Since about 4 weeks I have not been able to play any squash because of a modest injury to my Achilles tendon. It is getting better but it is not yet gone. I will play on Monday if all goes well. Let’s see how Monday is going to go.
Cigars and beer?
for the ones who did not yet try it. Cigars and beer does not work very well, even if it is a good German beer.
Saturday is Soccer Day
Since the beginning of April I have been going to the Dallin School with Ivan where all U6 Arlington boys play in the Soccer Clinic. Today the entire family went and Ana and myself brought the ‘sillas de capitan’ (camping chairs) which we bought maybe ten years ago when we were still living in Chicago. They were Ana’s idea and have gone with us on every camping trip and on many excursions since.
The clinic consists of a master coach (Dinelli) and a helper coach who will spent the first 40 minutes to let the kids play with the ball, performing a number of cool games, most of them involving the kids running around with the ball and someone chasing them. The kids enjoy this and they have their regular water breaks and the round of instructions. In the last part of the hour the teams play against each other by splitting each team in two and play two separate games with the teams playing next to them. On the Dallin field there are about ten teams in total nicely separated by their shirt color. Ivan plays in the royal blue team. Eric — a good friend of Ivan — plays in the orange team and Cal — another good friend of Ivan — plays in the green-blue team. I am not sure what the color is officially called, they must have a more snappy description of the color.
Ivan enjoys his soccer, fully dressed up with cleats, shin guards, long blue socks and his royal blue Arlington soccer shirt. He just loves to play around with other kids and he has some reasonable skills. If no one encourages and instructs him he would just run around on the field without paying too much attention to the ball. Once I remind him to look out for the ball and try to kick it he even makes some nice plays. He always scores one or two goals and he is a good team player. These games are not competitive and nobody keeps the score except sometimes the boys secretly wisper the score to each other 🙂 Boys will always be boys I guess.
‘Seta y Pete’ are gone
While most people think video games have only negative effects I wanted to share an experience with Markus these last two weeks. Markus went to the dentist for the first time in his life and behaved very well, as Ana reported. The dentist was very happy with the state of his mouth, teeth, gum and all, and showed Markus his x-ray. He showed him that his new teeth are already coming. When the dentist saw that he was still using a pacifier — pete as we call it — he was alarmed and told Markus that he was already very big and needed to kick the bad habit. Ana was delighted and of course supported the suggestion full heartily. Markus was equally convinced that he was a big boy but the ‘pete’ still had a large attraction. So, Ana promised him Wii-Lego-Batman if he could stop using a pete for at least one week. Since that day Markus has slept without a pacifier and without his beloved top from Mummy — seta, short for camiseta.
Today after almost two weeks I went together with him and we bought the video game together, which was a very happy event for him. He also enjoyed playing the game with his brother.
Carpenters….
After Pup left we called an Exterminator (from Cambridge Chemicals) to have a look at our attic. During the time Pup slept upstairs he was noticing saw dust and some sand coming off the ceiling in regular intervals. He also noticed some noises like crackling and small pieces of material falling under the panels of the roof.
I opened the panel, where we had identified the largest amounts of dropping and found in the process a number of carpenters — as we had started to call them (carpenter ants) — but nothing close to what I was expecting to find. Of course the insulation was still hiding the roof’s wood but I was disappointed. The insulation at the highest point showed some signs of a water leak, though everything was dry as far as I could tell.
The exterminator came the next day and from the dust I did not cleanup he determined that those were carpenter ants at work and that he could not do much as the whole nesting was completely invisible due to the paneling and insulation. He suggested to redo the roof and kill the beasts during this process. That suggestion did not seem very reasonable to me as redoing the roof is a major undertaking and costs a lot of money. He also told me that with a ‘bomb’ which releases aerosols the ants could certainly be largely killed but would equally certainly come back. After I offered him to expose the two biggest spots of activities down to the roof frame he indicated that he thought he could exterminate the ants.
So, I went back and took down the insulation, which was actually really easy and found in the highest piece of the frame a large ‘gallery’ about one finger thick, which was completely carved out of the wood, but now there was not a single carpenter in sight. I found one later in the room but nothing on the inside of the roof close to the gallery. They might have moved into a different spot as Wikipedia suggests 🙂
I am pretty sure we are not going to redo the roof just for the ants, and I think I will just open the panels and the insulation and exterminate the ants myself. Maybe I will on top of that place a aerosol bomb in the attic to make double sure the ants get killed. We are also spraying the garden and the foundations and drop some granulate against the ants from the outside. I am already now quite happy that I opened the panels and insulation in the attic because now I have seen what the roof looks like from the inside. I think I can easily redo the attic and even do a better job than what is there right now. I might even be able to put in the new sky light by myself — Ana would really love to have more light in the North side of the attic.
Stay tuned…. I will report on the next steps.
Recent Events worth Mentioning
Blake rolled over for the first time last Friday. We did not see how he performed the rollover but he definitively changed back-to-belly. He is starting to become dangerous 🙂
Ana enjoyed her real birthday with a good glass of cava at the evening camp fire.
‘Opa and Papi’ cut down the two trees, which covered our front view and we have now a nice lucid boys room and dining room as well as even more light in the sun room. The sighting of the house has really made a big leap forward. We also of course now have a lot of wood to be dried and burned in the not so distant future. To perform the lumber-jack action I bought a manly chain saw with a 20 inch (50 cm) blade. For the wood splitting I have now a real ax. I hope we can make further progress on the remaining wood cutting action.
