Category Archives: Personal

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Long-time readers know that the above headline usually announces a move and/or new job. This time it’s both.

André started a new job back in April. He’s working for a company near Karlsruhe, which is almost two hours from here by car. When he was offered the job back in January I applied for a transfer right away, but one of the few disadvantages of being a civil servant employed by the state is that you can’t just hand in your resignation and look for a job elsewhere, you have to wait for a transfer. Physics teachers have been in very high demand in Germany for several years, so it was no problem to find a school willing to take me on board, but the school I’ve been teaching at for the past eight years couldn’t let me go because there were only two other physics teachers. My transfer is further impaired by the fact that Karlsruhe is in a different state (Baden-Württemberg vs. Rhineland-Palatinate) and transfers across state borders are very complicated. However, Karlsruhe is right across the Rhine from Rhineland-Palatinate, so there are two schools quite close to Karlsruhe, and both were looking for a physics teacher.

For the past nine months André and I only got to spend our weekends together because he stayed in Karlsruhe during the week while I had to keep working here. Fortunately, it looks like I will be transferred to one of the aforementioned schools on February 1st, 2012 (when the new school semester starts), so we are going to be moving to Karlsruhe in a few days. André and I have spent every day since the 26th packing and disassembling our furniture and will hopefully starting to unpack everything in Karlsruhe on the 5th. I’ll then commute to my old school from a mostly empty house for the duration of January until my transfer, and André and I are both very much looking forward to everything being back to “normal” in February when we will finally be both living and working in the same place again.

This will likely be my last posting before the move, so happy new year, everyone! See you on the flip side!

Ten years ago

Since it’s all over every newspaper, TV channel and other media anyway, I’ll just post a few links.

Fray: Missing Pieces

“On September 11, 2001, an unthinkable act of terrorism occured in New York City and Washington DC. It left holes in our lives, holes in the skyline, holes in our spirit. These are some of the stories of those who were there. These are our missing pieces.”

Two recent MetaFilter threads of relevance:
Ask MeFi: Help me briefly re-live 9/11 as it happened.
MeFi: Teaching 9/11.

The documentary 102 Minutes That Changed America is recommended in the first thread.

Zeit online: Thema: Zehn Jahre nach dem 11. September.

Ten years ago, I only posted a brief note because it was already afternoon here in Germany when the attacks happened and because André and I were glued to the online stream of BBC World News for the rest of the day. I elaborated a bit the following day.

120 km in six days

Tap, tap… this thing on?

Well, it’s been almost two months since I posted anything here… the login button almost felt rusty. I really should get back into the habit of posting something here more regularly.

My six weeks of summer vacation are almost over. André and I spent one week in the Black Forest hiking the Schluchtensteig, I visited friends and family and spent some time relaxing at home and working on a new patchwork project.

Here are a few photos from our trip (as usual, click for a bigger version on Flickr).

On our way to the start of the Schluchtensteig in Stühlingen we spent half a day at Lake Constance and visited the Pfahlbau–Museum.

We started our hike the next morning, mostly following the Wutach for the first three days. Here’s a photo of our descent on the second morning of our hike, near Blumberg:

And here’s a view of the Wutach in beautiful sunny weather.

We saw lots of interesting butterflies, among them many Silver-washed Fritillaries (Kaisermantel):

On the third day the weather was sunny and quite warm, but the forecast predicted lots of rain for the following day, so we decided to keep going for a little while longer until we reached the Schluchsee. This turned out to be a very good idea, because we got to enjoy this view:

We had bad thunderstorms with rain and even hail during the night and congratulated ourselves on our decision to keep going because the Schluchsee was barely visible the next day when you stood right on the shores of it. It rained a lot on the fourth day, but we only had an hour of light rain before we reached our next destination a little after lunchtime.

Fortunately, the rain only lasted for a day, and we were greeted by the sun on the fifth and sixth mornings, and the weather stayed nice for the remainder of our hike.

