There's something in the air

Other people have 'rokjesdag', we had the first BBQ of the year.

Holiday time coming

For some people it's already started for others it's coming soon.
Summer always reminds me of camping in England with our children. But now the kids are big enough to go away on their own (and they should) so we have decided to go away in september to avoid the crowds.
But, to get in the mood (or to fondly remember) here's an applicable clip by dutch ensemble Happy Camper.

Glass porch

I wanted to post an update on our glass porch that we had added to our house three years ago. But looking back through my blogposts it turns out I never wrote about it in the first place. Ho-hum. So, a week after we had our sunscreens fitted the next company arrived on our doorstep.


An expensive week you could say. Sooo, they started with putting up the poles and attaching stuff to the house.


Look how it's totally different from the pergola thingy of the neighbors (which was one of the first things taken down by the new neighbors that moved in last year).


The glass beads are added (notice the workman -aware of the photographer- making fun of his colleague).


The (glass!) windows are put into place. I never knew that stuff was so bendable.


And of course, as soon as the glass was in place the rain started to fall.


So here is Lynn inspecting that day's work.


As the company's sunscreen option was a bit expensive we tried our own solutions. We had a mesh curtain made but the problem is that it's not easy to open and close once you attach it (and you want to when it's not sunny). So, cue three years later...

Rails are added to the beads.


More screws are screwed.


The screens are slided in the rails.


And there you have it! Easy open and close and no need to run when rain starts as it's hanging in a dry place.


We're totally ready for summer.

Tuesday Child, heard it years too late

I remember reading a very good review of the album 'Universal Playground' by the band Tuesday Child. But I never got round to investigating it, ignoring the comparisons to the band XTC (a favorite) and good reviews of their second album 'Vital Signs'.


It happens, sometimes you overlook something great. Often I get reminded by someone or an article but not this time. A few months ago I was online shopping for a cd and thought of what I could add to the cart to keep postage costs down, and then the name 'Tuesday Child' popped in my head. It turned out the second album was readily available at the shop (and still is, and cheap too). Of course after hearing this I went after the first album, which I found in a shop on ebay (again, cheap: shipping from the US to Europe was more expensive than the album itself).


The story of Tuesday Child is a very sad one. Everything was 'go' with the release of the first album but then band broke up and from reading the biography you get the feeling all goodwill was gone. After an expensive, shiny 'big studio' & 'mastered in Abbey Road' first album, the second one was more a home studio product (but you don't hear that) which has been on the shelf for a number of years before it got released on a small label (you only have to check the cd sleeves above to see that).

Despite their being so different, both albums are very good. 'Universal Playground' is exploding with great tunes (it even made number 72 in musicpaper OOR's yearlist for 1997). The second album is even better. Whatever the reason for breaking up, the bandleader Maurice 'Mouse' Bom was right. There are short sound clips here.

Eight years have gone by since 'Vital Signs' and sadly it looks like 'Mouse' has resigned to teaching and production jobs.

Lunch on a roof tile

In October last year we (my wife and me) spent a few days near Canterbury. I was reminded of the lovely lunch we had in the tea room of The Secret Gardens of Sandwich when leafing through my pictures folder a few days ago. I had a ploughman’s lunch then and yes that plate is a roof tile :)

Bedroom upgrade

After using it for almost 25 years we decided that our bed was in need of replacement (we did buy new mattresses halfway, but things started breaking off and it began to creak more and more). So... in december last year we sought out an amazingly expensive bed and heard it would take something like three months to deliver. We wanted to totally 'do' the bedroom as it had been 'done' when we moved into the house nineteen years before. And of course we kept putting off the work because there was always something else to do and besides we still had a month to go. Or so we thought until we got the call at the beginning of februari, a month before the 'planned' date!


Luckily I was able to get some days off work the same week so we could get started right away. Which meant: emptying the room, stripping the wallpaper, painting the ceiling (which first had to be cleaned and fixated - that stuff is evil - so we could use latex paint), wallpapering and finally: laying the laminate.


Amazingly this all worked out neatly in time except for wallpapering the corners and fixing the baseboards, but these were things that could always be done later.


So, a few days later the truck arrived and the workmen started filling up the room.


Luckily the stairs were not an obstacle for getting the bed upstairs (the days before the delivery we of course went looking for and found horror stories of beds that got stuck in the stairway).


I think within half an hour the guys were ready and on their way to the next job. Below the end result. Nice eh? It moves up and down with little motors too.

5XOD, what does it mean?

