Dorfdisco

On Saturday we attended a short live concert of a queer-lesbian country-punk band in the next village. The venue was an old GDR restaurant that has been lovingly conserved by a artist Frank Suplie. He’s inviting every once in a while for an evening of dance music and drinks. Its just lovely and cool to meet so many diverse people from the village and beyond.

Friends

On Saturday we finally had good old friends over for lunch. Due to the illness of my wife we weren’t able to invite friends over to us for about 5 years now. But since her conditions are slightly improving we finally able to have people over and enjoyed a wonderful reunion with a couple from France/Turkey and her lovely kids. This was long needed 🙂

DIY

This week we had to take some blood samples for a lab test. Living on the rural countryside it’s quite a trip to the next town for a doctor. Also… you’d have to wait in a crowded room for a while. Not really something a patient with severe ME/CFS condition can do. While we have support from a care-taking company, their staff doesn’t have the proper training to take blood samples.

So eventually I do this kind of stuff on my own. Its not rocket surgery and just takes proper instructions (learned it from several ER nurses) and a bit practice.

Oak Blossoms

Ever wondered what oak blossoms look like? I did. As I couldn’t remember to have knowingly seen oaks blossom. This year I was lucky to see this period of the oak vegetation period and took a picture (slightly out of focus though). The blossoms are rather unspectacular brown feathered strings hanging down under the edge leaves.

Movie/TV

After finishing “Doppelhaushälfte” I moved on to finally watching “Killing Eve“. It’s brilliant. A few years old already, but still gold. Many episodes are produced by the brilliant Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I love the play between Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer in there.

Links

Some assorted bookmarks I collected over the last week:

go-meteologix – Go packages for accessing Meteologix/Kachelmann Wetter/WeatherUS data from Lord Neessen

Solar-Akku für Alle – Wie du einen 15 kWh Solar-Akku selber baust!

ARTE Doku über die Geschichte Chinas

Reunion

On Saturday we celebrated the reunion with the Ukrainian families we helped to find accommodation in our village last year when Putin started a war on Ukraine. They have all found new places across Europe meanwhile, some went back to the Ukraine even. It was great to see them again and have good conversations over dinner and drinks.

We’re still amazed that the help for those four families basically sparked a whole bunch of new relationships in the villages. Beside meeting new friends in those people from Ukraine we also made new friends locally that we hadn’t met before. Despite living their alongside each other for several years already.

Helping those families helped bonding as a common cause and we enjoy the new company very much. Of course its sad that it took a war to start this.

Woodwork

a few weeks back I cut, split and stacked my wood. Was rather proud of my round stacks and how well they stood stable. Of course I was too lazy or busy to set up some stabilization around the stacks. And then the sunday before last sunday we heard a rumbling noise. One of the stacks collapsed as I had put a metal firepit on top to protect the stack from rain.

So I had to remove all the loose layers (almost to the ground) and restack the whole thing again. Took about 3 hrs. This time it put some fence around the stack right away to not touch that wood again this years …

Appliance failure

looks like this week was the week of appliance failure. Our fridge/freezer combination in Berlin doesn’t work anymore. So I had to order a new one. This is, beside the oven, probably the most important device in the kitchen as we need it store food and freeze the meals I’m preparing for my wife during the week for the next week.

Finally tuesday the new device was delivered and installed. So good to have chilled drinks again 😉

In our house in the #Uckermark the water heater broke finally after the 14 years. The magic smoke escaped and it has to be replaced now.

I hope this was the last bit of equipment that suddenly stops working…

Sunglasses

few weeks ago I lost my beloved sunglasses in the Baumarkt. Fortunately I found the same model on Kleinanzeigen and picked it up on Sunday evening. They ware dirty but fortunately in very good condition otherwise. A thorough cleaning and the look like new. No scratches anywhere.

And as the weather finally feels like spring or even summer, I could have lunch on the balkony and put them to good use right away 😉

Doppelhaushälfte

Started watching “Doppelhaushälfte” in the ZDF Mediathek upon recommendation from @klappstulli. This is brilliant TV once again. The stories are super funny and intelligent and the cast is really outstanding. We love it.

