Markus had another creative moments when he coined a wonderful new term for the buttocks.
Ana and Markus where chasing each other through the house pinching each others buttocks. There was lots of yelling and laughing and suddenly, Markus was running after Ana trying to reach for the object of desire, he started screaming: meatballs!!! meatballs!!!
I found this a wonderful expression, probably motivated by the movie ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ which we recently enjoyed. Checking with my native colleagues nobody had heart the expression used before in this context. So, I have to conclude that this is another of Marki’s creative moments.
Preparing the Garden, Fruits Part 1
Today we continued with the gardening and started finally on our fruit planting. We have a long list of things we like and today we started with the berries. We have planted 4 small blueberry bushes, defining the property line with Jim and Joanie just across the sun room. I hope they will catch on, in particular as they do not get too much direct sun. They are supposed to grow as high as 2m, and they should form a solid hedge. We purchased four different types which will allows for plenty of cross pollination. In blueberries a decent fruit harvest depends quite a bit on the cross pollination. Of course it will take a while until we get a decent hedge and who knows when we are going to eat our first blueberries.
The three raspberry bushes we bought were a little more difficult to place. Those guys spread like weed and we wanted them to live in our forest, maybe even defining the forest line a bit and cover the ramp which is mildly visible from the patio. I wanted to put them on the left-hand side right on the tree line, but Ana pointed right at the middle, same line. The big advantage of that spot is of course that there is a big rock which will prevent the raspberries from spreading into the garden. Raspberries fresh from the bush are one of my favorite fruits. I cannot wait for them to carry the first fruit.
Meanwhile, we have also been improving on the living room furniture: we have found a super large coffee table fitting our large sofa. Ana added also a nice seat on the TV side. Both pieces are really breaking the general style of the rest of the living room but in a nice way, we think 🙂
Spring Update
Even as the posts have not been very regular from the Paus Haus, life has gone on. Blake is still doing great, growing quickly and developing his skills. By now he can hold on to something given to him, he stands when given two supporting hand he can grab on to and he is smiling like a little ‘Futzemann’. When Ana talks to him he starts to make noises trying to formulate a response. His bothers and his sister simply adore him. There seem to be very little jealousy issue with neither Gisele not Markus. At the moment Blake is sleeping between Ana and myself because we decided the old crib was not really good enough any more. We will by a crib/bed for him very soon.
Meanwhile our main work in the garden is really finished. The terrace is dug including the building of the retaining wall and putting in some rugged grass seeds. There were a whole bunch of spots which needed some more grass. The first patch in front of the house has by now a whole bunch of little grass plants starting to peak out. The kids have pretty strictly stuck to my ‘orders’ not to walk over the freshly seeded spots. It is interesting to see that they really listen. Our little vegetable garden though has not the smallest plant yet. I am interested to see how long it will take.
Today we went with the kids to the Wilson Farms which is mostly one big store, where one can buy fresh fruit, vegetable and other ‘organic’ products. It also has a small gardening part where we saw some nice blueberry, raspberry and blackberry bushes. They are not ccheap but also not too expensive. We will plant some 4-5 blueberry bushes on the property line which is right in front of the sun room. Ana likes to create a little more privacy on that end. At the upper end of our property, where the forest starts we will plant some raspberries and blackberries to contain the leaves and make the view on the upper end even nicer. The plants should gow up there and we just have to worry that they do not spread out of the forest line 🙂
Spring has started, last week we had three days with 28-32 C which was like an explosion for the plants. Meanwhile the temperatures have gone back done but we had today a beautiful day at up to 18 C. I am in fact right now enjoying the sun room with open windows, a cigar and a good calvados. Leonard Cohen is singing his greatest hits which always reminds me of a trip to the black forest with Christoph Klemp, who lead the older folks of the catholic youth in the St. Evergislus parish.
