Remains

I really hate posters with messages that ain't obvious. And I can’t stand notes on lamp posts with messages I can’t read.
This one might have something to do with a party. The fragment looks like “Auf geht’s” which means something like “Let’s go”. “Let’s go to the party XY” for example.

But what if not?

What if the note said “Let’s go and wish your always moaning neighbour a good day”?
What if the message was “Let’s go to Goa, hang out on the beach and quit your stupid job that occupies you so many hours of your day?
What if someone wanted to say “Let’s undress, jump on one leg and bark like a dog”?

Bloody hell, I will never know because the paper was only a fragment. So I will ignore my neighbour as a did the last weeks, I will not quit my job but work overtime - and the barking-like-a-dog-thing? Well, maybe it’s better that the poster was unreadable.

Goleo

A cake with little figures on top. Little lions playing football. Probably it’s that Goleo lion - the mascot of the Fifa World Cup in Germany. I don’t like mascots in general therefore Goleo had no real chance to enter my heart. But if you see it without emotions Goleo is a lion wearing a T-Shirt without any trousers. Would YOU trust Ronaldo dribbling without shorts? You know what I mean?
Well the figures on the cake were lions WITH shorts. Fake lions? I’m a little bit unsure what to think.
The cake was a donation of a colleague because of his birthday. I made the pics with the camera of my cellphone and forgot to fetch my piece of cake. I guess even a half naked lion has a higher IQ than me.


Goleo Cake - 9AM


Goleo Cake - 10AM

Verve

One of the greatest things for me is to inspire people. It works very seldom but when it happens you can note the day in the column for good days.
Let’s say you invite two schoolgirls and their parents to an Indoor Climbing Hall. All of them have had nothing to do with climbing so far. You sit down with them at the foot of the wall and the Bearded Man and you show them the most important knots. The girls and the mother look slightly interested so far and the father looks bored. You know that the father doesn’t feel like spending money for such things.
The girls climb the beginners wall without problems, you shake their hands and you can see a little glow in their eyes. You lead them away from the newbie-wall to the high routes. They look at you with disbelieve.
“I’m supposed to go UP THERE?”
“Yes, little lady, if you want you can try. It’s high but it’s easy.”
And she dares. And she reaches the top. And she comes down and you shake her hand again.
“Look up there. You’ve been UP THERE. On your own.”
The other, smaller girl does the same. The glow in their eyes is now obvious.
The mother looks a little bit frighened when it’s her turn but you know that she is curious. She speeds up the wall like a spider.
More eye-glowing.
And what about the father? He stood in the back row until now. You give him your lap belt, for some reason he puts it on, you tie him to the rope and he climbs. A few moments later he is 10 metres above you but you can see the smile in his face. When back on the floor he wanders around and checks the degrees of difficulty of the other routes looking for the next appropriate one.
Finally you spend the whole afternoon climbing and chatting. The routes get more difficult each time. The girls seem to have forgotten that they usually are very fearful.

Conclusion:
All of them say that they can feel their underarms.
One of the girls wants climbing gear as a birthday present
The father asks about outdoor climbing in the summer
Mother smiles while walking back to the car
I have the feeling that the Bearded Man and I managed to create verve. Very good day.

Wood

I went Geocaching with K2. We hunted a night cache including a 2 hour walk in the dark forest. I really love the forest at night. All noises of nature sound much more intensive when it’s dark. We found the hidden treasure and I fetched a souvenir in the forest for my apartment. It has a wonderful scent of wood.
I counted the annual rings of the tree and found out that it was born in 1955. I noticed that the rings were much thinner in the last 10 years.
I’m curious on how I will see the annual ring for my personal year 2006 in some decades. Will I say “Well, 2006 was a very fat year”? Unfortunately one can count the annual rings of a tree not until it is cut down. If it is the same on human annual rings I do my life without that counting thing.

Flying Blinks

My colleague sn0wcat showed some jugglings with our red blinking balls. That balls are really a big thing. I made a very short video and I’m not able to keep it back from the world. You can download it [here] (7MB). You need the codecs for Xvid and MP3 to enjoy it.
I decided that I have to learn juggling, too. Sn0wcat provided some valuable tips and now I have to practise real hard. I’ll keep you posted.

