Category Archives: Personal

Tomatoestomatoestomatoes

Of all the plants we sowed in our garden this spring, the tomatoes and peppers were the only successful plants – probably because we grow them in pots instead of the soil. Almost everything else has been eaten by slugs. Too bad they don’t seem to like dandelions, we have way too many of them.

   

Anyways, the tomatoes for which André has lovingly cared since March are starting to yield fruit. I already froze some “regular” tomatoes – most of those are going to be used for cooking – and today I picked the first bowl of cherry tomatoes (about 1.2 kg/2.5 lbs).

These are really very tasty! We’re having pasta casserole with cherry tomatoes, broccoli and ham tonight: Nudelauflauf mit Schinken und Brokkoli. (I substituted some of the brokkoli with tomatoes, since we have so many.)

As usual, click the photos for bigger versions.

Another earthquake

This morning around five we woke up because the bed was shaking. Yep, it was another earthquake. We were even able to feel aftershocks, I think. It was a 4.0 on the Richter scale, and the epicentre was about 50 km north of here, close to Andernach (where we lived until last summer). Here’s the data and a map (time shown in UTC, so add two hours for daylight savings time in Germany).
I also found out that a second earthquake happened half an hour later, but we didn’t wake up again, probably because it only was a 2.0 with nearly the same epicentre.

The local newspaper, the Rhein-Zeitung, says the first earthquake has been the strongest earthquake in 15 years (article in German).

Woo-hoo!

Today was the last day of school. The last month was very hectic because it included not only the usual end-of-the-school-year tests, grades and conferences, but also a week-long school trip to Northern Germany with four teachers (including yours truly) and almost sixty students, and a project week.

A colleague and I offered hiking on the Rheinsteig and managed to get rained on only two of the three days we did actually hike, but it was still fun, and the pupils enjoyed themselves as well. The fourth morning was spent preparing the presentation at school, in the afternoon the usual end-of-year conferences were held which lasted till 9:30 pm this year. On the fifth day we had an open day so parents and other visitors could see the results of the project week.

Exhausted from these two weeks, we somehow managed to have a few days of “normal” lessons this week before the school reports (report cards) were handed out today.

Now I’m looking forward to six weeks without school (well, almost) before the new school year starts on August 27th. If only the weather would be summer-like here in Germany…

We have internet again!

And a phone connection, too, actually, but our phone got hit by the lightning as well. I ordered a new phone today. Amazingly, our little village of less than 100 houses has an electronics shop, and they said the phone will be here by this time tomorrow.

Other parts of our village have been out of phone service for the past two weeks as well, and it seems that an underground phone cable was hit, so it’s likely that they will have to wait even longer to be connected again because it seems that they have to dig up the cable to find the problem. The telecom guy said that we were the first household in our village that he was able to help right away. Phew!

Kaboom.

Apparently our phone line was struck by lightning yesterday. The ISDN-DSL splitter, NTBA, DSL modem, router and possibly the phone are fried. (Hard to find out about the phone for sure if you haven’t got a working splitter and NTBA any more.)

Fortunately, the powerline was not struck, or the FI circuit breaker worked fast enough, because everything else seems to be fine.

Without a working phone or internet connection it’s really hard to get any work done, to reach other people or be reached by them. I do have a mobile phone, but rarely use it and don’t give out the number to people. And my only internet access at the moment is at work.