I remember there were Georg Voelzgen, Martin Wolf, Ralph Wingendorf, myself and our fearless leader Christoph. We drove in his old VW beattle with Leonard Cohen and excellent conversation. The backpacks were loaded on top of the car. We got excellent Spaetzle with cheese and tomato sauce from his aunt in Freiburg, if I remember correctly, and went to have some great hiking. The interruptions at the Kneipp stations I will never forget. They were even in the summer very very cold and Ralph and I had a contest who could stay inside longer, watching our feed and lower legs turn red and blue, but the walking got so pleasant afterwards. We found and ate a whole bunch of wild blueberries. Poor Martin Wolf did not take them well and the blueberry incident on the stairs has become history, when they all came back and fell down the stairs…. This long hike was also the first time I remember that I was completely destroyed a few kilometers before we arrived at our destination. Luckily we had some wine gums, the ones with sugar, and they saved me. That was probably the first time I experienced a recovery from too low blood sugar. I was fine and full of energy again after a 15 minutes break.
Now that we have decided to stay in the US — I had gotten an excellent offer from the ETH in Zuerich to become the successor of Felicitas Pauss — Ana and I are thinking about all the things we would like to get done in our house and garden. There is a long laundry list but we have time and we will start soon to knock off the most important things. I think the new table for our dining room will come first, followed maybe by our master bed room layout. In the summer I would like to build a deck in front of the sun room to make use of our rather large garden. We are really blessed with a wonderful property which we can improve over the years to give the kids a great place to grow up. They often do not even want to leave the house because they are so comfortable here.
The First Spring Weekend
This year spring started with a wonderful weekend. Friday had some beautiful weather in store for us, so beautiful in fact that I decided to leave really early (around 16:00). I spent a number of hours in the garden with the kids jumping around and Ana keeping Blake happy and chilling on our little terrace. This weekend we decided to make a big push in the garden instead of doing excursions to the local beaches. It turned out to be the right decision. We had a wonderful Saturday with temperatures in the high teens and maybe even into the low twenties.
We finished our project to fill the areas around the house with our natural stone from the terrace digging. After filling the north side, where we park the car, we liked it so much that we started considering filling also the south side in between the bushes in front of the sun room.
I also finished filling up the right front part of the garden with a layer of good black dirt and planted grass seeds for a dense lawn. Once I drove by the garden center I was tempted and further encouraged with the kids to buy some vegetables. We bought a broad variety but only planted three types in front of the back window: carrots (Markus’ favorite — he likes the color and if they are cooked he even likes eating them), water melon (Ivan’s favorite — he loves to eat them) and broccoli (Gisele’s favorite — first thing she will eat on any plate). We marked the location on the retaining wall and hope that there is no more frost, otherwise we might not see any of those veggies.
Finally after cleaning up the back of the garden I continued digging our terrace. I established a new and more efficient scheme, in which I will take care of the smaller stones while digging. Instead of storing them in a temporary location I was using them to fill in the houses’ south side. The dirt from the dig is now used to even out the bottom of the terrace right at the houses south side. I increased the wall and the filling goes well so far. I will have to plant a lawn there but that should be fine because the lawn there is terrible. I made quite some progress on Sunday, which was another beautiful day with lots of sun but it was rather chilly. The terrace building has been going very slowly because the ground has become mostly just rocks. On the positive side though I have been finding a lot of rocks which are big enough to build the retaining wall 🙂 . Presently, I am estimating that the terrace will be completed after maybe one but definitively after two more weekends.
Spelling….
I noted that my spelling really sucks when I write blogs. And after that I also noted that usually my e-mails contain some spelling mistakes as well as more serious mistakes: through passes the spell checker but if it is supposed to be throw? not to mention the thens and thans what to do? I guess I have to be more careful.
Slow Saturday: Our Favorite Frogs
Today we were wiped out: Ana and myself of course, the kids were bouncy as usual. Unfortunately it was another pretty cold day with -6 C around noon and we stayed inside quite a bit. We watched ‘Aliens in the Attic’ which was okay but not really great either. Afterwards we had a yummy lentil lunch which took me out for a while — dosing off on the sofa — but afterwards the beautiful sunshine tricked me and I bundled up the 3 kids and went with them for a ‘parque and muffin’ trip. The Brackett school playground was of course deserted but we got out and played ‘Bodenmonster’ and ran up the hill once and down again. The Bodenmonster game consists mainly of me growling and trying to catch the kids while they are on the playground installation and I am not supposed to mount. This kept us busy for quite a while until I noted that Gisele’s hand were freezing. So we packed up and went to Jam’n Java where everybody got a muffin and a hot chocolate. It was obvious that the kids still had not had enough active playtime because they were all over the place in the coffee shop. Gisele and Ivan did not really finish their muffins (Ivan really had a chocolate chips scone, which was not as good as he had thought) but Markus went all the way. When we were driving back home Markus asked where we were going and mentioned that he would love to go to Chipotle. I asked him ‘Are you really still hungry?’ and he replied ‘YES’ ecstaticly.