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I guess the D-Day of “Them” has already begun. On Friday I saw three of them. Imagine this: Three on a single day! Two seemed to be a couple. If they reproduce themselves fast I don’t know how to stop an invasion.

Bathroom

Bathrooms are places of meditation. Really. They are even a little bit like Zen. Or like the Bauhaus dogma - “Form Follows Function”.
A bathroom is a place reduced to the absolute minimum. Usually you have naked walls only with tiles, no pictures, no little figures or furniture. In most cases you even keep your mouth shut while in the bathroom. That’s really special in our time when the whole world is in constant chatter.
Today I saw a very meditative bathroom. I liked the rolls of dedicated toilet paper - just like stones in a japanese stone garden. I haven’t seen any stone garden in real life but I imagine them similar to a Men’s bathroom.
Because I thought I was alone in there I dared to make some photos without fearing to be treated like a pervert. Well, I wasn’t alone. After my first pic with flashlight I heard very human noises from one booth. Shit! So now I’m the guy that is suspicious to shoot pics while peeing. Superb job, Kosmonaut - very well done. I left the bathroom immediately and have no idea whether my invisible buddy inside the booth was in a meditative mood or not.

Blinking Balls

My day was a blinking one.
For our booth at the European Congress of Radiology next week in Vienna my company ordered one thousand give-aways. Today we got them: several boxes with small rubber bouncing balls. Inside the balls is some electronic piece and as soon as you drop the ball a LED inside the ball starts to blink in red color for some seconds.
My colleague M74 and I had a great time to test the blinking feature. We used a dark corridor to throw the blinking balls at each other. Although they were flashing we were not able to catch the blinking balls in the darkness and it ended with a kind of mutual bombardement.
I really don’t know what happens when we give the balls to physicians or radiologists next week.

Gym-Sitting

My second time in the new Gym. All I saw were my two colleagues sitting around and talking junk. No sweat, no pain but only relaxed lounging. Is this really a Fitness Club? I guess so because I was not able to join them for some silly jokes. The trainer grabbed me and I had to perform stupid exercises. Life is cruel. The most strange thing was that Mr. ProjectLead and me got calls from New York from our colleague while in gym. It was nothing important but we felt like kings. No, not really. At least the two guys made some nice noises with the straws inside their glasses into my cell phone.

Telephone

One step back into stone age. Throwing away that ISDN rubbish. I paid for a ISDN line several years and what did I use of the features? Zero, nothing, null. Finally I managed to cancel ISDN and order a good old standard telephone line.
Unfortunately my ISDN telephone doesn’t work with that normal line so I had to get rid of the old phone, too. Today I bought a new one with loads of features that I probably will not use.
I already hear you asking what the advantage is of getting rid of non-used features and buying new non-used features. I really hate such questions.

Cinema

”Walk the Line” - a movie about Johnny Cash. It was nice but a little bit protracted. But that Johnny Cash guy seemed to be cooler than the Antarctic - enviable.
To be honest I enjoyed the empty cinema more. I like to keep sitting until the end of the credits and then to look around when the crowd is gone. For me it’s amazing how a room can be full with emotions and tension during the movie and a few moments later it’s nothing more than an empty room with a lot of chairs and a dark screen.



Today I saw “them” even in the bakery. Can you imagine that? I guess “they” are about to infiltrate our rolls and our bread. I have to be quick if I want to save the world.


Remark: For some reason my blog swallowed two postings. I was able to re-submit them but the original date of the posting is gone. Please imagine that the date of this posting is February, 18th.

Rainbow Food - Green

Why do meals most of the times look real boring? Nature is full of colors and the cooked stuff almost always looks like brown sauce mashed something. Let’s fight it!
In the next weeks I’ll try to cook Rainbow Food. One dish for each color of the rainbow.
Today I started with a soup made of peas. I’m not a good cook, actually I’m no cook at all but I managed to create a really green soup. Cool.
Let’s see how I come along with the more complicated colors like purple.



Remark: For some reason my blog swallowed two postings. I was able to re-submit them but the original date of the posting is gone. Please imagine that the date of this posting is February, 18th.

