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.
Meatballs!!!!
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.