One of of those lonely weekends was coming up and on Friday morning I realized that I had made amazing progress with my to do list, the one I keep to make sure work will stay organized. I was thinking about the weekend plan and in fact there was not too much to do. I also thought about my brother Seb who had been visiting us in Boston not too long ago and it hit me. I h ad never visited him since he moved to Switzerland, not even as I was spending probably about 50% of my time in Switzerland. So, I made a plan to go visit him for one day and be back at CERN someday later on Sunday to make sure the to do list would not suffer too much.
I called my brother and told him I would be coming the same night, he said it would be great, I got a few hours later to the train station and hopped on the train. It was a direct one and supposed to arrive after about 4 hours. I got out at St. Gallen where Seb picked me up a little before midnight. We had a smooth ride through the swiss country side and I was reminded again how on the map a drive can look straight forward but once on the ground it becomes long. Not uncommon in Switzerland 😉 During our ride Seb was playing some music and after some searching he skipped to Bernhoft a Norwegian musiciant I had just recently discovered randomly browsing through odd music on youtube. What a coincidence!
We arrived at Seb’s place and we grabbed a nice local good swiss beer and chatted along. Great to have a brother and just chat about what is going on. In such conversations it is comforting and kind of amazing to have the connection of having grown up together and gone through a whole bunch of stuff together. Things I usually even do not remember but they are all there. Cool to have brothers and sisters!!
Es muss Weihnachten 2007 oder 2008 gewesen sein als wir uns in Deutschland die Feier in der grossen Familie gefallen liessen. Bei diesem Anlass klagte Alex zum wiederholten Male ueber die Qualitaet des Kaffee’s aus ihrem wunderbaren Vollautomat, der dunkelroten “Vienna Millenium” von Saeco. Da unsere Machine am CERN kurz vorher ihren Geist aufgegeben hatte nach ungefaehr 1.5 Jahren (eigentlich viel zu frueh und durch einen unbedarften Versuch die Machine wieder in Gang zu bringen) kam mir die Idee Alex von dieser Machine zu befreien. Alex hat uns dann tatsaechlich die Machine ueberlassen und seitdem hat sie bis Mai 2012 hervorragende Dienst geleistet, ich wuerde schaetzen ueber 10 Kaffees im Durchschnitt pro Tag. Das waeren also (bin mir fast sicher wir haben im Januar 2008 gestartet) 4.25 * 365 * 10 = 15512.5 Kaffees insgesamt.
Leider hat mein treuer Wegbegleiter durch so viele lange Naechte schliesslich in der letzten Woche seinen Geist aufgegeben. Das Mahlwerk will die Bohnen einfach nicht mehr zerkleinern und in den Schlund der Presse schieben…. Ruhe in Frieden mein alter Freund!
I just made an entry I had made pictures for but never got around posting it. It is about typical fall activities in the garden. In case you are not reading the entire blog the whole time, here is a pointer to the post for you pointer. I am typing this while I am flying back from Geneva to Boston. I am sitting here in Newark (NJ) waiting in the Lounge of Continental/Unite for my short flight to Boston. What a wonderful day…. I had a business class flight and was sleeping like an angel, did not even wake up for the 5-star lunch.
View onto the airport. A beautiful winter noon, taking it easy in the lounge.
Boston is one of those areas on the map, where you have seasons, in fact you really have 4 seasons. There is winter, with pretty much at least one guaranteed snowstorm and several days if not weeks well below freezing, then spring comes along, with an amazing explosion of the vegetation. It is even more effective as over the winter you had almost forgotten how beautiful the natural colors (apart from gray) are. There are days that almost resemble summer with sunshine but it is not really hot, and over the evening the temperatures go back to a very reaonable level, sometimes they even go close to zero, but that is rather the exception. Everybody is getting excited for the summer, which beaches are we going to invade, maybe there is one we have not yet set foot on. Slowly we get used to the rich colors and prepare ourselves for the sometimes steaming hot summer in Boston. The kids are out of school and they spent most of their time outside, chasing adventures with the neighborhood kids.
Summer is there, we go to the pools and the beaches, windows and doors in the house are permanently open a great season to smoke cigars without smoking in the entire house. But all good things must come to an end. The end of the summer as a season becomes quite obvious when the kids start school again (the semester starts at MIT). But the Boston area is merciful and often the first weeks of Fall are beautifully mild; they are often referred to as the Indian summer.