As mentioned in the last post, we were preparing a party for the night to May 1st. We decided to have pea soup for main course as we were expecting around 40 people. I tried the soup a week before and decided that it was good. But now the dimensions were much bigger. We scaled up the recipe and figured that we didn’t have pots large enough in size and quantity. Although we already had quite large pots with 10 and 7 litres each. Anyway… it was more than enough food and we had a lot of leftovers.

We lit the fire and had a wonderful evening with many friends. Some of whom we haven’t seen in person since about 6 years.

Although it was May 1st, the night still had frost. But the next day was beautiful and sunny so we could have a “Frühschoppen” with the leftovers 😉

I took some of the leftover pea soup to Berlin to converse it in the freezer. But I noticed that in the last couple of days the fridge didn’t seem to get really cold inside. I put a thermometer inside to confirm it’s not properly workin 🙁 Didn’t got the temperature below 13 ºC in the fridge part.

I’m all for repairing stuff, but this fridge/freezer is old and ugly. I think it had its time and its about time to get it replaced with a new one. That’ll hopefully arrive on next Tuesday so I can finally store some fresh produce again.

Beach cleanup

On May 1st the village society has the tradition to clean up the beach of the local lake. That is a fun event were we rake the beach area and clean it from the debris and junk that have accumulated over winter. We even clean the several meters into the lake and remove branches that have been fallen or thrown into the lake and remove reed thats growing too much into the entry.

Beer & Burger

On Thursday our local beer & burger “Selbsthilfegruppe” had it’s regular gathering again at Hirsch & Eber in Prenzlauer Berg. It didn’t disappoint.

As always – great conversations and fun, good food and good beer. best burger crew ever 😉

3D Printing

I saw something useful on Printables that I had to try out. The magnetic clips to hold together curtains. My curtains also don’t properly close and would leave a gap in the middle. With these clips I can hold them together easily.

I have to adjust the magnets a bit. Currently I’m using rather strong neodym magnets which are a bit too strong. When opening and not holder the clip fast to the curtain, one side would just slip off before the magnets would release.

Most notable thing this week was probably the weather. Temperature went significantly above 10ºC during the day. On Friday it actually felt a lot like summer. Sun was shining, streets were buzzing with people and animals and a lot of trees finally decided to put out leaves.

Thursday morning was still very grey and rainy. I was driving through the area east of Berlin towards the border of Poland and the very low hanging cloud formed a homogeneous wall of grey. Was thinking that people suffering from depressions must probably have a really bad day this morning.

On Tuesday morning I met with an old friend in Westberlin. Always a bit of a trip and visit to the many different worlds of Berlin.

When I was still in school (and after the Berlin Wall came down obviously) we used to take the train to Berlin on the weekends to go to Kurfürstendamm. That was the posh and trendy shopping mile back in the days. You’d find the trending fashion stores and and “WOM – World of Music” at the famous Ku’damm.

It surprisingly survived and revived as a shopping distination. Of course shops have partially changed. But over all it’s still rather lively and trendy.

Sport

Got at least some running done on Tuesday. Was scheduled to have another run with a friend on Wednesday morning. That was cancelled last minute. So planned to go to the office gym with a colleague. But that didn’t happen either due to forgotten towel. Peer pressure didn’t really work out this week then.

But at least on sunday I managed to cross the local lake in our village for the first time this year. Water had 7ºC and it took about 18 Minutes back and forth. Unfortunately the GPS recording isn’t very accurate as I had to swim a lot of breast stroke. At this temperature I can’t keep up the freestyle all the way. Its much too exhausting. The actual distance is ~560m

Links

some bookmarks I put during the last week:

Fedimeister – a Fediverse client aimed at writers and journalists. Makes it easier to write longer posts (automatically split into multiple posts)

Coffee rabbit hole links:

• https://strivefortone.com/2020/09/19/low-pressure-turbo-shots-and-the-perfect-espresso/
• https://espressoaf.com/guides/profiling.html

Unterrichtsmaterialien zum Thema Informatik

I know I’m late again for my weekly review 🙄 but hey at least I’m not breaking my streak 😉

last week I still spent in the countryside due to kids holidays. But had to work from there. Which was certainly bearable. In general life in the countryside feels so much slower that the two weeks felt almost double as long as the same time in busy Berlin.

