Arrival in Northern Spain!

We made it to Spain! The ocean! The beach! The air! This picture above is Pascal jumping off the sea wall in Biarritz, France actually. It's a tony town for sure, but a nice beach and real surf. For your ferrari driving caviar snacking surfer to be sure. The car garage was the best: we drove down, down, down in this cave-like garage to level -7. Opened the car doors, stretched our car-sitting tired legs, turned the corner and at the end of the exit tunnel is a perfectly framed view of the beach and ocean of Biarretz. Stunning! And so welcome after 6 hours in the car.

Above is our main beach in the town of Ribadisella, not far from our vacation house. We went here maybe 4 times. I rented a surf board and went surfing twice. The guys renting the surfboard were so apologetic about the waves that they let me surf for free the second time. The waves weren't actually that bad, also not that good, but it's summer afterall. I had a really fun time surfing, no crowds, pretty comfortable water temp in a 3/2mm wetsuit, and even some fun little waves (better than Pacifica, CA my old home break).

The air temperature was perfect, a modest 75 degrees maybe a little warmer in the full sun. The water temp was bracing at the beginning getting in, but actually you could swim in the ocean for a good 1/4 hour and feel comfortalbe without chilling down too far.

That's our house in the picture above. Look for the red roof in the right half of the picture just below the dark green and rocky hillside, and just above the light green hillside in the foreground.

The countryside in northern Spain is green, hilly and beautiful. Above are some of the views from our house. A huge mountain chain the Picos de Europe begins in this region, and right next to the coast. The air is fresh from the ocean, and when the beach is too hot, the mountains are only 10 minutes away. Our house was minutes up a one lane road snaking through pastures and little vegetable gardens. That's Sabine sitting on our patio overlooking a beautiful valley. In the mornings the mist would rise out of the valley to the clinking sounds of cow bells.

But Spain has tons of beaches right next to those mountains. Here's Pascal "not getting wet" this time. There are beaches, and beautiful ones all up and down the coast.

This is Carmalita the horse who spent the week in the field just at the beginning of the road to our vacation home. We pet her everyday on our way to and from the house. Several mornings, Anika and Tessa walked up the road from our house to feed Carmalita carrots.

Portrait of two clean, and ready for bed children.

On the Road to Spain

We left hot, tropical Wien Saturday morning for Salzburg. Unfortunately the weather took a turn for the worse. Rain and wind all day. A steady rain in Salzburg - we got soaked walking around. We don't have proper rain attire. I grew up in California, so o.k. I'm not up on the latest rain gear. Nonetheless, today we could've used some proper gear.

We finally found a cafe/restaurant (almost all the cafes were full 'cause everyone was hiding out from the rain) and the kids took some black&white pix of each other.

The plan is to wake up early tomorrow and head straight off to Lausanne.

Pascal: I like the rain 'cause if I get my hair wet I don't have to take a bath and wash my hair.

Dean: I thought snow was bad, but rain is way worse.

Anika: The weather was bad, but therefore I had a good time.

Tessa: But I don't have any shoes.

Sabine: Today is today, but tomorrow will be different.

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We made it to Lindau on the Boden See today. Nice weather, nice lake, sunshine, pretty town and sailboats all around. Smells like vacation.

Lindau has a re-ocurring symbol of a tree with oversize leaves (sometimes with roots). Don't know what it means. Of course I couldn't say what the picture of the oak tree meant in Oakland, except that the city's name is Oakland so... get it: therefore a picture of an oak tree. Maybe it's the same thing for Lindau.

That's a model of Lindau, Pascal the giant is attacking.

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Next day, on to France. We stopped in a little town (Clemont-Ferrand) that had the name of Pascal all over it!! Was Pascal the mathematician born here? Don't know. But we ate at Cafe Pascal, and found a Rue Pascal.

The huge Michelin factory, or its decaying remains is near by "Town du Pascal."

The Green Woods around Wien

It's getting almost up to 90F in the city so we took an hours drive into the Wienerwald. Ahhh..... Very green, hugely green, all the photos had to be adjusted 'cause they were just too green. We walked up the waterfall and midway we took off our shoes and played around in the stream. I love the rocks and trees growing out of them. I love water.

The 'Disney' Schloss

Visited a non-crumbling Schloss. Pretty cool. But it turns out to be a fantasy of sorts. The castle was built on the site of an ancient castle, but was built more for the sake of art then accuracy. A very rich German coal magnate (from Schliesia where my mother was born) collected tons of medieval artifacts and wanted a place to pur them. So around 1900 he built up this castle to house his collection. Really beautiful stuff all over the castle, the coal magnate was certainly a passionate collector. Lots of film crews use the castle because of its appearance of authenticity and completeness.

It's almost cute little baby Jesus in Mary's tummy carved into a massive wooden door.

Anika's growing prettier by the day.

Also at the castle they had an awesome show of birds of prey. We saw them fly free and right over our heads. Here is the "Weisskopf Adler".

The castle is a mismash of different styles, but how cool a real drawbridge and moat!

Around Wien

Bands from around Austria came to Wien and marched around town. Very nice outfits.

Poor St. Sebastian.

