Even Berlin can be beautiful

Walking home from my German course last night I discovered that Berlin can truly be beautiful. Check out this gorgeous beast that was parked right out front of the Berliner Dom.

As we all know Lady has a 390 (cubic inch) engine - that works out to roughly 6.4 Litres. This beast has a 442 - which is about 7.3 Litres. Given that it has less doors, windows and overall metres it must go like the clappers. The 14 inch rear tyres must help get some of that power to the road - if you're really careful with the go pedal!

Bummer about the parking ticket though :-(

Entertainment Unit

Text follows when I'm less tired. Enjoy!

Have the bums lost?

Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I found this flyer in a pub the other night, and it really made me wonder if the bums really had lost:

Translation (important note : No it does not make any more sense in German!):
The Unified International Struggle and Holiday of the Jobless.
We will meet 13:00 at Senefelder Platz for a mighty demonstration. This year our cause will be carried by an even larger union of responsible initiatives, strong collectives and individuals who make a difference. Now as in the past our aims are the removal of the coercion to, and bondage of working for a wage, the free self-determination of ones life, the fight against the polution of absurd products and the joy of being. Come one and all, bring your robots and potted plants und let us all sing together.

So they've managed to scrape together funds to produce a high gloss postcard, and are going to fight for their right to be bums - have they really lost?

Springtime in Siberia

Spring in my hometown is one of my most despised seasons... because it is grey, dirty and muddy. The snow melts and there are little (and in some places big) puddles and creeks of dirty water carrying with it all the rubbish that people threw into the snow in winter. Due to the fact that in parts there are no good footpaths, one is forced to walk on the side of the road, so there's a big risk of being covered in the layer of dirty water by the passing traffic. Some pics below:

After about 30 years the lifts in my Grandmothers apartment building are getting upgraded... they now get new buttons (remember the ones that were there previously?) and the doors are now bright blue. Sadly for me the lifts were being renovated right now, so every time I go to visit I have to walk up six flights of stairs... but I suppose it's very good for me, so no worries there.


Below are some pictures from my visit to my cousin Andrei and his family... his wife Sveta, their older son Sasha and my little nephew Alesha. Alesha loves the camera - he loves to pose and will insist that you take at least half a dozen pictures just of him in different poses. He also cheats in cards and checkers... very cute :) As always I had a wonderful time there and got to see some of the renovations they did to their house.

Random pics of Gleb and I, Mum and Somerset :)

Lastly, tonight Mum and I went to the theatre of musical comedy to see the operetta Sylva . It was fantastic and now I am inspired to go to more theatres back in Berlin.

RIP

Rodney John Walsh, 31.3.1950 ~ 26.3.2009 - a good man who was always ready to lend a hand he will be sorely missed by many, including me.

The Special Guests

To take my mind off the disaster that is work lately and because they sound pretty good I went to see the concert of the dude who tiled our kitchen and bathroom: Willie. Here he is in all his Tiling Glory in our then unfinished flat:And here he is during the show with his 9 member band The Special Guests. They get bonus points for a very cool band name too.



The gig was AWESOME they started a bit late as Willie was waiting for his suit to turn up - but they played for over three hours. This was allegedly their last show ever, they've been around for about 14 years though, so one hopes that this isn't really the end *fingers crossed*
Here are a few videos I took during the concert, sorry about the quality - phone camera, and me bopping away like a mad man does not make for steady pictures.

Willie from the mosh pit:


Band kids break dancing and crowd surfing!!!


You should check out their website - they have quite a few tracks that you can download, and a couple of their videos on YouTube.

That's all for now folks...

Shoe Cupboard

Our "hallway", for want of a better term, has a nice little 9" pipe running through it. This is actually the drainage from the roof, so it kinda has to stay there. Needless to say it is a silly shape, in a silly spot and looks a bit ugly. We want to use this space to have a cupboard to keep our shoes in.

I managed to make a start to that this morning while I was waiting for people to come past and perform the annual maintenance on the ventilation systems that are installed in every flat.

I'm making the shoe cupboard out of spruce which is light, cheap and easy to work - it will be stained to match the bed and the coat rack later on before getting a couple of coats of varnish.

On the left is before again where you can clearly see the pipe, and on the right are the bits of wood that are will hide it. All three bits of wood you see on there the same height - unfortunately our ceiling isn't so I'm having to be a bit creative on that front ;-)

Here I'm drilling all of the holes for the dowel joins, and the adjustable shelves, then a test fit of a couple of parts.

Tonight I put together the stange side bit that will hide the pipe, unfortunately the walls are not straight - so it fits perfectly at the top and the bottom, but there is an almost 10mm wide gap in the middle - I'm guessing I'll need to fill this with some white silicon or similar so it doesn't look crappy later.

Expect more on the weekend...

Ok it's not the weekend but things have progressed...
On the weekend I cut out all of the corners of the shelves - as they all need to fit the silly gap made by the pipe, did some sanding too, but given that I was out of it most of Saturday after the concert I didn't get a lot done... gotta say I love my saw - this took about 10 minutes including setting up the depth gauge - about 30 minutes less than doing it by hand, and as a bonus all of the shelves are the same which is not to be sneezed at ;-)

I went home a bit early from work today and managed to get most of it done... Staining:

The cupboard is the full height of the ceiling, which means I can't assemble it lying on the floor - if I did then I wouldn't be able to stand it up - so assembly took place pretty much where it was going to be and this is one of the main reasons I bought all those clamps:

And full of shoes - all that's missing is the door - maybe Thursday??:

And the door - still needs a handle, but that will be up to Polina's creative spirit when she get's back from Russia ;-)

I have to say that for a relatively small cupboard, the only purpose of which is to store shoes, this was quite a lot of work and ended up costing a fair bit of money. Much less money than the professionals wanted for it but more that I would have guessed to start with. The biggest problems were:

• the fiddly non-rectangular shape - this meant more parts to assemble, more cuts to make, more things to try and line up.
• the full height - waving 250cm bits of wood around isn't such a big deal (all this stuff is fairly light) unless your ceiling is only 250cm tall. Certainly made working on it and assembling it more of a challenge than it would otherwise have been.
• staining - the wood is naturally a very light colour, which we don't really like and doesn't go with the rest of our flat so I changed the colour by staining it to match the bed and other items. This was a pain because 90% of the pieces had to be stained on both sides (as you can see the top and bottom of the shelves, the inside and outside of the door etc... plus the wood was very absorbent - thus I used much more stain than I expected.
• varnishing - see staining, varnish one side, wait until it dries, flip it over, varnish the other side, wait, flip, sand, wipe, varnish, wait, flip, sand, wipe, varnish, wait *sigh* time consuming is an understatement.

When all's said and done - it's not perfect, it's probably less good than something made by a real carpenter, but it is finally done and looks a hell of a lot better than what we had there previously (a left over bit of kitchen, with a left over bit of curtain draped over it).

Am I happy with it - 90%; Hopefully I'll do better with the bar...