Moment of tranquility for week ending New Year’s Eve, 2010

This is the waterfall on my employer’s campus. The ice in high def is surprisingly beautiful, particularly for an “everyday” object.

Go forth and own the peace.

More winter birds…

A couple more clips of the birds I shot (with a camcorder!) the day after Christmas. As you can see below, not all creatures are well-equipped to walk on ice.

A couple of clips showing birds that aren’t of the yellow-breasted variety.

Grizzly Prickril…

I’ve been spending a lot of quality times in the woods around Walldorf. Not exactly the stomping grounds of Grizzly Adams (are you old enough to remember him), but as close to roughing it as I’ll be getting (voluntarily) in the near future. It snowed like crazy all Christmas Eve and last night too. However, there’s been virtually no wind so the snow is piling up deep on everything, even the thinnest of tree branches. The woods keep getting more beautifuller. The sun breaking through on these trees was spectacular. I strolled close to the pond and took some nice video. There is only a small unfrozen pool next to the bank that is now home to all the waterfowl.

Folks have put out bird feeders near this area. I spent quite a bit of time filming the hundreds of birds getting their fill. Getting my camcorder to focus on these little buggers was much harder than I had assumed. I’m happy with the results though.

More to come soon.

Room for dessert?

In what amounts to a passing of the generational baton, B made her mother’s walnut cake. It was excellent. There was also an assortment of cookies, some of which were left for Santa. I’m not sure how he got them down, but I’m glad he found the strength to power through it.By the way, B found this cookie jar here in Walldorf for about 3 Euros. Cute little chap, no?

Christmas Dinner…

It was just us this year, but B still managed to pull together a top notch Christmas dinner (or Christmas Even dinner to be more precise). As usual, we got a little bit of help from the Bolz butcher shop in Kirchheim and, as usual, the duck and ham were superb.Their meatloaf-like stuffing also deserved high praise. B made “salada da sogra” and some wicked traditional stuffing with sausage. Assuming I really only need 2,000 calories or so per day and calculating my caloric intake over the weekend, it looks like I’ll have to run from here to Warsaw to avoid gaining weight. If it weren’t for all this snow, I’d be on the road right now…

New post to inner circle…

I’m finally getting around to posting some pictures of the kids to the inner circle blog. If you’re a member, click there to see that and probably some Christmas pictures soon.

Winter wonderland…

It was softly snowing this morning (and has all day) so I wanted to go into the Walldorf woods to shoot some pictures and video. I had planned to head out with Robert at about 10:00 when I discovered that B had failed to turn the camcorder off when she filmed Robert’s play on Wednesday. That meant no battery power and a full hard disk.

After doing some charging and clean up on the hard drive, Robert and I made it out the the woods around 14:00. It was absolutely gorgeous. I had seen several deer while jogging a week or so earlier, so Robert was excited to see some. I tried to manage his expectations down, but, believe it or not, we hadn’t been there 5 minutes when about 5 dear crossed the trail in front of us about 50 yards away. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to the video camera in time.

Anyway, I took some nice video, which compensates for the lack of picture taking.

Cleansing the snow-laden palate: Moment of tranquility for the week ending on Christmas Eve!

As I watch snow fall outside, thought I’d give folks out there and myself an attractive alternative.

Heidelberg snowy castle reloaded…

A few more shots of the Heidelberg castle in a blanket of white. The last couple of pictures are vertical panoramas. Here’s the snow-blind lion on video.

Snow at the castle…

Soon after we rolled out of bed this morning, it started to snow. I decided to head into Heidelberg to take some pictures and film a bit from up on high at the castle. By the time I got there, the snow was very fine so made the city looked foggy, but still beautiful. This lion gives new meaning to the term “snow blind”. After a while the snow stopped entirely. This is my favorite shot of the day. With a little cropping (or a microscope), you can see folks on the Haupstrasse and the skating rink (where we were yesterday).If you haven’t been to the castle in the snow, I recommend it.This clip looks like a still shot, but if you load it in Youtube you’ll see the merry Weihnachtsmarkt crown winding their way up and down the Hauptstrasse.

A video is worth a thousand pictures…

Well, not a thousand. But here are a few clips I took at Heidelberg’s Christmas market on Saturday. Directly below is the Kornmarkt.

Here’s the area around the skating rink. The kids were having a blast in the snow.

And here’s the eats. Gotta love Weihnachtsmarkt food…

Kornmarkt Madonna…

I’ve always loved the view of the madonna statue in the Kornmarkt with the castle behind. It’s particularly beautiful when decorated with a bit of snow and with the Christmas market in full swing around it. Enough said.

Back to H-berg…

My mission on Saturday was to wrangle the kids and keep them distracted far from home while B made ready the compound for her birthday party (more on that in future posts). The kids’ mission was to get their picture took (as we say in Oklahoma) with Santa. We killed two turtle doves with one stone (that metaphor is adapt particularly well to Christmas, no?) by going to Heidelberg’s Weihnactsmarkt.The sun was out, but low on the horizon and disappeared behind the castle mountains relatively early. The weather was nice, but cold! It looked as though the Altstadt had been flocked, which made for nice shots in my opinion. The muscle man in the Marktplatz was carrying a hefty load of snow on his shoulders.Santa was positively snowed under.We parked near the Kornmarkt and didn’t make it past the Marktplatz. We instead headed to the ice rink and the girls gave it a whirl, Sophia with the aid of a helper penguin. Emily, as usual, was cruising around unassisted in a matter of minutes.