Piet Barber and Family

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2011-05-03T20:24:00.002-04:00

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Ringing in Hope 10K

2011-01-03T19:12:00.008-05:00

To finish out the year, I ran a 10k race with my DailyMile friends. The event is a charity event http://www.ringinginhope.com/ that allows participants to choose one of the race's charities. I chose to support Loudoun's Habitat for Humanity.

I didn't run the day before, and had not done any training explicitly for this race. 10 kilometers (6.213 miles) is a distance I can easily conquer, but don't usually run with a strategy to run this distance at maximal speed. I just jog along at 5 miles per hour until I'm done.

For a race this small, running a 12 minute mile would have me come in dead last with a 10k time of 1 hour 14 minutes. My personal record for a 10k race was 1 hour 6 minutes, 47 seconds, with my Run 2 Register 10k in March 2010. With all the running I've done since then, I was surely in better shape, but with the recent speed of my runs and the lack of targeted training for this, getting a better race time was not a sure thing.

In case you are mistaking me for a competitor, I'm not. I like to think I enjoy running on the back-end of the pack. I don't have any grand visions of me winning any races like this, or even coming in the top half of my age group. The only competitor I have is myself -- to beat that time I made 9 months prior.

I started the race by bringing along my cheering crew, Joey, Joshie, Cecilia and Stacy forced me to leave with a later departure time than I was originally planning, but their company was quite welcome. I met up with my DailyMile friends, with whom I've been sharing running stories for the past 9 months. I've met with Stu a few times before, for long runs along the W&OD. I first met Stu at my first 10K race in March.

The start line was crowded, but started thinning out quickly. The race was self-seeding, where those who thought of themselves as fast would get at the front of the line, and we slow-pokes would bring up the rear. I seeded myself in the middle, mostly because that's where my friends were standing as the race was getting started.

The start of the race was pretty crowded, and just like the last 10k I ran, lots of people passed me. My marathon strategy of "start off slow, then back it off" was really not appropriate for this race. It was more like "start off too fast, then try to keep it up the whole way around." My first mile split was an unbelievable 9:39 pace (which I would never run on my own!). The following miles, I backed off to a more respectable pace in the low or mid 10's.

Because of my late arrival, I didn't drink enough water, and in an effort to minimize the amount of weight I was carrying, I didn't bring along any water bottles or my camel back. By mile 2, I was terribly thirsty. I didn't review the course map or water stations before the race, so I wasn't even sure if there was going to be water on the course or not. I welcomed the water station at the halfway point, where I walked through the water station, quickly downing four paper-cups of water.

I got back out after the water station, and picked up my unreasonable pace. Most of the crowd had already left me behind, and the people for the last half of the race that were going to finish with me were running my speed. My heart rate was high the whole race through, but I still had a little left for the final push.

As I passed mile 6, the final part of the course was uphill. I slowed a bit to get up the hill, but still had some speed left in me. As I crested the final hill, my friend Stu was waiting for me at the top, cheering me on to finish strong. I ran as fast as I could get myself to move, and sprinted as fast as 12 mph for the last 0.1 miles. My friend Ray took some excellent photographs of me sprinting to the finish line.

My final time was definitely a personal record, beating my previous 10k time by almost 2 minutes. The chip time was 1 hour 4 minutes and 48 seconds. I had an electronic chip attached to my left shoe that recorded when I passed the starting plate and when I crossed the finish plates. This was a more accurate account of the time on course than my GPS, since I didn't start or stop the watch at either of the crossing points.

GPS information about the run:

Links to the official race results

Flickr picture gallery taken by my friend Ray

My official standing was 50 out of 56 (eek!), but like I said before, I don't mind that much, since I am not an Olympic running athlete. I suppose technically, I'm still a novice runner. Don't think of me as fast, just persistent. The winner of this race was also a 38 year old from South Riding, but to put his speed into perspective, he was running an average rate (5 minute 15 seconds per mile) faster than my fastest possible sprint speed that I showed at the finish line.

Running with friends is the best part about all of this. I am especially thankful to my friend Ray Javier, who took all of those great photos of me at the finish line. Stacy had brought along the camera, but there weren't as many pictures along the last few yards of the run as what Ray managed to get. Most of the runners you see in the picture above will be running with me at the Ragnar Relay in September, a 196 mile run from Cumberland Gap to Woodrow Wilson Bridge in Maryland, split up among 12 runners.

One Kilomile

2010-12-16T11:25:00.007-05:00

According to my calculations, I just passed 1000 total miles for 2010. That's not 1000 miles of running, but 980 miles of running. Still, 1000 miles should bear some remark, shouldn't it?

First Marathon!

2010-11-05T23:09:00.008-04:00

31 Oct 2010

The Course
This was the 35th annual Marine Corps Marathon, held in Arlington, VA. The race starts near Arlington Cemetery, goes north into Rosslyn, across the Key Bridge, back to Georgetown, South to the Golf Course at Hains Point, back up to the Lincoln Memorial, down the Washington Mall to the Capitol, back west along the Washington Mall to Interstate 395, where we crossed the bridge back into Arlington. The race continues South into Crystal City, turning around, and heading back to the Iwo Jima memorial where it finishes at 26.2 miles.

Here is the Garmin Connect report of the race, as recorded on my super-nifty GPS watch:

Ugh. After reviewing the numbers, my split times really started to suffer after mile 10. This is where everything started falling apart for me, when that pebble got in my shoe. But let me tell you about all the good stuff! Let's back up a bit.

I drove into downtown Washington DC with Stacy and Cecilia the day before. Unfortunately, there was a rally in downtown Washington, called John Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear." The event organizers had originally predicted 40,000 attendees, but ended up with more than 150,000, by some estimates. I had a few friends head downtown for that rally with the Metro system to discover packed lines, and even more packed trains. By the time we drove downtown, the rally was dispersing, and all of the rally-goers were crossing streets, jaywalking, choking up intersections -- and there were also street closures disrupting the flow of traffic.

By the time we arrived at our Hotel, the Hyatt on Capitol Hill (On New Jersey Avenue), it was around 1700. We were sharing a room with our long-time friend Amy, who was also competing in her first Marathon. We brought along sleeping bags and air mattresses, and all crammed into a hotel room. Stacy, Cecilia and I headed to the Marine Corps Marathon Expo at the Washington Convention center on Saturday night, since there wasn't much else to do. Stacy got a chance to see all of the runner-oriented things they sell at Expos. I had already picked up my race bib and race packet the night before, so there was no rush to get to the Expo before it shut down at 1900.

We headed back to our hotel, and settled in for an early night's sleep, getting to sleep around 2130. I took the quite-comfortable sleeping bag and air mattress, while Cecilia and Stacy shared a bed that was really meant for only one. Amy slept in her own bed on her side of the room. Amazingly enough, we all got a good night's sleep, despite my snoring. "Let's just say there was some heavy breathing noises from your side of the room" Amy responded, when I asked her about my notorious snoring.

We woke at 0530, and packet up everything quickly. We were out of the hotel room by 0615, and off to the Union Station Metro stop. Stacy snapped a quick shot of Amy and me, and we headed off to our race.

The Metro ride was empty on the Red Line, but we had to change to the Yellow Line at Gallery Place. We got on an empty train that ended up being completely packed with marathon runners. It's a good thing that it was packed with freshly-showered and good-smelling marathon runners. I can only imagine packing the Metro that tightly with marathon runners after the race.

We got to Pentagon Station, and started walking. We must have hiked 1.5 miles until we got to the "Runner's Village", where we dropped off most of our stuff, and Amy put on her tooth costume. Amy is running to raise money for autism research, and she convinced several dentists in the area to handsomely contribute, so long as she wore a tooth costume with the names of their practices conspicuously displayed thereon.

I was terribly nervous. I turned on my GPS watch, and monitored the heart rate. I was 145 beats per minute while standing still. So many thoughts of failure haunted me. "What if I don't make the 17.5 mile cutoff?" "What if I don't make the 20 mile cut-off?" "I know I run fast enough to make that cutoff, but what if I have to go to the bathroom really badly and lose precious minutes in the Porta-John?!"

There are 30,000 runners in this marathon, so not everybody can line up at the starting line. For a race of this size, everybody lines up in the area for where they expect to finish. So if you are expecting a 6 hour marathon, you are supposed to line up at the 6:00 starting area. Amy is a much more capable runner than I am, so she headed up to the 4:00 expected finisher starting line. I lined up with the 5-hour marathon expected finishing time area. There were many other people much like me at this area. I saw a few VFF runners, and many people had never met a VFF runner before. So I spent some time explaining why I run in these weird shoes. This calmed me down. I met a couple whom I had met at the Marine Corps Run2Register 10k back in March. They remembered me and recognized me, mostly remembering me for the shoes. (amazing!)

The Start
We heard the cannons boom at precisely 0800. However, at the 05:00 expected finish time starting line, we were effectively 20 minutes from the start line. There wasn't much point in running to the start line, so the whole herd of runners started walking, once the 3:00 and 4:00 expected finishers cleared the way ahead. I walked along with some Army soldiers who were carrying 50 pound rucksacks. I asked one of them, "Hey what are you carrying in there, bubble-wrap?" "You want to try it on?" Me, stupidly: "OK!"

Holy schnykies! That was the heaviest thing I'd ever picked up. I am surprised I didn't throw out my back. It probably was the stupidest action possible, holding a heavy backpack like that with one shoulder, at the starting line of a marathon! My back hurt for 30 seconds, but didn't complain after that.

We got to the starting line, and I started jogging. I was following the pace runner, but didn't realize it until about a mile into the race. The pace runner is an experienced runner who holds a sign for an expected finish time. In theory, if you follow him, your finish time will be the same number on the sign he's holding up. In my practice, the 5:00 pacer got further and further ahead of me. By the time we turned onto Spout Run, he was nowhere in sight.

Despite being left behind by the 5:00 pacer, in all honesty, I was running faster than I should have. I needed to find a way to slow myself down so I wouldn't use up everything I had in the first third of the race. I saw this young lady walking, so I slowed down and talked with her. Liz, 20, was running her first marathon, and had just gotten over a bad case of bronchitis. She was told by her doctor that she shouldn't be running in the marathon, but she did it anyway. Her boyfriend, currently in the Navy Academy, was way ahead of us in the 9 minute per mile crowd.

Liz and I ran together up until mile 6, crossing the Key Bridge together, and along Canal Road. She would stop running, and I would slow down, not letting her get too far behind. I would turn around, she would feel guilty, and start running again. At mile 6.5, there was a switchback that went uphill. I am pretty good at running uphill, and terrible about walking uphill, so I ran, and didn't see Liz again until the end of the race.

As we got into Georgetown, the crowds started getting larger again. We hadn't seen many crowds since Rt 29 turned onto Spout Run. Several hundred spectators cheered us on. A whole sorority of Georgetown students cheered us on. One student had a sign that read, "You've got Endurance! Call me! Nicole (phone number)" The crowd here was awesome -- their cheering energized me. I high-fived all members of a fraternity who had lined up giving motivation.

"Make a hole! Gangway!" two guys were running way faster than the rest of the runners at this part of the pack. Just behind these shouting fast runners was a wheelchair competitor. The wheelchair competitors started the race 10 minutes ahead of the cannon booms at the start of the race. They take longer to go up hill, but make up for it on the down hill stretches. As we turned out of Georgetown, the wheelchair competitors, in these really reclined racers flew down the hill on Wisconsin Avenue.

The course turned along the Whitehurst Freeway, along to the Rock Creek Potomac Parkway. This is about where I got that pebble in my VFFs that messed up my run. I stopped right around mile 10.5 to take off my shoe and fish it out. When I put my shoe back on, I started running again, and it felt like the pebble was still in my shoe. This is where the blister started. Looking at my split times, this is where I started to slow down dramatically.

However! Remember that doing this race with a specific finishing time is not one of the goals. The only goals were to finish and finish fast enough to beat the cut-offs. I had to keep reminding myself of that on race day, as well.

Somewhere along in this part of the race, I was quite pleasantly surprised by Stacy and Cecilia cheering me on! I wasn't dressed conspicuously, so I couldn't really expect them to find me in the crowd. Stacy snapped a picture showing my surprise.

I don't remember very much for the next 5 miles. Running along the golf course down to Hains point is pretty unremarkable. I had lost all of the people I was talking to before, and hadn't made any new friends, so I wasn't talking with anybody along this part of the race. As we turned the southernmost part of Hains point, a half marathon seemed so easy! What a cake-walk a half-marathon would have been on this day.

Before the race started, I had set my Garmin into what I called "the grim reaper mode." The Garmin has a virtual partner mode, where it can calculate how far ahead or how far behind I am from a theoretical runner moving at an arbitrary pace. I set my nemesis to the 14 minute per mile pace. This is the pace that you must maintain on average to keep from getting kicked off the course.

There are two cut-offs: one at mile 17.5, on Route 1 (14th Street NW). If you don't make it to that point by a certain time, they will divert you to go directly from mile 17.5 to mile 20, and record your finish time as the most dreadful number of all: "DNF" (Did Not Finish). The second cut-off is somewhere along mile 20. If you don't reach the bridge by 1 PM, they scoop up all runners to re-open Interstate 395. Getting to the cut-off point before the dreadful bus of shame scoops you up is what the runners of the MCM call "Beating the Bridge." This, of course, was a requirement for my only real goal, which was to finish this race.

As we rounded mile 16, along the Lincoln Memorial, I was 25 minutes ahead of the Grim Reaper, and in pretty good shape. The professional photographers along the course were taking pictures of all of the competitors the whole way along the race. As I round the corner along the Lincoln Memorial, I smile for the photographer, and get a great shot.

Shortly after this, Stacy and Cecilia managed to see me. "He's not even sweating!" Cecilia shouted. I was sweating, but it was so dry on race day, that the sweat was drying up pretty quickly after emerging. It was really great seeing them cheer me on.

Mile 17 is easy going, and I am thrilled to be way ahead of the pace needed to make the mile 17.5 cut-off with ease. At around mile 18, the going gets much more tough.

For runners who run in "marshmallow shoes" running on gravel is easier on the body, than running on hard surfaces such as concrete or asphalt. Since I will never run in those atrocities that are modern running shoes, I have a different stride, and a different sensitivity to running surfaces. My preferences of running surfaces are almost completely the opposite of what is preferred by normal runners. I love concrete. Concrete is "cream" to run on. I like asphalt, but don't really like stray rocks that usually litter city streets. My feet are tough enough to handle the stray pebble, but occasionally, a stray pebble will be sharp enough to make me shout "ouch!" every once in a while. Even in those shoes.

At mile 18, as we cross in front of the National Museum of American History, the going gets tough. The running surface transitions from easy asphalt to rotten gravel. I have two choices: run on the chip-seal concrete, with loose gravel littered on top, or run on the dirt and gravel. Neither choice is really wonderful. Since there is a little bit of "give" on the dirt, I choose the dirt. One of the MarathonFoto photographers gets this great shot of me running in the gravel -- quite honestly, I don't know how I am managing to eek out a smile on this part of the run.

My feet were killing me at that point. It was time for my first walk of the race. I walk the whole way along the route in front of the Capitol building, and soak in the scenery. It didn't occur to me that, yes, it is nice to look at the scenery, but also the photographers are going to be shooting pictures of me in front of the Capitol. It's much better photography for me to be in the shot running and not walking!

I had been very good about eating the sugar along the run, and drinking the Powerade along the run whenever I had opportunities to do so. But for some reason, I had really gotten awfully tired along here. I started jogging, but had a hard time keeping it up for a significant distance. This is terrible. My eyelid is drooping, and I am not keeping good running form at all, so I am back to walking. Ah, this must be that "wall" everybody talks about. "OK, enough of this walking stuff. I see that sign, and I'm going to start running again, once I get to that sign. I have a bridge to beat."

"OK. There is the sign. Let's do this!" I shout out loud. Another walker next to me, feels guilty and starts running too, but then realizes that he was walking for a good reason. Some sort of cramp. He falls behind. I seem to have gotten past the wall, and am back to running. However, I am running very slowly. This is my lowest point in the race. I am running, but exhausted. I look up and am passed by a dude who is juggling five balls. He's not just throwing them to face-height, he's throwing them high. Crap. I just got passed by a juggler. I am jogging, but not especially happy about it, and getting passed by the freaking juggler isn't helping my motivation any, either.

I didn't even get a quarter-mile, and there was another drink station, handing out Powerade, water and Sport Beans (essentially Jellybeans). I am so tired and sloppy that I dropped two of the jellybean bags that were handed to me. I dropped one of the cups of Powerade on the feet of one of the Marine volunteers. (I apologized profusely). Maybe this wall thing isn't quite over with, after all.

Since I'm pretty far back in the race, there are literally thousands of drink cups littering the streets. The thousands of wet cups are a slipping hazard, so I slow down to be more careful. The sugar in the Powerade coats the streets. As the road gets drier, the cups get stickier, glued to the bottoms of my feet by sugary PowerAde. I have to bend over to remove a sticky cup from the sole of my shoe. I can't scuff it off. Starting again is tortuous.

"Where is the bridge? Have I beaten the bridge?" I shout to spectators. I am turning left onto 14th street. "It's right ahead! I think you made it!" Spectators now are carrying the signs saying things like "You beat the bridge!" "The Bridge is your bitch!" Excellent. The next of the major hurdles has been passed. I am running with very low speed, but still running, and making my way up the hill onto Interstate 395. I am beating the bridge. No bus for this runner!

I meet up with a fellow VFF runner, and I am upset I can't remember his name anymore. Let's call him Trevor. "I hate running. Always have." he tells me. He got talked into running a marathon by his friend, who is "up there finishing by now, I suppose. " We get to talking about running in these weird shoes, and we are a lot alike, when he said "I can't run in marshmallow shoes, it hurts my knees too much."

One of the disadvantages of the VFFs, is that walking is much slower than walking in regular shoes. We have to make shorter strides, and can not land on the heel the same way a shod walker does. So in order to keep the walkers from flying by us, we have to maintain a slow jog. My blister is especially unhappy with walking, since it is on the back of the heel. It is less unhappy with a very slow jog. This slow jog isn't much faster than a regular person's walking pace. A MarathonFoto photographer gets this great shot (where I look so sad), walking next to Trevor. I may look downtrodden and sad, but I think I am looking at the pavement for things that are going to hurt my feet.

We get across the bridge and see a fellow runner being carried away on a stretcher. He's got an IV bag, and an oxygen mask. "Glad I'm not that guy!" It was actually at this point that I added another goal to my attempted Marathon run: Finish Upright.

By the time we get into Crystal City, I have decided to sit down and take a look at my heel, to make sure that there isn't some sort of serious damage. I sit down, take off the VFF, and look at the heel, and it doesn't look that bad. Stop being such a baby! I get the shoe back on, and it was so difficult to get running again. Trevor was gone by this point.

I started running again, and caught up with, and passed Trevor. At this point in the race, nobody is running, and it seems that everybody is walking. Once we beat the bridge, there isn't much incentive left in running, so there are more walkers than runners here. All of the serious marathoners have finished their race by now, and the only people left are the first-timer marathoners, whose only goal is to finish; and the people who have some sort of knee or ankle injury, and are hobbling to the finish line, unwilling to settle for a DNF.

Since I can't walk comfortably, and I can't run comfortably, I am settling into a very slow jog, a pathetic pace only barely faster than a normally-shod walking participant. By now, it's somewhere around mile 23, and I notice a runner I passed at the beginning of the race. He's got a bright yellow shirt that reads, "I may be old and slow, but I am ahead of you!" We are turning onto South Washington Boulevard, just west of the Pentagon, and my pathetic jogging pace is not passing his respectable walking pace.

There is NO WAY this guy is going to finish this race in front of me. I pick up the pace and pass him. Whew! Just a few miles to go. By now, people who have finished the marathon, received their medal, and proven their mettle, are walking in the opposite direction to get home, sometimes cheering us on.

Without warning, old-slow-and-in-front-of-me guy has passed me! UNACCEPTABLE! I pick up the pace. I am running as fast as I can muster. I manage to get past him. It's now mile 26, and I have to keep this pace up to keep ahead of him. There may have been tens of thousands of competitors on this race, but right now, it's just me and this old guy. Ain't no way I am coming in behind old-slow-and-proud-of-it guy.

The final 0.2 miles are uphill. I do hills pretty well, since I have these monster barefoot-runner calves, that spring me up the hill. Everybody else is walking. No way I am walking up this hill. The Marines are all lined up, cheering me on. They are looking at me with strong eye contact, "WAY TO GO! Finish Strong!"

PUSH! It's the top of the hill, and I can see the finish line.

PUSH! In front of the grand stands. The finish line is RIGHT THERE.

PUSH! Almost there. Holy crap this is hard.

I think back to Hal Higdon's advice at this point: Remember: smile, and raise your arms and look triumphant as you cross the finish line, they will be taking pictures. Don't press the button on your watch right now, you can do that a few seconds later, after the cameras have stopped taking pictures of you.

"YES!" I shout as I reach the line. "Yes!" What a huge achievement!

I was ready to collapse. I was ready to sit down where I wasn't allowed to sit down. I am given a mylar blanket, which I didn't need, and was directed to the medal corrals. A Marine Lieutenant placed my completion medal around my neck. I pose in front of the Iwo Jima Memorial with the MarathonFoto photographers.

I'm done. Where's my beer? I meet up with Stacy and Cecilia, who miraculously found me in the crowd. I saw Liz, whom I had left behind at mile 6. She had finished the race, but I didn't see if she had a medal on or not. I never got her bib number or last name, so I may never know if she finished successfully or not.

I never saw Trevor again, and never got his bib number either. The only picture of us together has a partial bib shot, so I will never know who he was, either. Since he hates running, it's unlikely he'll be back for next year's Marathon. If I ever do see him again, I'll doubtless call him by the nickname I've given him, since I can't remember his odd name anyway. Trevor is close enough.

In no time, the shoes are off and I'm sitting in the grass, with no fuel left in my tank. Where's my beer? I never found the beer garden. With so much opportunity for disappointment today, if this is my only disappointment, I'm doing pretty well, don't you think?

I paid nearly 90 dollars for these MarathonFoto pictures. I expect you to humor me and follow this link to view all of my pictures. :)

http://picasaweb.google.com/PietBarber.com/MarineCorpsMarathon2010?feat=directlink

High Altitude Glider Flight

2010-11-05T21:54:00.004-04:00

4 Sep 2010
Even as the sun rose that morning, it looked like an excellent soaring day. I was dressed for summer operations. I was wearing my VFF shoes (clearly designed for summer), shorts, and a tee-shirt. Several people quipped that there might be wave lift, due to the westerly winds. There was likely also ridge lift. There were incredibly strong thermals early in the day, and even if the wave or ridge lift were not working, it would still be a great day to be a glider pilot.

On a lark, I packed the "new" oxygen system in the glider, and hooked up the cannula. Three years ago, I bought this oxygen system shortly before I found that I was being relocated to Switzerland. Due to the timing of the equipment purchase and the relocation, I had never made use of the oxygen system. It was a shame to buy this brand new toy, and never be able to use it for over three years!

I hooked up the oxygen system to the Mountain High regulator, and hooked up the cannula to my face. Psst! Yep! It smelled like oxygen that has been in a bottle for over a year. After some tow-rope-break-induced delays, I launched later than I had originally anticipated, donning my summer-clothes and cannula.

I immediately connected with some intensely strong thermals. In only a few minutes, I was up to 500 feet below cloud base at around 7 or 8000 feet. I started nosing around for what had to be wave. I hung around on the upwind side of the clouds, and aggressively worked any gusts. In this situation, my standard procedure of waiting for the vario to drop off before starting to turn takes too long -- the lift is too spotty and broken and disjointed right under a rotor cloud to use regular thermalling techniques. So I just treat it like "really aggressive thermalling", and turn at the first indication of a gust of lift.

It didn't take long, and I connected with the wave, just over the eastern ridge of the Massanutten, east of Fort Valley. In short order, I climbed above cloud base at a steady 2 knots, still not expecting this to be a great wave day. (At least it's nice to get above the clouds!) The duty officer called Potomac Tracon, who had cleared the airspace of all jet liners, and said we were OK to climb to 18,000 feet without worrying about conflicts with the jet liners. By this time, I was climbing through 10,000 feet, and almost at the top of the clouds.

I continued to head south toward Luray, where Jim Kellett joined me in the wave (but not for long). As far as I could tell, we were the only two people within radio contact to get into the wave on that day. The key to working this day's wave was patience. Since I didn't have anywhere to go, I had all day. Eventually, I climbed above 14,000 feet -- higher than I had ever climbed before. The oxygen system was working perfectly, filling my nostrils with oxygen-bottle scented air. The Mountain High regulator has a pressure sensor, which determines how much "puff" of oxygen to deliver to the cannula. The quantity of puff is based on your altitude. On the ground, it is not much more than a 'token puff', as I continued to climb, the puffs became more substantial.

Several times, I had decided that "this has to be the top of the lift" and almost gave up. It was not terribly cold at 14,000 feet, and since I was above the clouds, the sunshine was keeping me quite warm. I headed a bit more upwind, to the southern corner of Fort Valley. There, I connected with a solid 4 knot lift that took me all the way to 17,600 feet. I had decided beforehand to cut-out at 17,500 feet of altitude -- just to have some margin of safety so I wouldn't break into Class A airspace inadvertently. I made a quick recording of this part of the flight with my Blackberry camera-phone, and headed south toward Harrisonburg. The flight computer showed the outside air temperature at 20 F.