Aggstein Schloss (again)

Ani clowning in the party room of the castle. This room was sooo cool. Huge wooden tables a open fireplace, wooden beamed ceilings, windows overlooking the valley below. Knights in armor, stuffed bears, elks, eagles, etc. lining the walls. I was thinking how great it would be to have a party of 50 or so people in this room. And then..... a funny coincidence: my colleague at work (who moonlights as a band leader) happened to have played at a party in this same castle the same weekend we were there. Why do I call all these castles "crumbly castles"? Well, my colleague parked his car inside the castle walls to unload his music equipment, and on his second trip back to the car he saw a huge rock fall from the castle wall, blatsch&*$ right through his front windshield.He confirmed that it was an excellent party room.

an iphone app (by me:)

So I got an iTouch, then I started drawing on it. Then I found out it wasn't too impossible to program Apps on it (my own drawing app perhaps?). But a drawing app is pretty difficult for me. Something simple - fix a problem at work! Two things came to me immediately: a convertor to quickly find a volumetric flowrate from a linear flowrate (I just spent a couple of days explaining the calculation to my colleague at work). Since I love those picker wheels you see in for instance the alarm clock app, I made the linear to volumetric flowrate convertor use these wheels.

Well that program didn't turn out to be so difficult to write, so what about something else: a calculator to find Molarity with given gm, MW, and volume, AND to input any three of these variables and get the fourth, AND to enter any unit gm/mg, L/ml/ul, M/mM/uM/nM. Inspiration for this was frustration in incorrectly calculating an additive at work twice!!! It's actually a simple calculation but switching the units constantly (gm or mg, ml or L, M or mM/uM/nM) can cause costly mistakes. The mistake I made at work doing this calculation 'back of the napkin' so to speak was 1000-fold off. Ouch. Alright, so now I have this little calculator on my iTouch and I'll never make a mistake again. Correction: I'll make a mistake again for sure just not this particular one ;)

Aggstein Castle

Last weekend we took a trip up the Donau to the Castle Aggstein. It's way up on top of a rocky mountain overlooking the Donau river. You can see everything from the castle. If an army was attempting an attack on the castle you could spot them hours before they got anywhere close. It was also a gorgeous day, with a sunny blue sky. Anika got the picture of the day pretending she was scared of the attacking bear! The room with Anika and the bear was in the castle and can be rented out for events. It was so cool! Big wooden tables, a huge fireplace, big elk heads mounted on the walls, a knight's armor standing in a corner. You could really pretend you were one of King Arthur's knights attending a fest in that room. It was so real you could taste it.

Below the castle was a fantastic diorama depicting the stories from the 'Nibelung'. You know the story Wagner turned into an opera. Apparently the Nibelung is an age old Southern German tale from the minstrel days (i.e. before a real tradition of written literature). It concerns a hero 'Siegfried' who is exceptionally smart and strong. But he meets a tragic fate. Each story of the Nibelung was represented by little barbie-doll sized figures. In the room were probably twenty depicted stories. We actually read almost all of them to Ani and Pascal. The coolest story was how Siegfried killed a dragon with his magically strong sword. As the dragon dies it lights the forest on fire. The fat of the dragon drips on the forest floor and Siegfried smears the fat over his body, giving Siegfried an invisible armor as tough as a dragon's skin. Unfortunately little leaves mixed in the fat essentially cover small areas of Siegfried's skin so that these spots are not covered by the dragon's fat. At one of these spots Siegfried is later killed (because he is betrayed by a close confederate who knows about the location of the spots). Cool story! Cool castle!

Nine Years Old!

Anika had a really fun birthday party this Saturday. We had her party held at Schonbrunn Palace. They have a kid's museum about the royal family, more focused on how Maria Theresia and Joseph, and their children were as kids.

The party-kids dressed up in fancy gowns and cloaks (Pascal) then took a tour of the museum. Finally we went to the party room to have cake (Sacher Torte) and juice. A beautiful room looking out on the Palace gardens. Ani and her friends had a great time. They even sang songs from Udo Jurgens - a very smaltzy, sappy German singer, with lots of older women fans (Anika's teacher is teaching the class some of his songs - no one knows why).

The party was great!

Anika's 1st 'Nastics Meet

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Anika competed in her first gymnastics meet today. There were ten or more teams from around Vienna, more than 100 competitors. Anika was nervous, and half of her didn't want to go, but she went - and did very well!

Ani placed in the middle of 30 girls in her age group. Everyone is proud of her performance. Ani's team did well too, with one in Ani's age group winning first place. Anika placed seventh on the mini-trampoline - nice and high, legs straight, and stuck the landing - too bad the video is so poor. Her floor and beam routine looked pretty good, although she left out a couple of tricks on each. Aw well, it's her first meet.

Hurrah for Anika!

Proud, Tired Joseph

By Francesco di Christofano (1485-1525) painted around 1515. I love this picture. I especially love the depiction of Joseph, especially because he usually gets second billing when it come to pictures of the holy family. Joseph looks tired here (see his messed up hair) but proud of his family. That's the baby Jesus to the right, playing with his hair while sitting on Mary's lap. My finger painting here isn't the whole painting - it cuts out most of Jesus and all of Mary. But then this is the part of the painting that I like. I spent almost 4 hours doing this painting.

In the same room with me was a guy painting (oil painting) a copy of Rapheal's famous triangular composed painting of Mary, the baby Jesus, and the baby John the Baptist. It's a really, really, really great painting, and in every art history textbook. The painting is like maybe one of the top ten paintings in human history!!

Below is an image of the painting I copied, and then a movie of the finger painting.