There will be the day when it becomes clear that this is going to be the last BBQ on the terasse with the famous Hamburgerlers and Papi’s tasty special salad. We start to have to think about the windows and the door, they cannot stay open anymore and the first heating kicks. And then fall sets in, the leafs change colors from green to all possible tones of yellow, orange, red and brown and they start falling…. a spectacle to watch but as a home owner you develop a different view because now it is time to work in the garden and every weekend several hour will be spent to clean out the leafs. Of course one could have a company come and do it for us but the work has its nice sides.
Raking the leafs is the most ‘Zen’ activities I know around the house. Snow shoveling comes close, though the temperatures and the time when you have to do it (early morning) usually affect my ‘Zen’ quite a bit. The task of leaf removal is very well defined and it takes long, in fact it is rare that one can do it all in one shot with our garden. On the other hand it is not infinitely long. So one goes out gets the tools and starts to harp with the rake over the ground, in regular and long strokes the leafs are forces into piles. The fewer leafs the less power is required but of course the overall amount of leafs is fixed so with few leafs to clean the number of times you rake the entire garden increases. During the raking I often meet the neighbors and we talk about the usual things. Kids, the garden, the weather, work, the car and whatever else comes up. We have a wonderful set of neighbors and we get along very well with them, at least this is what we think. Often I have lit a fire in the back to burn some of the dead wood of our garden and sometimes we agree when it gets dark to grab a beer and sit around the fire and enjoy a wonderful evening together. Ana and I do this not so rarely, but this I can talk about in another post.
In the first year I put out over 150 leaf bags, I seem to remember that it was close to 170, but over the last years the number of bags has decreased as I have been taking down some of the trees and severely pruning others. I like to take a cigar with me when I rake the leafs together. The weather is mostly beautiful, and the kids are in most cases out in the garden, often they come by and ‘help’ me. Recently though only Blake has the stamina to stay around with me. He actually in general has taken a liking in repeating everything I do. The others will help for a few minutes and then find their friends and enjoy their last days before the winter comes back and the circle closes.
How do you convert green into lucid red? Fall just does it with our bushes at the driveway.
Red also right at our kitchen window, where the car is parked.
Now the lawn is leaf-free, of course the more difficult to clean parts are done once a year and that will be when all the leafs are dow, or the time of the last leaf pickup
The result of a weekend of Zen activities in the garden. To be repeated next weekend.
The summer is about to change over to fall…. kids have to go back to school and my sabbatical has already started. In summary quickly, and more will come soon on this channel, we have spent a very nice summer. Even as I was travelling like crazy we had a good time when I was home. We went to Chicago together for ten days which was really a highlight. Even as I was doing shifts from 4pm to midnight we enjoyed the great city and Chicagoland all around. as I said more to come soon.
Hmmmm, the automatic upgrade does not work for me. Is it maybe the fact that I would need ftp to be enabled? Or is it just that it has a bug. The manual upgrade sucks, and the instructions even more so. This seems so trivial to implement, I just did not understand from the instructions what to do, anyway now the newest version 3.3.1 is up and running. Oh mey… the publish button disappeared, it only appears when I use the 2 column version. Sucks!
Today we went with the kids along the minuteman bike path starting from Mill Street. We unpacked the scooters and Blaki’s stroller and off we went along the bike path direction Lexington. It was a perfect spring day with wonderful sunshine but still a little brisk. The kids were glad to be outside, at least that is what it looked like and Ana an I hoped for, and we strolled along the really nice path. Unfortunately there are actually quite some cyclist on the path — no surprise of course — and we had to watch the kids so they would not get in the way to much. Marki tried his new scooter (he has it already since we left Geneva, but rarely used it) and as it is a little more difficult to steer we had some falling but Marki mostly took it his usual way ‘I’m okay!’.
Gisele is by now quite good at using her scooter and she kept up pretty well with our two rowdy boys. Blake meanwhile just took in the fresh air and enjoyed the stroller ride commenting at times in his peculiar way. He demanded food and at times pointed out the good stuff on the path. I was calmly working on my large ice-coffee black which we had picked up at Dunkin Donuts right around the corner. I lite my cigar and Ana and I slowly followed or trailed the kids.
After some time they got bored of the scooters and we started to play racing. Ivan would mostly win, and Markus was the coach, so he would not loose :-). Gisele just played for the interactions and was happy, most of the time. After about 30-45 minutes we arrived at the playground which we figured must be part of Arlington Heights playground.