The flight toward Harrisonburg was slightly upwind, and I wasn't overly concerned about finding lift along the way. By the time I got to just north of Harrisonburg, I was just over 10,000 feet, approximately as high as the clouds. Time was growing short -- a schedule of returning in time to disassemble and get to the Flight Instructors' caucus was drawing near. I headed directly back to Front Royal, aided by a tail-wind, with a ground-speed averaging 110 knots, even though I only had 80 knots indicated. My return flight to Front Royal cost me only about 1000 feet. Apparently, on the return trip, I must have been riding the wave, or at least minimizing the time-in-sink along the way.

Along the way back, I flew close enough to a cloud to see the effect called "Glory"

What a day! Unfortunately, we (the owners of the glider Juliet Sierra) are having a little problem with our Volkslogger. It records -- most of the time. Other times it gets tired and doesn't want to look up to the sky to see the satellites to get its position. It is a good thing that I already have my FAI Gold Badge, and that I wasn't setting out for a badge flight of any sort. As for evidence of my flight? Since the Volkslogger wasn' t working, there was no suitable proof of my flight, other than my word for it. (I did get my GPS watch to record most of the flight, though). I wasn't able to upload the flight to the OLC, due to the fact that I didn't logging the flight with my GPS watch until I was airborne and on tow.

Here's a picture of the flight in Google Earth, (Click to get a better view) as viewed from an oblique angle, looking down from 33 miles of altitude. The black shadow is the ground track along the flight. The colored ribbon is for my position, Yellow, orange and red are for various rates of descending flight, blue is steady or climbing flight 0-2 knots. Light-green indicates slightly descending at around 0-3 knots. I put a thumb-tack to indicate where I achieved the maximum altitude over the ground.

Frankfurt TDY

2010-10-10T04:11:00.011-04:00

I'm currently assigned 2 weeks worth of work in Frankfurt, Germany. I'm here with 5 other co-workers, and most of the time we do on these trips is spent in a very inhospitable environment -- a computer data center.

If you've never been in one, they are not so bad for the first few hours, but after 10 hours a day, they really wear on the soul. By the third day or so, we usually shout, "Booo! Datacenter! Boooo!" Some of the work is quite manual and blue-collar. We take the shipments of the new servers, unpack them, collect all of the packing materials, break down the cardboard, stack the new computer servers in a stack. Usually on the second day, we rack them and stack them into the appropriate places in the rack. It is not unlike a very large Lego construction project.

By the third day, we are plugging all of the power plugs into the right places, and starting to plug in the network cables into all the servers. This usually lasts until Friday, when we are done with most of the physical work, and start doing the logical work. Installing operating systems, updating BIOS, etc. Since there are more than 100 servers at a site, it is quite an undertaking!

As I said before, the life in the data center is quite the harsh, inhospitable environment. The cold aisles -- where all the incoming dry, air-conditioned air blows into the data center is cold and uncomfortably dry. All of the computers face the same way, and output the hot air out the back of the servers. On the side of the aisle where all of the hot air is blown out is called the "hot aisle". It is a nice place to warm up, for when you spend too much time in the cold aisle, but the air is even more dry and uncomfortable.

It's a good thing we get a little free time to get away from this inhospitable environment!

Of course, I spend my time running. Since I am now at the point in my marathon training program where I am doing peak mileage, I have to find some nice places to run. Unfortunately, our hotel is in the outskirts of Frankfurt -- in a suburb called "Nordwest Zentrum", which is also the location of a very nice shopping mall. We never saw such a shopping mall in Switzerland, except in Zürich. I'm sure that if there was such a place to shop in Switzerland, Stacy would have liked the experience of living in Swizterland much more than she already did.

Unfortunately, Nordwest Zentrum is quite far away from the data center, and doesn't have much of a night life. There are only two restaurants open after hours, and quite frankly: We've used them up and are quite tired of them. (We get back from the data center quite late sometimes, and if there's nothing open, we starve!) Fortunately, it's not far from some really good running routes. It didn't take long for me to discover that going East or South will take me directly to a tributary to the Main river in Frankfurt, called the Nidda.

The Nidda has a running/biking/hiking trail that follows it for miles and miles. This Saturday, we took the day off to get some recharge time. I took the morning to sleep in, and then started on my journey after noon. Here's my GPS watch's record of the run, up until the point where the battery ran out.

Along the way, I found this absolutely lovely spot to refill my water supplies. For these long runs, I need to bring along a lot of water, for there is no telling how much I will be able to refill along the way. Along the southern route, there is nothing to drink, and there wasn't any water fountains anywhere to be found for seven miles going north. Just north of the town of Bad Vilbel, I found a fountain.

At first glance, this fountain was just like many of the water fountains with potable water are easily found in Switzerland. An exception to this is that one must press a button to get water from this fountain, where the Swiss fountains were free-flowing all the time. I had a water bottle that wasn't quite empty yet, so I emptied it out, and filled it up.

As I was about to cap the water bottle, I looked carefully into the bottle, and noticed lots of things floating in it. Thousands of tiny white things, and some brown flecks swirling around the bottom. At this point, I wasn't so sure if this was a good idea to pour out my perfectly good water, and replace it with this questionable water. I looked around to see if any of the locals were laughing at me, or horrified to think that this person could be filling up his water bottle with this well-known potable water. I saw no such thing.

I looked around and found this sign:
The first few sentences of the sign say that there is a significant amount of iron in this water. Also, I recognized the brand name of the fountain -- it's the same brand-name of the water that you get in the restaurants around Frankfurt! I've already drunk many bottles of Hassia while taking a break at the data center, so I was already familiar and fond of the taste of Hassia sparkling water. Since Hassia is sparkling water, that would explain the zillions of tiny white things floating in my water -- they were tiny sparkling bubbles of CO2. Here is a picture of a local filling up his water bottle with

For the first tenth of a mile after the re-fill, my water bottle hissed from the agitated carbonated water, as it spilled all over my running belt. It never occurred to me that carbonated water would do that on a run, since I've never run with carbonated water before. In any event, the carbonated water lost most of its zing after a few miles, and was not bubbly and sparkly by the time I consumed the rest of it for the remainder of my run.

The run was 19 miles in total. That's the longest I've gone yet. I could have gone another few miles for sure, but since the majority of the trail is made of gravel, my feet -- wearing the Vibram Five Finger Sprints, were pretty much done for the day. My legs still had miles left, but the feet did not.

The marathon training plan called for only 18 miles, and this is my planned maximum amount of mileage per week. I'll repeat this week's run plan on the next week, then I will start what's called "the taper", where the mileage drops off significantly in preparation for the marathon. The Marine Corps Marathon is 31 Oct 2010. According to different calculations, since I'm running 35 miles per week, at my weight I'm burning between 4000 and 7000 Kcal per week. Once I start the taper, reducing to 20 then 15 miles per week, I'll have to make sure that I reduce the intake appropriately.

Garmin and a Day's Instruction

2010-09-29T23:57:00.002-04:00

I have been running regularly for the last year. I happen to be training for my first marathon on Halloween this year. As a reward for all my hard work, I indulged myself with a super-cool gadget. I am now the proud owner of a Garmin ForeRunner 405 -- a nice running watch that has a GPS logger that I got to track my long distance runs more accurately. The wide range of features that this watch boasts are stunning, but I'll stick to the GPS features for now.

I was curious to see if the functionality of the GPS could work well for flight instruction, so I configured it to record a whole day's worth of instruction that I did on a day in August. I exported the day's recordings and managed to export the proprietary Garmin format (which is essentially XML) into a usable format for Google Earth. Once I successfully converted it into a kmz file, I extracted some really nice 3-D views of this day's instruction in Google Earth.

After viewing these flights in Google Earth, I made some screen-shots of the day's flying, and included them below. There was one spot landing approach that was just barely above the ground during the flare, that it appears to have gone underground. This is possibly due to the proximity to the ground was smaller than the GPS's accuracy, or the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data that Google uses for Front Royal's airport is slightly inaccurate at that location. Rest assured, most of the landings were on the grass, some were beyond the expected landing area, some were right on target. (Also note there was a tailwind that day).

The color coding is the rate of climb and descent. If you carefully look at the areas that aren't for takeoff or landing, you can see me walking around, dragging the glider back to the staging areas, doing positive control check, etc. These approaches were all done by solo or nearly-solo students, with no interaction from me about where to be in the pattern.

After seeing this form of display, I'm pretty sure this visualization could be used as an excellent opportunity as a reflection and review resource for students -- especially for the situations when the student doesn't realize that they were out as far and down as low as we said they were.

More Minimalist Running

2010-09-29T23:05:00.003-04:00

This is a really great video, echoing all of the things I rave about, when I talk about running without marshmallow shoes. Just watch and see.

Where have I been?

2010-08-27T19:05:00.006-04:00

It's been over a year since I've left Switzerland. Of course I miss living there!

I spent my final three weeks in Switzerland at Saanen, trying to get in as much flying in the Alps as I could before I left Switzerland to go back to the US.

Starting around October of 2009 or so, I decided I needed some exercise, and started running regularly. I was inspired by the book "Born to Run", which I picked up on the Kindle for no apparent reason. After reading this book, which starts out as "Why does it hurt when I run." I had an epiphany and started running with very minimal shoes.

It's been 10 months now, and to date, I have logged over 628 miles in 2010. I wasn't able to run very long or far between October and January, and didn't start becoming consistent (and logging it) until November. I religiously followed a program to get up to 10k that I found on the Internet, and was able to run 6 miles by the beginning of January.

In March 2007, I ran my first race. I didn't run this race to win it, I just ran it to see what a race would be like. This race was a 10k, which I finished in 1:06:47. Strangely enough, I haven't run a 10k that fast since. I've come close with 1:08, but I've never been able to match that speed again.

Along the way, I got dozens of people asking me about my shoes. These shoes don't look like your typical runner's shoes -- they have no arch support, no heel support, no cushioning at all. They operate on the principle that those modern comforts of running in marshmallow shoes end up being more damaging to the body after time. I became a believer after I started running again, and never had that knee pain that I used to have when running in New Balance Shoes.

In fact, there are a lot of things about running that I never experienced until about July. I never had a running injury, outside of a few blisters (up until July). I never felt like running was a "pounding" experience, mostly because when you run with very minimal shoes, you tend to have a softer stride.

I have signed up for the Marine Corps Marathon, which takes place on 31 October 2010. There is a 14 minute per mile rate that I must beat. I've been following a training program, and have been running quite consistently to that goal.

You can check out my running progress on the Daily Mile, to which I post my progress quite regularly.

Once a Week, at Least

2009-03-19T06:28:00.002-04:00

I have this nightmare at least once a week. It probably says a lot about how I treated life at the University. It's also a good reason why I probably will never go for a Post-Graduate program, even though I know a lot more useful tricks that would get me a good grade in any post-grad program.

(click to embiggen)
I think I the reason I keep my diploma by the bed, in the bottom drawer of my nightstand, so I am subconsciously reassured that I could pull it out and verify its existence when dreams like this call it in to question.

No, Seriously!

2009-03-19T05:43:00.002-04:00

"Look at that girl's HAIR!" Waves of that uncomfortable unease immediately grip Stacy and me. Joey is really loud at his comment. "No Seriously, Dad! Look at that girl!"

It was an increasingly uncomfortable scene on the #6 Tram in Zürich. Several people were giggling out loud, and Stacy gave me that look -- well I can't exactly say "that look" because I don't think I've seen it before. It's that look of "We need to put a stop to this" and also a look of "Let's see how this plays out" and also simultaneously a look of amusement.

"Look at that girl, Dad! She has blue hair!" Joey said in a loud voice, loud enough for the whole tram to hear. In Bern, we can usually get away with speaking English, and most people don't understand, or don't act like they understand, especially when we speak with thick American accents, or speak quickly or use lots of slang. In this case, the inhabitants of Zürich usually know English far better than their Bernese or Fribourgeois counterparts.

"Yes, Joey. She has blue hair. I actually think it's kind of cool. " I calmly replied in a hushsed voice, trying to get Joey to switch the subject. The two punk rock girls who got on to the tram were laughing. I am sure they have heard this before, probably in Züridüütsch, instead of English. Maybe the novelty of it being in English was enough to amuse them to the point of giggling.

"Turn your head and look, Dad!", Joey, 4, was really concerned that I wasn't making eye contact with the two punk rock chicks who boarded this tram. I definitely saw them before they got on the tram, and maybe even secretly admired that blue hair style, combined with multiple facial piercings.

"How do they make them like that?" Joey continues at loud volume.

"Like what, Joey"

"With all those things in their face".

"Those are piercings" The volume ratio is still identical. Joey loud, me responding in the lower volume that hopes to guide the next sentences into ever decreasing levels of volume. Joey is hypnotized. Judging by his unwavering gaze, and out loud comments, there is no doubt this is a new phenomenon for him. In Switzerland, sure there is the occasional grown woman who has the streak of purple in her hair. But in Bern, we have yet to see the girl who has gone all blue to the hair.

My Kindle Has Arrived

2009-03-10T17:15:00.004-04:00

I am so very excited, as my Kindle 2 from Amazon has arrived today. Right off the bat, I uploaded the 30 e-books that I got for free of the Internet, of old classics whose copyrights have expired. I have also test-run the Amazon.com purchase system to allow me to buy actual books off of their website, and my first purchase was Neil Stevenson's Snow Crash.

Jake took a quick look at the Kindle, and found the free e-book of the King James Version of the bible. He tried to page through the opening copyrights and such, and it froze up. Locked up hard. I was so embarrassed. I tried a few tricks to get it to come back to life, but to no avail. I eventually connected it through the USB cable, and deleted some of the books off of the Kindle through my computer. After that, nothing was readable. Never fear, a factory reset got everything back into working order again.

Apparently, My Kindle 2 is some sort of heathen that has no interest in reading the Bible. Well I should cross it off my list too. There's no telling what weird things in there I'll start believing if I read it.

One of the other cool features I unlocked was being able to upload pictures to the Kindle. I uploaded a few of the pictures the family took when we visited Geneva a few weeks ago to visit the American Market there. I should write about that afternoon, too.

Another arrival in the mail shipment from America is my replacement Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I have been stuck using a stupid QWERTZ keyboard, Switzerland style for the past few weeks. Of course, I convinced Windows that it was actually a QWERTY keyboard instead, so I didn't have to get thrown off by the parenthesis being shift-7 and shift-8 instead of shift-9 and shift-0. So long as I didn't actually look at the QWERTZ keyboard, it felt like a typical keyboard that we Americans are used to. EXCEPT: The \ key is in the wrong place. and so is the / key. Maddening! I would have to stretch my left pinky waaaay over to the left to get to the shift key, and sometimes, if I didn't stretch far enough, I got the / key instead. When hitting the Enter key, if I didn't stretch my right pinky finger waaaaay over to the right, I would get an extra \ where a linebreak should be. Maddening!

Plans for Kindle-ing

2009-02-25T04:57:00.004-05:00

This is a guy who has a lot of free time on his hands: Me. I spend more than 2 hours a day in the Swiss public transportation system, and end up reading a lot, if I am not staring out the window or trying not to be obvious about gawking at the pretty Swiss ladies.

In response to all this reading, my German reading skills have improved remarkably on this two year mission. I suppose this is not an unexpected side effect of reading a daily free newspaper that has trashy content and lots of pictures. The trashy content keeps the subject matter simple, (example); the pictures keep it entertaining, and help me along when there is vocabulary I don't know.

I also read magazines. The three you might catch me with are the Scientific American, Soaring, and the Aero.ch. Scientific American I really enjoy, except occasionally the articles about microbiology that are way over my head. I have a much easier time reading articles about astronomy, technology, psychology, public policy or chemsitry. The Soaring magazine articles are a perk of the membership in the Soaring Society of America, which I must maintain in order to remain a member of my flying club: Skyline Soaring Club. The third magazine is a similar deal: I must maintain a membership in the Aeroclub der Schweiz, as I am an active member in the Bern Flying Club (Segelfluggruppe Bern)

Other occasional reading I might do are some non-fiction books that enhance my focus on some of my more nerdy intellectual interests, such as the recent book I have been reading from Neil Shubin, called Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.

The main problem I have is that these things weigh me down. Literally. The backpack is a tedious thing to carry around; weighed even more by the library I carry on my back. If only there was some sort of technology that would allow me to have all these books, without the extra weight.

Another item to consider is that books in English are terribly expensive. I could buy the equivalent books in German, and read those, but the reading is much less relaxed, and a very strenuous exercise. Consider the German-language book that I bought about a year ago, and still haven't had the will to read it (they use really big words! :) )

In order to get books here in Switzerland, I would have to go to the Stauffacher , conveniently located in downtown Bern, or to the Thalia, even more conveniently located in the train station. But buying books at these stores in English are terribly expensive. To give you some sort of an idea about the prices involved:

Amazon (US): 13.95 USD
Stauffacher: 31.50 CHF (27.11 USD on 25 Feb 2009)
Thalia: 31.50 CHF (27.11 USD on 25 Feb 2009)

On a recent trip to Stauffacher, I bought Stacy the whole series of books from Stephanie Meyer, that cost over a hundred francs. Maybe the ability to buy cheaper books over the Internet, without the need to support a brick and morter

Recently, I have been wondering about electronic books, in general; the Amazon Kindle specifically. I often find myself wanting to read something that is not in my backpack, on my long, daily, boring train trip. The convenience of having my whole library with me would be really handy.

Enter the Amazon Kindle, (and the reason for the title of this article). Many years ago, when I was riding the Metro to downtown DC, to work on a contract at the GSA, I read a few classic books on my Palm Pilot Professional PDA. The acquisition of books was kind of a hassle, and the reason they were classic books and not modern books is because the classic ones such as Candide, were expired from copyright. The screen was pretty small, and didn't view very well in many situations, but I did enjoy reading e-books in such a compact package.

With the Kindle, I can purchase the latest books from Amazon, and read them in a convenient-for-Piet format on this small device that doesn't weigh much.

Disadvantages: they don't sell the Amazon Kindle in Europe. The Kindle has a wireless network called "Whispernet" that makes purchasing books (while standing in the United States) very convenient. Just click, and the purchase is made. With my current situation in Switzerland, it is not as convenient.

Amazon has deals with books to get the books into Kindle format, but that deal only applies to people in the United States. In order to get a Kindle, while living in Europe, you have to present Amazon a US-based Credit Card with a US-based Address. (And I have the advantage of being an American with these things at my disposal). There is a work-around to download these books to an Internet-connected computer, and download them to the Kindle over a USB cable. So the incredible convenience of downloading books over the Whispernet is lost, but the convenience of having a lightweight copy of all my books in one place is not lost.

I think I am going to go ahead with this, and I'll let you know how it all works out. In the meantime, I am planning all of the e-books that I have been meaning to read all these years, that I will add to my reading list. The BBC allegedly put together a list of the fiction that everybody should have read, and the average person has read only 6 of them.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

( ) 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
( ) 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
( ) 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
( ) 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
( ) 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
( ) 6 The Bible (most)
( ) 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
( ) 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
( ) 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
( ) 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

( ) 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
( ) 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
( ) 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
( ) 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (most)
( ) 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
( ) 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
( ) 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
( ) 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
( ) 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
( ) 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

( ) 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
( ) 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
( ) 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
( ) 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
(x) 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
( ) 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
( ) 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
( ) 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
( ) 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
( ) 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

( ) 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
( ) 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
( ) 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
( ) 34 Emma - Jane Austen
( ) 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
( ) 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
( ) 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
( ) 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
( ) 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
( ) 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

( ) 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
( ) 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
( ) 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
( ) 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
( ) 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
( ) 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
( ) 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
( ) 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
( ) 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
( ) 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

( ) 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
( ) 52 Dune - Frank Herbert
( ) 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
( ) 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
( ) 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
( ) 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
( ) 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
( ) 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
( ) 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
( ) 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(x) 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
( ) 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
( ) 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
( ) 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
( ) 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
(x) 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
( ) 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
( ) 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
( ) 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
( ) 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

( ) 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
( ) 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
( ) 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
( ) 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
( ) 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
( ) 76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
( ) 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
( ) 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
( ) 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
( ) 80 Possession - AS Byatt

( ) 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
( ) 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
( ) 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
( ) 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
( ) 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
( ) 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
( ) 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
( ) 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
( ) 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
( ) 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

( ) 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
( ) 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
( ) 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
( ) 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
( ) 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
( ) 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
( ) 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
( ) 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
( ) 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
( ) 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Wow, I suck; I have read only 3 of these, and two of them were because of a class in college. Maybe the person who came up with this list was one of those evil English teachers that simply likes to torture children with melodramatic crap from the Victorian era. Now that I see this list, I honestly don't see myself buying any of these books online.

Maybe the real reason I want a Kindle is summed up in this episode of xkcd:

All Good Things...

2009-02-22T08:38:00.002-05:00

...must come to an end.

On my trip back to the US in January, I had my performance review, and in it, essentially the discussion was with regard to WHEN I was coming back the United States, not a matter of IF I was coming back.

So here is what it looks like my schedule will be:

20 June 2009: SGBern Saanen Operations begin. (And I plan on being there!)
4 July 2009: Kids last day of school.
18 July 2009: Last day of SGBern's operations in Saanen.
31 July 2009: The family living in our house in VA must be out.
31 July 2009: We must be out of the house in Rüfenacht.

Now some of the less certain dates:

When the family goes back to the US: Unknown for certain, but Stacy wants out of Switzerland before the kids are out of school. I am not sure on the reasoning behind this, she's explained it to me many times, but it still doesn't click for me.
When the movers come to pick up the house's furniture and such
When I have to have the car returned to the dealer.

I do plan on living in a tent for like 3 weeks in Saanen, and living like a mountain man. I think the only stuff I will have will be a suitcase of a suitable number of clothes, my tent, my pillow, my air mattress, and my flight-related papers, such as logbook, etc. Oh I guess I will have my work laptop, too.

Now that we realize the end is near, I am trying to cram as much Swiss time in as possible, and trying to enjoy or savor every moment. I think Stacy and the kids all see this as the end of a miserable saga of torture and pain (Especially Jake would think that), and I know the relatives back in the US will all be so happy to see us come back to the US.

But me? I'm not as excited as everybody else.

The real estate agent has already started showing the house to prospective buyers; the real estate market is pretty sour right now in the US, and also in Switzerland, although to not the same extent that it is in the US. I suppose the owners wanted to have as much opportunity to try to sell the house while there are paying renters in the house, as they can.

October Trip to London

2009-02-22T07:56:00.003-05:00

I had a 2 week trip to London that I didn't know about until the weekend beforehand (short plans) Luckily, the kids had off school this week anyway, so Stacy considered the financial implications of joining me on this trip to London.

"Beware, I never get any personal time on these trips at all" "You may not see me more than 10 minutes at a time" "Beware, I usually work 14 hour days on these trips"

No matter. She had her plans anyway, that did not necessarily involve me being around.

We flew out of Geneva to London City airport, which is incredibly convenient. We took a taxi cab to our hotel, which we knew wasn't in the best part of town, but not the worst part of town either, London Limehouse. For the short cab ride the cabby charged us FIFTY POUNDS! What robbery! Now that I know London better, it would have been far more economical to put the kids on the light rail, that drops us off not more than a block from the hotel. Oh well.

I met with the one co-worker who was on this trip with me, Tim; a Limey ex-pat living in Northern Virginia, and works in the Dulles office, where I used to work in VA. We met at Picadilly Circus, and had dinner in some American restaurant chain that I don't remember the name of. TGI Friday's ? Aw heck I don't remember.

Anyway, since the vacation was Stacy's, and I was in a data center busy the whole time, you'll have to see the pictures for yourself; I can't add much more to the dialog.

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Ski Gürten

2009-02-22T07:47:00.003-05:00

You will hate living here if you hate the Winter. And you will really hate the Winter if you don't ski. We don't ski, mostly because the inertia of getting so many kids moved early enough to go skiing is nearly impossible. Also, skiing for so many kids is also a very expensive proposition.

In January, while I was in Northern Virginia on a business trip, Stacy took the kids skiing at the local hill here, called Gürten. They have a very small ski lift (more like a T bar), that is just right for kids. Along with a very affordable ski rental, the younger 3 kids got a day with a very gentle sloping bunny hill, quite appropriate for the beginner. Since I wasn't there, I can't really give a lot of details, outside of the following bullet items:

Joey was not interested in skiing at first
Cecilia did very well
Josh did all-right
Joey finally got the courage to put back on the skis after watching his brother and sister successfully getting down the hill
Jake stayed at home, since the age limit on this hill is 8. (and technically Cecilia wasn't allowed to ski here either, but she got away with it)

For more details, you'll have to discern them from the slideshow, or you'll have to ask Stacy.

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Am Zibelemärit

2009-02-22T06:55:00.003-05:00

November 2008:

Every year in Bern, there is a festival called Zibelemärit (Onion Market (EN DE)). Last November, I managed to drag the family out. The prior year, I had guests in from America (Hi mom!), and we spent the day in Fribourg, wandering around instead. Since this was likely the last opportunity for me to experience this unique festival in Bern, I had to take part in it. The warnings from everybody else who has been there before is usually "Get out by noon!" Of course, we did not follow this advice, instead; getting in just before noon.

