December 2009

December things

I had a positive day with Hans, after I made him wash under his arms, put on new clothes and clean his room! We went to Hachisches Hof, which he likes, and had a 'substantial meal' (Deftiges Essen) which he particularly likes with a couple of beers. We then wandered around the Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) in front of Berlin Town Hall as the sun went down. Better to see it in the dark. He wants to go to another one next Monday but in the evening.

As I wrote the above I got a reply from Tony and Rita. Looks like I shall be visiting New Orleans at the end of April and start of May. Need to confirm so I can make the flight booking. Actually, I was talking to Hans earlier about his wish to celebrate his next birthday (11 May) in Morocco and if that goes ahead then it will fit nicely with my return from New O.  Not sure I can have a skiing holiday in January now - must think of how to allocate my pennies!

I have already been invited to a number of parties and meetings up to Christmas and been asked to take on another specialist student at the Institute. I also take Micha to a Computer Club for Oldies each Wednesday and now Oldie Hermann wants to join in. He thinks he is missing something! There is also a concert and opera visit planned in the next few weeks.

Who will be popping Sekt corks to celebrate a birthday in December? Michael Nixdorf will have his 46th on the 5 December with his family. Geoff, my brother-in-law. will be having extra fish 'n chips on the 13th with Fran and Warren. Wish I were there!  Jördis will have her 30th birthday with Mathias on the 19th and Ian Maxwell, the famous 'London Banker' will be 48 on the 30th of December and celebrate in style with Birgit on a ski-piste in the north of Austria. Have a great time each.

Graduate Visitors

Graduate visitors from Spain

Yes, El 'arry and Arancha dropped by last Friday morning. Andrea arrived earlier so I gave her the tea bags she wanted from my last trip to England. A nice picture of her posing with teabags. We had time to exchange news, including that she had just had her hair dyed a shade darker!

Jan and Arancha then arrived. They had been out the night before 'celebrating' and I think you can see this in Jan's face :-)  They cleared his things out of my cellar and took them to Andrea's cellar which is bigger. He has to decide which to take to Spain, or not. It was nice to see them and he was more relaxed than when I saw him in the stress of trying to end his degree in Rhode Island.

On Saturday, the family drove to his university at Braunschweig for his degree ceremony. All went well and now we have to address him with the title,  ' Herr Diplom-Ingenieur, Jan Trautmann M.Sc.' Congratulations Jan!  He's got three interviews soon so hopefully he will be offered a job near to where he lives.  I wonder if he will send any photos to share, or have you got any of the big day Andrea?

Browsers

Browse awhile with me!

You may have a problem looking at some of the photographs I post. I discovered (that) it depends on the Browser you are using.

Two photographs of me in Alanya separated by 30+ years, and that of Peter in my last posting, will NOT show if you use Firefox Browser and a Microsoft operating system.

If you use an Apple operating system you are okay, even with a 'Firefox for Apple' Browser. It also works okay over Internet Explorer, Safari (the Browser for Apple) and Opera. I hope this all makes sense to you.

Meanwhile, my new flower is going crazy and opening at a record speed. See the new photo, but be careful which Browser you use :-)))

Dozing

Dozing through November

Since my return from England I seem to have dozed my way through November and next week offers little prospect of change. I am not complaining but I have to get used to the less hectic and active days of summer, and of my ex-working week.

I visit Hans each week and sometimes he seems to make progress. I took him to the local airport and gathered brochures for his next holiday. He wants to go to Morocco next May. We are now busy going through all the offers. He wants to go on a 7-Day Tour but I am not sure he will be able to cope with the constant travel. I need to talk to his helpers in the office about this.

I went to a local (two minutes from my place)  'Senioren Compterkurs' with Micha last Wednesday. I wrote notes as he listened to the teacher and did what she told the Oldies to do. He did very well but I noted his problem with concentration and looking at the screen. It was an internet course and at the end he had created his own e-mail account. I shall be going with him to lesson 2 this Wednesday.

Next week Jan and Arancha are jetting into Berlin for a long weekend. He has to pick up his two degrees for the University of Braunschweig. I hope they have enough time to make an appearance here.  I also get a surprise e-mail from Peter von Long-Legs. He sent a photo to show he was still alive and kicking, which I have reduced and added to this report. He is fine and doing very well with his studies at the University of Potsdam. After getting his Diplom he is now studying for his Ph.D and even been appointed one of two helpers to the Professor. Congratulations Peter!

I got some nice flowers recently - very unusual long things and I have no idea what it/they are called.  Now back to dozing through what remains of November and will post news at the start of December. Bis dann!

