference and the total time was about 6 hours. Big fun.

Here is Oberstdorf, where we stayed. This pic is from about 1/10 of the way up the mountain overlooking the town.

one week of vacation

Well, this is the last update until I come back from my week long trip to the Mountains. I will be staying in Oberstdorf:

Oberstdorf web Page

Hopefully the weather will be full of sunshine, moderate but comfortable heat and a happy baby that does not cry once. That would be the best.

Hopefully I will be able to post some nice pictures of us galumphing around the mountains. I have already filled up my ipod with driving to the mountains music. Nothing special, it is just that the radio sucks here.

The morning after

So, the party is over. The stinking italians won and we are all sad here.

It was the most boring game I have seen so far, I was just happy when the thing ended. The italians are absolutely dull to watch, maybe that is why they try to spice things up with all their comedy pratfalls.

Now I suppose I am cheering for France. Lets hope that my endorsement is not the kiss of death for this team.

 

Semi Finals today

Well, it is only 5.5 hours until the semi final against italy. Germany had one of their better players banned for the match for punching an Argentinian the other day. I think they should have thanked him, the Argentinian team were a bunch of loser cry babies. Germany should not have to suffer for thier poor sportsmanship, if a bunch of greasy girl-haired players were in my face, I would have probably punched them too.

Of course, now they have to face another team of greasy girl-haired divers with italy. If Germany wins, I predict my office will have a lot of people coming in to the office lates, with headaches tomorrow.

Oh, that is my beer mug.

 

summer weather

Here is proof that on occasion, the sun actually shines in Germany. Look how happy we can all be when it is not raining.