Saint Martin’s day walk 2009

It is that time of year again and Liam’s kindergarten made the annual Saint Martin’s evening walk with the lanterns last Thursday.  It was actaully the day after St. Martin’s, but given the size of the kindergarten classes, they do walks on three separate  nights so that the size is manageable.

Following the genius theatrical performance I wrote about last time, the kids all put on their coats and got their lanterns together to head out into the night.    Liam had made an elephant lantern that he was very proud of.  I thought it looked pretty good.  I am certain that he had quite some help from the kindergarten teachers making it, but he has been getting very good at drawing animals. 

So, with the whole group in tow, we began the walk.  Something I also enjoy trying to do on the walk is take pictures of them using a slow synchronized flash, so I can see some details of the kids, but also get the ambient lighting and interesting light trails from the lanterns.

Here are a couple of them strolling along the dark streets of the village.

Like I mentioned, Liam was pretty proud of his elephant lantern and  took many opportunities to hold it up and make many elephant noises.  He is also getting quite good at his impression.

Another Great Theatre Production

Well, before this year’s Lantern walk (to come in another post soon)  Liam’s kindergarten class put on a play about “Elli the Elephant”

The kindergarten was all set up as the theatre and in case it is not immediately obvious, the setting of the play is Africa.This year the kids made animal lanterns to use for the St. Martins walk, and I guess that gave them the idea to use them as puppets to do the show.  The story is essentially that Elli the Elephant has lost his herd and is asking other animals to help him find them.  Here Elli is talking to Giri the Giraffe.  All of the animals are named in this way.  Then a word with Gepi the Leopard (Gepard in German)After talking to Lions, Leopards, Tigers, Alligators and a host of other animals, Elli found the herd.  This was represented by the Elephant parade.  The parade was acted out by all the younger kids.  The puppeteers  were the older kids, the ones almost ready to move on to school.   They were better able to handle puppets, remember lines, and tall enough to reach over the wall.There you have it.  Not quite as big a role as in the play last year, where as you may recall Liam was the scene stealing hedgehog, but still, he did very well.  A fine play and I look forward to the next big production. 

Candy from a bygone era

I was in a toy store today shopping for a gift for my nephew, when I happened across  the candy section of the store.  There was a pretty wide range of sweets, the typical chocolate and hard candies along with some of the more unusual modern things like cell phone candy and the like.

Then I noticed this and had to look twice…  Candy cigarettes. something I remember having as a kid (popeye brand for me thanks,) but I thought had vanished in a poof of political correctness years ago. 

Of course I had to buy some, a bargain at 40 cents a pack.  Despite the fact they are now called “sticks” and not cigarettes, it is pretty clear from the packaging that they did not spend a lot of thought on the redesign of the product after changing this word.

First up we have King-Lion brand.  Look at this… I opened them up and sure enough, the “sticks” looked just like I remembered them.  Very clearly modeled on its tobacco counterpart.

The sticks are paper wrapped pseudo-chocolate. 

Just as all teenagers know, smoking makes you look cool.  Now I can have that whole defiant rebel look going on  without any of that pesky cancer and heart disease.

I do have to say, the use of the word “chocolate” is very generous.  It is barely chocolate.  It is barely edible in fact… they taste really quite bad.  If it were not for how cool they made me look, I would not have kept up the habit all afternoon.  The package actually calls it “chocolate flavoured confection” which contains Sugar, hardened vegetable oil, whey powder, soy, cocoa powder and vanilla.  After reading that, perhaps I should still consider they health effects of these bad boys.

One last thing, these “sticks” are not just for the boys anymore.  Obviously they have found small girls to be a key demographic that must not be missed.  So if the King Lion brand are a little to butch for you, there is the amazingly feminine “Aerobica” for the ladies. I particularly like the 1980’s workout lady image on the packet.  From the taste of these, they have very likely been sitting around since those leg warmers were in fashion.

Oh, before you condemn the Germans for still having this on the shelves, it is not a product they make.  This fine children’s confectionary is made by the good folks in the Netherlands at PIETERMAN

http://www.pietchoc.nl/

Just like Papa

Like lots of little kids, Liam likes to do the things that his parents do. I work from home fairly regularly, which means I spend the day in the office in front of my laptop. Recently, Liam seemed to become very jealous of this behaviour and was going on and on about how he needed his his own computer.

So... I dug up this rather old, non-functional laptop and stuck it in front of him to see what would happen.
It turns out, this was just what was needed. Liam started banging away on the keys immediately and seemed to not care at all that the screen was black. Now he has fairly much claimed this laptop as his and it is staying in his room on his wee table. Or when I am working, he is often dragging it over and sitting next to me at the desk while he works too.

Crazy boy.

I dearly love Penny Arcade

How great is this comic...

taken from the fine folks at Penny Arcade

A Musical Interlude

Today is forecast publishing day at work. This means I have to sit and type in lots and lots and lots of data. It can in fact be a little mind numbing and I like to do it while listening to music.

Last week I heard the new Ian Brown song "Stellify" and it reminded me to listen to one of my all time favorite bands, the Stone Roses. That has led on to my re-enjoyment of some older tunes lingering in my iTunes.