Wine and autumn

Days of wine and summer autumn

Yes, autumn is the time we reap the benefit of summer, sun and the vineyards. I noticed 'Eiswein' in my local shops last week. This reminded me of visits to Jan's grandparents many years ago in the north of Hungary when I tried to learn something about viticulture. His grandfather was a master and had a wonderful wine cellar near the local church. Ah.... memories!

It is also the time to taste the latest produce from La Belle Francais! I am sure Peter and Hannelore will be testing the local wines in Provence. I had to settle for the 'neu Beaujolais' either Village or Primeur available in Berlin from last Thursday.

My verdict is that it is okay to sip with friends but it lacks the stronger aftertaste that matured wines offer. Two glasses of the 'neu Beaujolais' were enough for me. What about you, Andrew and Adele - have you tried it yet?

Gnomes

The naughty gnome

Had a nice time looking at the German for dwarf/dwarves and gnome/gnomes and got the same = der Zwerg/die Zwerge and I also got der Gartenzwerg/die Gartenzwerge for gnome/s. When I thought of the caption ' The naughty gnome', I got frech/böse/ungezogen(e,es,er) for naughty. As usual, it depends on the context and if it is an adjective or an adverb you want. In my case I wanted the adjective so I decided upon 'Der freche Gartenzwerg'. If you have a better idea then send it to me.


At the Photoshop lesson last Friday we had to practice cutting out objects and posting to a background we had selected. I decided on a nice summer meadow background complete with little hut for the gnomes to live in. I could select a number of figures to work on and decided to build a composition using garden gnomes. Great fun and you can see the result here.

I really like the gnome in the bottom right of the picture. He shows innocent surprise at events while clearly enjoying the spectacle - just like humans! I wonder who called the gnome police :-)  Creating this image also involved 'embedding' the gnomes into the grass/meadow so that they did not look as if they were floating on it and this technique is not so easy.

Photoshop Group

The Friday Photoshop Gang

Now I have photos of all the members. I took them just before we started our lesson last Friday. This is the first post for two weeks. Mmmmh -- I wonder if that is a record?

The 'Boss' of the Friday Gang is Stefan. There is a good shot of him rolling his eyes upwards as if wondering if we will ever learn it all! We shall Stefan - one day we shall. Just give us more time!

There is also a really nice photo of Waltraud and Kurt Schröder, showing how happy they are to be a couple after many years! Another is of Helga with Maria Gebhard, who sits on my right in the lesson.



Joel (who sits on my left) and Susan make a nice smiling couple who you know from my earlier post. Jörg Müller completes the line up and you can see him on the Stefan photo. Jörg is the most advanced in the group and surprised us all last Friday by showing the short animation he had made.

A concert

Gamelan influenced concert

I told you earlier that I was going to the second concert of this season at the Komische Oper, which is my 'regular' opera and concert hall. Like some of you have a regular pub I have this building as my regular for music and drama.  It was a wonderful evening and I learnt even more about modern classical music. I was one of a very curious public for the opera house was at least three quarters full.

It started with the gentle sounds of the Gamalan Ensemble Arun Sih (a guest ensemble from Bremen) playing as Das Publikum entered the opera house and found their seats. There was a lot of talking as the music played and I picked up pleasant surprise at being greeted to their seats in such a musical way. When 8.00pm struck the conductor acted as interviewer with members of the ensemble and got them to explain what they were going to play and what it meant - musically!

After this 'Starter' we entered the main music of the evening.  This was made up of 4 pieces by the late American composer Lou Harrison, who worked on fusing western classic musical traditions and styles with the Javanese sounds you hear in Gamalon music, with its interesting repetitive percussion beats.  We started this exploration with ' Bubaran Robert for Gamelan-Ensemble and Trumpet', followed by ' Five sections from Solstice for Flute, Oboe, Two Violas. Double Bass. Trumpet, "Nagelklavier" and Celesta'. We then enjoyed Harrisons's 'Suite fir Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra'. The audience really listened to these small delicate works before heading for a break.

The second half was Harrison's Piano Concerto followed by the full orchestra in Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe, Suite Nr. 2 (1913). I have heard this piece many times but I listened to it with completely new ears and understanding as we learnt that Ravel had heard Gamelan music-percussion sounds at an exhibition in Paris and in this piece he introduced these sounds into the texture of the music. You could clearly hear it once you had been prepared to listen for the sounds in a concert like this one. Delightful - and I left the concert hall smiling and happy that I had learnt something new about a piece of music I thought I knew.