Can Stick

Yesterday I found a mysterious thing. A wooden stick with a soft drink can on one end. No idea what it was made for. And I have also no clue why it’s creator threw it away. But it looks used. This means that it’s owner did something with it. But what? Damn, sometimes my world is far more complex that I can bear. Occasionally I’m not able to think about something else for several hours but the sense of such strange items. Naturally I never found out anything.
Sometimes I really wish I won’t see that rubbish - it would help to keep my head clear.

Lamp

Tried to shoot a picture of a little sign on a lamp post. I looked up the lamp and realized that the cloudy winter sky had a few small blue spots. After long months of darkness and the color grey that blue color really cheered me up. Not enough blue to make a pair of jeans out of it, but at least something. I’m sure that when spring arrives that lamp post will know first.

Dividing

Finding prices of ex-common things for new separates lifes. Dividing CD’s. Moving money.
A not so nice evening although it’s good to get things sorted.


Checking old furniture invoices

6+

Climbing with the Bearded Man. After a break of 3 weeks and I felt a little bit rusty. To my great surprise I managed to climb a route with difficulty 6+ without falling into the rope a single time. 6+ is almost nothing for a real climber and I only did I top rope but facing my humble skills I was really amazed. I felt like a giant afterwards. Apropos giant: Without being 1.86m tall I’d have no chance to reach the next grip. It was frustrating to see the wee girl climb the same route like a little spider.
I tried to use the high spirits of the moment and attacked a more difficult 7- route. Well, my body produced litres of adrenaline because I fell into the rope many times. I liked even that. Too bad that I’m not able to shoot pics and climb simultaneously.


The green handles were my personal 6+ route

SAD-Bot

On Saturday I found a Graffity in a very small back road. For me it’s the perfect logo for this Blog. A sad robot. I’ll never know whether the artist was sad or not when he sprayed it or why the robot was created so sad. Maybe it is not supposed to be a robot because it has a heart and even a penis. For me it’s a kind of robot - for some reason with heart and penis - who cares?
I will use the SAD-Bot as a logo for this blog in the next days.

Hey robot, I’m the grandmaster of sadness and I guarantee you that there won’t be only sad days.

Without-Name-Sweets

I have no idea what the english name of that sweet is. A dome shaped marshmallow thing standing on a round bisquit and covered with chocolate. Not even the LEO translator seems to have an answer.
A colleague brought a whole case of those “Negerküsse” (literally translated: “Negro Kisses”) to the office and the day of our team was sweet. He also agreed to act as my foto model.
Trying to find names for uncommon things life confronts you with seems to be a common task for me these days. Sometimes you can’t resist to take such a big bite that you have to fear that this time it was too much sugar to stay alive. It never is.

Pals

I saw two pipes rising out of the sidewalk and I wondered whether those two pipes were two friends or twins or even a couple of two somethings in love. If you look closely you could see that one pipe is bending towards the other a little bit. This could for example mean “hey pal, I need your shoulder” or “it’s good to feel you nearby”. Well, altogehter it could be that there were simply two pieces of metal - no pals, no feelings. I try to refuse to see my world that way as long as I can.



Apart from that I found more evidence about the glove conspiracy. It’s amazing - they are everywhere. I’m sure that now no one can claim any longer, that the conspiracy doesn’t exist. Now that I’m sure I only have to find out, what the hell they are planning.

Sunglasses

In times when I’m doubtful I use my invisible sunglasses to pretend I’m cool. But there are also moments, very few indeed, when I need them because life is nearly unbearable bright. My inner glasses look not as sexy as the ones of my colleague Mr. CHK, but they work at least as well. Well, maybe my glasses are not dark enough for every situation.

Snow Dome

A few weeks ago I found a Snow Dome in my parents house. It’s one of those you can put you own photos in.
Deep inside I’m a romantic guy so I took it as a decoration for my office. My big archive provided two nice pictures and now the snow falls above a dead rat (Egypt 2001) and some flavored dead guinea pigs waiting to be cooked (Peru 2004).
I look forward to put the Snow Dome on top of my monitor tomorrow and discuss the different aspects of romanticism with my colleagues.