I think this song is forgotten by lots of people, but I still find it catchy:


Of course, the Specials are never forgotten

then there is Madness

New Work Computer

Well, something unexpected happend this week. I had a packaged arrive at my desk unannounced. It turns out that my work computer was due for a replacement.

I had recieved a message recently that I was "in the queue" to receive new hardware, and that an email would be coming to advise me when it had been ordered. Then all of a sudden POW. This turns up at my desk.

This is an HP Compaq 6530b, the standard laptop for the drones like me. It seems pretty decent. Core2 duo 2.8ghz processor, and sadly windows Vista. I had kind of hoped that I would be able to hold out for a new PC with Windows 7, but apparently it could be many months or even another year before our company IT is ready to migrate.

We also have the wonderful (and cost saving) do it yourself IT now, so I had to set up the machine by myself. I am a fairly technical guy and was not really worried, but it was in fact absurdly easy. I set up everything in about an hour and it appears to be working perfectly.

So... now lets see how I can adjust to new(old) windows, new(2007) office. New harware is always a pleasure to have in my life. It adds some enthusiasm to work.

n



n



n

Liam the Dragon Tamer

I am still recovering from the nasty cold I had last week and feeling quite run down. I did not get up to a lot last week other than sleeping and then sleeping some more. I did space it out with a little computer gaming (Dave still needs to tell me his WoW character name.) I have recently discovered the fantastic Team Fortress 2 and been having some fun with that. I also picked up Fable 2 on ebay for a cheapo price and started that up. Fun game.

Here is Liam the Dragon Rider at the fairy tale garden on a summer visit there. He will no doubt be a nerdy sci-fi geek like papa at this rate.

Fall is Fully Here

It is well into fall now and it feels like Winter is not too far away. I have had to scrape ice off the car the past two mornings and Liam slipped and crashed his way down icy front steps first thing this morning.

As much as I love snow, cold and winter, I would not be too sad for a few more days of warm sunny weather. It has been rainy misery here for saome days now.

Here is a nice family pic we took before the trees went yellow...

More Pumpkin Fest

Here are the rest of the pumpkin fest displays.

Bad Posting week

Sorry for t the scarcity of posts this week.

I am home with Liam who is sick with something that looks to be chickenpox.

He is in good spirits and on the mend, but I need to do some entertaining.

not much to say otherwise. I will not be posting photos of spotty Liam. That is cruel.

Happy Birthday Dave

Well, it is Dave's Birthday (as my MS Outlook and Facebook advise me) and I recall that for the past few years I have commemorated this occasion by posting a terrible photo of Dave.

This year I have decided to go another route and just post a photo of Dave in party mode that I took on my last trip to Canada.

Notice he is surrounded by adoring ladies.

Dave, you get this treatment as you are far and away my most vocal website reader.

Rock Band is awesome in a box

The Joneses were staying over a night with us on the way back to Geneva, which provided us with an evening of some fun activities. Normally this would mean it is time to break out some board games, but since it was a work night for Claudia, we decided to do something that was not quite as long a time commitment.

We broke out my recent Ebay purchase. ROCK BAND. This is a game I had been REALLY wanting for ages and ages. It was one of the drivers behind me wanting an Xbox at all. I have to say, it totally lived up to my expectations as far as fun goes.

I just have the first Rock Band game, one guitar, drums and a microphone, so we could not quite get the full band experience going. Maybe one day I'll splash out on a second guitar, but not yet.

I had played a bunch at my sister's place on my last vacation, so I had a bit of a feel for the instruments and how the game worked, and I had played with Claudia once since I bought it. I had to explain the whole thing to Doris and Ryan though. It is not super complicated and they understood the gameplay pretty fast.

What surprised me the most was the willingness to have a go at the singing. I don't enjoy it and did not sing, but all the other little songbirds had a go. I have to say it is a very good thing that the TV volume is higher than the singing volume. As a group... not the most beautiful voices. But i will definately say that Ryan put in the best stage performance as this photo shows.

It is also pretty funny how some people were just instantly better at some of the instruments. Claudia - basically never plays ANY video games of any kind. Picked up the guitar and was scoring 80%+ on the mudium difficulty levels. Drums... disaster. I think she did not get more that 20% through a song on easy

Doris - Also not a gamer, but did quite fine on the drums from the start, getting through songs. Guitar... not so much. She could not seem to master the timing and was pretty bad.

Ryan - Did very well at both Guitar and Drums on easy right away, but for some reason insisted on trying medium drums over and over, which he failed EVERY TIME (Sorry Ryan, but the little animated crowd does not lie.) Despite singing in a way that was making my eyes water, the little computer fans went nuts for him and he scored 95% I would give him huge bonus for his acrobatics as well.

I did make some videos as well, but I think I will save those until I can best figure out how to display them.

Claudia has also summed up the game well. "It is fun, but we really are just a bunch of lame-os sitting on the couch with plastic instruments!" I totally agree.

Pumpkin Fest displays

This year the theme of the pumpkin festival was Fairy Tales. So there were a whole bunch of displays/dioramas crafted from pumpkins showing various famous childrens stories. To be honest, I was not as impressed as last year's outer space theme.