Final note: I wrote "Nagelklavier' above and wondered what this could be. I had heard it and didn't need to know what it had to mean - but once I started to write this text I wondered what it meant in English. If you translate it word for word you end up with rubbish like ' nail-piano' which I knew really was 'Dinglish'! I finally found it via Google after I had entered my own translation as ' Prepared Piano' which I knew from the music of John Cage.

Sure enough, Google took me to Wiki and to John Cage who is credited with inventing this name although the practice pre-dates him by many years. It means you prepare a piano by placing objects between or on the strings or on the hammers or dampers. I studied music/piano until I was 16 so I know what this all means :-)) It actually goes back to the Harpsichord of the 17th/18th century. This manipulation and something called a 'Tack Piano'  (used by Lou Harrison) produces a more percussive sound and a brighter timbre, which fits with attempts to fuse modern classical and Gamelan sounds.

So there you have the story and now we have a photo of Christian Wollf preparing a piano for performance in February 2007. Unfortunately I missed it but I shall be there for the next one. See you there.

More things

More things in November

I've had a comparatively lazy week with lots of reading and two visits to my back and leg training sessions at my Wellness Club, ending with an interesting meeting of the Photoshop Gang on Friday.  These photos have got nothing to do with the text but offer an alternative to words! Now read on.

This morning I was woken early by my noisy neighbour and couldn't get back to sleep so have felt drowsy all day. Tomorrow I have been invited to lunch, which I know will end in the evening after supper and at least a few drinks.  On Monday it is Hans' Day and plan to take him to the local airport to gather information about his planned holiday to Morocco next May. Yes, I know it is a long way off but you have to start him with planning and thinking a lot earlier. Taking a lot longer to do things is part of his illness.

Just got an e-mail from Alan and Lynne to say they are safely at home and enjoyed their stopover from Australia at Singapore. They went to a local church and were invited to join in a religious discussion group. Ideal for both of them. Back in Cas they are still jet-lagged but slowly getting over it. Alan had his bike stolen (ex-Daniel two wheeler) from their garage while they were away but someone at the library has offered to give him another one. The doner apparently has two such bikes. Pleased to read they are settling back into life at Cas.

One of the books I am reading is about the life of St. Augustine. It was written by an American and makes for very turgid reading! I think he must have written it for a thesis, or to impress his Prof. by showing he could write for an 'academic in-crowd'. Fortunately I know all their tricks so can read on and between the lines while noting the use of words indicating probability or possibility. That means it is rather short on evidence!  If it was for a Doctoral thesis I hope it was rejected out of hand!

During reading this mess of thinking and presentation, I looked at a source and that led me to another one called 'Codex Sinaiticus'. I am sure all my religious family readers will know all about this - oder? It was uncovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert by a rather shady German explorer in 1844, name of Tishendorf with links to Leipzig University.  Codex is simply an old term for what we would now call a book. It is one of 50 copies of the bible commissioned by Emperor Constantin. No-one seems to know where the other 49 are!  It has 400 pages of papyrus, of which 347 are in the British Museum in London. Tischendorf sold them to a Russian Tsar .Years later, the Soviet government needed some hard currency so in 1933, they sold them to London. The rest of the pages you can still find in Moscow, Leipzig and in the Sinai monastery.

Why is it important? It is called the World's Oldest Bible' and written between 330-360AD. How do we know? Easy - carbon dating of the paper and checking content with other known information at the time of writing.  It contains part of the Old Testament and all of the New Testament. There are 23,000 corrections made by human transcribers, and the pages contain very different reports about what Herr. J. Christ did, or did not, say in comparison to other 'Codex' (also not included into the Bible) and the standard Bible of today. Very interesting! But I have known for a long time that what is passed off as The Bible is simply the product of careful selection to fit an institutional power structure developed over a number of years. Back to the turgid book tomorrow for I am interested to find out where the writer wants to take us.

November 2009

Things in November 2009

So what can we expect in the next four weeks? The obvious is that we shall move even further into Winter and the cold, wet, dreary days of this season. Not my favourite time of the year.

I am going to the next Komische Oper concert next Friday and will see Angelika again. Each Friday afternoon I shall be with my Photoshop Gang and two mornings each week I shall be in my Wellness Club to make my legs and back work. I have some private students and always enjoy seeing them.