When we got home I sat down at the computer and again stared at the frogs in my desktop. A while ago Markus and I were browsing the web for cool frog pictures. We stored Markus’ favorite pictures and finally today, as it is very cold outside we sat down and posted them in our blog. The top favorit is of course orange and black, Markus favorit colors. It is a poison dart frog.
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Of course I also looked through the Web and found together with Ivan his favorit frogs. They are not all that different, meaning they are exotic frogs, but the colors do differ and reflect more of what Ivan considers cool colors.
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Playing at Home against BSC Allston
Today I had my first club match playing the second position. I lost clearly 3:0 against Shane, a friendly guy from New Zealand. BSC Allston is the second best club in the league, so there is not too much shame in loosing.
I could have done a number of things better, though. First it is important to remember that if something does not work, do not insist and make the same mistake over and over again.
Shane had a good hard serve onto my backhand which I tried to cut off and put in as a nice drop, generally speaking probably the right idea. Unfortunately my drops went mostly into the tin, which cost me well over five points — maybe even ten. This can not happen when one plays against someone who is as good as oneself or maybe even better.
The other thing I am still doing is that I do tend to bring back the ball long, even if I am upfront and could drop effectively. I will have to work on that shot. Dropping is still one of my weak points.
Less obvious for an outside observer also that I did not employ my patience to set up the rally for the point. I was too hasty trying to make the point while it would have been better to keep the ball in the game and wait for a clearer situation.
Well, as long as I see what I do wrong I can still improve: next time it will be better!
New Location, New WordPress Version
All right friends. I have now moved my blog to its hopefully final location. I created a nicer name and updated the latest and hottest version of wordpress 2.9.1…. the blog was permanently reminding that my version was pretty old. The interface might have improved, I am not sure yet.
News on Cigars
Recently I have been getting back to my old vice somewhat more seriously…. yes I love cigars. Smoked together with a whiskey, a bourbon, a decent Rum or maybe a Cognac, there is few greater pleasures.
Due to the Cuba embargo, which is still active since the October 1960, there are no Cuban cigars around in this country. At least they are not sold over the counter to a normal person like me. Making the best of it I am studying the locally available cigars again. After spending 8 years in Chicago you can imagine that I am not a novice to non-Cuban smokes, but after three years in Geneva I had to brush up on my inventory.
I still like the Padrons which are really a great deal, as well as the CAO Brazil cigars which are a bit more flavorful. But there are also some new ones which had not tried. Right now for example I am sucking on a wonderful cigar from Alec Bradley (Vice Press). This is really as good as it gets, flavorful, a big gauge, which I do like when I have the time. Together with it I am sipping slowly on my Laphroaig a wonderful tart whiskey — Andreas recommended it and I have thankfully accepted as one of my preferred drinks — straight up and please, not too cold.
Watching Blake
While Ana is cooking lunch I am supposed to watch Blake. He is sitting here in front of me on his little chair and I am watching the little man. He is not happy when his hat gets over his eyes o I decided to take off the head.
I am sitting here in t-shirt on my favorite seat, legs up on the ottoman, it cannot be too cold for Blake. It could maybe be a little too loud as Van Morison is playing for me a wonderful set of songs… ‘Best of Van Morison’ or something like it. Anyway it is awesome. Ana also made me a lemon-green tea which is surprisingly good, too. Blake dosed of for a few minutes but is now searching, probably reminded by some feeling of emptiness in his stomach. Luckily our lunch is just cooking and Ana has come by to make Blake happy.
Now will have to convince my older children to come with me and cleanup the play room …. one of my ‘honey do’ duties as I just being instructed.
Looking at the pictures I find this one from yesterday night, me and Blake, and noticed that my hair is really getting long. Hmmm, but winter ain’t over yet.
