Category Archives: Personal

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.

Lego

My sister and I played with Lego a lot when we were kids. We had a small playroom, and my dad built a table for our Lego train and roads etc. that took up one whole end of the room.

Brickfactory has got scans of all (?) the Lego sets and the building instructions, starting about 1958. Link via MetaFilter, of course.

I found some of the sets my sister and I had: my favourite house (another photo), because it has hinges in the middle. That way, it was one whole house or two halves in which you could play. We also owned a motor, a police boat (the set is from the seventies, back when the minifigs didn’t have movable arms and legs yet!), a petrol station, a doctor’s car and quite a few sets from the Fabuland series.

We often played with this train, complete with transformator and points (ours were manual though).

We also inherited a lot of bricks from my father. Of course I don’t know the complete sets because his parts came in one big box, but I’m sure he had the letters and numbers and probably some of these houses – left, middle, right – because I remember the plates used for the roofs and the windows and doors. These sets apparently came out in 1958, when my dad was ten years old. It looks like the bricks back then only came in white, red or clear.

Ah, those were fun times… :-)

(News) Flash

You should really keep paying attention to the speed limit while pondering why the heck someone flashes their brights at you even though your headlights can’t possibly be broken because you just had the car checked at the garage the previous day.

It turns out that you remember the other reason why some drivers flash their brights at you in Germany a few seconds later when a blinding red flash indicates that you have just been photographed by the police: The driver was trying to tell you that there’s a speed trap around the corner.

This is what happens if you’re taking the scenic route through the Rhine valley instead of using the autobahn for your way home from work as usual. At least I was only going a little bit over the speed limit; we shall see if I get a ticket or not.

(Related: Why did you flash your brights at me tonight?, Headlight Vocabulary.)