Category Archives: Umzu

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…

Winter Wonderland

It’s been snowing quite a bit here during the last week or two, and by now we have about half a metre (19 inches) of snow, I think. I took some photos on Saturday morning, when there was much less snow than now.

Winter landscape around my village on December 18, 2010

This was taken during a walk around our village on Saturday morning, before it started snowing non-stop for the rest of the weekend.

I think this is the most snow we’ve had where I live since the winter of 1979, when the snow was higher than I was tall. Of course, I was a bit younger then…

Snake!

This afternoon our neighbour rang the doorbell and asked me to help him catch a snake in his garden. Yes, you read that right. He’d seen his cat outside of his window obviously prowling something and then taking a sudden leap because something lunged at him. He managed to put a bucket on top of the snake upside down and now wanted me to help to put it into an upright bucket with a lid. The snake was very aggressive and hissed like mad, but we managed to put it into the second bucket. Here it is:

It didn’t look like a native snake and googling for snake images didn’t help at all. We didn’t want to take it into the forest and release it in case it was non-native, but it was hard to identify. Finally I called a friend who teaches biology and knows a lot about snakes; he even keeps one as a pet. I showed him the photos I took, and he said it was a grass snake (called Ringelnatter in German). They usually have two distinctive yellow spots behind their head, which this snake was missing, but my expert explained that these spots faded with age.

Compare the head with this photo.

He said our specimen was an older one and quite a big one to boot. He recommended releasing it at the edge of the forst, preferably somewhere where it can catch some sun tomorrow. Of course we obliged. The snake pretended to be dead for a little bit, but quickly recovered and slid away into the darkness…

Frohe Ostern!

We had some visitors over the long weekend and visited the butterfly garden in Sayn and then went to see the birds of prey at Burg Maus yesterday.

Links are only available in German, sorry:

André took some awesome photos, the best of which you can see on his Flickr page. Here’s a little preview: