This Sunday morning was chilly at 25F (-4C). We really hope this was the last frost for the season! With temperatures now regularly reaching the 60s and 70s, it does feel like spring around here. But last night, we put the blankets on the horses one more time and filled the bucket with warm water. Once again, the emu stood at the frozen water bucket, pecking at the ice, trying to drink. It’s still very confusing to them!

DEUTSCH
Heute hatten wir noch einmal eien richtig kalten Sonntagmorgen, mit minus 4 Grad. Letzte Woche hatten wir schon Temperaturen bis 25C und der Frühling hat richtig begonnen. Aber gestern Abend mußten wir noch mal die Pferdedecken rausholen und dann den Wassertrog nch Mal mit warmen Wasser auffüllen. Am Morgen stand dann der Emu wieder am Wassertrog und konnten nicht verstehen warum das Wasser schon wieder “kaputt” ist und er nichts in den Schnabel kriegt!

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Fascinating video footage of our sun. On July 19, 2012, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory’s AIA instrument captured these images of an eruption on the sun’s surface over the course of 22 hours.

Faszinierende Aufnahmen einer Sonneneruption vom 19. July 2012. Über 22 Stunden hat NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory’s AIA instrument diese Aufnahmen im Ultravioletbereich des Lichtspektrums gemacht.

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What a pretty spring day! The daffodils are blooming and it’s 82°F/28°C and sunny. Only 10 days after we had a 20°F/-7°C morning and less than 3 weeks after the 2015 Snowpocalypse, it’s finally springtime! I’ll take it!

Und auf einmal war Frühling! die Narzissen blühen und es ist 28°C warm und sonnig. Noch vor 10 Tagen war es am Morgen minus 7°C kalt, und weniger als 3 Wochen sind seit der Schneepokalypse 2015 verstrichen. Ich beklag mich bestimmt nicht!

Today is Pi-day here in the US: with the month/day/year format today’s date looks like this: 3/14/15

Heute is Pi-Tag in the USA, denn mit dem komischem Datumsformat hier – Monat/Tag/Jahr – sieht das Datum heute aus wie die Kreiszahl Pi: 3/14/15

Interesting discussion of the history of Pi on Reddit.

Pi on Wikipedia

Die Kreiszahl Pi auf Wikipedia

D Chraiszahl uf Alemannisch

More Pi below

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Thursday morning we woke up to 6 inches (15cm) of snow. Around here, that pretty much shuts down everything. Power went out at around 4AM and water stopped shortly after. No school or work, of course. We were stuck at home all day, keeping the house warm with a fire in the fire place and melting snow on the gas grill so we had some water. In the evening our neighbors came over for dinner and we sat around the fireplace all evening. We kept the fireplace so hot that the iron grate melted, but we kept the living room at over 60°F. Friday morning at 5:00 the power came back on, and Friday at noon I went in to work for a few hours.

The wet snow stuck to the trees and broke many branches and even knocked down some trees.

The horses were not real happy about the snow. Neither were the emus.

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With all the crazy weather last week, I almost forgot that Wednesday night, the Mercedes passed 310,686 miles, which is equal to 500,000 KM. Nice milestone for this 24-yar-old car.

Whoah! This weather is crazy! Look at the graph below (from Wunderground) and you can see how temperatures here went from a low of 5°F on Friday morning at 7AM to a high of 57°F on Sunday 1PM. That’s a 52 degree temperature change in 54 hours!

DEUTSCH: So ein verrücktes Wetter! And dem Diagramm oben kann man sehen wie the Temperaturen hier vom Tiefststand von minus 15°C am Freitag Morgen um 7Uhr auf plus 15°C am Sonntag Mittag um 13Uhr angestiegen sind. Das sin 30 Grad Unterschied in 54 Stunden!

Our weather station showed an outside temperature of 5.6°F /14.7°C this morning right before I went outside to feed the animals.

Snow, snow, snow … we have had several snow/ice storms over the last couple of days. School has been out for 2 days and the weather forecast is predicting an arctic chill down to 0F for the next couple of days. That does not seem to bother Sassy and Snoopy, though. This is their first snow and they seem to think it’s cool!