After spending the night in Wehr, our final destination, we took public transportation back to Stühlingen (quite a journey on a Saturday because the connections were less than optimal) and drove home. We had to take a little detour because of construction work and happened upon one of the train stations for the Sauschwänzlebahn (Wutachtalbahn, siehe auch Wutachtalbahn bei Wikipedia) where a train was just about to depart. We had seen the train on the first day of our hike so of course we had to stop and have a closer look. Here’s one of the historic steam engines which was built in 1942 (auf deutsch mehr Infos zur 50 2988 der Wutachtalbahn):

Wir Blogger (-innen): Schön, reich und berühmt.

Wie mir erst heute von meinem Mann zugetragen wurde, fand mein Weblog schon vor geraumer Zeit auf der re:publica 2011 in Berlin Erwähnung, und zwar in einem Gespräch von Don Dahlmann, Felix Schwenzel, Anke Gröner und Jörg Kantel, dem “Methusalem der deutschen Blogszene” (Zitat Don Dahlmann).

Natürlich hatte der Schockwellenreiter das entsprechende YouTube-Video 10 Jahre Blogs in Deutschland auf seiner Seite, allerdings habe ich es seinerzeit nicht angeschaut. Das habe ich gerade nachgeholt. Ich zitiere Jörg von hier:

“Das [sein Weblog] lief auf Manila, das war eine Blog-Software, die hatte Dave Winer, ein Amerikaner, geschrieben, und die war seltsamerweise in Deutschland mehr oder weniger führend um diese Zeit. Also alle, die Blogs machten, machten das in Deutschland mit EditThisPage, was ‘n bisschen, glaub’ ich, mit der Urmutter aller deutschsprachigen Weblogs, nämlich mit Andrea, zusammenhing. Die war mit einem Mitarbeiter von Userland befreundet und brachte sozusagen damit dann EditThisPage nach Deutschland.”

Jörg dürfte wohl der einzige sein, der ausgerechnet mich als Urmutter aller deutschsprachigen Weblogs bezeichnet. (Ich persönlich würde ja den Titel eher Melody aka Carola Heine zuschreiben.) Ein paar Reste meiner damaligen Seite, andrea.editthispage.com, findet man noch bei der Wayback Machine. Und der Mitarbeiter von Userland, mit dem ich befreundet war, ist heute mein angetrauter Ehemann, der immer noch – wie damals – unter SpicyNoodles! erreichbar ist (inzwischen allerdings unter .net und .org statt .com).

Meine erste tag line damals war “Not famous yet…” – und die passt noch immer, aber vielleicht wäre das anders, wenn passend zu Jörgs Äußerungen meine Web-Adresse eingeblendet worden wäre… und wenn ich es öfter als ein Mal im Monat schaffen würde, hier etwas Gehaltvolles zu posten. ;-)

P.S.: Und ja, den Titel habe ich vom Methusalem der deutschen Blogszene geklaut. :mrgreen:

Earthquake!

Today at 1:43 pm an earthquake happened in the middle of one of my physics lessons. The students didn’t quite know what to make of the shaking and vibration they felt and asked me what had just happened. I said I thought it felt like an earthquake. I was able to look it up during the break between the 7th and 8th period. It turned out to be the biggest earthquake in the area for two and a half years: 4.4 on the Richter scale. The epicentre was about 15 km from my school.

Everyone talked about the earthquake for the rest of the day. One of my colleagues said it was the first earthquake he’d ever experienced, which quite surprised me because I have only been living here for the past 14 years and have felt at least three quakes I’ve posted about plus one I mentioned and another I clearly remember because someone told me they had dreamed the books in their shelf had danced – only to learn that it had not been a dream.

Two stories about missed earthquakes: I spent five weeks at a highschool in Hesperia, CA in 1992 and had wondered about earthquakes before going. Of course, there was an earthquake in Hesperia during those five weeks – it happened in the few days we spent in San Francisco, so we didn’t feel it. And on the day after we returned to Hesperia, there was one in San Francisco.

Earthquakes are rare occurences in Northern Germany, so I never experienced one while growing up. One of the very few quakes there occured on October 20, 2004 only about 10 km from my parents’ house. Of course, they happened to be visiting us on that day, so they missed it as well…