This is a festival unlike anything else I have ever seen. Just about anybody who has a booth in Bern, sets up one along the streets; so street after street has store vendors selling their stuff; anywhere from the traditional kitsch trap of any touristy place, to food, to just about anything having to do something with onions. The city is quite crowded as the streets hold just about as many people as can get crammed in.

The Swiss, usually a rather "reserved" type of people, let loose on this day. They carry confetti, and throw it at passers-by in the street. The curlier the hair on the target, the better. The ammunition for the confetti assaults are sold by the bag-full by many street vendors on this day. Also popular with the kids, are plastic hammers that make an adorable squeak sound when you hit somebody on the head with them.

Me? I'm busy finding the Glühwein (Mulled Wine), a very thick, red, citrusey wine that is served undrinkably hot at first. As the cold November day wears on, the wine cools to a more drinkable temperature.

The kids all got armed with bags of confetti, and start throwing handfuls at the strangers in the street. This is OK, as the strangers in the street throw back their own bags of confetti in retaliation. By noon, the streets are covered in a thin paste of rained-on-smooshed-up yucky muddy confetti, that sticks to your feet.

Every once in a while, Joey would get a face-full of confetti thrown in under the rain shield on the jog stroller he was riding in, and would get very upset. He did not enjoy the day so much, as his view was not much more than lots of butts, and an occasional blast of confetti to the face. I don't think he enjoyed his day until the tram ride home.

At our lunch break, the rain came. The good news about the rain, is that it chased away a lot of the people on the street, giving me that window of opportunity to get food from the street vendors, without having to wait in a long line. I got a bowl of Rösti, which Stacy took a taste of, and immediately decided she needed a bowl of her own. Jake had a similar reaction, and actually ended up eating two bowls for himself.

We managed to escape the city center around 2 PM, where I understand a huge confetti fight takes place at 4PM with all the kids who have confetti left to throw. We were finding confetti in our pockets for weeks, and still, in February, find an occasional small unexpected bit of confetti.

Here's the slideshow of Onion Market day:

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Car Crash!

2009-02-13T04:49:00.004-05:00

3 February 2009:
I woke up late that morning. I had been having problems sleeping, since I was getting over a cold. Stacy thought that I was taking Tuesday off as well. Since I was feeling much better that day, I was ready to go to work. But it was too late for me to catch my train, and if I took the next train, I wouldn't get into work until about 11:15.

Since the kids were all home sick (all four of them), and I needed to escape the house of virus, I took the car to go to work. Taking the car to work is a pretty rare event, and can turn a 1:15 commute into a 39 minute commute. I only get to do it once or twice a month.

I was headed north on one of the final roads to get the office. Thoughts were going through my mind of the huge amount of work I have ahead of me. I have a large deployment of software, and some pretty tricky work that lies immediately ahead of me.

Suddenly, the car is at a complete stop. The airbag is deployed. The car is turned 120 degrees to the right of the direction I was previously going. There is a smelly, smoky dust floating in the air. The radio was off. The hazard lights were on, clicking away. "Sh%$. I must have been in an accident!"

I had no notice that the crash was going to happen. I had no idea the car was going to impact. I had no idea the car had been destroyed. I was driving along, minding my own business, a clear road in front of me, and then I was in a wrecked car. It is amazing how quickly it all happened. There was no slow motion "OH NO WE ARE GOING TO CRASH" No screeching tires, no dramatic music, no anticipation at all. Just driving, and crash.

I get out of the car, probably faster than I should have. In retrospect, I didn't even look for other traffic. If they too weren't paying attention, I would have been a pedestrian smear on their bumper. I see what must obviously have been the other car, a fair distance away, and go to check on him.

As I walk to his car, I look at the intersection again. My initial reaction was that the accident MUST have been fault, since I am a foreigner, and often am confused by the rules of the traffic here. I looked over to the big white triangle painted on his side of the road, and confirm that I, indeed had right of way.

I'm the first person to the other driver's car as he opens the door. He seems to be all right. His face isn't wedged in the windshield or anything, and I don't see any blood. He gets out of the car without any need of assistance. I ask him if he's OK, in English (I seem to have forgotten German at that moment). He responds that he's OK.

Me? No pain so far. I do notice that my knee feels like I fell and scraped it. It doesn't hurt, though. By now bystanders are showing up to see if everybody is OK. The old guy driving the Mercedes, gets out of his car, and speaks Swiss German to me. I don't really know what he is saying; it wasn't Bernese German, but some other dialect of Swiss German that I don't know at all. The bystanders who rushed to the scene to aid us all spoke French. Maybe it was a mild case of lingual aphasia on my part.

One helpful bystander, who was driving a motorcycle behind me before the accident (and saw the whole thing) spoke both German and French. He was awesome. He translated everything for me into German, and directed traffic, from all the other cars that were starting to get stuck at the intersection, not knowing what to do. The smoldering twisted hulk that was once my car was in the dead center of the intersection, immobile. The new traffic is routed around the broken glass and twisted metal.

The old guy had a pretty deep cut on his right hand, and he goes with one of the bystanders to the hospital. He opens the trunk to get his walking stick, and they are gone. People ask me over and over again, "Are you hurt?" No, don't think so. My knee is a little scraped, but not much else. "No neck pain?" Nope.

I call the wife promptly. "I'm OK. The car is destroyed."

I instant-message my co-worker, Chris, and tell him to come over and see the car wreck. He is an avid photographer, and loves to photograph cool stuff, I am sure that car crashes would also qualify as stuff he likes to shoot.

The police show up. None of them speak German, they are all Francophones. The first officers show up to direct traffic, more show up to take pictures, measure distances, make chalk markings on the pavement, scribble details in their notepads. One officer shows up to me and asks me if I have any injuries.
He has a brethalyzer in hand. "It's protocol to measure all drivers involved in an accident for blood alcohol content" I blow. It's a zero point zero (as was expected). Chris had the presence of mind to snap a shot of the event. It made a pretty funny picture.

I had to retrieve all of the documents out of the car, the license, registration, the GPS, anything I could stuff into my backpack.

The traffic cop who does speak English and German shows up. He tells me that he prefers German, so I go along in German. He drives me back to the police station, where I give my statement.

This was an odd experience unlike any I have had before. The office was a small room with just enough room for a desk with a computer, and my chair on the other side. I had to present all of my documents. My Ausländerausweis (Foreigner's permit), my passport, my drivers license, my title of the car, my proof of car insurance.

We described the events of the accident, as he wrote all of the happenings for me. The final document was half in French, half in German. The first part of the document was in French, the basic information, like the names of those involved, the location, the time, the types of cars, etc. The part where we described the accident was in German. I can't imagine a document in America as being in two languages, but this is Switzerland, and things are different, I guess.

Here's a map of the accident.

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I am coming from the south, heading north on Route de Chandolan. You can see the cross-street, Route de Petit Moncor, where the other guy was coming from the west, headed East. If you look closely at the satellite photo, you can see the white triangle painted on the road. In America, this would be a stop sign, but here, it is simply a "give-way", meaning, you have to yield to the oncoming traffic. There is no need to stop if there is no traffic. His view up the street probably couldn't see me so well, as the sun was behind me, and the street was wet. When looking back up the street, the sun and the wet road lined up just well enough to shine very brightly.

I have gone down this road a few times more, and my view of the oncoming traffic from the left is very limited. Limited both by the car wash, on the southwest corner of this inter section, along with lots of parked cars, and snow banks piled up high, preventing a view of the oncoming traffic from the left. In addition, every car has this blind spot just in front and to the left of the driver, where the frame of the left side of the window blocks a small part of the view of the driver. These issues combined are probably why I never saw this guy coming.

Here's my pictures (with comments) on Facebook:

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Penguin vs. Orcas

2008-12-09T13:35:00.001-05:00

You know I love penguins, especially Gentoo penguins. You may like this video too.

An old Fix-er-Up

2008-12-03T05:23:00.005-05:00

A few of the members in the club are getting together over the winter to fix up one of the old gliders. The old glider is a "Rhönlerche II", and needs to be completely recovered. This will take a few years to do, and I will probably be gone back to the United States by the time it's done, but I decided to help out anyway, since it is a vintage glider with lots of class. I never have seen this old bird actually fly. It was already grounded by the time I showed up last year. It sat unloved in the hangar for the whole flying season of 2008. Maybe by 2010 she will be flying again.

I set up a web site (using Google Apps, of course) so that the people who work on the glider (Mitchrampfer) could have some place to keep track of all of the work they do. They are meeting tonight to recover and refinish the elevator. The website is http://www.hb-664.ch/ . Here is a picture of Dänu after a flight in the Rhönlady.

Long Off-Season

2008-12-03T04:52:00.007-05:00

October 27th was a while ago. That was the last weekend day of operations in the flying club in Bern. It's December now. I'm kind of frustrated about how long the winter can be here. Anyway, here is a video put together by Christoph Schlaeppi about the landing competition we had on the last few days of operations in the club. I managed to eek out second place! I couldn't do better than the winner who scored two perfect scores on his first two tries. This video is imbedded directly from Christoph's website, and I don't know if he has the bandwidth to handle it, so if it is a slower than what you expect from YouTube, I apologize in advance.

My Daily Commute (by Train)

2008-10-23T09:22:00.005-04:00

Many people in Virginia ask me, "What's it like in Switzerland?"

That is a huge question to answer. So I can break it out into small chunks. How about I describe my commute? Yes? Ok.

Northern Virginians can talk long and passionately about traffic. In Northern Virginia, the population has exploded in the past 2 decades, and the roads have not expanded to meet the challenges of the increased population. The state government in Richmond gladly takes the increased revenue from the growing economy of Northern Virginia, and promptly redistributes this wealth immediately to the impoverished back-water sections of Virginia. Thus, the life of a Northern Virginian can be described as "brief periods of life separated by long hours in traffic. "

There are days when I feel like my life in Switzerland could be described as "memorable periods of life separated by long hours on the train." This is mostly because I live in Bern, and work in Fribourg, and I hardly ever get the joy of driving to work. This would be a commute that most Northern Virginians would reply, "Your commute is 36 minutes by car with no traffic? That's pretty good! I wish I could do that."

Depending on the day and my mood, my commute could consist of many combinations of walk, tram, train, bus, walk; in that order. I can be enthusiastic about this daily ritual, but after too many days of doing it, it starts to wear thin on me. I really would like to live 10 minutes from the office for once in my life. I haven't had such convenience since I lived in South Riding and worked in Chantilly.

One day in the middle of September, I took along my camera, and documented all the steps along the way. This was a day when I got out on time, but spent too much time goofing off and taking pictures for your benefit, so my timing on all the connections got messed up. Let's start.

I recommend you read through the timeline, then watch the slide show in full screen mode. There is also a map showing where I took all my pictures along the way, if that can help you visualize.

7:55. I have to promptly leave the house at 7:55. If I leave just a minute later, I jeopadize making the train in Gümligen. One cool thing about the trains being nearly always on time, is I learn how to cut it close. If I leave any later, I have to bike to work, or take the tram. I prefer to have the 30 minute walk along the top of the hill, it is much more scenic, and I get a good bit of exercise, a little time to clear my mind and prepare for the day ahead. My office has a competition where we track the number of miles we walk, and I have logged over 250 miles since we started in August.

The trip starts out in a small patch of forest, and has me head uphill past a horse farm. At the horse farm, there is this big black German Shepard that always comes out and barks at me. I have yelled at it at the top of my lungs, and that usually stops him from barking at me. When the mean dog is not around, usually there are two early 20's or teen-aged girls helping out on the farm, and they always say good morning. Since nobody else is manly enough to do a hike up this hill every morning, I guess I have become sort of a regular thing for them.

The path takes a steep turn up a gravelly rocky road where cars and motorcycles are not permitted. There is evidence of regular horse riding, as there are many "road apples" along the way. Some mornings the hill is more forboding than others, but as I do this commute up the hill more, the hill gets easier. The hill is steep enough that one could not dream of riding a bike up it, and just simply walking up this hill with a bicycle in hand is also a dreadful thought. Maybe the Swiss don't think it's so bad; maybe I'm just out of shape, or maybe I am just not used to the hills any more.

By the time I get to the top of the hill, the gravelly path has joined a small one-lane road which has very little traffic. Usually I see only one or two cars every morning. The rest of this part of the journey is a gentle downhill slope which makes the walk to work easier. Biking back up this hill going the other way is terrible. I have biked this way home only once, to get home a sloppy sweaty mess, out of breath for a good 10 minutes after arrival.

8:20. I get to the Schützenhaus der Gemeinde Müri, which has a very nice water fountain for me to get my hydration levels back up. This is where the forest breaks, and there is either a grey sky above me (the usual scenario), or on this day, the sky turned into a brilliant blue. There are more cars along here, but not so many that I fear for my life. The Schützenhaus is where the Swiss, who own guns, do shooting practice. There is a target range that you can walk under the live fire when they are shooting. I have never been here when the shooting range is active.

8:33. If I make a good enough walking pace, I can grab the S1 line that takes me directly to Fribourg. The train ride on the S1 is exactly 55 minutes long, and this is the fastest way to get from Gümligen to my office, bar none. It also is one of the more uncomfortable rides. The S1 is packed, so I don't get to sit until we get to the main train station, and most of the people get off. I usually don't take this train. I really have to walk quickly and not slow down for anything to make the S1 in 38 minutes from my front door.

8:38. The S2 that goes to Schwarzenburg arrives at Gümligen. I usually take this train to the Bern main station, where I then take the intercity to Fribourg. This gets me to Fribourg 8 minutes later than if I was to take the S1. So if I miss the S1, it is not a tragedy. I have a back-up plan.

8:40. If I manage to miss the S1 and the S2, there is a third fall-back. There is a tram that leaves Gümligen and shows up in downtown. A very brisk walk after the "G" tram makes it into Bern Zytglogge can get me to the 9:04 train at the main train station.

This morning, I was so busy taking pictures for you, that I blew it, and missed all three connections. This almost never happens. i got distracted by taking some pictures of cows and mountains, and sights along the way, that I didn't realize that I had fallen so far behind schedule. Oh well. This gives me an opportunity to show you what standing around the tram stop in Gümligen looks like, so you can get a glimpse of my everyday life. Since I missed all three of the above connections, I also missed the intercity train to Fribourg that leaves at 9:04. So the commute will take even longer now.

Most of the Swiss spend their time on public transportation reading the free newspapers. They are not the paragon of journalistic integrity, but they pass the time. The articles are written in simple enough German for me to read (I have a really hard time reading the real newspapers, that use lots of words I never learned, and I would spend all my time reading the dictionary to get the meaning of the articles.) Here, this day's newspaper describes the Stock Market meltdown, and also describes the new uniforms of the Swiss Ski team.

The tram trip is pretty slow going, and is only a few minutes faster than it would be to drive downtown. I get off at Bern Zytglogge, where the "G" tram ends. In order to make the inter city train, I have to walk to the train station, about 8 minutes walk away. Sometimes, I grab the #3, the #5 or the #9 tram, which all take me straight to the train station. Since I have a lot of time to get to my 9:34 train, I decide to walk it and show you some of the pictures along the way. For those who don't know the rules of pronouncing Swiss words, "Zytglogge" is pronounced kind of like "TSEET-glock-kah" Along the walk from Zytglogge to the Bahnhof (train station), there are many shops along the way. A few clothing stores, like H&M, Vögeli, and a butcher/deli. I never do any shopping, so I don't have much idea what is actually in these shops.

9:16. I arrive at the main train station. I have no idea what Bern looked like before the great construction of 2007. In 2007 through May of 2008, all of this area around the train station was a huge mess of construction and blocked roads, pedestrian paths re-routed, trams stopped. They managed to finish all the work for the revamped train station just about a week before the UEFA soccer tournament began.

A part of the massive construction that was done includes a new wing of the underground mall, where they now show some of the old city walls, enclosed in a glass display, showered with pink light. There is no escaping the worldly influence of McDonald's, as there is one that is never empty right inside the train station. I get to the train station meeting area, where there is a big blue display showing all of the trains that arrive and depart from Bern. I already know what train I am taking, as do most of the people here this morning. There are occasionally tourists studying the departure board carefully, or asking for directions. There are also the locals waiting around for a friend to arrive; they use this area as a meeting point.

My train to Fribourg is the nice train. This train comes once an hour, at the bottom of the hour, instead of the top of the hour. This is the double decker train, with a very nice restaurant on board. At 9:04, the train that goes to Fribourg is not nearly as nice, but still much more comfortable than the S1 that stops about a dozen times between Gümligen to Fribourg. On the adjacent track is the Cisalpino train to Milan. I have not had an opportunity to take this train yet, but will probably sometime in the next few weeks for a business trip to Turino.

When the train arrives, there is an orderly shuffle without proper queueing to get into the train. Many of the Swiss stand too closely to the door, as crowded passengers coming in from Zürich attempt to get off. Since this is such a late train, it is not nearly as crowded as if I had gotten on this train an hour earlier. I usually get on the car close to the restaurant, there are usually more seats further up the train, but it is never a problem trying to find a seat toward Fribourg.

The double-decker train InterCity Express is incredibly quiet and smooth. There is one car named "the quiet car", which is so quiet you can often only hear the rustling of newspapers. There are usually tourists who get into the quiet car and inconsiderately start talking. I seem to be more Swiss every day, as I usually give these rude talkers a very dirty look, but say nothing.

The train arrives in Fribourg 27 minutes later, but this day, there was a seven minute delay. In August 2007, there was some sort of landslide that caused the rails between Wünnewil and Flamatt to be unusable. There has been construction on this line ever since. In one small place on the line, there is only one track for both directions, which will require us to wait for a service in the opposite direction to pass. The train I took on this day had to wait, and it caused a seven minute delay. The delay in this direction does not bother me much; especially since I have had so many other delays this morning, what is another seven minutes?

I exit the train with nearly everybody else. A sea of people exit the train, and walk at an average walking pace down the ramp to the rest of the train station. At the exit of the station, I hang around at the bus stop. It is usually only a 2 minute wait, but since we were seven minutes late from the rail construction, I waited longer than usual.

The rest of the commute is not that interesting. I take an empty bus to the edge of town, and walk another ten minutes to our office. The morning is started by a fresh cup of coffee, as delivered from our Nespresso machine, which I adore. This machine is great, especially as it does not give my coworkers the opportunity to be rude and finish off all the coffee in the coffee pot without refilling it. Insert a capsule, put a cup in place, and press the button, and a great cup of coffee comes out.

The amount of time I put into the daily commute does start to drain on me. Emotionally, it has taken a serious toll in me, especially in this past week. Time can be shaved off here and there; if I take my bicycle from the house to Gümligen, I can do the trip in 7 or 8 minutes. I have to be walking out the front door by 8:25 at the absolute latest to bike to Gümligen and make the 8:33 S1 train. In any event, I probably will remember the commute when I think back on my time in Switzerland. I might even look upon it favorably. However, I will never look back memorably on my Virginia commute by car.

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New Look

2008-09-23T03:51:00.008-04:00

For the past year, I have subscribe to a friend's pictures and paintings. She is the wife of fellow ex-pat Chris, who works in the office with me. First, let me show you some of the awesome pictures that the two of them paint. Yes, I said PAINT. ...with Brushes... and actual water-color. Even an easel!

Chris and Miz K both subscribe to something called Illustration Friday, where a website they subscribe to asks its patrons to paint something for the subject of the week. Miz K, the artist whose paintings I so thoroughly enjoy, has this strange fascination with squids. To the right, you will find her most recent painting, although not an Illustration Friday submission, a picture of two birds in a tree.

Miz K pointed me out to her father's blog, where she was commissioned to make a painting for her father's website header. I liked the look of it so much, I had to have one for myself!

I commissioned her for a painting, with no price set, "But you can now call yourself a professional artist.", I promised. So in case you are unable to correctly interpret the art, let me help you out. To the left, you will find the perfect representation of me, always away from the family, and off flying. Although I don't fly planes with engines, it is kind of hard to draw a glider and have people not respond with something dumb like "Where's the engine on this plane?"

The next snippet shows Jake (who is now much taller in real life -- he is taller than Stacy now. Anyway, you will find Jake and Cecilia rough-housing with Joshie, who is airborne. If you have ever been over to our house in the evening, you will know that rough-housing is a very important part of our bonding. Each of the kids had their favorite rough-housing game, usually involving throwing the kids onto the bed in one way or another. (This was all a really good work-out for me, too).

Finally, you will find Joey clinging to Mommy's side for attention. Doubtless, there are many days when this is really a perfect description of Stacy's life. Joey is growing up a bit, and not quite as clingy as the last year. However, when he is sick, the clingy-tendencies come back.

You may be wondering, "Why rabbits?", well I suppose Miz K found it appropriate, seeing as we have two pet rabbits who live outside our front door, Buck and Sunny. I think I also remember saying, "I don't like crabs so much, so please don't paint something with crabs. "

Gondola at Stockhorn

2008-09-18T04:13:00.007-04:00

Aug 3, 2008

Right after getting back from the US, and before the kids started the new school year, we took a nice Sunday trip to the mountains. I decided to drag the family to Stockhorn.

The Stockhorn is one of the mountains we can see from our patio, shown here:

This is one of Stacy's favorite mountains to look at, so this seemed to be an excellent opportunity for us to go out and see what it looks like from the top.
We were originally going to set out on the train, but with the collection of water bottles, snack, stroller, food, kids, clothes, shoes, socks, WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T HAVE YOUR SHOES ON YET?! WE'RE LEAVING IN 2 MINUTES! We always seem to drive instead. I don't think the inertia of the family allows us to leave for anything on time.

The car ride takes us south, toward Thun, then Spiez. We turn East, and go behind the mountains that we can see from our patio, under a tunnel, and down a narrow road with no way to pass if we get stuck behind a tour bus. Eventually, we stop in Erlenbach, and are guided to the last parking space in the whole town.

Within a few minutes, and 40 francs later, we are on the gondola climbing the mountain. I take some nice shots going up the hill:

We arrive at the first stop named "Chrindi" In case you are not familiar with Swiss German pronunciation of things, that "Ch" is not pronounced like "Chicken" or "Church", but as a voiceless uvular fricative -- or maybe it's a voiceless velar fricative, more like the ch in "Lochness Monster", as said by a true Scotsman. I'm not exactly sure, but it is one of those throaty phonemes that is lacking in the English language.

Anyway, once at Chrindi, we stop for an expensive lunch that the kid's didn't enjoy much. Stacy got the "Fitness Teller", and I got some sort of something that involved a lot of gravy and a schnitzel of some sort. It was awesome, but I think was probably too high in something tasty like cholesterol or fat. The kids ate mostly french fries. (They are impossible to feed). The restaurant had a nice view, at least.
Also at the Chrindi statin, there is a small playground with a big rocking horse that the kids enjoyed for a bit. I would rock that thing as hard as I could while they were on-board, and they would slide around screaming from fear [Video].

Between Chrindi and the mountain top, there is a lovely lake where lots of fishermen cast lines, and don't catch much. I never have really understood the point of fishing, but it looks like the people there who were fishing were enjoying themselves with a campfire, beer, and a cooler containing more beer. We set off for a walk around the lake. There were really cool rock patterns that look like they were carved from glaciers, some of the smallest frogs you've ever seen, zillions of little fish in a small pond, We came across a lady whose dog loved to play fetch into the lake, and as he emerged, looked like the Lochness Monster.

Of course, the kids complained of the exercise, and none would pose for pictures. What is a very annoying behavior that the kids have picked up, is to run away from the camera, or to cover their faces as they flee. They think it is funny, but it is grating on my nerves. They also enjoy blocking the camera as the shots are being made of the scenery. It was rather hot on this day, so they enjoyed splashing in a horse watering trough. I think we drank that water too, which looks worse than it was.

We circled around and came back to the gondola station Chrindi, and set out to the second leg of the climb. The second leg goes form Chrindi to the top of the mountain. At the top, there of course are spectacular views, a nice restaurant where we enjoyed the view and some ice cream. We walked up a small zig-zag path to the top of the mountain to soak in the view from all directions.

To the North, we could see nothing but clouds. The clouds did not penetrate into the valley to the South, where it was a pretty clear view to the rest of the Alps to the South. To the East, we could see Interlaken and Thun, when the clouds cleared out just enough. There was very obvious uplift along the mountain faces on both sides, as evidenced by the clouds being blown upward, and the birds soaring effortlessly along the ridge tops. There were no gliders to be seen, but I was definitely looking out for them. A Cessna flew by the restaurant at idle, as not to disturb the restaurant-goers.

The view to the North occasionally allowed us to see "Glory", an optical phenomenon when your shadow is cast upon a cloud. It is like a little mini-rainbow with the shadow of your head at the center of the rainbow. The pictures I took did not come out so well, and I could not really get the colors enhanced enough to artificially enhance what was more obvious with the naked eye. Here is a false-color image of that glory, with the hues enhanced, maybe it will help you find it more easily. The clouds were pretty far down below us, making it harder to see. I have experience with glory as a glider pilot. Occasionally, I can fly above the clouds, and the shadow of the glider is highlighted by this beautiful rainbow halo.