Snow Dome (Front)


Snow Dome (Back)

Värde

The next part of the IKEA chronicles. Finally I managed to assemble a thing called Värde - a sideboard for my kitchen.
Actually I don’t like assembling furniture - and I tell you why:
Every single time I end up with some spare parts that were supposed to have an important task inside the furniture. Usually I’m not enthusiastic enough to remove all necessary parts again to bring the spare screws in place.
But I have to admit that the manuals from IKEA are quite good and I’m the moron. This time it was different. I was told to nail the back plane on to Värde - and I did. Afterwards I had to screw the worktop - and I did not. The reason was that one was not able to reach the screws because of the damn back plane. I got angry and now the back plane has a few small holes because I removed it with pure violence.

Making your apartment cosy should be peaceful and harmonic - I think I make an elementary mistake - again and again.
You think it’s not that interesting to read about guys assembling sideboards from IKEA. You’re right.


Pre-Värde


Post-Värde

Muffins

Your life feels like baking a Muffin? It’s not as far-fetched as you might think.
You have those empty paper baking cups and try to fill it with some life-pastry. You are absolutely sure that you don’t have enough emotions to fill the cup. It looks quite empty. It’s quite amazing to see what life makes out of it. I’m sure that your life-Muffin will almost overflow when the heat of the real life is through with it. Life seems to be increased after hot phases.

Surfaces

Surfaces work. Protecting stuff. Covering things. Hiding edges. Preventing from dehydration.
But what if one small piece of the paring gets removed? Then it’s easy to remove the whole rest with a few quick moves.
Being peeled can be really great but it’s damn risky.
But I guess the first piece is already gone.

Crumbs

The plate is empty at the moment except some small crumbs from the last bread roll. You use your index finger to pick the crumbs up. It doesn’t fill your stomach but it’s good to help you imagine jelly in your mouth. I like that crumb picking thing - and I love jelly.

Coke

Almost 800 km by car. Driving is not my favorite activity. It was a caffein-day for me. The good thing was that my mind was able to hover around several hours. And hovering didn’t end when I came home.

Special Places

Actually I feel quite good today. I intended to post something that reflect my current positive mood. But then I decided to upload this picture because the scene impressed me on this afternoon. The pic was taken on a bridge over the Autobahn in Nuremberg.
In Germany there are sometimes little crosses on the roadside. They indicate places of a deathly traffic accident. Usually I drive past without noticing them. Today I walked over this bridge for the first time and got aware of that girdle of flowers and the red lantern. I’m sure that the next time I cross that bridge I’ll have forgotten about it.
For me it’s a simple bridge, nothing more.
I thought about the fact that some people won’t be able to cross that bridge without thinking about the loved one they lost here. I’m sure that they think of him or her every single time they drive past. The city must be overwhealmingly filled with such special places. Not necessarily places dealing with death. I’m talking about places that mean nothing for almost everyone but are very intensly for a few. I’ll never know about them.

Any Time

Multi-continental-companies. There’s something special about it: Timezones. When your colleagues come to work your workday is almost over. Somtimes you need to get to collaborate quite close and the time shifted communication via eMail isn’t working. That are the moments for mails like “you can call me any time - even in the German night”. You’re glad if you counterpart gives you a call the late eve because you need to have some things finished. Wandering around in your apartment in your slippers, trying to concentrate because of you have to talk in english to your fellow in the U.S. and - and forget about your Pizza in the oven. That’s the difference between phone calls at the office and at your private apartment - you usually don’t cook in your office.
It ended up with a piece of charcoal. I ate it anyway. Sometimes life can be as hard as a charcoal pizza.

Substitutes

I thought about why we are are settled with substitutes of life so often. Instead of real feelings we go to the cinema and watch a stupid Hollywood movie. Instead of real tears we are listening to melancholic music like Portishead. Instead of ascending on the twiners of life we stuck on our jobs and pretend to think that this is the real life.
Sometimes substitutes not work. My order for these days should be: Seek and destroy life surrogates. I got a glimpse of something real real and seek for substitutes has already begun.


Substitute

This posting comes a day late and this was the first time I was not consequent on posting at least one picture per day. Am I sorry? No I ain’t.