We managed to really get most of the work we had planned for the two weeks done. There is a tiny bit of wood stacking left, but thats OK for the next weekend.

The weather is really cold and wet this year. Its mid April and the temperatures during the day are still in the single digits. At least the nights don’t seem to be freezing anymore and we can consider leaving the tomatoes and chilly seedlings outside in the greenhouse.

Working

was working remotely this week from my trusty container. Spend way too much time debugging the network again. The container got a LAN cable thats plugged into a FritzBox Wifi Hotspot to provide WiFi in the container. While a windows laptop, my phone and iPad just happily use the WiFi, my laptop complaints a lot about. Wouldn’t want to connect, connection very flaky, stopped connecting at all. I ended up pulling out a LAN network adapter for my Laptop using the LAN cable directly. So annoying….

Sport

I considered the woodwork as sport as well 😉 Apart from that I only did the regular swimming. This week we took two turns – on Sunday and on Monday as this were holidays and most of the people in our swimming group were still around in the area.

There seems to be a little gear competition going on. I might have started it by having a hand paddles and a buoy for swimming. Now another guys got a buoy and hand paddles and a second guys said her ordered an buoy belt …

Hipstamatic

Boerge recently rediscovered his love for Hipstamatic. This was probably one of the first apps I had on my first iPhone and I’m using it ever since. I love the design of the app and the concept of combining films and lenses etc.

They recently did a bit of an overhaul of their app and introduced a new incarnation of their social network around Hipstamatic shots. Apparently the profiles can be seen from the web now and you can follow people on their social network. I’m not entirely (or actually at all) convinced this will get enough momentum to sustain … but hey, lets give it a try: https://hipstamatic.app/@maxheadroom

BeReal

I’ve also started to participate into the daily BeReal rounds again. Had the account for a while already, but didn’t got around using it as I didn’t (don’t ) like this forced time period of posting thingy. I get the idea, but find it bit of impractical for me.

But apparently people in friend sphere still sticking with it. So giving it another try.

Random pictures from the week

Vacation

since it’s school vacation in Berlin I took time off as well and we moved to our house in the #uckermark.

There was a lot of woodworking waiting for me. Last spring there was a big storm taking down many trees in the surrounding forests. So we’ve got a few cubic meters of wood for a very good price. But it has to be cut down and split to dry properly.

Spend all Monday cutting down the big pile of logs with my trusty chainsaw.

On Tuesday we got a hydraulic splitter from a friend. But somehow we managed to break it and blew one of the hydraulic hoses.

Turns out it’s not entirely trivial to replace such a hose. Apparently the fittings are not really standardised and you can’t just by them in a normal DIY shop. You have to find a specialised shop to custom make the hose with the proper fittings.

The first problem but was to get the hose off the splitter. Of course I first had to buy a proper wrench that size. From a agriculture hardware shop in the nearest town I’ve got the address of the closest hydraulic service company.

Living in the countryside this means a lot of driving and time. Had to go to the nearest city for the proper wrench and then to a smaller village about 50km from our place to have the new hose made. All in all about 4hrs and 150km later the machine was working again.

Wednesday to Saturday we spent parts of the day with splitting and stacking that wood.

This will last for a few years …

Stabat Mater

On Sunday we attended one of two sessions of “Worte, die die Welt bewegen“ – a choir concert in the “Maria Magdalenen Kirche” in Templin. This was a joint venture of the local choir, the “Filmorchester Babelsberg”, “Preußisches Kammerorchester” and several solo artists.

Quite an impressive concert

Sport

Of course we started the new week (counting Sunday as the start of the new week in this context) with swimming in the lake.