Nordic Ski Trip Sachsenkam to Schaftlach

Here is a gallery of my Nordic Ski trip this morning.

Ice cold at the start – 9.12am, was even ice in my nose to begin with and I couldn’t feel my fingers, but I soon warmed up.

An Airfix kit for girls!

As a boy, around this time of year post Christmas I’d be sat on the floor, busy cutting out parts from a Christmas gift Airfix kit. You’d cut out the parts, then glue them together.

I’m doing one this year at 44 years of age, but a cloth one. Alright it’s a teddy bear needlework kit! A gift friends purchased from Tchibo, you get fluffy cloth and a paper outline to cut, yarn, and fluff to fill it. Initially I didn’t want to start, but the wife gave her usual disparaging comments about me, and I stubbornly decided to see it through. What is happening during its making though is wonderful.

I’m sitting there breathing, concentrating, creating, solving problems, in fact all the stuff perhaps my Mum might have “just got on with”, but in our X Factor world today we’ve completely lost. Well I at least have. There is something profoundly meditative about the whole experience, the occasional frustrations, then the relief at the resolution of problems, which the digital world just doesn’t give.

Put me in my other fireplace room /we call it the tile stove room as it used to have a ceramic stove which we took out for a cosier looking glass fronted fire), some candles (four naturally!) and it takes me back to 1940s Britain. One only needs one of those huge radio cabinets with Dick Barton Special Agent, some Ovaltine and we’re back in the days of the Blitz!

I’m going to give him when he is complete to my son. Today during a moment of calming him down after he slipped, fell and cried, I asked him what we might name him “Teddy” he said. I told him the original name of teddy bears was Edward, so could we name him Edward? He agreed, so Edward when he is finished will have a birth certificate which came with the kit, and will be the new arrival in our household.

Am I a human barometer?

I’ve always been a lousy sleeper. The last few nights I ought in theory to have slept like a log (It’s been a Haaaard Day’s Night!) yet at 3am every ngiht I’ve been wide awake, unable to get back to sleep. This has been my downfall all my life, tiredness, lethargy and the odd depression. it does ease up with regular exercise, but at Christmas this is simply impossible. 

As my wife set off for work this morning she mentioned the weather. “I wonder if the low pressure we have at the moment is affecting your sleep?” she asked,. Moments later Google was my friend and I got surfing the subject of weather on sleep. It seems there may be a link between dropping pressure and sleep, according to these amazing links I found:

http://www.robsworld.org/barometer.html is a more anecdotal account of weather effects on people

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2854702/ is a more scientific study.

http://www.ciesin.org/docs/001-338/001-338.html is a more general study of the effects of climate on humans. We get a lot of Föhn here which I often hear induces headaches, which don’t seem to affect me. Mind you I was raised at sea level as a boy. 

So that got me thinking – can a scientific link be found between barometric pressure and amount of sleep? Thus can there be a correlation between Jeremy going occasionally bananas and self medicating with the odd dash of alcohol and being up all night, and the weather?

I used to be interested in a sleep disorder called DSPS – Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. I used to fill out a spreadsheet application detailing my sleep patterns. Upon analysing the sheet it became apparent I didn’t have that disorder, yet is it possible I have sleep apnea which means my breathing goes odd in the night waking me up? Perhaps. I think two approaches will help. Recording my daily sleep patterns again, yet relating this to barometric pressure may be a successful strategy.

 Another  will be to somehow record perhaps my breathing at night somehow using a long term tape recorder, ´to see if my breathing changes in the early hours of the morning.

Surf surf and surf again Jeremy, and look what you find! This gem of an article turned up:

 http://www.bmj.com/content/332/7536/266.full  

 We just started going to our favourite recycling centre. and what did we find the other day? A Didgeridoo!

 Without that article I might have thought this was nuts. But it sounds plausible. Sleep therapy with the didge!

 

 

 

 

Take care capturing from Bing!

Right then,

Here is a snippet of advice from one who has just learned his mistake. I am presently digitizing our town for Openstreetmap as I believe in the community effort to build a map of where we live. 

I’ve been entering JOSM then using Nominatim to select the town in which I live – “Holzkirchen” in southern Germany. Unnoticed by me, there are two “definitions” of the place. The first is a relatively narrow small area defines as a “town” which I’d been clicking on often. The second is as (I think) a region. I’d been clicking on the former and downloading OSM data for that alone.

Now I didn’t realise my error till I received a rightly disgruntled message from one who had been far more hard working than I in the same area. Upon checking the data in JOSM I saw that he was absolutely right. My error was to capture over an area Nominatim had selected which was too narrow.