Finally, Pups, in an effort to keep our kitchen organized, carried out the garbage in the dark of the night and fell off our retaining wall. Well, he tried to step down in total darkness and did not realize the size of the step. Luckily, he seems to have a very alert guardian angel and good coordination to avoid serious injury…. he just scratch off some skin on his thumb. It looks like all the praying has paid off.
That is all for today, keep connected 🙂
The Tree Project – How it all started
It really started when my father visited in May 2010. He wanted to check out Blake and during his visit I started to cut down the first somewhat larger but relatively easy to cut tree.
Pup with the simple tool we used.
You can faintly see the tree trunk still in the back.
Happily sitting on what was before the tree.
Well, these are only the branches.
We talked a lot about all the trees that still needed cutting on our property to protect the house form growing over but it looked like a humongous task at the time. Pub was listening (which I did not really notice much) and on my birthday I received a very thoughtful birthday card (as usual) but also included a small fortune to buy proper equipment to do the cutting by performing a real arborist’s task. I was impressed but never spent the money until finally end of July I bought the equipment and started to implement the master plan. All trees I could do without I had completed over the years.
Picture of the house from advertisement.
Here is a picture how the front of the house looked like before we bought it. The two trees on the left and right hand side of the house both had to go. They were not nice to begin with and they were taken a lot of light from the house. It was reasonably straight forward to get ride of those. The cedar tree (probably a red one) on the left side of the house had carpenter ants in it as I found later. An interesting fact is that the flowers somewhat in front of the stonewall in the front cover actually a part of the wall which is out of shape. They seem unmotivated when you look at them but did not catch our eye originally. Of course when we visited the house we noticed the somewhat decaying wall.
Later I started to severely trim down the trees shading our driveway right at the right side of our house. It was the first higher climb and without any safety, but is was easy enough. The last simple tree action was late fall last year the trimming of all low hanging branches of all trees in the street in front of our house and the most annoying ones over the driveway. Looking again at it now, I should have taken off much more, but that is for another time.
Pup in Arlington
Monday May 3 — Martin’s birthday — I get a phone call from him. Apart from accepting my congratulations he tells my that my father is about to come to visit us for 3 weeks arriving Wednesday May 5. Surprise…… we knew he was planning on coming but we had not agreed on anything more concrete than summer. Well, I should have expected this, as usual nothing happens until finally it cannot happen quickly enough 🙂 That’s how it works with my dad.
We had to wait for more than an hour at the airport although the plane landed 15 minutes before schedule and about the same time before we reached the gate. We were on time. Finally he walked out and after some explanation we understood. The process at the entry into the US took a little longer due to incomplete forms and some complications filling the additional forms. We arrived quickly at the PausHaus in Arlington which got excellent critics reviews, mostly because of the nice location and the great garden….. we knew that.
On the first day after the arrival we were not able to locate a mass in time but everything was set from then on: the church of choice was Saint Eulalia [speak: julalie (German pronunciation)]. St Eulalia is located seen from the PausHaus beyond the wonderful golf course along Hutchinson Road and is part of the neighboring Winchester. Pups has quickly made contact to the priests and the parish members, which offer themselves to drive him back home after the rosary sessions. He is excited about the openness of the US American and only the fact that they speak to early at the end of the mass and that they are maybe not pious enough gets some negative mentioning. Well it looks like that he is enjoying his stay here quite a bit and he has found some nice spots to help out in the house.
For example the roof rail on the East side of our house was first cleaned by him, I did not finish the cleaning after last fall…. he also tried our very very heavy electronic lawn mower. The battery makes up a good fraction of the weight. Also very much appreciated was the sweeping action on the patio and our driveway. Raking of the backyard was on the program as well, while I was cutting large quantities of wood for our regular evening camp fires. After the summer, I hope, we will have burned all the large pieces of dead wood on our property while having excellent camp fire evenings.
Opa made friends quickly with Blake, Ivan and Markus, but with Gisele it would take a while, But finally ‘Vulcana’ also had to give in, another victim of Opa’s charms.
Physics Rocks
This entry should have been made on May 10, 2010 but I did not get to it on time. So here it is and in fact you might find it under May 10, after I have figured out how to change the date on a post. So…. on May 9th there was an event organized by one of the seniors in the physics department which was supposed to show that physicists are also cool people, and very adequately it was dubbed ‘physics rocks’.
I was not very interested in this event, when I received e-mails asking for participation but at least I was reading them. A little later I saw Peter fisher signing up to be the MC of the event which I incorrectly interpreted as putting up records. He asked me whether I was interested in ’emceeing’ with him and clarified that it mean Master of Ceremony which means to announce the acts during the event. After some hesitations I agreed and did not do much. Peter decided we were going to use the Man in Black as a theme: ‘The Professors in Black’, him being ‘K’ me being ‘J’. The evening arrived and I just put on my black suite, the white shirt and the new black tie, which Ana bought for me the day before. I checked my self in the mirror and I have to admit, proper clothes do make a difference. Of course I also shaved and shampooed my hair for the occasion. I took Ana’s shades to have some weird glasses and our sleek black camera to be used as a neuralizer later in the evening. On arrival (we were maybe 40mins early) I caught up with Peter and we started to prepare our jokes, which were straight forward. The event started and the rest is history. We had a blast and enjoyed the improvised happening. It was impressive to see another side of some of our colleagues and students. The Tech had a big article in its edition 26 (May 10).
After the event Pup and Ana were speaking for a long time of a memorable Tango Performance from Professor Vuletic, while I rode home with Richard Milner who gave a solid guitar performance during the concert, culminating in a cover of ‘Free Bird’ from Lynyrd Skynyrd.
By the way, in case you have enough time to download and watch, this is almost the complete event recorded with a pretty decent video camera.
Producrivity
some late evenings are productive, like for example today.