At the top, I tried to get a picture with all four kids. I think I took about 25 shots in total, each time, there was a problem with at least one of the kids. many times, the shot would not come out because a kid was squinting in the sun, or there was a kid looking at his feet. Another time a kid was making a silly face.

Gnaargh! I need to do more kid picture training practice with the kids. Maybe I should get them to be goofy and playing for the first few pictures, to get it all out of their system, and then get the serious picture taking. Well the joy of digital cameras is you can make up for a lack in quality with an abundance of quantity. I took so many pictures, that some of them were bound to come out.

As the day was getting later, the number of people trying to cram into the gondola increased. We got one of the last few gondolas down, and the humanity was packed much like those crowded Tokyo subways. On the car ride home, it was difficult keeping the kids from falling asleep.

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Backlog of Updates

2008-09-17T08:32:00.004-04:00

Well, so I see it has been a while since I have written anything. A few people have been nice enough to notice, and even nicer to kindly remind me that they enjoy reading what I have to write. So thanks!

And some of them were even Swiss and didn't take the line about how I sometimes feel like it is a nation of noise-sensitive accountants. I am sorry about that. I was very frustrated when I wrote that. But you should know that some Swiss even agreed with me.

America! Heck Ya!
It has been a year since I have been to the land of WalMart and Cheeseburgers... I mean the land of the free and the home of the brave. I arrived in Dulles airport, and was greeted with a wave of unpleasant humidity and heat, as I exited the aircraft. The moist wall of oven heat smacked me in the face haunting me with the unwelcome reminder of why one should never book travel to the nation's Capital during the summer.

When I first sat in my seat on the way to America, I soon found that the window seat next to me was to be occupied by a college girl headed back home to Virginia. She was one of these sorts of people who like to have the window shade closed (these people should not be wasted on window seats), and was also the sort of person to go to the bathroom every 30 minutes (strike two! You should not be gifted with a window seat), and was, in her words , "Very Prone To Air Sickness!"

Great.

Now that I look back, my first experience with the heat of landing in America was the nausea that my seat-neighbor suddenly felt as she was nearly ready to return her meal to her lap. An approach into Dulles on a very good soaring day, with lots of turbulence from 9000 feet down to the surface. I wanted to look out the window and look for good soaring clouds. She could not tolerate that. With the turbulence, along with her closed window, along with the sudden rush of heat as we touched down, this was nearly all that she could tolerate. Of course, I had the air sickness bag ready to deploy in hair-trigger mode. Thankfully, there was no spewage.

Always in the Wrong Line
This was a full flight. And half of the flight has someplace else to be; Dulles was not their final destination. There were other flights also arriving at the same time. And they must have all been Jumbo Jets packed with weary stinky international travelers. Dulles International Airport was very clearly designed before the 9/11 revisions of security policy.

As these two jet-loads of passengers off-loaded, they were shoved into a very narrow hallway. There was barely enough room for two people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder. We moved along like cattle. I was reminded of the expression, "Unless you're the lead Husky at the Iditarod, the view never changes."

I had no need to rush, but I could see the frustration of the faces of those who were making connecting flights. They were bumping into me from behind, nearly stepping on my heels. It was crowded, and the pressure of making the connection was pushing me from behind. There was a fork in the path; some people went that way, I went to the left. I could not see the sign past the sea of people, and I could not go that way even if I wanted to; for fear of getting trampled.

We go down a flight of stairs, and I we are all funneled into a room. I stand in a large room with two lines. One for MURICANS! and one for dirty foreigners^[*], who are all treated like suspected terrorists. These suspected terrorists, also known politely as "foreign nationals visiting the United States" get to stand in a much longer line with much fewer homeland security personnel, carefully scrutinizing all foreigners who wish to enter the country. Their biometrics are carefully recorded, including a hand-scan. Our country is safe, I know it. I am glad that I am in the line of people with their proud US passports.

I am bringing food into the United States. Going through customs is going to be fun. I declare it. When asked, I answered "Seven jars of preserves."

"Preserves? Like life preservers"

"No, like Jelly. You know. Jam." The border patrol guy doesn't seem to care much, and stamps my paper, and I'm on my way to baggage claim.

My old luggage used to have this big yellow stripe painted through the middle. It was a really crappy paint job too. I did it with a can of furniture spray paint, and it leaked, dripped. It looked rather like the white stripe on the back of a skunk. Clearly, no luggage thief would ever think of stealing this "skunk bag" And not even a blind man would mistake this horribly clashy ugly piece of luggage as his. This time there was no skunk bag. I did not have much time to even look at the luggage I was packing, much less paint a stripe on it. The original skunk bag got smooshed too many times, and had to be retired. This new monster bag is as easy to identify in a sea of identical luggage bags.

With the skunk bag, finding my baggage is usually pretty easy. I normally have a horrible track record with having my luggage sucked out from the luggage compartment and lost at sea somewhere over the Atlantic. Maybe the jet liner flies into a mini black hole, and my bag is the only thing sucked into it. I do not know. But I do know that nobody has as bad a luck with luggage as I do. With the skunk bag, if that bag is showing up on this carousel, I will surely find it. I will not ever confuse it with the zillion other bags circling around, unclaimed.

I stand a bit back from the luggage carousel. Everybody else stands right next to it, and when somebody else needs to get their luggage off in a hurry, the person standing directly next to the conveyor belt doesn't move, and gives a dirty look when the luggage being removed hits them in the knee.

I stand.

I wait.

I watch all the people I saw on my flight show up.

They get their bags.

They leave.

I wait some more.

The conveyor stops.

I wish I had the skunk bag.

I rummage through the several hundred other bags just to make sure that my bag is not among them. Without the powers of skunk-bag, this is not as easy as the task usually is. I finally give up, and am resigned to another episode of wearing the same clothes for several days while my luggage's contents are gathered from the bottom of the Atlantic.

I stand in the long line of lost luggage-ers, one Indian family with a screamy baby, one family headed off to Atlanta. One adult among a large group of children who were all traveling together with some sort of cheer-leading camp or band camp or some sort of school event overseas. I show my baggage claim check, and the lady behind the counter doesn't even type the number into the computer.

"Are you a connecting to another flight?" Wow. It is really nice of her to figure out that I might have a short connection and that she might rush a bit more.

"Why, no. This is where I am stopping" I reply.

"Sir, you got in the wrong line. You need to take a shuttle bus to the other terminal, then go through the other Customs line"

Oh. That is what that other line that I couldn't fork off to was going. I do a facepalm so hard, you might have heard the smacking sound from wherever you were at the time. She escorted me back through customs, where I sneered at the dirty foreigners^[*] trying to enter my country. (ok, not really). Back up the flight of stairs, past even more people waiting in line. I finally get to the fork in the path on the too-narrow hallway, and find myself waiting for a shuttle bus. The last shuttle just left, and I am forced to wait another 20 minutes for the next one. It was an uncomfortable wait, considering that there was no air conditioning in this part of Dulles, or at the very least inadequate air conditioning.

I get to the "correct" line at Customs, and present my already stamped customs form, which immediately raised suspicions with the customs guard. I had to admit, again, that "stupid me got into the wrong line and came here once I realized my baggage was coming to this terminal." Facepalm again. He actually was a customs agent with a sense of humor. There was nobody behind me, so there was no pressure for him to get me through the line as quickly as possible. When he asked me about the "bringing drugs in the country", he quickly rattled off the list of all of the nicknames for any drug you had ever imagined.

"No Weed? No smack? No Crack? No Strips? No blips? No needles? No vines? No snuff-snuff? No Puff-Puff?" He said these all in rapid succession that I was rather stunned.

"Nope I'm clean!" He let me on, and stamped my customs form AGAIN. That is the funniest guy in customs I have ever seen. I thought these guys were not supposed to have a sense of humor. Maybe it was some sort of mind game they played trying to get me off guard to admit to something un-American. A clever strategy! I would not be fooled!

I am sure some customs agent reviewing all the submitted forms wondered how one of these could get two stamps. It could only take an idiot....

Driving Adventures
I have no idea what happened to my Virginia Drivers License. Good thing I have my Swiss license. I got my rental car at Hertz, and started the drive to my hotel in Sterling. The first thing I noticed was a three way stop sign just before exiting to the north of the airport. I realized then why traffic circles were so excellent. If there was a traffic circle here, nobody would have to stop. Since nobody is coming from the right side (EVER), all parties just swoop around the traffic circle, and are on their way, without an expensive stop. Do you realize how much gas is wasted by just stopping and starting a car? Clearly the US could use more traffic circles. Maybe I shook my fist in anger at this traffic engineer.

I get on to Route 28 to find myself in a traffic jam. This is typical. In Northern Virginia, this area west of the Capital Beltway expanded very rapidly in the late 1990s and early 2000's, and is still expanding. Of course, the Representative government of Virginia loves the extra income of the explosion of population. And they love taking that tax revenue and sharing it with the rest of the state. This means that there is a disproportionate amount of wealth put into the rest of the much less affluent state; and it shows in the choked traffic patterns of Northern Virginia. It is enough of an issue for some people to propose seceding Northern Virginia from the rest of the state. I, for one, am all for it. For one, I am tired of living in a state that always votes Republican in the Presidential elections. If you were witness to this traffic, you might even vote with me.

The List of Nine
While sitting on the plane, next to the easily-stricken with airsickness college girl, I wrote down a list of all the places I needed to eat while I was in Virginia. This list would have come so easily while I was in Switzerland around October of last year, when I was feeling kind of homesick. But now that I have gotten rather used to life in Europe, I don't miss those things so much any more. Here was my list, to the best of my recollection, in no particular order:

I had a coworker take me out to "anything on my list", a friend from the company drove me to Los Tol Tecos, where we enjoyed an excellent Mexican food dinner. Switzerland does not have many Mexicans, so the Mexican food there is.. well ... very French, and not very Mexican.

I found a way to get to everything else on the list, with the exception of the Main Street Mill, in Front Royal. I went to the gliderport to meet everybody and do some flying. Some friends suggested we meet at the Mill after flying, and they left early. By the time I had gotten there, they all had left. So no Mill for me. For the most part, people were so happy to see me, that they paid for my meals for me. So even though I was travelling on the company's bill, I still did not have many items to place on my expense report.

The food at all of these places was not as wonderful as I remember it. The nostalgia was more important than the actual lunch quality. I did really enjoy the Mexican food at Los Tol Tecos, and the burger at 5 guys was pretty good; but I could do just fine without these for another year.

Wandering Around the Office
As I arrived to work, my main focus was to meet up with the people I haven't seen in a year. I went floor-by-floor, office by office, meeting people that I really like, and having the same conversation over and over again.

"Hi! Are you back for good? Or just visiting?"

"Just visiting"

"I heard you were coming back [permanently]. "

"It's complicated. But for now, I'll be back in August 2009. "

"How is it over there? "

"(Sigh) Have you read my blog?"

"You have a blog?"

"Yes. "

"What is the name of the blog? "

"I am the only Piet Barber in the world, it's not that hard to find. " (There are some advantages to having that weird Dutch name).

"How is the family doing?"

"It's a pendulum. They hate it one week, and the next week they love it. Jake never has loved it though. "

Imagine this conversation about 30 times over a week. I should have just brought along queue card for the script. Or maybe a FAQ for the person before we have to talk.

Other Adventures and Notes in America
I'll just list these in brief:

The family and I took a day trip to King's Dominion
The family got taken out to dinner to Red Robin by my father (on the last possible day)
The family got invited to my sister's house, but only I went, since some of the family was sick.
I worked a lot, there was about 4 weeks of work that everybody tried to cram into my 6 days at the office. Not to mention all the personal time I needed with the various co-workers with whom I never see, and don't get to talk to.
Five Guys Burgers are as awesome as I remember them.
Virginia is hot in July and August.
Driving sucks in Virginia
Being forced to drive everywhere sucks. No wonder kids always want a driver's license immediately when they are 16.
Traffic circles would be a really excellent enhancement to traffic management in Virginia, but nobody in America knows the rules of the traffic circle, and there would be driving fatalities for the first few years, at least.

* I don't really feel that way about foreigners, it just seems that the Homeland Security Parade looks at the visitors to America in this way.

Week in Saanen

2008-08-05T07:11:00.004-04:00

As you may have known, I belong to the glider club in Bern, http://www.sgbern.ch. As you also may have known, the family was in the US for the whole month of July, and I was on business travel to Stockholm and Lithuania for the end of June, early July. Every year, the flying club packs up all their gliders and heads to this little town in the valleys in the southern part of Canton Bern, right on the border to Vaud. That town is Saanen.

The club relocated for four weeks. For three of those four weeks, I was unable to do any flying; being in Stockholm, Lithuania, or being the on-call Systems Administrator at work. During this hectic week of being on-call, I have no personal life whatsoever, and flying is out of the question. So without any ability to make good on the first three weeks of Saanen flying, I tried to cram it all into the last week. I took off a week from work and planned to become the expert Alp glider pilot.

Saturday: Rain. Stayed home and played video games.

Sunday: Rain. Stayed home and played video games.

Monday: Rain, I made some Johannsbeeren Jam.

Tuesday: I show up at the field at 10:20. "Sorry, you had to attend the meeting at 9:30 to fly. Today there are not enough instructors anyway" I did not know about this rule, so I am both heartbroken and disappointed. I do not argue. I drive through Vaud to Fribourg via Gruyeres, and go to work. Too bad, because it was the perfect soaring day. I did my best to not look out the windows, and stayed late at work to avoid seeing the nice weather on the way home. I did manage to get some quality work done.

Wednesday: Show up at 9:30, just in time for the briefing. I would have shown up earlier, but had a tour bus in front of a line of mile's worth of frustrated traffic, all driving slower than they wanted. Once the tour bus stopped, the cars flew out in front of me and I did not see them again. At the field, I managed to get an instructor and fly. More on that in a moment. I took so many pictures that another camera battery ran out of charge. Unfortunately, I could take no more pictures. Fortunately, I got some stunning shots.

I brought along my camping equipment to spend the night. I pitched my tent, in apparently the wrong place, and got a serious yelling-at by one of the locals. Typical. No signs, No nothing. Just tribal knowledge that me, the dirty foreigner had no way of knowing. Sometimes I think this country is inhabited by noise-sensitive accountants. I walk with such soft steps around the Swiss, but always seem to anger them by something I did wrong. Whether its taking out the trash the wrong way, or pitching my tent in the wrong place; it doesn't seem to matter. This is one of the quite frustrating parts of the Swiss Experience. When I go back to America, I promise, I will be much nicer to the foreigners. (The yeller, a club member, later apologized).

The town of Saanen had a big party with beer, raclette and steak and lots of people enjoying themselves. Unfortunately, every time something cool like this happens, work calls. Even though I was no longer on call, I was asked to explain the otherwise unexplainable. I quickly inhaled my pork chop dinner, being greatful that I did not drink too much bear, and spent the next three hours on-line finding out why a.root-servers.net was doing a traffic spike. (That's one of the many things I do, figure out what caused DNS traffic spikes on VeriSign's root name servers).

Thursday: It rained. Again. I did not sleep particularly well, my make-shift pillow was highly unsatisfactory, and I never could get quite comfortable. The ran that fell on Thursday was the sort of long awful depressing rain that turns the most devout tea-totaler to a life of the bottle. Prior to my departure on Wednesday morning, I knew it was going to rain all day on Thursday, but I decided camping through the rain was necessary to flying on Friday. On Friday it would be impossible to be late and miss the morning briefing. Besides, what else was I going to do? Watch TV? Play video games? Go to work? My RC Helicopter was broken, so that wasn't going to entertain me.

While wasting time that rainy day, I ate lunch inside my favorite café in Saanen, looking at the drippy world outside. I later visited The Museum der Landshaft Saanen in the city center. The museum had lots of artifacts from the 18th and 19th century. Many artifacts of the pre-modern era, and it was clear that either those people had lots of religious icons, or the religious icons were more durable and tended to last a few centuries.

The night of camping with a sack of socks and underwear was not a suitable pillow, so part of my day's agenda was to go shopping for a pillow in Gstaad. I found a flowery pillow for the very reasonable price of 10 CHF in a froofy store selling lots of stuff with potpourri. My tent no longer smelled like stinky wet clothes but now smelled of stinky wet clothes and potpourri. Not too bad I guess.

Thursday evening had the Saanenlagerfest. The morning started out with a call for volunteers to snap the ends off of the 18 kilograms of green beans. I volunteered, and sat with 7 or so Swiss ladies in their 60s and 70s snapping or cutting away. They spoke Bärndütsch with each other until one said, "Oh You probably don't understand ANYTHING we are saying!" (in High German). I responded "Nit nüüt" ("Not nothing", in Bärndütsch, which, in case you're curious is "Nicht nichts" in High German).

As is typically the habit, people will be speaking Bärndütsch, and as they scan the room for feedback, once they notice I'm there, they quickly switch to High German. Invariably, three sentences later, they revert back to Bärndütsch without realizing it. Or it becomes a mix between High German, but uses many oops words that they don't realize are not High German. I don't mind. I have to learn it anyway, and it is more rude of me to expect that the whole region conform to my needs, than me to conform to their customs.

When the dinner was ready, the tables were set for us. Each place had a name tag in the form of a Post-It note. Mine was "Pit", which in Bärndütsch, you would pronounce like how you would normally pronounce Pete. If it was "Piet" Bärndütsch rules would dictate that it be pronounced like "PEE-yet." The Swiss always think it is strange when I introduce myself as "PEET", a name they are not familiar with. They expect the German pronounciation of "PAY-ter." The Bernese, and presumably other Swiss Germans like to mess up somebody's proper name to Swissify it. Peter is "Pesha" Kurt is "Kurtli," and so on.

All of the placemats were hand-made for this event. Each place-mat was a spread from the Swiss equivalent of Tiger Beat magazine. Why waste perfectly good paper for a disposable place mat? The corners were carefully cut round, and before dinner, there was a good conversation piece. My page was clearly from a teeny-girl magazine, and describe the different ways you could accessorize for events like "going on a Safari", or "going to the Jungle" or "going to the Beach."

Some of the people to the left had crossword puzzles. My flight instructor, "Pol" (Paul) had a biography of a very beautiful young woman, full-nude. Her particulars were protected with a half of a Post-It note and the word "Zensur" inscribed. I guess the Swiss equivalent of the Tiger Beat magazine has nudity, too. Europeans don't get so freaked out about these things. Everybody had a good laugh about it. The post-it note was flipped up many times. "So! Sy isch Brazillian!" one commented.

The food was excellent. I went back for seconds on the green-beans, but also enjoyed the other stuff that came along with the beans. There was this big hunk of wurst of some sort, dried pears and the dessert was a donated pair of cakes suitable to feed 40. This was a meal to remember!

Of course, the whole thing was in Bärndütsch, and I am really glad I decided to start taking lessons to learn this dialect starting around November of last year. I have finally cut the corner of comprehension, and can understand, for the most part, what the heck these people are talking about.

I'm getting better with this, and if I paid attention really closely, I could make out 70% of what they were saying. We went out for drinks afterwards. Ivan spoke of a tale of living in Thun. He spoke (in Bärndütsch) of people coming from all over Switzerland to a huge conference. The conference featured these people showing off their strange devices. I did not understand what this device was, and I did not interrupt. "there were green ones and big ones and awful ones and ugly ones" He went on for a while. "They were so proud of these awful machines." I smiled and nodded in that way of "I have no idea what you are talking about." I simply lacked the cultural reference to know what he was complaining about. The others at the table roared with laughter. OK, I was pretty left out.

Ivan (who speaks English quite well) stopped and saw I wasn't following, and filled me in with the information I was lacking, with a short lesson in English. Ivan was talking about a Barrel Organ, "Drehorgel" in German. Now I can only imagine how entertaining it must have been to see this conference, with all the goofy different Drehorgeln. After Ivan filled me in, I laughed the same volume and tone, only delayed by the required description of what a Drehorgel was.

Friday: The clouds were too low. The only instructor present at the field wanted to pack up his camper and head home. I packed up my junk and headed home. Finally, some replacement parts came for my broken helicopter, so I put them all together and did some flying for the first time in a month. In case you were curious, the replacement parts were for a broken the rotor hub and lost the fly-bar -- it separated in-flight and is lost in the rose garden somewhere, just before I headed off to Stockholm.

Saturday: No formal flying operations at Bern. Packing up all the junk at Saanen. I spent the day chatting with people in Bern, and had dinner with everybody at the party after the relocation to Saanen. While bored in the hangar, I sat in the cockpit of the DG-300 to get comfortable, and read through the glider's manual (all in German). The evening had a large dinner for a very reasonable price of 5 CHF (somebody donated lots of money to the cause). The food was excellent.

Sunday: I was the Barakenchef, and kept the clubhouse clean while nobody flew. The weather was marginal, and the clouds were gathering for a great storm. At the nearby Gurten mountain, there was a big concert forming. The chief of the days operations warned us sternly to avoid flying over the concert. Although the flight activity was minimal, I managed to convince the Chief Officer to let me do some flying. I got 3 flights in the DG-300. For this club, in order to solo any aircraft you need to have four familiarization flights. I managed to get out three of them.

The DG-300 is a very nice glider, no surprises, easy to fly, is quiet at high speeds, good balance between rudder and ailerons, although I had a tendency to skid. The seating was also quite comfortable. To demonstrate my precision landing ability, I had a hard time seeing the part of the grass field, which didn't help with my ability to prove the spot landings. The chalk and gravel has been overgrown by grass, and is impossible to see clearly on final approach. The third flight was a release at 250 meters on the downwind leg, and the rain was coming down hard as I landed. Operations were canceled for the day as a thunderstorm soon rolled in. We used old windshield wipers to clean off the rain from the wings.

Monday: On a plane to the USA, starting at 5:45 AM. My neighbor was very nice, and so nice that he volunteered to drive me to the airport so early.

Flying Report:
In total: 5 days leave from work, 1 flight in Saanen, lasting three hours. Three more flights in cloudy rainy weather in Bern totalling 41 minutes in total.

Was it worth it? Heck Yeah! Wait till you see the pictures!

View pictures in Map mode

I told my instructor "Pol" to give me a demonstration to flying in the Alps. We towed up to 1000 meters above the airport, to about 2000 meters above sea level. We held on a bit longer, towing up to about 2200 meters, before we let the towplane go. The turbulence was moderate right next to the moutain peaks on tow, but once we were off, things smoothed out.

We sniffed around for lift, but finally settled on a thermal that he was very familar with; that house-thermal that every local instructor knows about. In this case, it was not a house, but rather a restaurant at the top of a ski lift. During the winter, this ski lift would be filled with warmly-dressed skiiers enjoying a Latté on the top of the mountain. On that Wednesday, the ski lift was empty. Too bad, because the Latté drinkers would have gotten quite a show. We circled just upwind of the restaurant, and climbed well above the ridgeline within a few minutes.

We would head south to go see the other mountains near Gsteig more closely. With no lift there, we headed back to our faithful thermal over the Restaurant. We headed back over there a few times, and I even asked Pol to do some of the flying so I could get some pictures.

Of course, these photos don't do any justice to the actual views I experienced.

After about two and a half hours, Pol started craving a cigarette, I could tell. I warned him if I had it my way, we would be flying until sundown. We did a steep approach with a very strangely shaped pattern; a VERY LONG downwind leg, almost a 180 degree turn for a base leg, and a very LONG final approach, with deadly consequences if we landed short of the runway's edge.

Johannisbeeren Konfitüre

2008-07-19T10:23:00.005-04:00

(Pronounced like yoh-HAN-niss-BARE-ren, not like Joe hayn niss beer rin)

(Ribe Jam)

First, About the Garden
Our garden is an amazing expression of nature. The owners of the property (and previous tenants) clearly put a lot of work into this house and the garden to make it beautiful. There are roses everywhere, and all sorts of other plants that I do not recognize and can not identify.

This inability to recognize and name plants goes for the weeds, as well. As an American without a flora identification book, I can not distinguish between the flowers and the weeds. What to do with all these plants growing in the garden? Is this a weed? Is this some flowery plant we don't have in the US? What kind of plant is this?

"Let them grow" said a friend in the flying club. "You can later decide if you want to keep that plant or not if it has flowers." Great advice.

Now, About the Weeds
Unfortunately, this gave time for one weed, which I do not know its name, plenty of time to gain a foothold in the garden. I had to call it something; "that weird sticky plant" just didn't satisfy me. So I had to come up with a German name for it. I call this the "Teufelpflanze" (Devil's plant). It does not have any sticky glue on its leaves and stems, but it sure acts like it does. It is a weed with a very small root system, and a very excellent ability to stick to other plants and grow like crazy. It chokes out all the other plants as it takes over.

The good news is that they are easy to pull out. The bad news is that when you pull them out, their seeds drop into the dirt ensuring the next generation. These weeds are an excellent demonstration of evolution in action. The perfect storm of weediness. Survival of the most annoying and insufferable weed. Darwin would be proud. I spend many Saturdays fighting, cursing, and uprooting these awful flora.

"Don't bother composting these weeds, they are too terrible. Throw them away" was the advice I got about these Teufelpflanze from a local. Too late. I had composted these plants by the heaping arm-full. I figured it would be a great fate for these plants to rot with bunny poop and old kitchen scraps. I may regret this.

