Christmas! (Brainmonster version)

Christmas at the Martindale's has been very joyful and happy, and I'm sure there'll be more posts soon, but I figured I'd start out with the brain monster! RAWR! Serena knit this awesome hat for me... and I love it :D

 

 

Christmas came early!

Jason and I were surprised by some early Christmas Presents this week! The wonderful AMME Vissers (Aaron, Meghan, Micah, and Elizabeth... it was better than MAME, maybe EMMA is better...) sent us both some very thoughtful and fabulous presents! Jason received an iTunes gift card and he's going to buy "lots of awesome games for my iPod!!!!" I got the best present ever... a sweater (with some assembly required)! For the non knitters... I got 14 of these...

with which I will make one of these... It's just what we wanted :) Thanks so much Family!!!

Job hunt update

But the good news is that Jason has been interviewing for a job as a Technician in one of the labs here at USC... Keep your fingers crossed folks!

Odd power outage...

Yesterday, Sunday the 7th of December, around noon, Rowan and I were sitting in the apartment, happyily watching some Star Trek (the original series!) when we heard the typical screech of a car braking suddenly. Usually, this ends in silence and everyone continues on their way, but this time it ended in a surprisingly loud bang which coincided with the lights flickering once before we lost power. Clearly something fairly major had just occurred. With not much else pressing to do, we ventured out to the street and sure enough, about half a block (~100 m) from us (see attached map) an SUV had slammed into a power pole, shearing it completely off at the base and moving it the entire length of the car through a nearby fence! If you look closely at the last photo, you can see the frayed remains of the base of the power pole. Unfortunately, we didn't get much information from the police that were already all over the scene by the time we were there, but it was obvious that this was something more than just an accident. There were about 10 police cars there and a bunch of officers were approaching a nearby house carefully. Apparently, no one was seriously injured, which is always a good thing. All of this happened around noon, and we didn't get power back until after 6pm. I went to investigate around 5pm, and it looks like they just removed the broken pole and restrung the lines between the nearby poles. Perhaps the pole will be replaced at a later date?

Random Posting

I seem to have this strange aversion to posting something on my own blog when I feel it might out-of-order, not interesting, or just doesn't serve any purpose. Well, unfortunately this leads to me being lazy and not posting about much at all. Perhaps it is a better blog because I try to keep it trim and efficient, but I think a lot of interesting and fun stuff gets left out because of this. Not that every day is a wild adventure filled with mayhem and feats of daring-do, but certainly much more goes on than is posted about here. Anyways, nothing may come of this, especially as Christmas approaches and things tend to be forgotten, but perhaps we'll have a small flurry of posts about flamie-type stuff and things... ya, that's it! Oh, and as a bonus, here's one of my favourite photos from our stay in Vienna this summer.

Mind-bending genius

Changing up the pace a bit from hiking and the Alps, I'm going to post someone from our time in the Netherlands. One of the days, we were granted the use of a car to do with as we pleased for the day. We had some grand plans of going to visit the Delta works and so, but by this point in the journey we were pretty burned out and just wanted a short, relaxing trip. Driving to the Delta works probably would have been amazing, but it was still hours of driving away. So, instead we headed off to "The Hague" (sounds funny to me, as it is Den Haag in Dutch) and visited "Escher in the Palace" AKA the Escher Museum. The building itself was quite beautiful, as is called a palace because during the 18th and 19th centuries it was a palace, and Queen Emma stayed there until 1891.

The museum itself was very thought out, with the progression of rooms following Escher's work through his life chronologically, which also is the same thing as from normal to mind-bending. Much of his earlier work was quite mundane, though perhaps showing bits and pieces of what would show up in his later works.

By the end, it was just rooms filled with tessellations, impossible perspectives, and all of the other work that Escher is so well known for.

I thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience and gained a new appreciation for Escher's genius and unique his mind was.

Austria Part 3: Hohes Brett

This was probably our most difficult hike. Fortunately, we had a few hikes under our belt by this time, but we still weren't close to our peak (hah!) fitness. It started out with a wonderful cable car ride, which gets you most of the way there. Unfortunately, in this case, "most of the way there" is most of the way up the wrong mountain. So, we had to hike partially down the side of one mountain before we could start up the one we were actually interested in. You can see this a bit in the first two photos... the path seen below is the one we had to follow to get to the mountain on the left. Notice the colours of the dots on the sign, they indicate the difficulty of the hike...black is as hard as it gets before you need to have mountain climbing gear and we were heading to the Hohes Brett.

Here is a shot back that Rowan took where we were fairly far up our target mountain. What you see in the foreground is what most of the path looked like at this point; rubble, gravel, and rock debris. Definitely not very nice for hiking. In the distance, if you follow the trail, you can see to Bahnhof, that is, the top of the cable car lift.

We never made it up to our target altitude, but it wasn't for lack of trying, it was because we ran out of water and were starting to feel a little "off". Probably the combination of exertion, heat, and altitude. So, we played it safe and headed back at around 2200m. The lift was at 1700m, but there as I mentioned, you have to cross the "valley" first, maybe 100m or 200m below the lift.

All-in-all it was an exhausting hike and we never reached our final destination, but it was still rewarding to have gotten so far as out-of-shape North Americans. The part that truly crushed our spirits was when we were at the point where we turned back, an elderly couple (I'm guessing between 60-70 years old) came descending from some point above us. Oh well, in case I haven't made this clear yet, I now firmly believe that Austrians are part-mountain goat and are born to climb things that no other humans can climb, and make it look easy. My hat goes off to them.