Author: Crisis

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The ‘New Playroom’

It has been a while since my last post but I a determined to improve. The last project in the house was out play room for the kids. On the long run we want a nice wood floor and possibly even redo the wall right under the roof but that is a major project and needs time and money both of which are not available in abundance these days.

So, I looked at the situation to see what could be improved with some time and some money and it struck me: the wood paneling and all the build-in furniture are all super dark stained wood. The dark color combined with the small windows in those two rooms takes away all the light. This is why I thought let’s lighten this room up and just paint over the dark stained wood in white color, typical New England style and much against all I learned from my father, to leave the wood in it beautiful natural color. To set some nice accents and as those are the future rooms for our oldest Ana and I decided to paint the window frames in a strong color. We choose green for the back room and orange for the front. In the front we were also going to paint the build-in shelve in orange, it had this really awful color: a light red going towards pink, how could anyone choose this color in the first place?

This is the shelve after Seb and I had inserted the TV

Anyway there we were, the painting was painful, the grooves between the panels clearly require a brush and no rolling and the dark color clearly required two passes for a good fraction even three passes were required to avoid the dark color to come through. Painting the doors for the build-in shelves was dreadful with all the blind style which has remarkably many spots you can miss :-).

So many spots to miss on these blind style doors.

The first real hick-up though was the choice of the green color for the back room accents. Ivan and I went off to ACE hardware to make our choice with Ana giving us her trust. We went for the beautiful ACE color F34 ‘Dragon Lair’ but it did not meet approval with the boss: it is easy to pick the wrong green I had learn. Ana and I had to go again and we converged on F31 ‘Hearty Hosta’. Thanks to this little back and forth our

First try – F34 – Dragon’s Lair

window has now about six layers: three Dragon’s Lairs and three more Hearty Hostas.

F31 – Hearty Hosta our second try. Much more froggy. I like it!

Luckily, for the orange tone Ivan and I succeeded on the first try with the somehow obvious F19 – Juicy Orange. Here is a sequence showing how things developed. The painting of the shelves took some time and I had to decommission the video system (including TV, DVD and video consoles) for a week. Our kids dealt with it but not without Markus reminding me every day that I had to complete the job, which I did yesterday night, one day before the deadline I had promised them.

F19 – Juicy Orange – a first pick success. Markus loves it!

The remainder (the orange skylight and the left wall in the front will still take me some time but it is already now clear that the project was a resounding success. The new playroom has so much more light and looks so much more friendly.

The take home message for today is: Never underestimate the effect of a (decent) paint job!

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Historic

I was browsing through our pictures and found this one…. Summer is so much fun in particular when there is snow outside. Looking forward to the summer fun this year.

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The Athletic Season coming to an End

Halloween Baseball Ending
Life is good in the outfield when the sun shines.
Halloween Baseball Ending
Weird but fitting picture for Ivan’s last baseball game
of the season on Halloween weekend.

In the last few weeks we have been going to the weekend athletic activities with jackets and it was starting to feel a little cold and with the leaves collecting on the grass in the yard it has become most obvious that fall is in full bloom. This is the time when the athletic activities of the kids also come to an end, which I take as a good opportunity to collect some of the nicest pictures taken and describe some highlights.

Ivan’s First Home Run: The second to last game of the season Ivan hit is first quite unlikely home run. I am quite sad I did not record it, I was about to, but kind of thought it was not going to be interesting. It turned out to be the most memorable play of this season. So, here is how it all happened. Ivan was up to bat and he had been able to connect with the ball a number of times before so he was clearly in good spirits. He missed the first but on the second try he hit the ball not very hard in the direction of the pitcher which should have caught it but did not so Ivan’s run to first base made sense but the pitcher picked up the ball and threw it towards first base and I thought he was going to catch it but he did not. I was happy and thought Ivan was taking this as an opportunity to stay at the first base. Ivan though had a different reading on the situation and sprinted towards second base, the first basement gained control of the ball quickly and threw the ball towards second base and the ball arrived certainly quite ahead of Ivan but, the second basement missed the catch and Ivan made it and I was glad and thought that was it, but Ivan kept on the run as the ball was missed and people scrambling. By now there were first shouts of team mates and coaches to stay on safe grounds but Ivan was going. He would have been caught on third base again but it happened again the ball was not thrown very well and the catcher missed. By now the recommendations to Ivan were very audible to just play it safe but Ivan had other plans, he was seeing the home base and was going for it full blast. I was sure he had pushed it too far as the catcher actually was one of the older kids who would not miss a catch. I was already feeling sorry for him that he would loose this nice run and even mildly upset how you could be so irresponsible to just not play it safe but magic was in the air and the catcher missed the catch and Ivan brought it home. At this point everybody was cheering and he got a roaring applause in the bull pen…. He took a big risk, but the turn out was awesome. The home run, not sure but maybe even the only one of the season for the entire team put quite a swagger into our oldest step.

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Flying to Geneva, again

It is going towards Thanksgiving and the semester lies in its last stretch. Students are dropping their least liked classes and professors are lookoing forward to the end of the term. At the same time temperatures are approaching real cold, the afternoons become very short and leaves are piling up in the yard. Rakink seems useless but it is not as this one year showed when I waited for the last leave to drop and was barely able to make it for the towns last pickup….. Ana had chipped in quite a bit which did not seem fair. Anyway I am on my way to Geneva to one of those meeting that seem useless when you do not go but turn out to be very useful once you go.
One of the invariably useful features of CERN trips are that there is nothing else but work to do and magically lots on the todo list gets done and the inbox clears up. Looking forward to be back tough.

Update…. it seems my luck is running out. I lost my flight in Charlotte and l am just barely making it back to Boston. Is that what you call poetic justice, as I left Ana home to deal with the new car purchase? Maybe it is just fate to make sure the, two of us are available to buy the new car 🙂   I think that must be it. So, bottom line: My luck is not running out but just continuing even in a bigger picture.
Let’s see how this plays out tomorrow…. at least there is never a dull moment in our lifes.

It turns out missing the flight was a blessing as we did buy the new used car in the morning of the next day — would not have happened with Ana by herself — I had a much better 1 stop flight to Geneva and I even had a good talk at the C&O week. I also did not miss the important dinner of this working week so to summarize, my luck has not run out on the contrary it is intensifying its streak it seems. Hang in there!