One great strategy I found against the Teufelpflanze is to get a pitchfork and stab it into the patch of these plants. Twirl the pitchfork like a fork twirling up spaghetti. Take the pile and put it into the compost heap. Another strategy that has proven effective is to just whack the pile with the pitchfork, and make the sticky-quality of the weed act against its self. You can flatten a whole bushel of the weeds and make the weeds at the bottom hidden from the sunlight, doomed to die a fate of darkness. After a week or so, you can remove them all with the spaghetti technique I mentioned above. The weeds are not always easily reached, as they are on a ledge not easily accessible to people.

Stinky Compost Heap
Our compost heap is an environmentalist's dream. We recycle almost all food scraps (not meat), and the bunny poop too. Also destined for the pile are the weeds and any grass-clippings from my small lawn. Within a few weeks, all traces of food are turned into dirt. I haven't had the chance to make use of any of the excellent soil from this output, but I will be sure to make Stacy shovel it out of the heap. There is currently a tomato plant that has taken advantage of the rich soil and is growing out of the side of the container.

The heap is not stinky, unless I have just added a fresh batch of bunny poop. The only really disgusting thing about this heap is when we let some of the vegetables go for too long in the little kitchen composting box, (called bioabfälle eimer or rüstabfälle eimer) If we wait long enough, the contents will liquefy and settle; causing a mushy slurry of decayed and stinky vegetables to slip from the green bioabfälle bin.

Among the roses (which I have to admit I don't like very much), there are other plants. Some wild strawberries that have disappeared before I have gotten a chance to eat, Johannisbeeren (Ribes), about three bushes full, mint, some sort of ferns, other weird plants I have never seen before that may in fact be weeds that have enough flowers to fool us. (Another interesting evolutionary adaptation that would be). Of all of these plants, my favorite are the Johannisbeeren.

As far as I know, they are pretty much unknown in the US. At least I had never heard of them before coming to Switzerland. Last summer, we bought a nice little box of assorted berries: Raspberries, blueberries, and these weird berries we had never seen before. We sampled them and occasionally Stacy would shout "WOO!" when she gone one that was a little too tart. These little guys are not very sweet, and have a lot of zing that I really enjoy.

I was at first not sure if this bushy plant was a weed or some sort of plant. There were no flowers. The only indication that I had that this was not a weed was that some of the bushes were tied up to stakes with some string that looked like it was very old. I patiently waited for the development of these strange plants. There are apple trees in the backyard which I will get a chance to harvest starting in mid to late August.

Around early June, these little green berries started to form on the plants. I found them to be a familiar shape, and looked around the Internet to find out what they were. I had correctly identified them as "Johannisbeeren" and was excited for the eventual ripening and output of these bushes. I hate the rose bushes; their thorns scratch me as I mow the lawn, and my poor remote-controlled helicopter crashes into them occasionally, causing me to reach into the bushes to draw back a bloody scratched-up nub of an arm with undamaged helicopter. They give me flowers that are OK, but the thorns I hate too much. These Johannisbeeren, on the other hand; They give me these awesome berries.

Berry Exciting
The week before I headed to Stockholm, the first batch of berries were ready to be harvested. I scoured the bushes to find a bowl's worth of berries to triumphantly bring to the kitchen. I washed and cleaned them, and Stacy and I enjoyed them with a batch of blueberries, strawberries, and home-made whipped cream. Jake joined in on the berry action. We enticed him to try the Jo'beeren by saying "They taste just like Nature's Sour Patch Kids." He tried them and enjoyed them as much as we did.

I left for Stockholm, the family left for the US, and the berries ripened. When I returned from Lithuania, there were way more berries than I had ever dreamed could come from these little bushes. I quickly gathered bowl after bowl of these red jewels. With nobody around to help me eat them, and their prime time berry joy quickly fading, I had to find something to do with them.

Making the Jam
One of the bowls I gave to the neighbors one night when they invited me over to dinner. Those neighbors speak many different languages, but English is not one of them. That evening's conversation was all in German, and I think I did a pretty good job in keeping up with the conversation, with not too much frustration at not being able to explain myself. The only part I had a hard time explaining myself was to describe my job. I had never had the opportunity to talk about what I do to people who are not computer literate. It is generally a hard time to explain what I do to people who don't know much about the Internet, or computers, or networking in English; let alone German.

With seven bowls of freshly picked berries, and time running out, I had to find something to do with them. Why not do what people did in the old days to preserve fruit? Put them into jelly! I searched the Internet high and low to find a Johannisbeeren recipe, or a ribes recipe, or something that would help me out. I had never done anything like this by myself before; so this was going to be a great learning opportunity for me.

I finally find a how-to general guide to making preserves/jam/jelly. Although nothing specifically about these berries. I give it a shot and make use of the empty jars I had just bought.

First step: Clean up the Berries. These berries you can not easily pick from the branch without getting all sorts of non-berry items: Twigs, leaves, dirt, bugs, etc. So I took the spaghetti strainer, and emptied out bowls of the berries into the strainer and washed out the berries carefully. I sprayed everything off with the sink spritzer, and separated the non-berry components, and any berries that weren't satisfactory.

I put a few spoons into the freezer to chill them down. It sounds weird, but there is a reason for this. Then I took one batch of berries a time, and added them to a sauce pan. With one of the specialized tools for making smashed potatoes, I squished the berries in the pan until they were a slurry of juice, seeds, and berry slush in the pan. With low heat, I added large amounts of sugar and stirred constantly. A little bit of lemon juice just in case this is the sort of berry that doesn't have enough pectin naturally, and lots of stirring. I take a taste to see if it has enough sugar. The trick is to not add too much sugar; it still has to be tart.

When the juice has started to thicken after boiling off for a while, take a spoon from the freezer, and pour some of the jelly into the cold spoon. Place it onto a clean bowl, and put into the refrigerator. Let it sit in the refrigerator for about 5 minutes, while still stirring the pot. If it has cooked long enough, you will find the jelly on the cold spoon will congeal and have jelly/jam consistency. It should slowly slide off the spoon just like you're about to put it on toast. If it is too watery, cook it a little longer and take another one of those cold spoons from the freezer and try again.

While stewing the berries, have your jars ready for the introduction. I washed the jars with soap and water, then sterilized them by putting them in the oven at 150°C for 20 minutes or so. It is also important to note that if you leave it in the oven for TOO long, the jars will be too hot, and the jam you drop into the jar will sizzle. If you put a 150°C jar into boiling water, it still will be too much of a temperature difference, and the jar will shatter (ask me how I know this).

While stewing the berries, and while baking the jars, take the lids for the jars and throw them into a pot of boiling water to sterilize them. Once all parts are ready, carefully pour out the stewed berries into the jars. Remove the lids from the boiling water if you like, or keep them in the vat of boiling water. Place the jars with the jam into a pot of boiling water and let it simmer for about 10 mins or so. Make sure that the lid of the jar is clean from jam that has gotten on the side by your sloppiness.

Take the lids out first, then take out the jars, and lid the jars quickly. the lower air pressure inside the jar will get even lower as the fewer air molecules inside the jar start to cool, and reduce the air pressure. If done correctly, there will be a partial vacuum on the inside of the jar. If you have one of those lids that pop up when the jar is opened, the little button will eventually pop-down as the jars cool.

Ta-da! I now have something to give to people when I go back to America for a week on Monday. Since we can not import live berries to America, this is the best way I could come up with sharing these berries with my friends and family back in the US.

Here are the pictures I took:

Here are pictures of the various flowers and plants in the garden.
No pictures of the Teufelpflanze, which I think I should include to see if somebody out there can identify its real name for me.

Another thing to mention: my American accent rarely shows through my German, but it definitely shows when I say "Johannisbeeren." One of the locals thought I was talking about Johannis bären, the bears named "Johannis." I will have to work on that pronunciation.

Hail to the Chief

2008-07-11T20:12:00.000-04:00

I can hear the song now.
The video says it all:

Lithuania

2008-07-07T05:38:00.004-04:00

It's not every day that an American gets to go to Lithuania. As a part of the upgrades done with Project Titan, I had a short trip to Kaunas Lithuania on the way back from Stockholm. The trip was planned rather suddenly; so let me first explain the events that led up to my spontaneous trip to LT.

But First... More About Stockholm
Much like the trip to Amsterdam in May, the business trip to Stockholm consisted of long work hours, day after day of working, and a tireless, thankless effort. The shining moment of this trip was that as we were escorted daily to the bunker, our escort would also tire of sitting in the data center for so many hours, and kindly request that we pack it up and leave. Fortunately, this kept the days from being too long.

For the first few days in the bunker, I was painfully bored, as I was waiting for the networking team to hook up all of our equipment to the network. It is so loud from al the machines and cooling units that a normal conversation must be held at full volume shouting. I passed the hours by trying to do other types of office work; but instead of the comfortable environment of an office, it was attempted in a very loud and cold data center.

In fits of boredom, we discovered that some of the foam packing material hovered a few millimeters over the floor air vents. This data center had perforated floor tiles to let the cold air circulate and keep the computer equipment nice and cool. The hovering packing foam would not stay there for long, and would eventually fall off to the side, to one of the unventilated tiles.

A quick adaptation to the packing foam with a pair of scissors, and we could get it to sit there all day; but only while spinning. Boredom does strange things to me. At least I know how to pass the time. The networking guys got their equipment up, and quickly the boredom turned into a break-neck fast pace of trying to get everything up and running, with no time for anything else.

Unfortunately, due to the delays of getting the network up, and the shortened work days from the tired escort, The work still had to be done, prolonging the business trip over more 3 more days. What had originally been planned for 5 days long ended up being 8 days. I had only packed 7 days worth of clothes without rampant re-cycling. Since the family had already left to the United States on Saturday morning, there wasn't much sense in me rushing back to an empty house in Rüfenacht, since the very nice neighbors were looking over the house and our rabbits. I looked into a day trip to Lithuania, which was "on-the way home" from Stockholm. I picked up a new camera battery in the Stockholm airport, so I could take lots of pictures of a country I may never get to see again.

The servers I needed to tend to are in a little town called Kaunas, in Lithuania. Since most of my readership is American, I will assume that none of you have heard of this city before. It makes sense, as there are not a lot of Americans who travel to Europe to see Kaunas. Also, Americans as a general rule are terrible at Geography. As graduate from George Mason University with a BA in Geography, I am quite sure that the content of study consisted of at least 40% carping about the state of geography education in the United States. This somehow reminds me of my favorite quote from Ambrose Bierce:

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

Ambrose Bierce

View Larger Map

Short Geography Lesson
Short geography and history lesson: Lithuania is a country in the Baltics. No, not the Balkans. The Balkans are those countries like Kosovo, Yugoslavia, Croatia and Montenegro. I'm talking about the other side of Europe. The Baltics are east of Denmark, North of Poland, West of Russia, South of Finland. Three countries and a Russian Oblast (An Oblast is kind of like the Russian equivalent of a state) (and lots of times people don't include Kaliningrad as a part of the Baltics) are a part of these Baltic states. The Kaliningrad Oblast (belonging to Russia), the nation of Lithuania, further north is Latvia, and the northernmost is Estonia.

Kaliningrad used to be inhabited mostly by German speaking people, until they were mostly kicked out by the invading Russians at the end of World War II. Lithuania has about 3 million people, all speaking Lithuanian. In Latvia, people speak Latvian. In Estonia, they speak Estonian, which is very similar to Finnish. (Dear fellow American: they speak Finnish in Finland).

Lithuania used to have a very large territory in the 15th century, extending all the way south to the Black Sea. They were occupied sometime in the 19th century up until 1918, when they declared their independence. At the beginning of World War II they were occupied again by the Soviets, and in 1944, annexed into the Soviet Union.

The United States never recognized Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia as a part of the Soviet Union. Lithuania was the first of the Soviet Socialist Republics in 1990 to say "We have had enough of this Soviet rule!" and declared Independence. The United States never needed to have this relations-straining problem of recognizing Lithuanian independence, as it had never recognized Lithuania as a part of the Soviet Union in the first place. After Lithuania made its announcement of independence, the other Soviet Socialist Republics soon followed, and by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was finished.

Short Language Lesson
Lithuanian and Latvian are not like any other languages you may have heard. Both are classified as Baltic languages. Lithuanian is a very old language, not much different from its original form in the last 800 years. Linguistics researchers believe that Lithuanian has more similarities to the Proto-Indo-European language than any other living language today.

The Lithuanian language consists of all your standard Roman alphabet characters, with some accent marks in places you may not expect. This language is not like French; if there is a letter there, it is pronounced. Thankfully, reading out the words allowed me to find many English cognates, and that was the only hope I had for understanding the language for my two days there.

Lithuanian Adventure Begins
The town of Kaunas is not particularly large. There is no airport with scheduled service. In order to get there, one must fly into a neighboring city. The best option for me was to fly into the capital city, Vilnius, which is about 100 km away. When I did my research into the trip, I did not know about the train service between the two cities (which I would have really enjoyed), so I used the inter-city bus.

Amazingly, there was a direct flight from Stockholm Arlanda to Vilnius, which left at 0845. The day I flew to Vilnius is also the first day of the Stockholm public transportation strike. All of the bus drivers in the city decided they were not getting paid enough, and went on strike. Thankfully, there was a train between my hotel in downtown Stockholm to the airport called the Arlanda Express, so I was not affected by the strike at all.

Now I am a strong believer that a travel adventure is the most fun when there is no preparation beforehand. This trip was no different. I do not know the language, the locals do not speak English, I have only a small slip of paper with the address of my destination, and another small slip of paper with a description of the hotel that I booked only the night before. I have no local currency, and what currency I have is Euros, and not much of it. I have no bank card, and only a credit card that I haven't called the company back in the US to say, "Hey! I'll be in this country called Lithuania for the next few days. Please allow transactions from there. Thanks"

Nope, travel preparedness is for the weak. My ability to "wing it" is only worthwhile if I get to put it to the test. On the other hand, perhaps this sense of adventure through unpreparedness that I have only reinforces the world-wide perception that Americans know nothing of the cultures and countries they visit.

I show up in the Vilnius airport with only a small knowledge of Lithuania, the recent history, nothing about the language or currency. I know there is some bus somewhere that I have to take to get to Kaunas. I believe that driving a rental car would be a catastrophe, so I never reserved one. I knew nothing about the train station or the train to Kaunas.

One of the penalties of not knowing exactly where you're going is that it takes a long time to get your bearings. I do not recommend this form of travel if you are short on time. Upon arrival, I stood outside the airport observing. There were some public city buses that came to the front of the airport, and all the locals got on. There was no money being given to the bus driver. There was no money machine on the bus (from what I could see) and no money machine outside to buy tickets, as far as I could find. I found that the number 1 bus took me to the bus station. The number two did not. The number two comes every 10 or 15 minutes, the number one bus comes only once every half-hour. I just missed the number one bus.

Screw this. I'm taking a taxi. The clearly bored taxi driver and I negotiate where I am going. Unlike Geneva, where the French-only waiter did not understand "bus" said with an American accent, German accent, and only recognized "bus" when I said it like Inspector Clouseau -- this taxi driver knew right away where I was going. But that was the extent of his English skills.

As we arrived at the bus station, I showed my wallet of Euros and asked "Euros?". He got that disappointed look and pulled out a note pad and started saying lots of words that I did not understand. He wrote on the paper 37 Lta. He said "Thirty Seven Liters!" I said to myself, "There is no way we just used 37 liters of gasoline to get only 5-7 kilometers to this train station. This guy is going to jip me off, and I can't complain because I don't know the language!"

It was then that I realized that 37 Lta mean 37 Lithuanian Litas; or about 16 USD. Whew! I gave him 20 Euros, and he gave me change in Lithuanian money. Lots of change. Enough money to buy lunch! It was about lunch time.

I wandered down the rows of buses looking for one that said Kaunas. I stood in line for a few minutes in a hot and not-well ventilated room with lots of anxious people. It turns out that this was some sort of package drop-off office. Thankfully, I had figured this out without having to get to the front of the line and ask for a bus ticket. I wandered around some more, and found that international sign for "buy your tickets here"

For 20 LTL, I get a bus ticket to Kaunas. What a deal! I use the credit card and it works (whew!). I check my cell phone (which I use as a pocket watch) to see that it is only 11:35, and the bus leaves at 12:45 -- so I have some time to kill.

I wander around the bus station, and decide to buy some lunch, as it is going to be a long bus ride, and I didn't have any breakfast. I wander into a Café, and navigate my way to the lunch-line. The lady behind the counter stood in front of all these foods that I don't recognize. The lady pointed out each of the items, and somehow, knew the English word for lots of them. "Beef Goulash" Mm. sounds good! "Potatoes" Oh good! "Beef... ehhh. " she pointed at her lower stomach. Eww. Cow Intestines. No way.

"Beef Goulash!" I order. She piles a nice helping onto the plate, and some salad, some other sort of salad like kraut made of cabbages. Along with a coca-cola, it comes out to a very respectible 10 or 12 LTL. (Cheap food!) I sit at a table by myself to enjoy my lunch.

As I start to much, I wonder. Hmm. I wonder what time it is back in the US. Subtract 6 hours, oh probably too early to call home. I was feeling home-sick. This country is awfully far to the east, I wonder if it really is 6 hours ahead of the US East coast. I look at my phone again. The Cell phone towers relay time information so the time on the clock is always very accurate. But I wonder -- Hmm. I wonder if Lithuania is in that time zone east of Switzerland and Sweden. I wonder if the clock on my cell phone got adjusted when I landed here.

I'm starting to get nervous, and my beef goulash is starting to get cold. There are no clocks to be seen from my cafeteria seat. I use my cell phone with Internet access to start going on the Internet. Google takes me to a page called timeanddate.com. On that page, you can plug in any city name, and it will give you the local time. OK. Wait for the page to load. Oh noes! it is 12:44. I look at my bus ticket again. 12:45.

If Lithuanian buses are anything like Swiss Trains; it is too late. I inhale my Beef Goulash and not enough of the salad. I take my tray up, and bring my unfinished Coca-Cola along with me. I rush out to the buses, and my bus is not there. Slot 35, where bus was supposed to be -- is gone. Rats!

I sheepishly take my unused ticket back to the ticket counter to see if I could get another one issued. No such luck. Another 10 LTL and I have a bus ticket for 13:05. That'll teach me! My cell phone is one hour behind the rest of Lithuania.

At around 1 pm, I get onto the bus, which is more like a full-sized 20 passenger van, and we are off to Kaunas. The countryside reminded me of east Texas. Mostly flat. Occasionally lots of trees -- occasionally long plains. Power lines that extend off into the distance. I bet I could show you pictures of East Texas from the highway, and pictures of Lithuania from the highway and you couldn't tell the difference, either. It is possible that I have been in Switzerland so long that I just simply have forgotten what flat land looks like. So I will let you judge for yourself. I have several pictures on the way back in the slide show of Lithuania.

To the Hotel
From the train station, I take a taxi ride to the hotel, the Perkuno Namai. This hotel is in a very nice neighborhood. The neighborhood consists of many old-growth trees, beautiful homes, modern cars, no graffiti, no trash on the streets. It reminded me of the suburbs in Northern Virginia, mostly around Falls Church, where the houses are older, and not so "modern" looking like in Ashburn or South Riding. I check in and make myself comfortable with a coffee. I send some emails over the phone to my point of contact at the University of Kaunas to set up an appointment for the next day. It is almost 4 pm by then.

The reason I chose this hotel is its proximity to the data center where the servers I must attend to are located. It is a short enough journey on foot, so I pull up Google maps on my Blackberry (cell phone) to give me precise directions. I get a good idea where to go, and I write my point of contact for directions on foot.

I get back an email describing the journey, and the landmarks along the way, and I set out on foot for reconnaissance. Along the way, the first landmark I come across is a soccer stadium, followed by a monument, with two guys who are wearing some sort of pilot-looking head-gear. I did not know the history of the individuals, so I kept walking. I took a few pictures for later reference.

It turns out these two guys are very famous people to the Lithuanians. I remembered the 10 LTL note, which has two pilot-looking guys too. These guys are located near the bottom of the monument, but in prominent position.

After further research, I discovered that these two guys are Steponas Darius and Stasys Girėnas, two pilots who attempted a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, and ended up crashing somewhere in Germany (now Poland). Steponas Darius helped fund the stadium that is next to this monument, and the stadium was later named after these two pilots. It's no wonder they made this big monument for these two guys!

I wander through this beautiful park, past a sculpture of a Bison, and find my way to a few buildings which I suspect are where the data center are. One of the buildings as a really excellent sundial, that I showed up too late to view (the sun had gone behind the wall, making it impossible to show what time it was).

I walked back to the hotel and had built up a significant thirst. I find my way to the bar and see this local beer on tap. "I'll have one of those! Yes! The big glass!" 0.5 liters of delicious local Lithuanian beer and 4 minutes later, and I am ready for the second. That beer was incredibly awesome. I sit to dinner and enjoy one of the most excellent meals I have ever had. It is a terrible shame that I had to enjoy this dinner alone. And by alone, I mean the only guy in the restaurant. There were two what I guess to be Polish tourists in the restaurant when I first got there, but they left early. The gravity of my solitude starts to hit me squarely in the chest.

My family has left for the US for 4 or 5 weeks, and my return to my comfortable house in Switzerland will have me just as lonely as here in this restaurant. Nobody really speaks English, so I spend a lot of time on the cell phone calling people, writing random friends messages to pass the time. There is no wireless Internet access that I could find, so my portal to the Internet was all through the phone.

When I got the bill, I couldn't believe the price. A mere 66 LTL (30 dollars) for a meal and service of this caliber. It has been a long time since I have crowed about the power of my US Dollar. This restaurant and this country makes me feel like my dollar is worth more than inky rags.

Working, Again.
The next day I meet Tomas, who shows me to the data center, and I start working on my equipment. We break for lunch and talk shop. He runs the Lithuanian Registry; so everything that ends in .LT shows up in his office. He had just come from the ICANN meeting in Paris just the previous week, and we dropped names to see who we knew in common. I've been in this field for a long time, so there is much common ground between us, and it made for a delightful conversation. The food was good, the environment was nice, and the conversation was thought-provoking.

We had lunch at this lovely café on the pedestrian street in downtown Kaunas, next to some large church that I now think was the St. Michael the Archangel Church of Kaunas. (I might be wrong, though)

As with all of these site builds, I spent most of the day working, (even though this was a much smaller build than the Stockholm site), and I spent so long getting my equipment working that Tomas was ready to go home. He left, while giving instructions to his co-workers to let me see myself out. I left the office about 6 pm.

Watching Television
One great way to get an idea about a country you are visiting is to watch the local TV. Often in hotels, they have special channels that are only available to the hotel, and do not really give a good indication of the channel selection. Thankfully, the hotel did not have one of these specially computer-driven services with satellite television.

There were two channels, the first two -- in Lithuanian. I could understand nothing. They looked mostly like US films from the 1950s that had been dubbed over. The next channel was Polish, followed by 3 in Russian, that I could not view (blacked out and unviewable). There was a wasteland of unwatchable channels, and then, at the top of the dial -- the German-language stations. These channels I am familiar with! I watched Spongebob in German.

On the night before check-out, I stayed up to watch this awful movie. It was an action movie that had some hot chick with purple hair on a motorcycle dodging bullets and crashing into helicopters. The computer graphics of the fight scenes were terrible, but it was at least something I could watch. What a terrible knock-off of the Matrix movies. Of course, all the dialog was in German, but that doesn't bother me that much anymore. I can watch German-language TV almost as easily as English TV.

Just as the thinly-constructed awfulness that vaguely resembled a plot started to get interesting... the movie cut out. It was abruptly replaced with another movie. In fact, this movie was on a different channel. It was about midnight.

I can see from the bug in the bottom of the screen that the new channel is "Hustler TV", and this new movie is usually something you would have to pay top dollar for in a hotel. Oh! She is very flexible! But most of all: Hurray! they are speaking English!

The plot was even thinner than the previous movie with motorcycle-driving fast-shooting purple hair Matrix chick. But for this movie: I knew exactly how it was going to end. It was kind of rude how they abruptly ended the purple hair gun chick right as it was starting to have a plot. Oh well.

I later found out that this movie (with the purple-hair chick) is named "Ultraviolet", and I can't believe the users of IMDB would rate this heaping pile of doo a 3.9 stars out of 10. I never found the name of the movie on Hustler TV, but I don't think the name of that movie is very important.

A Few Hours in Vilnius
I departed early the next morning, mostly because I didn't know how long it would take to get me to Vilnius by bus. The bus ride home was the same sort of vehicle, but had what must have been busted out shock absorbers. I bounced the whole way back to Vilnius. Maybe they only pave the western-bound sides of the highway, and not the eastern routes. Anyway; it was a bouncy brutal ride home. My ride home was also made uncomfortable by the very stinky guy who was two seats in front of me. Whew! Cut back on the onions and garlic-drenched herring from your diet!

My flight was going to leave at 14:45, and I showed up in Vilnius at 10:30. How to spend this time? I left the bus station and found the train station right next door. I found a locker and locked away my luggage for a few hours as I wandered around. There is no escape from McDonald's. They had one right across the street from the train station.