DEUTSCH: So viel Schnee! In den letzten Tagen hatten wir mehrmals Schnee und Eis. Die Kinder haben schon seit zwei Tagen Schnee-frei von der Schule. Und für die nächsten zwei Tage is richtig arktische Kälte in der Vorhersage – bis zu minus 18°C! Unsere Ziegen Sassy und Snoopy scheint das Wetter nicht zu beeindrucken. Das ist das erste Mal daß sie Schnee erleben und das schein ihnen Spaß zu machen!

Snoopy looking majestic!

More photos below …

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Timelapse of the sun / Zeitrafferaufname der Sonne

Over the last few months, my 1991 300D ran pretty badly. At first, I was able to get the engine’s power back to acceptable levels by fixing various leaks in the vacuum system, especially in the lines that control the turbo waste-gate. Without the turbo, I could start at the bottom of a small hill going 60 and I’d be down to 45 at the top of the hill.

Then, one morning mid January, the car would not start at all. I had it towed to A Better Wrench in Chapel Hill (US Rider is a great road-side assistance service). They replaced the glow plugs and the car started great, again. However, right after that repair, the engine power was really bad, again. I tinkered with the car for a few days, but I could not find any more obvious vacuum leaks. So I took her back to the shop. Max, the owner, fixed all the vacuum leaks and now you can really feel a turbo kick in again! AND he figured out why the transmission shifts so early into higher gears, which was also not helping the performance of the car. He also showed me how to check whether the wast gate actuator works, and how to adjust the transmission linkage to change the how early the transmission shifts up.

So, after two trips to the shop, and $560 in repairs, the old Mercedes starts and runs very nicely again. Thanks Max! Great job.

During the month of January, I took some time of from my beloved beer and explored a variety of flavors of tea. The best place for buying tea around here is A Southern Season – a swanky gourmet food store in Chapel Hill. They sell 2oz and 4oz bags of their loose-leaf tea blends and you can’t beat that for freshness and flavor. Here are some of the flavors I explored:

Paris Tea: A delicate, vanilla flavored black tea with a touch of bergamot and blackcurrant

Green Dragon Tea – green tea with lemon peel, marigold petals, golden chrysanthemums, passion fruit and lemon flavors

Ginger Lemongrass Tisane – lemongrass, licorice, ginger root, peppermint, lemon peels, black pepper

Evening Chai – Cinnamon chips, cloves, black and red pepper, lemongrass, green cardamon, ashwagantha, ginger root, cinnamon  and clove flavors

Organic Orange Ginger Tulsi – Tulsi herbs (Holy Basil), candied pineapple, candied papaya, apple bits, carrot bits, rose hip petals, sallow thorn berries, orange peels, flavoring, multivitamins

I also really enjoy the Republic of Tea flavors Jasmine Jazz and Moroccan Mint Green Tea.

The various green tea flavors are really my favorite – lightly sweetened with agave sirup I can drink them all day long. The Paris Tea has pretty much replaced my third cup of coffee in the morning. In the evening, the lemongrass tisane or the tulsi tea really wrap up a day quite nicely.

This afternoon we went to see the famous viol player Jordi Savall play his 300-year-old, 7-string bass viol at Durham’s Baldwin Auditorium.

Savall is the world’s most accomplished viol player of our age. Before him, these instruments and their music had been all but forgotten. Since 1965, when Savall discovered the viola da gamba, he has been at he center of the revival of the viol family of instruments.

These instruments were popular in the Renaissance and Baroque eras and they are all played upright, like a cello or a bass. They are quite different from the more popular violin family of instruments: they are fretted with movable frets and they have 6 or 7 strings; their backs are flat, not curved and their shoulders sloped, not square and they have c-holes, not f-holes like the violin.

Most importantly, the viol is usually tuned like a Baroque lute. However, during the English and Celtic second half of the concert, Savall actually re-tuned his instrument to the lyra-viol tuning and to the bagpipe tuning appropriate to that style of music.