Some of the displays, like Gulliver, were pretty great, but there were all too many that seemed to be just a couple of wooden mannequins standing in a small patch of pumpkins. that is uncool.

Here is the very nice Gulliver one. You can see they did a pretty nice giant Gulliver getting tied down by the Lilliputians.

Up a little closer you can see some of the details. Also you get an idea of how huge this particular display was.Now... Little Red Riding hood. Lame. Two wooden figures standing in some pumpkins. They could have made the characters, or some trees or some other think out of pumpkins surely. It is like they were not even trying.

Very disappointing.

Robotic Pancake Picking Machine

I just saw this and I am hypnotized. It is a machine that can pick and stack 400 pancakes per minute. Do yourself a favour and watch this short video.

Things that came to mind while watching this.
1) 400 Pancakes per minute. In a 5 day, 8hour per day work week equals about 960,000 Pancakes. Do we really eat that many pancakes?
2) This Robot REALLY looks like the monster from "The Matrix"
3) The comment from the company Director about how the "Robots allowed us to absorb an number of overheads.... save on labour costs" It is amazing how sanitized the language is when they mean to say "we fired a bunch of people and bought robots"
4) This Robot is really awesome.
5) Would Claudia let me buy one if I promise to eat 960,000 pancakes per week?
6) If I had one of these, I would paint a face on it and name it Flexo.
7) Does ABB build a similar robot that will pour a bowl of fruit loops at 6am on the weekends for Liam? I have some weekend overheads that I would like to reduce.

Pumpkin Festival

As anyone who has been reading for a long time will recall, last year I went to the world's largest pumpkin festival. Well, it was so awesome.... I had to return this year.

As Luck would have it, this year marked the 10th anniversary of the fest. Something that had to clearly be written out with about 50 feet worth of pumpkins.

This year it happened to occur when my mother was visiting. So Mum, Liam and I all packed up and drove to the fest. Here is the smallest pumpkin fan sitting with a cow-pumpkin sculpture, enjoying some roasted cinnamon-vanilla pumpkin seeds (they were awesome.)

More photos will follow, the theme this year was Fairy Tales. Last year was of course Space, you can browse back to the old pumpkin posts last fall for a taste of what will be following.

Last photos of Italy

OK, it has taken a long time, but here are the last photos from the Italy trip that I am going to post. They are just a few rather random images really.

First up, a rather nice one of Claudia and Liam sitting on some steps in Sienna. It is pretty hard to get a photo of these two where both are smiling, looking in the right direction and have their eyes open. This one is nice though. Bonus points for Liam still in full tourist regalia. Funny hats make me laugh.

Of course I brought board games along to enjoy in the evening. We were actually too tired most nights to get aroudn to them, but we did manage to get in one night with the famous train game (Ticket to Ride.) As you can see from the faces, Ryan snatched victory from Claudia in the final moments of this match.

And finally I thought this one was funny. We were walking through a nice old town, I think it was Montepulciano, when I saw this nice single pair of underpants hanging out on the laundry line. Now these underpants can be shown to the entire internet. Enjoy.

Sienna

The next place we went to visit was Sienna. Another hell of parking ensued. After a looooong walk to the middle of the city, we arrived at the centre. I right away remembered this square from the James Bond Film "Casino Royale" it was pretty nice square, there is a famous horse race that takes place here every year. It was happening the week after our visit and there were already quite a few posters and promotions around the town.




We then headed over to the Cathedral, which is also pretty well known. I could write down some facts about it, but I would just be copying from the wikipedia page. So if you want to know about the place, feel free to look it up there.

My perspective.... It was big. lots of marble. Lots of paintings. Lots of tourists.

Quite nice.

Liam particularly enjoyed the patterns on the marble floor and amused himself by walking the patterns while we queued to enter the cathedral.

Nore that he is in full tourist regalia.

brief pause

Hi all.

No posts until Sept 23. My Mother is visiting and I am not really on the web so much.

San Gimignano - Part 2

OK, back to the Italian holiday.

Still in San Gimignano, our group split up. The women and children went shopping and the men decided to walk up the famous tower. I think it really had nothing to do with being men/women, it just worked out that way.

We strolled inside and bought tickets to walk up many stairs.It did not take so long to get to the top, and we had a nice view of the town. Here is the square below, and you can see another of the towers, one that is not open to be climbed though.
I also had a nice view back along the street we had used to walk into town. It really made me think of a maze or some sort of corridor.
From the top, you could see quite far off into the countryside. That is the benefit of all these hilltop towns in tuscany. Nice views.
Inside the tower, was nothing. It was just a hollow stone shell, apparently it had been used for everything from storage to a home for lepers over the centuries. This was not one of those palace or fortress type structures.

In the adjoining building at the bottom, there was some nice art though. This was not part of the tower proper, but the now-museum that you needed to pass through to get in and out of the tower.
After our tower excursion was over, we all met up on the steps out front. Here is a nice group image of Claudia and Liam with Oma and Opa.That is it for the San Gimignano stuff. On to the next exciting town....