As I wandered the streets of Vilnius, I found this big building that lots of people were filing into. So I had to investigate. It turns out that this was a huge department store. It looks like something I had seen from the old propaganda films of how excellent Soviet life was. Except this had lots of stuff on the shelves. There was one aisle with meat of all sorts. So much meat, in fact, that I had to make a hasty retreat -- it seemed like if I had stayed any longer I might have become a vegetarian.

Here is the slide show of the pictures I took in Lithuania.

Return Flight
The flight back was pretty uneventful, other than the flight attendant who noticed me reading the Michael Moore book "Stupid White Men", which is really "Liberal isn't liberal enough" (and had me believing it by the end of the book). In the other hand, I had a German newspaper that I had picked up while boarding. I suppose it is kind of strange to see an American with a German newspaper. "He misses American Football and Baseball." Uh huh. I understand. The football part, at least. She lives with her American husband in Basel. She seemed genuinely interested in the book, and I had finished it as we flew over Poland, I think. As I was exiting the plane upon arrival, I gave her the book.

Stockholm

2008-06-29T14:23:00.004-04:00

Mission
Somewhere in Sweden, near Stockholm, there is this deep man-made cave. About 100 meters below the surface (well, maybe not that much, but it's gotta be deep!) I have had to spend my days this past week. The data center in which I am installing this new equipment is deep in the heart of a rocky hill in Sweden. I am doing this work as a part of PROJECT TITAN.

As much as an adventure as this may sound... This actually sucks. It has been a beautiful weather here. We spend the whole day underground where there are no windows. The room in which we are installing the equipment is deafeningly loud with the white noise of air conditioning units, computers. I wear industrial ear-plugs to reduce the noise, but it still has an effect after a day on your feet diagnosing and solving problems with the software installation, configurations, connections and so forth.

We emerge twice a day, climbing our way through a circular ramp to the outdoors. Once to break for lunch, once to end the day's work. As I emerge, not unlike a Neanderthal emerging from his cave, the sunlight blinds and shocks our group, reminding us that it is a beautiful day -- another lovely day lost to the cave.

Like all of these other trips, they lave little time for fun. The lone benefit of this site trip over Amsterdam, is that our escort has a life outside of work, and would also rather not babysit us in the cave for the whole day. We get a reprieve as our hosts usually cry for mercy around 6 PM.

Like all of these other trips, I eat too much. Faced with the prospect that there is a long day of work ahead of me, I dare not go the mission without the sustenance of breakfast. And when presented with the option of "FAT AMERICAN BUFFET" I must yield to its magical power of crepes, scrambled eggs, and endless coffee.

The flight over here went through München (Munich), and flew right over the Bodensee -- I could clearly see the city of Konstanz, Hard and Bregenz. I strained to see the farm we stayed back in April, but we were flying so directly over it, that it was not able to be seen. I took some pictures, which may have gotten a better angle than my face pressed across the window could muster.

As Murphy would have his way, the camera battery decided to start complaining of low charge, while I snapped aerial shots of the Bodensee. Unfortunately, this camera is not powered by a set of AA batteries, but instead by a flat Canon LiON battery. I did not pack a charger. By the time my flight was over, there was not enough juice to take another shot. So no pictures of Stockholm for you! (or me)

Cuisine
The Swedes clearly did not attend to perfecting their cuisines to the foreign palate, as all restaurants are based on foreign themes. Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, American, etc. No Swedish food. Stockholm has many of the American chain restaurants that I have not been exposed to since I left the US. We have attended the Hard Rock Café (twice). It has been a long time since I have had good Nachos.

Another favorite of my coworkers is this fast-food restaurant called "Tasty Thai", which really isn't the Thai food I've been used to in the past; but sort of a Chinese food restaurant with vague Thainess.

With each of our daily emergences from the bunker/cave, we found ourselves at a nice little lunch buffet, which was also enjoyed by the locals. I managed to avoid the "Fisk". It was reasonably priced, at 90 SEK for a hot meal. I guess that is reasonably priced; the currencies here are all difficult to calculate in your head.

Next Steps
Due to logistics, and timing issues, I had my trip here extended by a few days. Since the family is now back in the US, and the neighbors are watching over the house, I will extend my trip to Lithuania, to work on one of our Project Titan sites. The work should take about a day. Hopefully, I will find some sort of solution for my camera battery problems before I go to Lithuania. I may never get to go back to that country any time soon.

Back to America
The other 5 members of the family have returned to the US for several weeks. Stacy stepped off the plane and immediately was reminded that Virginia is a very unpleasant place in the summer. "I want to go back to Switzerland" she quickly announced. I am considering a trip back to America in the end of July, but I am not really be looking forward to it. The Summer is the most excellent time in Switzerland, and wasting it by going back to the US is .. well... a waste of precious Summer.

A Day in Amsterdam

2008-06-16T04:22:00.005-04:00

My company is notorious for scheduling trips to foreign countries where it is an active holiday. We almost scheduled a week in Stockholm where it is a "ghost town" -- their second most important holiday of the year after Christmas. "midsommardagen" -- Not really a big deal, except that we need their staff to be attentive to our needs on these trips. So scheduling this trip to Stockholm on this week would have been disastrous. I can imagine a conversation sounding like this, if the roles were reversed:

"Yes, we need you to help us work; we have some people showing up in your office on the last Thursday of November. They will be working only on Thursday and Friday. Yes, they will probably be working 12 to 14 hour work days. Yes, we need your staff on-hand during that time. That would be great. Thanks. "

Thankfully, we were forewarned by a clueful Swede, and the trip postponed. But unfortunately, that means that my trip to Stockholm is being delayed until the 22nd of June, and it isn't really that incredibly convenient a time for me.

My recent trip to Amsterdam also happened to be on a public holiday. It was not only a holiday for me while I was in Switzerland (Another holiday here I have missed! I'll rant about that in a second) . In addition, you may recall that my co-workers coming from America had their flight canceled. So stuck in Amsterdam on a holiday with all the stores closed on a hot summer's day -- what was I to do? The delay of me asking that question and this post is mostly because I had no way to get the pictures off of my camera while I was on business in Amsterdam. Now that I have uploaded and sorted the pictures, this story comes to you.

How to spend a day in a city I don't know much about. Oh! I know! Go walking and try to get lost in this foreign city. This has been a stragey to serve me well -- I found the Tokyo Dome once when I was in Japan wandering around (and watched a way-cool baseball game too). I have found wonderful places to go jogging in Stockholm. I have found the most delicious Indian food in Singapore. Why not Amsterdam, too. This is one of my favorite past-times. Along people-watching. What better way to do both at the same time.

I wandered into the big central-park equivalent of Amsterdam, and discovered that not only is it a holiday, but all the young people are out in their bikinis. Of course, I am walking around like a nerd with a pair of jeans, but this doesn't matter much to me. It is a nice park, and I'm going on a walkabout, darn it!

Slideshow of the few pictures I took

Unfortunately, the only fun I had was the first day, when my co-workers hadn't yet shown up. We continually worked 12, 13 even 15 hour days after that. There never was time for lunch. Fortunately, we filled up on a large expensive buffet breakfast first, worked the whole day through, and had a nice dinner.

My business trip's departure had been delayed twice, once with a 3 day extension, once with a one day extension. When I asked the hotel clerk for that one day extension, he managed to find room for me. But oh by the way, the rate is now a hundred Euros more than before! Oy! I was being charged the weekend rate, now this was the weekday rate. No matter. On the last night of my work day there, that was a 16 or 17 hour day. We showed up around 10:00 am, and did not leave until 2 am. I had an early flight the next morning. I asked the man behind the desk what time I had to get a cab to get to the airport on time to get my flight. 4:30. Ugh. That means I will need a wake up call at 04:00. So for two hours, I slept in the bed. I did not want to do the math that at 300 Euros a night, for 2 hours of sleeping, that works out to about 150 Euros an hour. Ouch.

Sommerrodelbahn bei Kandersteg

2008-06-13T06:01:00.004-04:00

(Summer sledding in the city of Kandersteg)

Stacy had enough. Sitting in the house every weekend had reached a peak of "unacceptableness". We were doing something this weekend; I don't care what. We're getting out of this house.

She scoured the Internet for the greatest of the Summer available adventures. The kids whimpered that they needed to stay home to play video games and be sloth-like. Stacy would have none of it. Many trips were presented to Captain Grouch-meister himself: Jake. All were summarily rejected save one. Kandersteg.

Jake had just previously spent a week with school in the town of Kandersteg. The school's program is called "Landschulwoche" which really means "getting out of the classroom for a week so that the kids can have fun together in a class-like setting. This seems almost unheard of in America.

We set out of the house around 9-10'ish, and got on a train from Gümligen to Münsigen, where we changed to a train to Spiez. Once at Spiez, we travelled direct to Kandersteg. We arrived around 10:30. After walking around for a short while, we found a restaurant that was empty. In my stay here in Switzerland, I have learned that the Swiss are many things:

Punctual
Very sensitive to noise
Have a very narrow time in which they must eat lunch. If you stray outside of this time, you will go hungry or end up waiting until it is the correct time.

It would seem that we violated all of these Swiss tenets at once. We showed up before the lunch rush; expecting to be fed at 11:00AM. Since there are four kids, they are definitely loud. And we show up at a restaurant on a Sunday when it is not the right time to eat. It is a wonder the Swiss haven't extradited us yet.

The waiter started speaking German with us, Stacy and I spoke back in German. Once the waiter heard our kids speaking to each other in English, they decided to switch the language to English. (OK with me!) I enjoyed the Lötschbergerröschti: potato pancake with grilled veggies, and two slabs of cheese not unlike Raclette cheese. Jake enjoyed the expensive steak (he has figured out that we will always buy him steak. We should stop buying him steak). Stacy had a sandwich with too much mayo, and the three younger kids all shared a large bowl of sauce-less spaghetti.

Our tummies full, the kids played in the playground right next to the restaurant while I paid the bill. After a short pause, time enough for a few pictures of the mountains and the kids playing, we were off to the hills. Just in time: The Swiss all punctually showed up hungry for lunch precisely at noon.

We rode a chair-lift to the top of the local hill and marveled at the sights to be seen. There were mountains that were still snowy. One of the local peaks had a glacier that looked like it was ready to break off to the hills below. I enjoyed the ride up with Joey, who asked constant questions about the chair lift, scenery, etc. He pointed out trees ,rocks, and cows along the way. Below the chair lift I noticed a path for the cheap-skates to walk up for free. Since the ascent is a non-trivial 450-500 meter climb, I think the chair-lift was a better idea. Each time we do some sort of hike, I end up carrying Joey.

Finally: The destination we had been looking for: The summer sledding. Since there was no more snow at this altitude, there was no way to do the sledding on snow. This was a small park with metal tracks, kind of like what you expect to see with Olympic bob-sledding. We purchased one ride to make sure that the kids would like to do the trip. After an enthusiastic first run, the kids begged for us to buy the 10-pack.

The minimum age for a rider was 8, but you could have two go through if the riders doubled-up together. We ended up getting more trips for everbody, by having Cecilia go with somebody. I usually went with Josh or Cecilia; Joey usually went with Stacy. Oftentimes Josh would go with Jake.

The trip was like most roller-coaster rides, a slow trip to the top of the hill, and gravity took you the rest of the way down. At the end of the ride, you woudl take a ride half-way back up the hill to exit the ride.

Here is a video of the ride:

Here is a slideshow of the day:

(Slideshow: click to view the pictures more closely)

On the train ride home, a pair of Americans got on-board the train. We didn't talk to them, but we did overhear their conversation. Judging by their awful twang and broken grammar, there was doubt, they were from the southern United States. I had almost forgotten how horribly southern accents grate my nerves. Now I really don't want to go back to the United States.

Every Damn Morning

2008-05-30T07:06:00.004-04:00

This happens to me at least twice a week:

http://xkcd.com/430/

Geeking out on a Sunday

2008-05-25T06:49:00.003-04:00

I am spending Sunday afternoon catching up on some geeking; I am watching lots of videos on TED; I've posted a few of them before with the CERN article, and the training crows article earlier this month.

I just ran across Michael Shermer's presentation. Michael Shermer writes in Scientific American every month, and it is usually the article I most look forward to reading on my long boring daily commute by train. I have also read his book "Why people believe Stupid Things" and find it to be a really great book, comparable to the late Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World", another one of my favorite books.

His presentation touches on the idea of pareidolia -- the remarkable human ability to recognize faces where there are just blobs. Seriously, you religious people can be so gullible sometimes. I chould use some extra cash: I'm going to manufacture some religious icons in toast so I can cash in and make some money like the one sold to the casino for thousands of dollars.

I especially liked the ending. They play this song on the radio all the time here in Switzerland.

My friend Miz K always complains "The video is 3 minutes! It's too long!" Man, talk about a short attention span! The one above is 13 minutes long. Hope you can sit through it.

If you're also being lazy and wanting to geek out on a quiet Sunday, I also found these videos very interesting:

Brilliant Short Film

2008-05-18T15:53:00.002-04:00

I ran across this absolutely brilliant short film (in French, but with subtitles)

J'Attendrai Le Suivant
(I'll Wait for the Next One)
by Philippe Orreindy
http://www.pangeaday.org/filmDetail.php?id=32

The Intelligence of Crows

2008-05-17T09:14:00.002-04:00

This is a whole new way of thinking about crows

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/261

URL Barcodes

2008-05-17T08:59:00.003-04:00

What's this new-age art? No. I met this interesting fellow named Leo. He is one of the few people, when I explain what I do, actually knew what I was talking about, and knew some of the people I have had dealings with. Leo is a unicyclist who does computer networking contract work to pay the bills. Or maybe its the other way around: A computer/network contractor who does unicycle stunts to pay the bills.

Anyway, he told me of one of his cool side projects with making barcodes easily importable into an iPhone. You go to this website called "zap.cat" and enter a URL. The URL gets coded into a barcode like the one you see above. (The service to do this is free)

You post this on a poster, or at the bottom of an advertisement or whatever. Somebody with a camera and the right kind of software takes a picture of the barcode, and then the software determines the barcode. You don't have to have an iPhone, the software is supported on lots of different mobile phones that have a camera. Unfortunately, my blackberry does not have a camera, so I can't play around with this.

You can view Leo's Unicycle page at http://www.unicycle.net/

In Amsterdam on Business

2008-05-12T03:57:00.003-04:00

I flew out on Mother's Day to a week-long business trip to Amsterdam. I was last in Amsterdam in June of 2007, on my way back from my pre-housing visit to Switzerland. I got to the hotel room at around 10 PM.

My company has a corporate maximum rate of charge for a hotel room. But unfortunately and evidently, the people who came up with this rate have never set foot outside of the United States during the "George W Bush" regime, with the depressed value of the dollar. What I used to be able to afford was the Marriott hotel next door, that is where I stayed in June. Now all I can afford with the VeriSign corporate maximum hotel rates is the Amsterdam Eden Hotel. Now the name might not have much meaning to you, and it sure didn't to me, either. It appears to be a regular hotel that I would pay for if I was stuck someplace overnight on my own dime.

My opinion was starting to be formed when I got into the elevator. There was nigh enough room to fit me and my rolling luggage (one piece). When I stepped into the hotel room my opinion was fully-formed! I have never seen such a small hotel room! The only point where I could easily roll my luggage was down the initial foyer from the hotel hallway. After that, there was not enough room for both me and my luggage. The wardrobe was close enough to the bed, the desk was close enough to the wardrobe, and there wasn't enough room for all of us.

My flight out last night took the plane right over our house in Rüfenacht. I wish I had my camera out. I had spent the whole day in the airport -- the gliding part of the airport -- acting as "Barakenchef". In that club, just like any flying club, you spend cash to do the flying, but the stuff that needs to be done around the club is all volunteer work. So I get volunteered approximately once a month to act as the chef for the day. I show up in the morning to cook the "Nüssengipfeli" (croissants that have this nutty nougat inside), I take sandwich orders in the morning meeting, and cook the sandwich baguette bread so that it is ready for the noon flying break.

Only problem is there wasn't much flying going on. The only flights that were allowed out of the airport for that day were flights that were 100km or more in distance. The instructors didn't show up, as they couldn't do any training flights in the area around the airport. There was one student who showed up, hoping to bum a flight with somebody who was going on a cross-country flight. And there were the airport bums who showed up on a nice sunny day to enjoy a picnic.

I got one sandwich order, and did the dishes, and that was about it. I spent the whole day waiting for something to do. I couldn't easily go home (I didn't have the car). Yesterday was a boring, long, frustrating wait. The passed by less slowly when I found that the flying club had a local wireless network that I made use of. Web-Surfing really does help the time go by.

My co-workers flying in from American were due to show up this morning. Their flight was canceled. I do not know when they will arrive. I may have to spend the whole day here in the hotel lobby doing computer work. Maybe I will go out and see if there is anything to do in this town. ;)

New Pictures from Austria

2008-05-09T05:39:00.002-04:00

I have added more pictures to the vacation in Austria section of the photo collection.

Urlaub am Bauernhof

Large Hadron Collider

2008-04-30T18:49:00.004-04:00

The Large Hadron Collider is "just down the road" from me here in Switzerland. Here is a very interesting presentation from one of the physicists about why they're bothering with this HUGE undertaking for the collider. I have a new co-worker from the office who used to work at CERN, but I suppose got tired of working with the crazy physicists (my words, not his) (go look in my LinkedIn profile). He's been doing a pretty good job of explaining the detector, how it works, how they built their computer network to do the job.

It seems to me that he left the more interesting job to come to my company, and I would have gladly traded with him. Gee, my office is only responsible for some of the most important computers on the Internet, but he's smashing atoms and watching the bits fly off.

Anyway, watch the video, I think Brian Cox does a really good job in explaining why this LHC is important, what they're doing, and he gives a brief lesson on particle physics and the "standard model"

If that's too serious for you, here's a checklist of the CERN scavenger hunt that my friend Chris invented when he and his wife visited CERN at its biennial open-house:

A Day Trip to Liechtenstein

2008-04-28T14:23:00.003-04:00

Liechtenstein?

Yes, there is a country between Switzerland and Austria. It is absolutely tiny. When compared with the District of Columbia, Liechtenstein boasts only 160.4 km² (62 sq mi) and over half of that is too mountainous to be inhabitable. The size of Liechtenstein is just a little bit larger than Dulles Airport's property. Compare these two maps: Dulles Airport and Liechtenstein.

So, What does one do in Liechtenstein? We wondered the same. There was absolutely no preparation for this trip whatsoever. We just forced the kids into the car and set off. I told the GPS for "City Center of Vaduz (the capital), please", and off we went. This was to take only 45 minutes, and seemingly half of that was headed down the big hill that we were living on.

We showed up in the city center of Vaduz. As far as capital cities go, this was a pretty small affair; but you shouldn't be that surprised that the city center of this tiny country wasn't a major metropolis. We showed up around lunchtime, and waited forever at a table right across the street from

The entry into the country was no challenge at all. There are no border crossing points between Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The border of Liechtenstein and Austria is administered by the Swiss Customs Agency. Liechtenstein has no army, and holds only 34,000 people (that is about as many people as are in the City of Manassas). If there is no border challenge in entry, how does one get the country's stamp in his passport? In order to get your passport stamped, you actually have to visit the tourist office, and pay 3 Francs for each stamp.

We paid for the tour-train; a cheesy tourist truck with wagons that is shaped like a train. These sorts of things appear to be universal. We got a tour of the city and got to see such things as "The Red House" (They couldn't come up with a better name?), the Vineyards that are owned by the Prince of Liechtenstein (which are right next to the Red House). The castle on the top of the hill is the residence of the Prince of Liechtenstein, and is not open to the public. We got a bunch of pictures to share. I'm sure many of you will never have the opportunity to visit this country.

Liechtenstein

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Photos from Week In Austria

2008-04-28T14:19:00.001-04:00

I forgot to include the pictures from the week.

Urlaub am Bauernhof

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Urlaub am Bauernhof

2008-04-17T12:39:00.005-04:00

I have been working some very long hours at work lately. This has been painfully noticed by the children, who may have even forgotten who I am. I would leave the house at the same time they went off to school, and for a few weeks, I would get home after everybody had gone to bed. (Sometimes even Stacy!)

Now that the kids go to a Swiss school in Rüfenacht, they follow the Swiss schedule for time away from school. You may not be aware of how differently the Swiss school system handles vacation time:

Christmas: Two weeks
Sportwoche: One week in February or March, I think this is set up so that the Swiss families can go to the ski slopes together one last time.
Spring Break: Two weeks after Easter, three weeks for the kindergarteners.
Summer Break: Five weeks starting on 4 July.
Fall Break: Three weeks starting early September.

Last year, I had to go on a trip for Fall break, but this was at the ISB -- it was not three weeks long, but still: WORK got in the way of a family vacation.
Christmas break, I didn't take any time off, Sportwoche was spent with me on the phone all the time, as I was on-call that week. (And the company got its money's worth out of me!) Stacy made well sure that I took some time off work during Spring break, with all sorts of threats!

As you may or may not have imagined, it is quite hard to overcome the inertia of four kids and get everybody out on a vacation. Most hotels won't let you crowd all of those kids onto a hotel room floor, and some insist that we book THREE rooms instead of two. A hotel for three rooms anywhere in Europe can get quite expensive very quickly. Especially with the terrible exchange rate for the US Dollar versus the Euro (1.58 USD per EUR).

Stacy found a nice compromise by finding a vacation at a barn. No, we are not sleeping in haystacks, and we're not shoveling manure. This is a bread and breakfast sort of affair, at a barn in Austria. The organization that puts together all of these establishments on-line is called "Urlaub am Bauernhof" which means "vacation at the farm" This is the first vacation I have taken with the family in a long time, the last time was probably a beach vacation in 2006.

The logistics involved in moving all of these people to a neighboring country, not to mention all of our luggage, can only be mastered by the "Urlaubschef" (Vacation chief) Stacy. There was not enough storage in our car to bring all of our luggage, along with all of our kids in one trip in the car. The trip is about 3 and a half hours by train or by car. Once we folded up all the seats in the car, and loaded all of the luggage into the hatch-back. There was only enough room for two occupants (positions driver and shotgun), so the rest of the kids had to go to Austria by train.

Since I have a General Abonnement (I ride all public trains in Switzerland for free) , along with some "Junior Karte" (Kids with paying adult ride for free); we all made way by train; leaving Stacy and Jake to go by car. The GA does not pay for fares outside of Switzerland, so once I crossed the border at Sankt Gallen, I had to buy a 14 CHF ticket to Bregenz, Austria. This is an extremely cheap way to cross into Austria! 14 CHF to transport 3 kids and an adult from Bern to Austria? The GA is great.

Stacy went by car, Jake "navigating" in the right seat. On the way, Jake attempted (repeatedly) different ways to annoy his mother. He would sing awful songs in the worst singing voice he could muster. "Are we there yet?" But mostly the "dumb noises and incessant repetition" Mission accomplished.

The kids and I arrived at the Bregenz Bahnhof at around 3:30. As Joey was getting off the train, he shouted "We're in Australia now!" By then, Stacy had made it to the house and unloaded the luggage by herself. The kids spent time on a great playground right on Lake Constance, so it was not really difficult to let Stacy go to the grocery store in time. In time? You ask. On a Saturday afternoon, all of the grocery stores close at 5 pm, and don't open again until Monday morning. Going out to eat 4 times with the weak dollar could have easily made this cheap vacation very expensive!

Stacy called me to coordinate. We agreed that groceries were vital, so she went to the grocery store for some desperately-needed shopping. The kids were untiring, and continued to play on the playground with great enjoyment. This playground boasted a zip-line, an excellent tire swing, and a round-about.

Right away, I felt at home -- the kids on the playground spoke High German for the most part (I have a very hard time communicating with Swiss kids, as they generally don't speak High German yet) . There were a bunch of kids on the round-about, who responded "extremely fast! (Ja ganz schnell!)" when I said "Shall I spin you fast? " I spun these kids on the roundabout so fast that I actually made one sick. (how awesome). This is my kids' favorite toy at the playground, something not found in the US, so going too fast is not possible.

At the farm, the hosts had manufactured a hutch for the rabbits to live in for our stay. When Stacy asked them if there was room for them, the hosts responded, "Oh we can come up with something for them". There was plenty of grass for the bunnies to nibble on, and a place to hide when the local critters came up to look into the cage to see what's inside.

At the farm, we were greeted with the friendliest dog I have ever met, named Lucy. She had a habit of tripping us as we were trying to walk. The dog would just sit down right at your feet, and rest her head on your thigh, saying "pet me! pet me!" She would often just run up to you and lay on her back for you to rub her tummy. Really: The nicest dog I have ever met! Even Jake the caninophobe wasn't afraid of Lucy.

The hosts were pleased to find out that we speak German, and insisted that I get a chance to practice my German a bit. To make it easier on her, I spoke only German with her after the initial meeting. The husband, the farmer, did not ever speak anything to me other than the local Austrian dialect (I didn't get its name), which wasn't too terribly difficult to decode; given my Bärndütsch training. The accent wasn't so thick, and many of the words were the same.

Where was this place? It was on top of a mountain right on the lake shore of Lake Constance, the Bodensee -- The view was pretty spectacular. This picture here is taken from the top of the hill looking down on the Rhein as it empties into the Bodensee. It wasn't that great looking in pictures -- much better in life.