See below a video of Savall playing the bass viol (solo and with his ensemble)and discussing music and musicianship (in French).

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I am happy to report that for the fifth year running, I successfully completed the Great Beer Quest and acquired my allotment of the Special Release bottles of Sexual Chocolate Stout. Once again, we froze our butts off in 20-degree temperatures camping out on the sidewalk in front of Foothills brewery in Winston Salem, NC.

Around 10:30 I picked up Dan and Derek and we drove to W/S. We arrived at the brewery around 11:30 to join the tail end of the release party (and 10-year anniversary party) and had our first glass of this year’s Sexual Chocolate Stout. And our second. And our third …

At 2:00, we set up camp outside and settled in for the short, chilly night, huddled around the little propane heater I borrowed from my neighbor. I was tired and actually slept for several hours. I woke up around 5:00 and those three hours until they opened the bar were long and cold. Once we got in, we got a breakfast beer and a sausage biscuit (that’s a southern thing) but this year they charged $2 for the sausage biscuit! (last year they were on the house). At 10:00 AM we each got our 6 bombers and then we pretty much just left and drove home.

Interesting publication by the Population Reference Bureau. According to their estimates 6.5 percent of all humans who lived in the last 50,000 years were alive in 2011!

Wie viele Menschen haben jemals gelebt? Die Wissenschaftler des Population Reference Bureau schätzen daß in den letzten 50 Tausend Jahren 108 Milliarden Menschen gelebt haben. Das bedeutet daß im Jahr 2011 ungefähr 6.5 Prozent aller Menschen jemals am Leben waren. Unglaublich!

How Many People Have Ever Lived On Earth? 108 Billion

Year	Population	Births per 1,000	Births Between Benchmarks
50,000 B.C.	2	–	–
8000 B.C.	5,000,000	80	1,137,789,769
1 A.D.	300,000,000	80	46,025,332,354
1200	450,000,000	60	26,591,343,000
1650	500,000,000	60	12,782,002,453
1750	795,000,000	50	3,171,931,513
1850	1,265,000,000	40	4,046,240,009
1900	1,656,000,000	40	2,900,237,856
1950	2,516,000,000	31-38	3,390,198,215
1995	5,760,000,000	31	5,427,305,000
2011	6,987,000,000	23	2,130,327,622

 

NUMBER WHO HAVE EVER BEEN BORN	107,602,707,791
World population in mid-2011	6,987,000,000
Percent of those ever born who are living in 2011	6.5

Source: Population Reference Bureau estimates.

A new year and another 11foot8 boxtruck canopener:

This one is a “classic canopener” – the crash beam just peels back the roof of the box and drops it behind the truck.

This is truck crash # 82 since April 2008. All the videos are posted on my website 11foot8.com

2014 brought us many changes: new jobs, new critters and a new school for Jacob. 2014 also was the year when both our kids officially grew over our heads. Jacob is now taller than I am, and Julia is taller than Laura.

Right at the beginning of the year, Henry the cat moved in with us. He was an indoor cat all his life and the great outdoors was a bit daunting for him. However, recently he has started venturing out more. He seems to like hanging out on the deck, and sometimes he follows me out to the pasture and watches me feed the horses. Still, his favorite thing is sleeping on the couch. Henry is an Abyssinian cat and we got him from Laura’s brother Peter, who moved to Costa Rica.

In January, we also had quite a bit of bird-related drama. A dog killed most of our neighbor’s chicken and chased our emu Sidney out of the pasture. I had to drive around during a snowstorm looking for the bird, and for a while, a Sheriff’s deputy even tried to help. After several days we found the emu and managed to catch him and take him home in the trunk of the Mercedes. In February, during yet another snow storm, Sidney got out again, and we had to chase him down and catch him, again. Later that spring, we got another emu, Darwin, but then Alice got out and we did not manage to catch her, so we were down to two emus, again.