I thus duly deleted all my bad capturing, which was doubly captured house outlines and apologised to him! 

I hope that makes sense. 

Well it growed, and it growed!

(yes I know that is awful English! I heard it once at a playgroup during story telling!)

I continue digitising houses the best I can in OSM, yet it is now obvious I need to understand the finer points of JOSM. Thus a perusal of Steve Coast’s video explaining how stuff is captured:

http://showmedo.com/static/flowplayer/flowplayer-3.1.5.swf

I think we need to check the road and street naming also in our database. It does seem to already be in excellent shape though.

The greatest discovery I made is the building plugin in JOSM! I can now input buildings very quickly!

Armchair Open Street Mapping

A few days ago I checked over our small town for its OSM data and discovered that there were vast areas unmapped at house level. So I decided to correct this with JOSM. It took a while for my edits to appear in the main database but here they are! I am so excited to see this and very motivated now!

Learning Mapnik

As part of my efforts towards a quality bike map of my region i am learning Mapnik. Installing under Windoze was a pain but I managed it, and got my very first output from the test script:

We spent the afternoon having our apples juiced

…and at the end I found a local distiller who will take our plums and make Schnapps out of them!

Following Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilsation” book in Google Earth

Have always admired his writings in the Indy and have decided like with my Pollan book to check out his references in GE. Here is the first:

I wonder if this is the road the bin Laden built between Khartoum and Port Sudan?

Was trying to examine places near south Sudan but didn’t see much evidence of conflict.

However this region has some stunning stuff. See:

The Proper Parent

Right then,

As many know I’ve been an at home Dad for the last five years. From ex-military contractor to “nappy table material management specialist / tantrum avoidance manager” the role change was rather extreme. Adapting to that role took a very very long time, and if any words I can offer help others treading in my shoes then I humbly offer them here.

If any have read this blog then they’ll notice a wide range of things I’ve written on, yet parenting has been a notable absence, mostly because it was something I felt rather crap at. The problem is that it isn’t something like office work, where are several strands of things going on at one time and you just juggle them till the stuff gets done. Home parenting is an open ended, chaotic mess, which gets periodically cleaned up and just occasionally there come moments of wonder and joy, but they aren’t often.

As we head into the summer break many of us may be feeling overwhelmed by the thought of 24 hour kids about. If you are like me you may be have been the dumping ground for all the neighbourhood kids. Admittedly we have the biggest house and garden with one of those blow-up pool jobbies in it, and thus we’ve been a mecca for the other kids. One summer we blew the thing up and out of the woodwork came six kids with their German towels, all ready to jump in which they did. We have been far too polite to say no and stop this, accepting it and hoping the other parents might one day reciprocate. This as the years dragged on, made itself clear, was never going to happen.

I’ve been angry with this situation for years, always the idiot clearing up others messes and never getting much free time for me. However today I suddenly stood up and said fuck it, The worm turned, the shoe was on the other foot and other cliches you might think of. Stressed after a long visit to me in the morning in my house I said to the foreign kids in German “This afternoon my kids will play at yours” “Oh I’ll have to ask my Dad” .Sure enough after lunch she ran over to us assuming as usual Idiot Dad would babysit for free as usual. When I said “No you will host my kids” she said “We have a wasp nest” I replied “then you will all play inside”.

i then got dressed and tested out my mobile to check it worked, scribbled it down and walked over and handed iot to the child’d Dad. I told him i was off on a bike ride and I needed to get fit. He said fine, What I didnt tell him was how long I’d be gone . about three hours which was as long as his kids had been at mine in the morning, to say nothing of how often they’d been only at ours.

I then buggered off for a fantastic free ride through country lanes with glorious views of tha Alps, a good long aerobic workout with fresh air, crickets and what I love, speeding downhill through forest tracks at full tilt. Upon my return I went to fetch my kids. The mother who was also there, didn’t look very happy with the fact that I’d just done to them what they’d spent years doing to me.

I’m in a better mood now as I stood up for myself, Will now make sure that the split in childcare is 50:30 not 90:10 against me as it used to be. I’d been too soft and had paid a heavy price. I now have a lot of my former confidence back, feel more in control and am more in love with being with my kids than ever.

So if that helps a stressed parent to cope better, to take five minutes out for themselves to regroup then reexamine your playdates and who is going to who more often. If you are the meek then get your act together and stand up for yourself, dump the kids and get out to enjoy an activity.

Oh, it’s blessed are the MEEK! Oh, I’m glad they’re getting something, they have a hell of a time.