They had a pair of ponies for Cecilia to ride (which she did many times)

The weather ranged from spectacular to miserable. Being on top of that mountain, we really got to experience the difference between "rainy day down low" and "snowing at the tops of the mountain" The bunnies, living outside in their new shelter didn't mind; they like to play in the snow, dig in it, and shake it off of their bunny heads. Unfortunately, the rest of the family found its self hiding indoors on the snowy day we had. Fortunately, there was wireless access, and some of the boredom was driven off by the temptations of the Internet. There was cable-tv in the house, but TV here really doesn't interest us; and Austria is much the same.

We drove into Germany to find a huge shopping mall. It was just like home in so many ways. As far as I can tell, they do not have huge shopping malls like they have in Northern Virginia. On our way through Germany, we crossed Lake Konstanz (Bodensee) by ferry, to visit the city of Konstanz, on the other side. At Konstanz, we visited the "Sea Life Museum"

In the next article, I will describe our day trip to Liechtenstein.

Biking in Switzerland

2008-04-09T17:09:00.006-04:00

22 March 2008 --
A few weekends ago, I took another long bike ride down the Aare valley. This time, I brought along a camera, and took some pictures along the way. I set out on a beautiful Saturday morning, with a light jacket, a water bottle, and a camera. The first part of my trip was down the road to Gümligen, where I was met with a stiff, cold headwind. I wondered what I was getting myself into, and debated turning around to go home.

I went through Gümligen down to the other side of Muri, near the local Media Markt. I found a nice little "Wanderweg" down the hill to the Aare river. I stopped to take in the breathtaking scenery, and snap a few pictures of the Aare valley, very clearly able to see the Bern-Belp airport and Belpberg.

These photos were taken at the location as represented by the northern-most camera icon
"View of Belp and Belpberg" on the map linked at the very bottom of this posting.

As I traveled further down the path, I found this lovely little park bench next to a water fountain, where I filled up my water bottle, and read a historical sign describing the construction that was done around the riverbank to tame it, in the 1850s. After a short break, I was on my way again. I headed south, this time, trying to see if the eastern bank of the Aare was as friendly to bicycles as was the western bank.

When I got down to the riverbank, I took a short break to snap a couple shots of the river. I bet that this river would be great fun to swim in during the summer time. In fact, lots of people do swim in this river. It is clean enough, and although fast moving, there are plenty of places to pull over and get out.

I found this cool little island accessible only by foot traffic on the path. There was no bridge, so I I dragged the bike along the stone that were submerged just a centimeter under the flow of the creek. When I got to the other side, I did not find much of interest, but a few campfires burned out, a small island of untamed wilderness, and a little bit of trash that has washed ashore from the river.

After getting my feet very wet on the return across the creek, I set back on the path, going south, toward Thun.

It was such a warm and sunny day by then, I was really excited to peddle briskly down the path. I passed lots of people, making sure to ding before I passed the strolling people -- all Swiss bikes are required to have a bell for just these circumstances. Nobody took it personally, and they always replied "Bitte" when I called out "Enshuldigen Sie, bitte!" I called Stacy when I thought it would be a great idea to have her drag out the kids for us to cook out in one of the many parks along the way.

I had to stop again to get a few excellent shots of the Alps from my bike path.

By the time I had met up with Stacy, it had gotten cold and grey. The light jacket that I was wearing had gotten me downright COLD. The kids threw rocks into the river near Münsigen, while I tried to start a fire to cook lunch. With not enough kindling, not enough matches, and wood that just didn't want to get lit, we eventually gave up on trying to cook any food.

Stacy and the kids retreated from the cold and drove back to the house, not only disappointed that I had dragged them out of the house, not only disappointed that I couldn't get the fire started, but also disappointed all-around.

I rode my bike down to the Wichracht train station , and made my way home by train. On the bike ride to the station, it was snowing heavily. Having never been to the city before, I was lucky that there were many signs directing me to "Bahnhof"

We got home and cooked the wursts on the outdoor wood grill. It was snowing heavily by then. The two who enjoyed the snow the most were the rabbits, whom we let out into their "play area" outside the front door of the house. They dug in the snow, got some on their heads, shook it off, and then repeated the whole process.

Here is a map of the path, along with the locations of all pictures [Map]
Here are all of the pictures I took on that day [Pictures]

RC Heli Rebuild

2008-04-09T07:44:00.004-04:00

In the last article, I mentioned how I was about to rebuild my helicopter. The original heli had some serious design flaws, and I had started to grow out of the instability problems at high speed, the inability to fly in anything other than absolute dead calm, and the fragility of the rotor blades from withstanding any sort of impact whatsoever.

I go through rotor blades very regularly on this heli. Here is a picture of the original construction, with some battle-damage showing. Note the busted landing gear, the broken rotor blade. There are portions of the plastic fuselage that also broke off.

I was sick on Saturday, so I stayed in bed all day long. Near the end of the day, I was feeling better, but felt MUCH better when Stacy announced that my package of replacement pieces arrived.

I tore into the packaging like a kid at Christmas time. I managed to take a few pictures just in case I forgot how to reassemble the parts that I took off. The slideshow below shows the reconstruction steps.

This collection of new pieces did not come with any instructions. So for the most part, I had to figure out how the old helicopter worked well enough, and figure out where the new pieces fit together in the new approximate positions of where the old obsolete components were. There were a few instructions on how to assemble the rotor shaft, which had key information about where specific washers were, I suppose those washers were quite important.

I did make many mistakes in the reconstruction process.

The first mistake was where I missed a collar that attaches to the rotor shaft. This piece keeps the rotor shaft from sliding up and down, and keeps the two big white gears from grinding against the wrong pinions. I realized this mistake after getting everything assembled, and the only way to install this collar was to back out the whole rotor shaft. This cost about 45 minutes of small screws.

The second mistake I hoped to avoid by taking good pictures of everything on the old helicopter as I disassembled it. The electrical hookup of the motors I got mixed up. The motor for the top blade was hooked in backwards, so when I powered up the engines, both rotor blades spun the same way. And with so much torque coming in the same direction, the fuselage of the helicopter spun very madly in the opposite direction.

The third mistake I made simply is indefensible. It took a while to diagnose the problem though. The main symptom was the wild spinning of the fuselage, either full left or full right. I could have the heli on the ground with no engine torque; power up the engines slowly, and the fuselage does not spin. Increase the throttle a little tiny bit. Still OK. Not enough power to lift off. More. Heli spins to the right madly. Give it a little tiny tiny bit of left "rudder" and the heli spins madly to the left.

It took me a while to figure out that I had hooked up the motor for the left engine into the electrical hookup for where the right engine should go. I guess the onboard electronics got confused and the incorrect hookup caused a divergent negative dynamic stability problem. (Those are some 5 dollar words there).

Once I got all of these components hooked up, I did another hour worth of trimming and lengthening pushrods here, tweaking the "proportional" and the "gain" riostats. I finally got it flying pretty well. The first thing I noticed is that the controls were much more sensitive. I also discovered, by means of a few crashes, that the rotor blades are not indestructible, as I broke one of my new blades right at the blade root.

The evening of flying ended when I crashed it and the new rotor hub for the bottom blade broke. I suppose one of the disadvantages of super strong rotor blades is that the damage just moves to the rotor hub. I had no replacement rotor hub parts, so the flying was done until some more replacement pieces came in.

A very long week of waiting around and not being able to fly my heli dragged on. After a full week, a new box of pieces came in from Canada, I replaced the rotor hub for the lower blades, and the new refurbished heli flies a lot better than ever before.

View Album

Get your own

After all the fixing, adjusting and correcting, finally I got this thing flying smoothly. After all the fixes, this thing flies like a dream. I wonder how long it will be for me to crash it and need new parts again. I started all this RC flying because the soaring season here in Switzerland is short compared to flying in Virginia. I have to start getting back to the airfield more often, especially now that Spring is here.

(video)

Valley Bike Ride

2008-03-19T09:19:00.006-04:00

Feeling Fat
We had a dinner party invitation that evening to eat Raclette at our German teacher's house. Raclette is lots of cheese, and I was feeling the guilt-trip my doctor was going to give me when I got back to the States. The shadow of "Lipitor" looms over me.

So I had to get out and get some exercise. I hopped on the bike and tried to see just how much endurance I have built up since I started biking to work almost daily.

In the coming week, Easter Sunday, to be exact, I have to serve the flying club as "Barakenchef", which means "Barracks Chief" -- This means I get to cook the bread for the sandwiches, make the sandwiches, clean up the crumbs, and generally be available around the club-house while everybody else flies. Back in my flying club in Virginia, I would find myself giving flight instruction. But here, I am but a student. In order for me to know what to do as Barakenchef, I decided to go to the airport and hang out for a while, to see how this week's Barakenchef handles the stress of the job.

Out on the Road
As I headed out on bike, I struck out onto a path that I had wanted to take many times. A look at the map from my house in Rüfenacht to the airport shows a pretty short distance, even though I can not see the airport from my house, as it is blocked by a hill to the south of here. On the way to Belp, I took the direct route across the river. There is a pedestrian bridge crossing the Aare, directly across from Belp. The bridge is a wooden covered bridge, and is quite picturesque, (wish I brought a camera).

The river appears to be tame (today), with nicely managed embankments, allowing you to walk right up to the river and dip your feet in. This will be a great place when the summer comes. The water is mostly clear, and you can see nearly to the bottom of the river where it's not too deep.

I set out to Belp, and hung out in the barracks for a while, finding out where the croissants are kept, where the sandwiches hide, etc. After about an hour of telling people that I was not going to fly, I set back out on my bike. This time heading home. Stacy needed me to get home in time to take Jake out shopping for a new computer.

I got back to the bridge, saw that there was this great gravel path that went upriver, and thought, "where does this go?" I set out on a wonderful journey of this flat, well-maintained bike path that had no interruptions, no traffic lights, no stops, no hills, no valleys, but a few puddles here and there. The path followed the river, with a place to build a lovely picnic every 100 meters or so, right on the river.

I rode along this seemingly endless gravel path, along the riverbank. I stopped once to admire the view of the river and call home. "Jake keeps asking if you have gotten hurt! You're taking so long to get back. Get back soon, the Media Markt closes soon." My original purpose of the call was to get Stacy to drag the kids out here to see the cool place to have a picnic. Oh well. I had gone so far down the river, that it might have been easier to just continue south and get to the place where Viehweidstrasse crosses the river.

While I was so far south, I took a shortcut into Viehweid to pick up a few new upper rotor blades for my Blade CX2. There is a store that specializes in just radio-controlled helicopters, named Helikopter Baumann. I crash my Blade CX2 a lot, and they make big money out of me coming to buy replacement blades on a monthly basis. I often fly the helicopter outdoors (flying indoors has gotten boring); and just the slightest breeze keeps the helicopter from being able to get upwind. Oftentimes the helicopter ends up getting pushed backwards as it tries to fight into the wind. This is usually followed by a crash into the trees behind my patio.

About 30% of the time, my flying ends with a fatal injury to the helicopter, usually in the form of busted blades. I have a large supply of replacement blades, and have become quite adept at replacing them (more into that later).

A short visit, and 15 CHF later, I back on the bike ride home. I made it into Rübigen, and expected the family to start getting impatient with my delayed return. I pass the train station and wonder if there is a convenient train departing soon. Sure enough, the next train leaves at 1259, just a few minutes from when I arrived at the station. I pull my bike into the train, and get back to Gümligen, the next station, within a few minutes.

Here is a map of the day on my bike. Total distance: 5.07 miles to the airport (blue), 7.64 miles to Rübigen (magenta). Not bad for a flabby guy like me! The soreness on the next day was not that bad.

View Larger Map

Blade CX2 Upgrades
I followed the link to the company that makes my RC Helicopter (I have the red one on the upper-left in the picture to the right), and they sell all sorts of upgrades for this model. New fuselage (replaced twice due to landing damage. OK, I'll be honest, it was crash damage). Replacement landing gear that is purported to be "indestructible" (I have already replaced the landing gear only once). Indestructible rotor blades (we'll see about that), better batteries, stronger motors, replacement tail boom (lighter), new battery box. Of course, once I found this, I immediately had to buy them all. I am considering this an investment -- the constant replacement of rotor blades, fuselage, landing gear, batteries is starting to get expensive! I am sure Helikopter-Baumann will miss me.

What is really funny is people say, "well at least R/C helicopters isn't as expensive as soaring" I laugh. I am not so sure about that uneducated statement, that is quite close to being wrong.

The flying experience usually goes like this:

Go outside with helicopter
Fly for a bit
Come back inside because:

batteries ran dry; (I have three); 20%
motor got too hot; 10%
Crash-Damage (30%)
Winds too strong, precautionary retreat to avoid #3 above (40%)

Atlas of Strange Maps

2008-03-19T05:18:00.005-04:00

I love maps. You may have noticed that I always seem to find a way to include a Google Maps page showing the recent locations of my adventures. This has pretty much been a love of mine since I was a kid and enjoyed opening up the National Geographic maps and exploring all the geography of each new issue.

Last night, I ran across this wonderful site that sings to my original calling -- that love of maps, named "Strange Maps" This Blog keeps track of strange maps that the author has found. I love old maps. As you may know, my original training at George Mason was as a Geography major, focusing on cartography. Since there is no money in map making, and many better career opportunities with "teh Internets", my career ended up at VeriSign, and not drawing maps. One of these days, I'm going to have to get my mom to get me a tour of the dusty old map room at the Library of Congress.

My favorite of the maps was a book cover showing the "Röstigraben", the "isogloss" border in Switzerland, where French is spoken to the west, German to the east. I traverse this border daily, and clearly notice the difference; most notably in the names of the street signs. Rösti is also one of the few Swiss foods that the children, especially Jake and Cecilia, really love. Stacy makes this dish at least twice a week.

Papiliorama Adventure

2008-03-14T15:22:00.005-04:00

On a sunny Saturday in February, we decided to do something with our day. We did not really know what we were going to do, but among a few choices, decided to go to the Papiliorama to the north of here. We took the Intercity to Lyss, and then switched to a privately-run train to the Papiliorama stop, which is right in front of the park. With a modest admission fee of $44 for the family, we entered.

Butterfly Garden
The first stop was the Swiss Butterfly Garden. This is a geodesic structure that acts as a very effective greenhouse. It was a pretty warm Saturday in Switzerland, a recent heat-wave making everything seem like spring. Inside this butterfly garden, it was very warm and moist. The kids complained constantly. But they are at home complaining. The only time they are not complaining is when they are unconscious.

When we first got in, we noticed the room is full of plants, flowers... and after a few seconds, you notice there are zillions of little butterflies flitting around. The entrance to the room has four rules, (not in English), but at least they have enough pictures for the kids and non-German, non-Francophones to comprehend. No catching them, no stepping on the butterflies, no touching them, and no food.

I took about 75 pictures with the camera's macro-mode. It is really hard to get these photos right -- the butterfly is flitting about, the focal distance is only about a centimeter, and the lighting has to be right. Out of all of the pictures I took, only a few were suitable for publishing on the website (see the slide show above).

Also wonderful to behold was a huge pool, with some sort of monster fish, which fascinated the kids. He kept bumping on the window, with his big monster fish lips, and I kept telling the kids "I am a monster fish. I eat children!" The kids just laughed, and didn't run away screaming.

We found a butterfly that landed on a picture of a butterfly. I guess he found it to be a convincing rendition of a fellow insect. Cute.

There were a few hummingbirds zipping around the butterfly garden. One particular hummingbird was very upset about any butterflies that approached. As he sat on the branch, he would leap into the air and chase away a butterfly, then return to his perch, to pose for us. He would not let me get very close, so it took many attempts for me to get this photo above.

The Nocturama
There is a second room, about the same size as the Swiss Butterfly Garden; this room painted with a blue roof, to reduce the ambient light to about 1/1000th of the light of daytime. In this room, all sorts of nocturnal animals rummaged about doing their nocturnal deeds.

Sorry, no pictures; they expressly prohibited flash photography, and all the low light shots I took did not come out very well (very grainy). The Nocturama page boasts about "[three-toed] sloth[s], tree porcupines, night monkeys, kinkajous, ocelots, giant anacondas and many others. "

It is probably a good thing they did not go into detail about "many others." When you first get into the Nocturama, it is the same terror you get as you walk into a dark room scattered with legos on the floor. You can't see anything, so you walk very slowly. It takes about 10 minutes to start to adjust to the dark, and after 15, you are pretty much fully adjusted.

For the first ten minutes, you are admiring the cute ocelot, and trying to find the kinkajou, or marveling at the size of the monster anaconda.

Occasionally, there is this whiff of air by your head. You don't really notice. Part of the tour takes you through a very dark stone cave-like part of the path. I now have walked around this part of the park long enough to be fully-adjusted, and I know why they did not go into more detail about "and many more. "

There be bats in here! The bats are awesome creatures. It is quite clear to me that they are truly acrobats of the night. I have gained just enough dark sensitivity to realize that those whiffs by my head were bats zinging by. A different part of the path looked down on the other visitors who were in the first five minutes of the 'adjusting to the dark' phase. It is quite the experience to watch the people WHO HAVE NO CLUE.

Out of the bat cave, zing these bats at a pace that would seem to be a blur in normal light. The unknown latent sufferers of chiroptophobia completely unaware of the gravity of their position. The bats flit out of the cave at unbelievable speeds, zip by the family of four looking at the ocelots; zing by the newlyweds looking at the kinkajous, all while completely unaware that there is more to see.

Once I excitedly remarked "Wow! Bats!" Stacy decided to (quickly) return to safety -- outside of the Nocturama. Jake and I stayed in long enough to do more anthropology lessons -- people watching (one of my favorite past-times); and admire the speed and agility of the bats.

Flashbacks of Bats
I am sure my mom, reading this somewhere in Virginia, will start recalling one of her most memorable moments of my childhood. On Easter break, I was wandering around four mile run, in Arlington; where I grew up, with my friend Ward. I suppose we were about 9 or 10 years old at the time.

While enjoying a quiet afternoon of throwing rocks into the creek, or finding interesting pieces of trash in the creek-bed, busting bottles on the rocks, we decided to find entertainment in making as much noise as possible. There were huge metal flood doors that slam shut to keep a flooding four mile run from backing up into the streets of Arlington. The hinge outwards to allow street run-off to enter the creek/river. As kids, we neither cared nor knew what function these doors had. All we knew was the sound of them slamming shut was awesome.

They were big heavy doors that once lifted with every ounce of might from my developing arms, would whoosh down and meet the bottom with the most terrific klang. The pipe that the door protected was easily big enough for us to walk into, although hunched over. Once or twice, our ears not ringing yet, the crashing noise of the klang was immediately followed by this wheezy shriek. Curiosity overcame our desire to make racket, to discover a poor bat with a broken wing, lying on the floor of the monster pipe. Each time the door klanged, he was probably screaming in pain from the noise.

Without touching him, we managed to coax him into a cardboard box that we had acquired from the nearby Giant Food grocery store. Ward managed to draw the bat out with the moisture of a stick (guess the little guy was thirsty!) This was also during the time that there was a rabies scare in our area. I don't know if it was an actual scare, or if it was just one of the bogeyman stories that adults tell children to keep them in line, but the fear of rabid animals was a phobia that gripped my imagination most vividly. (I do not know where that rabies fear was during this adventure, though).

We proudly brought the prize of what we had found at the creek back home. I called my mom, who was at work, "Hey mom! Guess what! We found a bat!" After a pause of what I can now imagine my mother's imagination running wild, probably with the same images of rabid animals that I had beem filled with. "Well don't touch it!" was my mother's first response.

We called the animal shelter of Arlington, which sent a representative to come pick up the poor creature. I presume it was nursed back to health, but now as an adult, I suppose that the poor creature had slim prospects to survive.

On the subject of creepy creatures
... and back to the previous subject of the Papiliorama; they had another room called the "Arthopodarium" -- they had a few insects, a few arachnids; some quite adorable tarantulas, seen in the slide show above. Stacy did not spend much time in this room, either. One of the youngest stick-bugs managed to escape his glass display case, discovered by Joshie, and got to sit on my finger for a while.

There was a really great park and a petting zoo that the kids really enjoyed. Among the things that "the pongo plaza" boasted were swings unlike any we have seen in the US, shaped kind of like a basket, which allowed me to swing the children to obscene heights.

A pair of Swiss German girls, about 9 or 10 years old, climbed on to the swing, while Josh and Cecilia watched on in terrified horror. In German, I offered to swing them, "I won't swing you so high" I said. One of the girls responded, "Doch, GANZ HOCH!" (no way, really high please!) Not only did I swing them as high as I could, the girl started standing up on the swing to get more sway out of it. Now that is bravery.

Once they were done, Joshie and Cecilia got on-board. I swung them about half as high as the two Swiss-German girls swung. The kids never even got to the zero-G point of the swing. The two screamed like there was an axe murderer. Josh kept screaming, "Not so high!"

It's Springtime! (or not)

2008-03-14T08:18:00.003-04:00

We have been surprised that the little pond outside our house is home to about 35 frogs. We previously thought that only koi were the main inhabitants of this small pond, and now that it has gotten warmer recently, the frogs are out in force. The last two weeks in February were quite warm, by Swiss standards.

This site maintained by the Swiss weather service MeteoSwiss shows the actual temperature versus the average. You can see that last two weeks of February is well above average. I don't think the frogs in our pond knew that they were going to be in for two more snowy days, and they emerged ready to procreate. Our pond had frogs everywhere. On top of each other. Some parts were writhing orgies of frog-pile. They emerged from the pond long enough to lay about a zillion tadpole eggs. Walking around our patio in the evening had to be done carefully, for fear of stepping on one.

One evening, a frog wandered all the way to our front door, and looked as if he was trying to get inside through the kitty door. Stacy made me get him out of the way. Of course, I had to pick him up and look closely. It was rather a chilly night, and his cold-blooded disposition really enjoyed the few minutes of sitting in my warm hands. I took the frog inside to show to Joey, who was terrified. He hid his head under the pillow, "I don't want to look at the frog!" His mood turned as I was about to return the frog to the pond. I think Joey only got a short glimpse of our amphibian friend from outside, and he changed his whole demeanor. "I like the little frogs." Joey said. It soon became a struggle to return my new friend outside, as Joey wanted to keep him; at least long enough to look at him.

It snowed twice in the first week of March, and we haven't seen the frogs since then. I hope they didn't get frozen to death (the frogs and the tadpoles). I suspect they are fine.

To be honest we don't really know if these are frogs or toads, so I am presuming they are frogs for the meantime. I have also recently learned that the difference between frogs and toads has no taxonomic basis, so maybe I should just refer to them as "Anura", the name of the biological order for "frogs and toads."

Butterzöpfe

2008-03-14T06:53:00.003-04:00

Recently, we decided to try to replicate our favorite types of bread that we enjoy here in Switzerland. There is this type of soft fluffy bread in braids, locally called "Butterzöpfe" in the Swiss German part.

Stacy got a bag of flour, and followed the recipe in a book, and the results, while more expensive than what we would buy in the store, turned out to be almost as delicious. We are now experimenting with the temperature of the oven, our last few results have turned out to be too-brown, yet too mooshy inside.

What Do You Do All Day?

2008-03-05T07:51:00.002-05:00

My wife forwarded this email to me. So... what are you trying to say, Stacy?

What Do You Do All Day?

A man came home from work and found his three children outside, still in
their pajamas, playing in the mud, with empty food boxes and wrappers strewn all around the front yard.

The door of his wife's car was open, as was the front door to the house and there was no sign of the dog. Proceeding into the entry, he found an even bigger mess. A lamp had been knocked over, and the throw rug was wadded against one wall. In the front room the TV was loudly blaring a cartoon channel, and the family room was strewn with toys and various items of clothing.

In the kitchen, dishes filled the sink, breakfast food was spilled on the counter, the fridge door was open wide, dog food was spilled on the floor, a broken glass lay under the table, and a small pile of sand was spread by
the back door.

He quickly headed up the stairs, stepping over toys and more piles of clothes, looking for his wife. He was worried she might be ill, or that something serious had happened.

He was met with a small trickle of water as it made its way out the bathroom door. As he peered inside he found wet towels, scummy soap and more toys
strewn over the floor. Miles of toilet paper lay in a heap and toothpaste had been smeared over the mirror and walls.

Ashe rushed to the bedroom, he found his wife still curled up in the bed in her pyjamas, reading a novel. She looked up at him, smiled, and asked how his day went.

He looked at her bewildered and asked, "What happened here today?"

She again smiled and answered, "You know every day when you come home from work and you ask me what in the world I do all day?"

"Yes," was his incredulous reply.

She answered, "Well, today I didn't do it."

Stuff White People Like

2008-03-05T05:51:00.003-05:00

A friend forwarded me a link to this site, and I found it to be hilarious.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

Actually, after reading through it, I started to feel like a non-white anthropologist had been spying on me, and made the list to report the findings.

Let's go down the list and see how I measure up. Let's give it a score, +1 for HIT, +0 for Miss or N/A or No Comment.

