Category Archives: Personal

Weihnachtsbastelei – Crafts for Christmas

How to make a Fröbel star – Wie man einen Fröbelstern faltet (YouTube, no sound, so works no matter what languages you speak :-) )

I tried this for the first time yesterday and was instantly hooked. I cut the strips (size about 1.2cm x 30cm) myself from construction paper in four different colors, but apparently you can buy the strips in many different colors and designs, at least here in Germany.

Here are the ones I made yesterday and today:

Now I think I also need some in a blue-green-purple colorway.

More than a century

The Washington Post: Meet two amazing women who are still working at the age of 102. Yes, 102. “Everyone asks the centenarians: “What’s your secret?“ The answer is pretty simple: work.”

Of my grandparents, my grandmothers died at ages 88 and 91, one grandfather died in his seventies of diabetes and his unwillingness to take medication for it, and the other grandfather is still alive and quite well at 92, so we’ll see how long I’ll be able to make it. The women in the article are certainly people out of whose book I might take a leaf.

Link via MetaFilter.

Schildkröte

Since the weather was still unusually balmy and sunny for November André and I went for another long walk yesterday, Sunday. We went to the Wagbachniederung, which is a protected area not far from us. It is known for attracting birds, especially migratory birds, as the area is very boggy and has large areas of water and reeds.

Auf der Seite von Norbert Kühnberger kann man nachschauen, welche Vögel in den letzten Wochen (bis Jahren) dort gesichtet wurden.

We took our binoculars and saw a lot of the species that we expected, for example around twenty Great egrets (Silberreiher), which are not usually found in Germany. Of course we also saw the much more common Grey heron (Graureiher) and hundreds of cormorants (Kormorane).

I was most surprised though when we saw this animal:

See it right in the middle of my horrible cellphone photo? It’s a turtle!

Unfortunately it was too far away to make out any details, so identification is difficult. It might be a European pond turtle (europäische Sumpfschildkröte), but it’s quite large in that case. Another possibility is that it is a Blanding’s turtle (Amerikanische Sumpfschildkröte) that has escaped from captivity. I guess we’ll have to take a proper camera with a good tele lens the next time we go there…