Next Sunday I have been invited to lunch and to show my photos of the USA, Canada and recent visit to England. I'm going to a teachers workshop on the 14th. It is about 'Interaction in the classroom'. I'm always open to learning new things - and it will be nice to see Dorothy again after her return from Florida!  And that is about it for the moment - but then the telephone can ring at anytime and things change.

Birthdays in November

Jeff, Robbie and Annie celebrate 54th birthday on the 19th with Computer Mathias having a beer on the 20th to celebrate his 42nd with his lovely Jördis. Stefan Seitz has his birthday on the 29th but I have sill lost contact with him - perhaps I shall find it and arrive in time to help him celebrate.

Hamlet

Hamlet

After a day in the country mit dem Boot, I ended the evening at the Komische Oper, Berlin. Angelika had got me a free ticket to see the last performance, so I spruced myself up and off I went.

Nice to see Angelika again, for I missed her birthday due to travelling, and to see the opera house again. I am going again next Friday evening to the second concert of the season.

Last night I watched/listened to Hamlet and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was specially commissioned from the composer Christian Jost. I heard one of his compositions at a recent concert and liked that so I was interested to see what he had done with Hamlet.

Of course it was reduced to 2 house and 20 minutes from the original just over 4 hours and kept very much to the narrative of the play. I particularly liked the black and white visual effect supporting the sound and action. Can only praise it highly and would happily see it again.

das Boot

Das Boot

I had to get up early yesterday (Saturday) to get ready in time for Sailor Rolf to pick me up. He is the proud owner of Anja II, which I steered around a lake a short time ago and posted a report on this blog.
It was time to take it out of the water for its winter sleep.  Back in next April for another spring and summer of sailing practice for me. I dressed warmly and enjoyed the drive to the lake south of Berlin where he has his boat.

I took a series of photographs starting with a shot of the berth area from which you leave to enter the lake (Left).  There is another one of the entry into the lake (Right). Looks nice in autumn colours. I steered the boat through this channel as you read in my last report.

The boat is in the middle of the shot looking very lonely. The next one is of the boat with its blue protective covers on the masts and cabin (Left) . This is where it rests in summer when not in use. The next is of it being hauled out of the water by a specially adapted fork lift truck (Right). We were the first of six boats taken out of the water that day.

The boat's trailer (on wheels) is pushed into the water under the boat then both are moved forward so the boat rests on the trailer and both are then slowly pulled out of the water and deposited in a work area. Here the bottom of the boat is cleaned of algae with a high pressure hose and lots of rubbing with rags.  There is a photo of Rolf working on it (Below - Left). This is really the hard bit and it takes longer than you think.

When cleaned, the fork lift truck arrives again and takes it to its winter berth. Another photo and of the boat looking clean and parked under a tree. The outboard motor was then taken off, the cabin cleaned, the decks wiped and finally the large tarpaulin set over the whole of the boat and secured. That was it!

A nice day which ended when Rolf took me to a local restaurant, as his guest, for some 'deftiges Essen' /a solid meal. I chose Hirschbraten (roasted deer) because as we worked on the boat I could hear a huntsman in the local wood shooting,  and we guessed it was either for hirsch or wild boar.

Now to add the photos. I wonder if I shall have the same placement problems again? Yes, but I had to reduce the photos even more to be able to move them. Still don't like the changes!

Dream kitchen

Dream Kitchen

After getting home from my Friday Gang meeting I opened e-mails and found a nice one from Barry 'n Pam. He commented on my blog post about them,  updating a Mac :-),  how much they had enjoyed meeting Alan and Lynne, and seeing family in Yorkshire.

They also sent me a photo of their kitchen to show off the new 'Granite' working tops! Yes, I  did write 'Granite'! I am suitably impressed and can add that you can eat not only from the dining table, or these new granite tops, but from the floor as well. Spotless is the word for their kitchen. It is now competing with their garden as an attraction!

Friday Gang

My Friday Gang

I have reported before that I go to a Centre for Seniors each Friday afternoon, led by the ever patient Stefan.

We are learning how to use Photoshop Elements. Since joining this group I pay more attention to how I use my camera for a shot and we have fun learning how to uses Layers/Ebene!

Last Friday I just snapped a few of my Friday Gang. PerhapsI should take a group photo. On these you can see Helga about to eat something, Joel with his red scarf, Kurt with a broad smile and Susan with her arms crossed on her lap. I borrowed a photo of Stefan from his blog. Now you know some of the people I share me Friday with.





I am having more problems to load photos since Blogger changed the posting format a few weeks ago. This is just one example: I can't get the photos on the same level. Not the first time as you can see from recent posts. Must find a solution - perhaps another blog provider.