#81 Graduate School

Being too much of a slacker in college, skating my way through, I never got a high enough GPA to qualify for Graduate school. I applied for George Washington University's graduate program in Loudoun county for a Systems Engineering Masters program, but wasn't allowed to join because of my "too much beer and chasing women" habits I had in college.

#80 The Idea of Soccer

Nope. Not me. I can't understand or stand soccer. "Playing Soccer is Un-American" as my father said. "Soccer is what those 'Messican' kids play", another said. I couldn't agree more. I might be interested in Soccer if the goalies were prohibited. How could anybody possibly be interested in a game where the final score is 1-0?

#79 Modern Furniture

Hit. Our house in Switzerland here is full of Ikea furniture.

#78 Multilingual Children

Hit! The kids are all in a Swiss school all learning German. Cecilia has a genuine talent, although her German has a Swiss accent (Especially when she says 'Danke'). Jake, not so much. The kids sometimes argue in German.

#77 Musical Comedy

They show a picture of "Flight of Conchords", which have been featured on this blog. So a "hit" for this one.

#76 Bottles of Water

Can't stand them. Stop being so pretentious and drink some tap water. The bottled water tastes awful anyway.

#75 Threatening to Move to Canada

Not only have I threatened to move to Canada, I moved to Switzerland. If you read the article, they say the Canadians threaten to move to Europe.

#74 Oscar Parties

I hate celebrity worship, so not a hit for me.

#73 Gentrification

Nope. Wish that all buildings that look old would get imploded and replaced with a modern building.

#72 Study Abroad

Did it; went to Ireland in 1988 to be a foreign exchange student.

#71 Being the only white person around

Kind of hard to do in Switzerland, but was a common event in my high school, where white people were not the majority.

#70 Difficult Breakups

Uh, just about every one of them, except for one or two.

#69 Mos Def

Not so much

#68 Michel Gondry

Not so much

#67 Standing Still at Concerts

Guilty, as my co-worker says (who used to work as an usher at the Patriot Center in Fairfax), "The most white people do is bite their lower lip and move their head a little bit, unless it's a heavy metal concert."

#66 Divorce

Parents did it, so I guess I understand this one. Thankfully, I haven't gone through one of my own.

#65 Co-Ed Sports

So much fun!

#64 Recycling

We have three trash cans here in Switzerland, AND our own compost heap! But we recycled before we came here, and felt good about it. Call this a hit.

#63 Expensive Sandwiches

Guilty. Back in Virginia, we would buy expensive sandwiches all the time. The "Atlanta Bread Company" was a common location for the expensive sandwiches. There is a point when I won't buy the sandwiches, as we did not often go to "The Corner Bakery", after I once called it the "overpriced mediocre sandwiches" I didn't mind so much when the company had a meeting, and the Corner Bakery was the caterer. So let's call it a hit.

#62 Knowing What’s Best for Poor People

Guilty. They should get jobs.

#61 Bicycles

This was painfully guilty. I have been riding the bike to the train station for the past 4 weeks (I have a separate post pending for this activity). In fact, just this very morning I noticed a woman got on the train with her bike, and instead of looking at anything else, I started to look over all the wares on her bike. "Ooh she's got a better gear arrangement than mine! She could probably bike up that steep hill next to my house. Wow, those gears have a much better ratio for straight-aways too. She has a break light on it!" Hit.

#60 Toyota Prius

I have been coveting my mom's Prius for years. A coworker has one with all the electronic gadgets, and I want that one too. This one is definitely a "Hit"

#59 Natural Medicine

I think it is for the gullible; probably also the same sort of people who believe in UFOs, creationism, holocaust denial and that 9/11 was faked. The people who believe in this crap need to read Michael Shermer's book, "Why People Believe Weird Things" Miss.

#58 Japan

100%; I love Tokyo. Hit.

#57 Juno

Never saw the movie. Didn't know the movie existed until I saw this post.

#56 Lawyers

Hate them, and their movies, and how the fear of liability has ruined America. See #75.

#55 Apologies

I'm sorry. I haven't though much about this one. (Hit)

#54 Kitchen Gadgets

Guilty. Just on Saturday, we made home-made "Butterzöpf" with our new electric Mixer.

#53 Dogs

They are fun. But we have rabbits. (Miss)

#52 Sarah Silverman

I think she is both cute and hilarious. I thought she was awesome on the one-season show "Greg the Bunny". I also thought she did a good job in "School of Rock" (Hit)

#51 Living by the Water

Yes, often a dream; an ideal location. But maybe Hurricane Katrina scaled back the idea of how wonderful that would be.

#50 Irony

"It's like rain on your wedding day" -- It actually rained on mine. (Hit?)

#49 Vintage

Not me. (Miss)

#48 Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops

Yep. We love the stuff. (Hit)

#47 Arts Degrees

Not so much (Miss)

#46 The Sunday New York Times

Very enjoyable, but being in Switzerland makes it hard to come by, except for the on-line version. (sorta-hit)

#45 Asian Fusion Food

Very nice. (Hit)

#44 Public Radio

Love it. And I miss it. They can make even the most boring stuff interesting in a traffic jam. (Hit)

#43 Plays

Not so much. (Miss)

#42 Sushi

Love it, but have to be careful to not have the stuff with my food allergies. Can eat tuna sushi all day long, or Inari sushi. Love Love Love the edamame. See #58. (Hit)

#41 Indie Music

Unknown (Miss)

#40 Apple Products

Prefer Linux. (Miss)

#39 Netflix

Have considered it, there being not a wide selection of movies to choose from here in Switzerland. We have resorted to downloading movies from iTunes instead. (Only a few hours' wait, instead of several days for the DVD to show up in the mail) (Miss) (iTunes is an Apple product, so does this make #40 a hit?)

#38 Arrested Development

Never seen it. (Miss)

#37 Renovations

Helped my sister with her house in Arlington, so I think this qualifies. (Hit)

#36 Breakfast Places

Yes, the Sunday Brunch at Westfield Conference Center comes to mind. (Hit)

#35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report

I don't get to watch very often on TV, but I found them on ComedyCentral.com a while ago, and added the RSS feeds to my Google Reader. I try not to watch it at work. (Hit)

#34 Architecture

There's lots of it here. (Hit)

#33 Marijuana

No comment. (Miss)

#32 Vegan/Vegetarianism

If my wife wasn't such a carnivore, I might even be one. Thanksgiving would be perfectly acceptable without the bird. (Hit)

#31 Snowboarding

Too afraid of getting injured -- I have a lot of walking to do to get to work, and an ACL injury would make my commute horrible. (Miss)

#30 Wrigley Field

I'm more of an Astrodome guy. (Miss)

#29 80s Night

Hahaha. Love the 80's music they play here on the radio like it's new. (Hit)

#28 Not having a TV

Have often wanted to live this lifestyle -- especially when I worked for Media General Cable back in 1993 -- when I was the poor bastard who had to field the phone calls when the cable service went out AGAIN. Now, I watch so little TV that I might as well take the jump. But the kids might get angry about it. (Hit)

#27 Marathons

Back in August and September of last year, I was jogging every day. However, I jog so slowly that it might take me 9 or 10 hours to finish a marathon. (But I'll still call it a Hit)

#26 Manhattan (now Brooklyn too!)

A wonderful place. I really enjoyed my trip there last year. (Hit)

#25 David Sedaris

Never heard of him. (Miss)

#24 Wine

I fail to understand the big deal about wine. Having a wife who doesn't drink doesn't help this at all. I do however, cook with the stuff. (Miss)

#23 Microbreweries

Yes, our favorite being a microbrewery in Ashburn called "Old Dominion Brewery" (Hit)

#22 Having Two Last Names

That is very funny, but I am not guilty of this. (Miss)

#21 Writers Workshops

Not me. (Miss)

#20 Being an expert on YOUR culture

I am more a victim of this rather than a perpetrator of this. The exchange student trip in 1988 was a direct result of my grandfather's fascination with Irish culture. So this is a hit.

#19 Traveling

I have been to all continents except for Africa, so this is a hit.

#18 Awareness

I am a very aware individual, so this is a hit.

#17 Hating their Parents

Not so much. (Miss)

#16 Gifted Children

#15 Yoga

Miss. I lucky to be able to bend over far enough to tie my shoes.

#14 Having Black Friends

Hit. I have both token and actual.

#13 Tea

Hit, but not so much as in recent years, vastly overtaken by #1 (below)

#12 Non-Profit Organizations

Hit, belong to at least three.

#11 Asian Girls

Had a Vietnamese girlfriend once, so I guess this is a Hit. Used to really like them, but have utterly lost interest since moving to Switzerland.

#10 Wes Anderson Movies

Miss (Haven't even seen any of the movies listed there)

#9 Making you feel bad about not going outside

Definitely a hit.

#8 Barack Obama

Hit.

#7 Diversity

Hit.

#6 Organic Food

I think it is in the same realm as #59, Natural Medicine. Hormones and antibiotics I am against for food, but GM crops I'm ok with. (Miss)

#5 Farmer’s Markets

#4 Assists

HAHAHA. All I could do when I played hockey was assist. (Hit)

#3 Film Festivals

Hit. I love the move Sunshine, and Little Miss Sunshine

#2 Religions their parents don’t belong to

Yes, that would be 100% true if you consider complete apostasy as a religion. (Hit?)

#1 Coffee

100% true. My day at work can not be started without coffee. I used to have a boss who thought it necessary to list out his demands upon my first arrival to work. This of course was usually met with a stern response of "Do not talk to me until I have had my coffee."

My score: 54 out of a possible 81, giving me a percentage of 64.28%. So I guess it isn't that close to home.

Commute by Bike!

2008-02-22T09:36:00.004-05:00

I never have been able to do this, in any of my careers before. Biking to work in Northern Virginia is suicide. Not to mention too far, too hot, too scary and too cold. Traffic in Northern VA is terrible. The suburban sprawl has increased the number of houses to the west of the Washington DC area, but the number and quality of the roads have been slow to increase to match the population increase. It is said that there are three subjects that people can always small talk about. Politics, weather, sports. In Northern VA, there is a fourth: The traffic (or your commute this morning).

Everybody in Virginia has an opinion about traffic. "Oh, don't go on 28 between 7:35 and 9:30, you'll be in bumper-to-bumper!", "Oh you should take that cool bypass around Route 234." "Forget about getting on I-66 before the HOV lanes turn on." If you ask anybody who has lived in Virginia, they can give you detailed horror stories about how they hated their commutes, or at the very least, they all know the radio stations they like to listen to, as there is not much else to do in the car while sitting in traffic.

When I lived in Virginia, the location of the house was in South Riding, just southwest of Dulles International Airport. The office is in Sterling, northeast of Dulles Airport. There were two or three different paths to take to get to work. North in route 606, which is in places, an undivided highway of traffic going 96 kph (60 mph), giving me a very narrow 4 inches of real estate on the side of the road. Along this road drive 18 wheelers, and much worse: soccer moms driving their Chevy Suburbans primping their make up as they chat on their cell phones. I said suicide. I meant it.

The other path is north on Route 28, a 6 lane divided highway, a main thoroughfare between the Interstate I-66 and the Dulles Airport terminal. The traffic on this road, despite all the lanes, is usually stand-still in the morning, or at least creeping along at 32kph (20 mph). Still, there was a fatality of a poor guy on a bike a few years that I haven't forgotten about. Probably a soccer mom. By car, the commute is 16.6 miles (26 km) or 15.3 miles (24.6 km), depending on the route. The commute routinely takes 45 minutes during the morning, not so bad in the evening. That is an average of 20 miles per hour. For this suburban-sprawl induced traffic problem, I have sworn with words laced with anger and dripping with obscenities on a daily basis. If that is my average velocity in a car, I might as well have that commute on a bike.

So you must understand how excited I was when I came to Switzerland, and see people on bicycles everywhere.

Ever since we moved to Rüfenacht, taking the tram has been a source of impatience. I knew that the average velocity by tram was approximately that of me on a bike. So I started biking to the train station, to start my daily journey. My new commute consisted of: Walk to tram, 10 minutes. Wait for tram, 5 minutes, take tram to Gümligen, 10 mins, Wait for S1 to Fribourg, 3 minutes, 45 minutes to Fribourg, 5 minutes waiting for a bus, 10 minutes on a bus ride, and another 8 minutes walk down a hill to the office.

What an itinerary.

Well for the past 4 weeks, I have been taking the bike to the Gümligen train station, and sometimes even further into town, where i can catch a different tram to take me all the way to the central train station, Bern Bahnhof. The way to the train station in the morning is all down hill. If you drop the 10 minutes that it takes to walk down the hill to the tram stop, taking the bike is actually a shorter "door-to-door" commute time than taking the tram.

Since the way to work is all down-hill, and fast, I do in fact have a higher average velocity than the tram. One morning I got out late, and rode my bike past the tram as the passengers were boarding. What a perfect opportunity to test my theory that it takes about the same time on a bike as on a tram.

I peddled down that street as fast as I could. I was ahead of the tram. Whoosh! The tram passed me. Ah! but he's stopping. I peddled faster. Good thing this is down-hill. I pass the tram. I'm ahead! yay! The tram passes me again. We do this a few times, but his last two stops are close to each other, and I race by.

I had parked my bike, locked it up and was walking to the train platform as the tram shows up in Gümligen Station.

Since the S1 is a long ride, with many stops, and there are often no seats on the train in the morning (until we get to Bern), I have been doing an alternate course to get to work, which takes a little bit longer, but takes the InterCity train, which is bigger, nicer, quieter, and less stinky. This commute involves: bike to Eggholzli (which I think means 'little forest on the corner'), park my bike there, take the tram to Bern Bahnhof, and take the Intercity train to Fribourg that leaves every 30 minutes (on :04 and :34).

There are days that I wish I did not bike to work. The rain does not bother me so much, so those days I wish I did not bike don't happen to be the rainy ones. However, one day, after getting over a cold, and generally feeling spaced-out -- I was actually hoping that my bike had been stolen while I was gone. Most of the people here are trusting enough to lock up their back tire to their frame, and that is it. No locking up the bike to an immovable structure such as a pole, tree, bicycle rack, etc. This was a bit strange to me when I started the bicycle commuting. I am used to having those metal Kryptonite locks securely bolting the bike to something that would take a bulldozer to knock over. Once, I even locked my bike up, and forgot to take the key with me. The bike was not stolen.

It is clear to me that the bike I brought over was not well-equipped for commuting to work here in Switzerland. First of all, the gears are inappropriate at every speed. There has been times where I am racing down the hill to Gümligen at a very respectable pace, maxed out at the highest gear, and found myself being passed by a local Swiss.

Of course, since I am fat and pathetic, I am not surprised that I get passed going up-hill, either. But I did notice that even though I was going up-hill in the lowest gear, those who passed me had a faster rate of pedaling that did not match up with what I was doing. The only explanation for this must be in the gears. I find myself casually looking at the gears on the local Swiss bikes, and it becomes more apparent that these bikes are built for going up hills. The front gears are tiny and the back gears are huge. I guess I shouldn't feel too bad about not being able to climb the hill on the way back to home. (See how I gawk at other people's bikes in the next post, Stuff White People Like).

The return trip by bike has a modest up-slope which seriously reduces my return velocity. The grand finale is a terrible hill that might even have conquered me at my peak biking performance capabilities when I was 16 years old. I never get home without being out of breath and sweaty. I suppose it is better than getting to work out of breath and sweaty.

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Swiss Education

2008-02-13T16:01:00.002-05:00

Let's be honest. Jake may never forgive us for this trip to Switzerland. I have adjusted to be quite comfortable, even with the longer commute from Rüfenacht. The other kids seem to be have adjusted, made friends, gotten used to the change. Jake: not so much. "This is the worst thing you guys have ever done to me."

We sent him back to the US over the winter break to help cheer him up. I used 80,000 of my United Airlines frequent flyer miles to send him back in business class. We were hoping that this trip back to the US would remind him that he still has friends and family who support and care for him no matter what. Upon his return, (with a broken arm and a cast), we were hoping for a refreshed and renewed Jake ready to take on the new semester at school with enthusiasm and vigor.

Not so much.

"Dad, I hate the ISB." Jake mumbled. This was the same sentence that he has spoken many times before, as if it were a prayer chant, a meditation, a mantra. "Can I be home-schooled?"

"No"

"Can I go to a Swiss school?"

(Are you crazy?) OK we'll see what we can do.

The kids went to school at the ISB for one week. Friday was the "Ski day" where all students from the second grade on up go to a day's worth of skiing. The kindergarten kids and first graders go to the ice rink to go ice skating. Jake, of course, was not allowed to go skiing with his broken wrist. So he stayed home. But instead of actually staying home, he was given the opportunity to visit the local Swiss school in Rüfenacht. The school had a special day to try out the new environment called "Schnuppertag" (snooper day).

Jake enjoyed it. Actually said, "Let's try more". The school had a "Schnupperwoche" (snooper week) that Jake tried out the next week. Since the vacation days between the two schools are completely different, we decided to ask the other two kids at the ISB if they wanted to try the local Swiss school. They went to the local public school on the same week as Jake's "Schnupperwoche"

After a few days, it was pretty clear that they are no longer going to go to the ISB. They all chose this themselves. We didn't pressure them. We can't believe it either. All three children has withdrawn from the ISB, and are now attending the local Swiss schools full-time, in a fully German environment.

Josh is going to the Kindergarten named, this is so cliche, "Hansel und Gretel". The class is all in Swiss German, and he has no clue what is being said. He just follows along and plays with the kids. There are rules in the Swiss education system that prevent Kindergarten from being like the Kindergarten in the US, where it is almost as much pressure on the poor Kindergarten kids to learn as is pressure on the high school kids trying to get into college. So in a Swiss Kindergarten, you're pretty much guaranteed to goof off, play, get in lines, sing, stuff like that. No writing, or reading, or deconstruction of iambic pentameter.

Jake spends the day in intensive German training. He goes to some of the classes that involve not much lecture; classes like Gym, or Industrial Arts. Cecilia has much the same schedule.

I may give more details on the kid's educational progress and schedules in the next few posts.

Re-Relocating

2008-02-13T14:34:00.005-05:00

Moving is a serious pain. You would think that moving once every 5 years would be enough. You might even think that moving once in the last six months would prevent any plans for moving any time in the near future.

Apparently the pain of cramming all of our family in that tiny apartment in Bern was too much to handle for my wife and kids. There was no place for the kids to retreat. Any time they walked down the hall any louder than a tip-toe, and I would yell at them to walk more quietly. I am sure that the neighbor below appreciated this. Eventually, everybody realized they were miserable, my wife included. She even was toying around with taking the kids back to the US without me, until my contract to stay here finished out. What a revoltin' development!

My wife set out to find some place new. She found several places, all of which made my daily commute even worse than we already had. There was one in Oberscherli, which wasn't that far from our apartment in Bern. After a review of the public transportation, I found out that I would have to get a Post bus that comes twice an hour, and then take another bus to the Bern Bahnhof train station. Total projected commute time, one way: one hour 56 minutes. Up from one hour, 10 minutes. Amazing, considering that this place was only a few km away from the first apartment.

Oberdiessbach, even further away. The house was awesome, the view stunning, the commute beyond dreadful. Apparently Stacy was taking this this "One man's quiet suffering" idea to the morbid extreme.

Finally she found this cute little cottage two tram stops from the International School of Berne, within a short walk of Joey's baby sitter. A short tram ride from the Gümlingen train station, which takes me straight to Fribourg. The same rent as the apartment in Bern, more space, a yard to play in, a parking space, and a most spectacular view of the Alps from the dining room table.

Faced with the very uncomfortable prospect of paying double-rent for another 8 months, Stacy set out to find some renters for the apartment in Bern, so that we could break the lease with, as the Swiss call it "ein Nachmieter" (an after-renter). We set up an ad in the local newspapers, and on-line to find a renter right away. During the whole month of December, we had two visitors. (This is really not the best time of year to rent out an apartment). Things were looking pretty desperate, and we had no prospects to assume the rental of the apartment when we finally moved in January.

With so few prospects, this was an increasingly more revoltin' development!

Anybody who expressed a vague interest in the apartment was met with great enthusiasm on our part. We met everybody who wanted to see the apartment. There were a few guys who got out of medical school and were looking to find a place after their landlord decided he wanted his apartment back since he was coming back from an extended relocation to Ireland. They were desperate to find a place to live, they need it now! And I have just the place!

We showed them the place in the first few weeks of January, and they indicated their interest, eventually signing the lease two weeks ago, to take residence in the middle of February. Stacy had the protocol inspection with the tenants, a real estate agent, and a representative for the cleaning crew just yesterday, and as of last evening, we are finally free of that apartment! I should have a drink to celebrate.

We've been here for 6 weeks as of today, and have been settled in quite well. The kids seem happy -- something we certainly haven't seen in them during the crowded months at Somazzistrasse. We have met the two neighbors who share the house, a very nice lady above us, who was originally from Muri, lived in Berlin for 20-some years, and has recently moved back to Switzerland. The other neighbors have lived in this shared dwelling for a very long time. He first moved into this dwelling in 1945, when he was 8 years old. Retired, and terribly nice.

We have also gotten the "yellin' at" from the locals too. Not by the neighbors mentioned in the above paragraph, but by the neighbor who got angry at us for some cardboard we left out on the sidewalk, that wasn't picked up by the local trash company. As many of you Americans may think that the trash company is at fault for not picking up the trash, please understand that in this case, "the customer is not always right." Here, the trash company is usually right. We didn't follow the protocol for the recycling of cardboard and newspaper -- all cardboard has to be neatly tied up. We just chucked the cardboard -- neatly stacked -- into a big cardboard box and hoped for the best. We got away with this sort of behavior in Bern, but not here in the Worb Gemeinde.

Not good enough. They didn't pick it up, I didn't notice. A day went by. It rained. The angry neighbor shuffled through the papers, and found our address and left an anger-o-gram on the outside of the box. We didn't notice the cardboard or the anger-o-gram. Another day goes by. The neighbor visits Stacy during the day and gives Stacy a good yellin'-at -- in Bärndutsch. Well, in Switzerland, I guess it's not home until you get yelled at by a local about some critical trash or noise violation. The Swiss are sensitive to trash, and especially sensitive to noise.

Understanding French as a Beginner

2008-02-11T04:48:00.000-05:00

As you may know, I live in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and work in the French-speaking part. I've been sick all weekend with some sort of cold, and couldn't wake up in time to catch the normal train to Fribourg. My wife took pity on me and drove me to work. She came into the office with me, and was greeted by an elevator full of Cartier watchmakers (who work in the same building), all in their white lab-coats. Each of the lab-coated technicians greeted us with "Bonjour!" and Stacy later remarked that she almost responded with the Bernese German response "Gruess-ech Mitenand!"

We haven't bothered to learn French, as it just confuses the language learning process. My brain gets melted enough by trying to learn the Bernese German dialect... However, I have had the opportunity to pick up a few words here and there. Here is an excellent music video describing my French-Switzerland experience pretty well. The band who made this is called "Flight of the Conchords" and they have some amazingly funny music that can be seen on YouTube.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=FUVagbFcSUU

Links and Stuff

2008-02-05T04:16:00.000-05:00

This is kind of Interesting. Since I'm a member of the Civil Air Patrol, although I don't ever do any search and rescue operations, especially now that I'm here in Switzerland. This article in Air & Space Magazine describes the search for Steve Fossett.

I have recently found the FAIL blog to be worthy of repeated visits. . I also find daily amusement with the Shipment Of Fail. "A Fail so Epic, it is a Win!!!"

Speaking of Fail, I found this web clip which seems to reinforce the idea that Europeans have -- think that Americans are dumb. After seeing this video, I have to agree. http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZaN6Rx8X6_I
and

A friend sent me this video commemorating the 25 Years of DNS. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqHcrZKc-jU

All of my fellow Ex-pat co-workers have made it back to the US for a visit, and they all crow about how great the Mexican food is. There is a Mexican restaurant in Geneva I might make a trip to visit -- to see if it might help out that craving for a burrito that won't go away. Still no Taco Bells, Baja Fresh or Chipotle here in Europe from what I can tell.

I have recently been on a mission to get caught up with old high school, college friends and co-workers. I have rapidly expanded my LinkedIn profile, to help keep in touch. If anybody ever did a Google search for me, I would be pretty easy to find. The fact that I don't get a lot of random emails from friends probably means that people aren't thinking enough about me to bother doing a Google search. (I guess I should take the hint?) Anyway, I was recently looking to get in touch with a high school friend named Henry, with whom I had kept loose contact, the last I had heard from him in 2003. Well, unfortunately, he was killed in a tragic car crash last week.

Neat Day at Work

2008-02-04T17:17:00.000-05:00

I was originally going to title this as "Hoo-ray! We Didn't Melt the Internet!" but I think some people at my office wouldn't find that so funny.

Did you notice?

Hey I actually helped make a part of this historic occasion! I work with the team that activated two of the root servers mentioned in this article on BBC. Actually, in the wee hours of this morning, I was doing lots of work on the servers, even before the world knew about them. I'm waiting for Slashdot to write about it, but it would appear that they're too focused on the RIAA actually notice.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7220116.stm
http://www.iana.org/reports/root-aaaa-announcement.html
http://www.icann.org/committees/security/sac018.pdf (I'm listed in this one)

I don't generally like to write about work on the blog, I try to keep it to personal matters. So. Sorry for the diversion.