Somehow I rolled into the 'indie cassette scene' of the early 80's where you would record tapes with your own music (or 'sounds' in my case) and swap them with other people. The trick was to get a nice variety of 'correspondents' so you would get a nice variety of tapes back. Among my favorite correspondents were Rob Lawrence (aka Robot) and Mark Phillips (aka MAP) from Cardiff/Bristol, as their tapes had a constant quality (i.e. they often had good tunes unlike some of the 'industrial noise' tapes that I got from other people). After some time they joined forces as 5ive Times Of Dust (aka 5XOD) and made even better tapes.

Eventually, life happened and I lost touch.

And then some twenty (+ change) years later while perusing the interwebs I face that acronym again: 5XOD. It turns out the guys split up at the end of the eighties. But the good thing about split-ups is that you can come back together: they did a few years ago. In fact they picked up where they left off by taking old recordings and 'reworking' and remixing them. I got in touch with Rob who was so kind as to send me their 'come back' cd: Incense in the Middle Fridge of Birth.


The fact that I'm not so up to speed on electronic music is not really important as an obvious influence like YMO (like on the track 'You've got to Love the Nature') is not new either. It also helped that some of the tracks are reworkings of tracks that I already knew. Anyway, tracks like 'Fluffy Bomb' and 'Mass Collider' are instantly recognizable as 5XOD and great in their own right. One of the smart moves is sometimes using an electronic voice as the girl singer Miku which comes as a blessing after some of the more 'industrial' tracks.
On the whole I quite like it. It also made me (while typing up this blogitem) pay a bit more attention to their my|---| site: there is even newer 'Dust Music Product' available: mOVING tHROUGH tWISTED fORMS.

To explain the title of this posting: after all these years I was wondering if 5XOD meant more than just four words and googled out it probably does. Here is a link to an excerpt of 'The Soft Machine' by William S. Burroughs.

Island ashore

Last year the company I work for has moved from Haarlem to Amsterdam so now my workplace overlooks the IJ and I take the ferry every workday. More on that when I catch up on last year.


Aaaaanyway, two weeks ago week a few cranes showed up accross the water and hoisted the REM-eiland on it's place (an iron construction that I previously had no idea what it was for) . It was famous for being a pirate tv-station (in 1964, when there was just one dutch tv channel). It only broadcasted for a few months (before the government shut it down) but has a legendary status. The building will now become a restaurant. Nice, you can eat there and look across the water and see where I work.

Springtime

Almost a year has passed since my last posting. A LOT has happened and enough to blog about. Only... I didn't.

Now it's spring, time of fresh starts. Let's see how it goes.

These trees are located in the Westerpark, where I bike through on my way to work (more on that an other time). No sun in this picture (made three days ago), I had my camera with me today (a sunny day) but the blossom was blown away for a large part.

The Roof of the Shed

Sorry about the lack of posts here, I guess this posting has been brewing in my mind for a few months now and kept me from posting other stuff. Let me begin with showing our shed as viewed from our second floor during the winter.


The story began last year when we agreed with our (new) neighours that the roof of our adjoining sheds needed work. There were some leaks and even I could tell from a distance that things were getting bad (I also knew that during the eighteen years we live here, we never did anything about that roof). Little did we know how long the work was going to take.

At the beginning of october the first work was done: we added new rain-pipes at the back. The pipes on the front just ended a foot in the ground on some rocks which meant that when it was raining pools would start forming around the shed.


At the back our gardens is an alley on which there is right of way for all houses that border to it. The good thing about it is the sewer that ends excactly behind our sheds, we should be able to connect to it.


You connect to such a sewer using a 'schuifmof'. I never knew that. Fortunately my neighbour and his dad know about this kind of stuff. When finished it looks like this:


After connecting the pipes and putting back the sand and bricks the first stage was complete.


Sooooo... forward two months to december when the new roofing stuff was agreed on, bought or ordered and when everyone had time again. On a thursday we started to break away the old roofing which meant lots of gravel stones and old asphalt to scoop up and bring to the waste disposal site (you have to pay a little because it's 'dirty waste' but it's still cheaper than renting a waste container). We could borrow a big four wheel trailer so a few rides was enough.
(Unfortunately, I had no time and/or had forgotten to make pictures that day.)

Aaaaanyway, we covered the roof as good as we could (with some old tarps) but of course nature chose that night to have one of the heaviest rainfalls of the month. Here's the inside of the shed; almost just as wet as the outside...


Once you have started on a job like this there's no other option than to keep going. So, the next morning (friday) we removed the covering, dried the roof and added new boards on the side.


Then you nail 'spijkerrollen' (nail rolls) on the top. This involves nailing a lot of nails.


After all this it was time to call it a day again so we covered the roof with a new tarpaulin as more rain was underway. The next day (saturday) we were getting to the point when we could attempt to lay the first roofing roll when rain came (again). We covered the roof and had some more coffee. After the shower we had to dry the roof first.


After drying we managed to get one roll on there before we had to cancel and cover things up again. We had to wait until next weekend.