After our long walk we thought it was a good idea to pick up the two drawers from my ‘new’ office table which I had recovered from the office from one of our retiring researchers. A very nice old simple but solid wood desk. The material is in pretty decent condition but the varnish is all dirty broken up and scratched. Anyway we got the two drawers and on our way back I figured, if I restore the desk I should start with the drawers. So we stopped by ACE hardware and got some stripper and polyurethane and some sand paper.
After we unloaded the car I got started on the drawers while Ana made a classical wok and the kids played with our neighbors kids in the garden. When it was lunch time (a typical Spanish one at 4pm) I had just finished to strip both drawer and sand the first one. The result was rather promising. After an excellent lunch (many mmmmmms!) I sanded the second drawer and carefully put the first layer of polyurethane on. The result I though was really wonderful. The table has a rather dark color but looks so much better in its natural wood color. I really hope I can do the same with the desk.
After this is took a beer and lit a fire in the back to burn off some of the smaller and bigger branches which had fallen off the trees. A very ‘zen’ activity which I shared with Blake. Blake seems to enjoy to spent some quality time with his papi, and I do enjoy my time with him.
Marki on his way to gain some distance to us.
We are getting closer to our little man.
I’m okay!
I’m still okay…. but it hurt a little.
Ana with her cool Ray-Ban knock offs…. she of course claims the are genuine.
Blaki with pete.
Beautiful cherry trees at MIT in full blossom.
Beautiful cherry trees at MIT in full blossom with the dome in the back.
View from above of the freshly restored drawers. They are still drying.
And this is just a corner of the table… still to be restored. And yes, this is my Whiskey glass, my glass with excellent green tea and my fat cigar, in case you were wondering.
After another break I find my blog again to report on the recent events in the PausHaus. With my new ‘job’ at CERN, I have started again to travel like mad. I am predicting that I will this year get the 100k miles card for the first time in my life. During my last trip (Dec 1-10, Geneva) our youngest started to make his first steps. When Ana told me on the phone I was a little upset that the sucker did not do it while I was at home but really had do do his first steps while I was on my trip.
I think it was the Saturday (Dec 4) that he put his best two feet forward and ‘wobbled’ his first two steps through the kitchen. Ana was amazed how the little guy with these short and column like legs could make any steps, but he did. It was not really much of a surprise as he was already able to stand up without any help and stand in the room reigning the plane. Steps of course were only possible coasting along objects of the appropriate height or at the hand of his parents of siblings. He was visible proud of his accomplishments.
Blaki from above.
Meanwhile Ana also got a new camera (for our Dec 3 anniversary, which we celebrated separated by the Atlantic Ocean as last year; not so good for my credit score). I hope later tonight I will be able to upload some pictures of our proud walker.
After very positive results from moving lots of bushes and other plants in the garden I was confident enough that I could move our last tree in the front yard to a the property line behind our shed to create a bit more privacy for our sun room. Ana was of course all excited about this idea.
I started maybe half an hour before the Laker vs. Celtics game which started at 20:00 (this was game two, the Celtics down by 1:0 in the NBA finals). First I stitch out one spade (a special long and narrow one for digging tranches) deep around the tree cutting all the roots in a maybe 0.5-0.75m radius around the about 2.50m high tree. The roots I cut were not particularly big. That went pretty well, but of course the tree did not move a bit when I tried to take it out. Then I dug a 2 spade deep trench around the tree lining up with my previous stitches. By now I was able to get a bit under the tree’s roots and when I finished all around the tree started to move slightly. I thought there must be still some big roots keeping it down below and I asked Guillelmo (who arrived yesterday for a 12 days visit) to help me bend the tree together with its roots in all direction and cut off everything below. I was at that point completely wet from the digging.
We were able to bend the tree over to each side and I found no more roots connecting the tree and we realized that it must be the weight of the dirt sticking to the roots, which made it so difficult to move the tree. We were barely able to get the tree out of the whole after I shook off as much dirt from the roots without destroying more roots. After some major force was applied we were finally able to load the tree onto the wheelbarrow and pushed it with a lot of effort up the slope behind our shed were it fit perfectly into the hole I prepared. Meanwhile, it had gotten dark and I was glad to sit on the sofa after a massive shower. I had gotten so dirty the big hole will be closed tomorrow. Photos will follow soon, stay tuned. Dirty and exhausted, but successful and happy.