On March 28, we bought another horse – a 5-year-old Rocky Mountain mare by the name of R U Madison Saint. Our elderly gelding Wally has ligament problems, and we can’t ride him much any more, so Laura got herself a healthy, young mare, whom she can train and push to do more intense stuff, like hunter paces and endurance rides. In the nine months Madison has been with us now, Laura has turned her from a good, but “green” horse into an excellent, well-trained trail horse. She trailers easily, she is confident and relaxed on the trail, and she is now fit enough to keep up with our older mare Cleo, who is a real speed demon on the trail.

Well, and then there are the goats. In August, we bought two goats, Sassy – a Kiko mix (the brown one) – and Snoopy – a Boer mix (the black and white one). Snoopy was a wedding present to our neighbors, who got married August 30th. Our neighbor Nick and I built an enclosure out of an old horse shelter on their property, and we keep both goats there.

The two goats are quite a dynamic duo and they love climbing on stuff and Snoopy especially loves to jump over, onto and off of anything. They are quite bonded to me and when I am out, working around the house or the pasture, I often let them roam freely, so they can browse on whatever tasty plants they can find, like tree saplings (they love the pine saplings) or ferns or acorns or just some grass. And sometimes we go on walks in the woods or in the neighborhood.

So lots of excitement around the animals this year. But we had other excitement, too. Laura quit her job at Duke in June and spent a few months consulting and growing our own start-ups, 11foot8 and Heathenn Lamps into small, but profitable businesses.

Laura also took Julia on a tour of several universities this fall. They visited Duke, the University of North Carolina and American University. Julia liked American best and we really hope that she’ll get in and can study there. But of course, Duke or Carolina would be great, too. The college selection and application process is really pretty intense and complex. It was (and is) stressful, even though Julia has excellent grades and Laura was really able to guide her through this process. I can only imagine how hard it must be for some kids whose parents can’t help them with this, or have no interest. Even with help, this process is challenging.

During the summer, Julia also had a bit of a dry-run for the college experience. She spent 5 weeks at the Governor’s School, which was fun for her because she got to hang out and study together with smart kids from all over the state. And it gave her some experience with campus life, having a room-mate and living in a dormitory.

Jacob started High School this fall and after a week at his assigned school we got a call from DSA that he got accepted off of the wait list! So we pulled him out of Northern High and he had to do 2 days of placement tests and then he started classes at Durham School of the Arts. Besides DSA’s status as one of the best High Schools in the state, it is nice that Jacob can play the bass in a good orchestra program and it is really nice that classes start at 8:45 and not at 7:30, like at his assigned school.

On November 16, Jacob and I went on a little road trip to Washington to meet with an old friend of mine and his wife and daughter. They were visiting New York and Washington from Germany and I had not seen him in almost 10 years. Jacob is studying US history, and he had never seen the capital, so this was pretty interesting to him and he agreed to keep me company during the 9-hour round trip that day.

Me? Well, work has been super-busy, as we are building the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development. My boss of 13 years, Dr. Angold, is retiring and as of today, I officially work at the Autism Center under Dr. Dawson. That’s pretty exciting! I ran another Bull City Race Fest half marathon in the fall. That was fun. On Nov. 28, I had my traditional Black Friday party – albeit without a keg of the usual Sexual Chocolate Stout. Still, a good crowd showed up and fun was had :)

All fall we were quite social, going to Halloween parties, anniversary parties, baby showers, and hosting and attending several neighborhood bonfires.

However, my favorite social event and historic occasion of this Year of the Lord, 2014, took place in June and July.

All I can say is  W E L T M E I S T E R !!!

We hope you all had a great start for 2015! We gave the old year a nice send-off with a big bonfire.

We sat around the fire with the neighbors until well after midnight, grilling hot dogs and potatoes and drinking beers.

This year, I spent a lot of time listening to Ambrose Akinmusire’s album The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint. Gorgeous album. In this live performance the quintet plays some songs from that album, and some other songs. Relax. Enjoy.

Our driveway on a crisp, sunny evening in November.
Unsere Einfahrt an einem sonnigen Novemberabend.

Julia and Cleo getting ready to ride out.
Julia und Cleo bereiten sich auf einen Ausritt vor.

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