Next week I got sick (no surprise there, remembering all this). But our neighbour's father was just retired and kindly finished the job for us. Here he is with a fellow pensioner (his neighbour) putting on the roofing rolls.


Watching from behind the window, still not able to lend a hand, here he is next day, melting the side pieces in place. Of course we rewarded him with a nice bottle of whiskey.


As you can guess by now, the roof was still not rainproof. The edges still needed to be sealed and in order to do that one needs to have time and it has to be dry (both at the same time). By now it was halfway december so the roof stayed covered for the rest of the winter. And what a winter it was! The coldest and most snow in decades. So here we are at the end of march. With a private swimming pool for ducks on the roof.


Finally in april the weather was good enough and the job was finished. Completely finished? Well, not completely as both sheds still have a bit of leakage. But it's good enough for now and finally the blue tarp is put away.

Lack of new posts

Mitzi finds the lack of new posts here booooring.

Mitzi tries for a portrait

It's more that I tried for a portrait of Mitzi. She grows so fast and never sits still for long; as soon as she hears a sound she either turns her head to the sound or is off to the other side of the room.

In these pictures she's sitting in front of the insect screen in the window of my study on the first floor, where all things happening outside kept her sitting (relatively) still.

What? Already?

Last week I noticed giant bird flocks swarming around in the air. Usually it's an indication that the birds will soon start their migration towards the south, wich surprised me because august is not even over yet and the weather has been very hot (but then what do I know; I just don't want to think about winter yet).
Anyway, early morning a few days ago I saw a flock while I was shaving and later when I was downstairs fixing breakfast I suddenly heard loud twittering coming from the back garden. It turned out our neighbor's rowanberry (dutch: lijsterbes) was being raided by starlings (spreeuwen).
It was a bit early for good 'n bright pictures but here's what I captured.

The owls are not what they seem

My mother found out a few weeks ago that she has a young long-eared owl (Asio Otus, in dutch called a ransuil) in her garden. She found some of it's pellets a few weeks before that but didn't know where they were from. We have no idea why it would find this a great place to stay as my mother lives in an urban area (although most houses in her neighborhood do have big gardens). It's going to be interesting to see what it will do in a month or two when it gets colder and the walnut tree will lose its leaves.

Anyway, it certainly is 'something else'. I managed to get a nice picture too (as usual, click to enlarge).

Daniël's Nineteen!

Wow, nineteen already! It made me think about this and what a blessing it is that he is not in some far away country, fighting in a war. Instead he will be spending his nineteenth year pondering what to done since he failed his propedeuse at the university of applied sciences (in dutch we call it 'hogeschool').

So, how very appropriate the pondering picture below of Daniël a month ago in Scotland.

Introducing: Mitzi

A friend's cat had kittens three months ago and we got one. The kittens are a cross between a 75% norwegian forest cat and probably a european shorthair (they don't know who of the five neighborhood tomcats is the father).

It looks like she might get the longer hair of the norwegian forest cat but we'll have to wait and see to find out for sure. What we do know is that she has a very loud purr and behaves like the hyperactive cat from the cartoon Gaston (in dutchyland we know it as Guust Flater).

So here is a picture of her resting in between attacks.

Our own bell peppers

About three months ago we bought a bell pepper plant (the dutch call it 'paprika') with three orange peppers ready to be eaten. The peppers are about half the size of the ones you buy at the greengrocer but the taste is very good. We never thought it would do much after that but look at the picture: it just keeps on giving.

Johan live at the plaza

On the 2nd of august I went to see a free outdoor concert by the dutch band Johan on the Canadaplein in Alkmaar. It was a lovely sunny day and Johan is becoming a trademark for 'good music'.

More pictures on flickr.

Check out their new album '4' or the compilation box '12.5 Years, 3 Albums, 36 Songs' that contains their first three albums and a DVD with clips.

Update: three weeks later Johan has announced they will split at the end of the year (they will finish the current tour). Sad news but what a great quartet of albums.

As I can't seem to find clips for their new album, here are some clips from their 'THX JHN' album.

Scotland 2009

We returned from our holiday three weeks ago and no blog up yet. Tsk, tsk.
Scotland was beautiful and full of sun and rain. We stayed at a lovely cottage in Pitlochry. Here are some highlights (as usual you can click the images for a bigger picture), more here. I have included a slideshow at the bottlom of this post.


We had a rough sea on the way to Newcastle. This is what leaving the IJmuiden harbour looked like:


Reservoir at Pitlochry power station dam:


Pitlochry dam and fishladder:


Waterfall near Pitlochry called 'Black Spout'. Thanks to the lookout point all pictures on the webs look the same.


Culloden.


A place called Queen's View, Craiglich.


Scotland's smallest working destillery: Edradour.