Beach Terrariums and Cannons

We had a certain routine at the beach. Show up around 10am - the beaches are deserted because the Spainish like to stay up late in the night. Anika starts collecting snails, little to medium sized crabs and hermit crabs. She digs a hole in the sand, fills it with water, either by the tide or a bucket, decorates the premises and places here animals in their new pen. Pascal helps a little, and when there is a bit of surf he gladly plays for hours jumping over the incoming whitewash, karate kicking the foam, etc. He was in the water so long he needed to take a rest more than once because of blue lips.

A typical beach. Mountains in the background, little coves and wading pools. Fine sand all around. Not many people out before noon.

Anika digging a pen for her creature collection.

Anika's dugout pen with a bunch of hermit crabs.

Nice wading pools, and we weren't the only ones poking about for crabs and the like. I think these folks were collecting crabs to eat later. By the way Spanish food is really good. I'm sure they have a delicious preparation for the little rock crabs found all around.

Pascal's penguin ready to be shot out the barrel of a rusty cannon.

A Stickbug!

It didn't move a millimeter, looks like it is missing a leg, and there it was on the stone wall to our vacation house. I thought these bugs were only tropical. Guess not.

Wild Horses

In the mountains, in addition to cows and horses are free ranging "wild" horses. We found some grazing alongside a lookout stop, and in the mossy forest below. They look a little smaller than your average horse, and behaved more like cows I guess than what I might think is gallopy horse behavior. I'm not even sure they are truly wild, but there was no fence, and the horses were roaming about freely.

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!