The Great Beer Quest of 2012 was a smashing success! Just look at these four beauties! Last night at 11PM, I met Oz, Derek and Dan in Hillsborough, they piled into the Beast and we roared over to W/S to Foothills Brewery. We hung out at the release party for the Sexual Chocolate Stout and [...]

Auf Deutsch … 2011 was a rough year. I’m trying to come up with some good stuff that happened this year, and it’s not easy. One personal highlight was participating in the Doughman race with the 11-foot-8 team. We raised $340 and came in 8th place (out of 75 teams). Besides the race, I ran [...]

Today we loaded our horses into our new trailer and went horseback riding at Cedarrock Park near Burlington. Saturday, I spent several hours fixing the electrical on the trailer. The wires in the hookup were connected in weird places, one of the brakes wasn’t working, and one of the taillights was connected in reverse. The [...]

Today we drove to Roxboro and bought this horse trailer. Finally we’re properly mobile with the horses and can take them places. There are a number of parks in the area that have horse trails. Also some of the stables around here have trails that are open to the public for a small fee. We’re [...]

Partytime! Tapping a keg of Foothills Sexual Chocolate Stout and grilling goat sausages down by the pond. Good fun! Dan poured the first pint on 11/11/11 at 11:11 AM EST. Funny: that keg was filled at Foothills Brewery on 1/10/11.                               [...]

Nothing says “summer is here” more than a couple of muggy mid-90 days over Memorial Day weekend, building a tree house and catching fish in the pond. Last weekend, I completed our treehouse. Well, it’s not so much a “house” as a platform in the tree – about 15 feet (5m) above the ground. It [...]

Yes … I am selling the Mercedes. It’s a great car. I really enjoy it, but we can’t afford 3 cars any more. The untimely demise of that POS Ford truck tore a big hole in our budget, and so the Mercedes has to go. Here is the listing: This is an original E-series Mercedes [...]

The pair of wild Canada Geese in our back yard had 4 goslings last week. Today, on Easter Sunday, I got close enough for some pictures and some video.

[DEUTSCH weiter unten ... ] Saturday, we took Wally and Cleo out on a road-trip for the first time. We borrowed the truck and trailer from friends of ours. We wanted to check out the truck’s towing prowess as we were planning to buy it. We had done a test-run the previous weekend and loaded [...]

This weekend was supermoon weekend and the weather was beautifully warm and clear here in NC. We stayed up late with the kids and the horses playing in the moonlight. Click on the photo above – it links to a gallery of some of my recent moon-lit night photos (including the shots from this weekend).

Yeah – another one of those weeks were “challenging” was just not good enough. At work we have to re-build our main file server and so we’re shuffling Terabytes of data around the networks, checking file permissions, backing up data, bla bla bla … Julia had a viola recital today with all the other students [...]

Today, 2/27, on my way home from work (!) I saw the odometer roll over to 277777 miles (=447038.748 kilometers) on my 1991 Mercedes 300D. Cool number – especially on today’s date :) So that’s now 33,000 miles on my homebrew  biodiesel in the last 3 years, and she’s going strong.

Yes, horses like to eat hay, but my god – these guys EAT HAY! Lots of it! Each of our horses can eat several hundred pounds of hay a week. We have had a pretty cold winter, so far, and so they eat even more than they usually would because when it’s cold their metabolism [...]

Deha – our 18-year-old siamese on caturday.

Photo by Zack Wheeler Lunch today at Dain’s Place on 9th St. in Durham. I had a “Defibrilator” – a 1/2 pund burger with bacon, sweet chili, cheddar cheese, cole slaw … and topped with a hot dog … except I had mine with goat sausage. :)

This morning we woke up to 3 inches of snow, after a fairly warm Christmas eve. The snow is wet and sticky. Wally and Cleo kept their faces mostly in their favorite hayroll. But in the morning, for a while Cleo was prancing around, bucking and rearing and shaking her head at the snow.

Once again, the longest night of the year is upon us. On Dec 21, daylight lasted only 9 hours 42 Minutes here in NC, 8 hours 22 Min in Freiburg, Germany, 4 hours 7 Min in Reykjavik, Iceland. In the old days, when people did not really understand how our solar system works, they worried [...]

Today, we had our first snow this winter. The weather report called for some flurries tonight, but instead we had about a 1/2 inch of snow this afternoon.  I went out around 5:00 to see if I could get to the grocery store, but even Guess Rd. was totally covered, and so I turned around. [...]

If you have read my posts over the summer, you’ll know that we pretty much spent our summer vacation building a 1200 foot (400 M) pasture fence. Well, Google Earth noticed too, and took some great pictures of our work – from space! Google hat vor Kurzem die Satelitenphotos von unserer Gegend erneuert und mir [...]

Sunday afternoon we went Trick-or-treating in the neighborhood with some friends and with Waldo and Cleo.The horses behaved themselves as much as can be expected. The cars and dogs did not bother them much, but Cleo did not like the stop signs. After 1 1/2 hours it started getting dark and and they had had [...]