Even if it's pretty late by now... a merry christmas to all of you. ;-)

Aaaah, and again there's a huge hole without any new entries in this blog...
But this time I have a pretty good excuse: I was hit by my typical once-in-a-winter-cold, which was just some weeks early.

But by now I'm fully recovered. ;-)

Yesterday evening we were on a concert of the german punk band "die ärzte" in Dortmund.

It was a really great concert - die ärzte are known for very long and funny concert. The whole show went on for almost three hours and the audience was asked to perfom some very interesting mexican waves: The normal ones, a slow-motion variant of it, and even just with sound. Very nice. I'm already looking towards their next visitin Dortmund. ;-)

Last night at about 2 a.m. there was a car accident right in front of our house.
A driver (of whom I'm pretty sure he was driving under the influence of [lots of] alcohol) almost crashed into a wall.

He didn't seem to be seriously hurt - his upper lip was bleeding, that was all. And he was wavering from the alcohol. But of course we called an ambulance and while we were waiting for them to arrive, he suddenly tried to start his car again and drive away. Well, first he tried to convince my father to back off the car so he could drive on (which my father of course didn't do), then he tried doing so himself. Well, he tried - we didn't let him.
As the ambulance arrived, he told them that we were driving the car... let's just say the paramedic didn't really believe him. ;-)

Well, the driver was okay... but he did make some damage: The right one of the two serving area interfaces was lying on the street, the left one just got "touched" by his car (in the meantime a technician "reapired" them); the phone booth (which wasn't a real phone booth - it's called "basic phone" [Look at the according Google Image search results]) was lying on the street, too (it's the small silvery thing on the right next to the serving area interfaces), and last but not least there was a big sign pointing to an restaurant down the street, which's frame can be seen in form of some wooden bars on the right side of the picture.
The car has been towed off; if it was still standing there, it would've filled the picture as if it has been normally parked on the sidewalk.

Phew, that was a night!

Two days ago the winter began for me:

It was cold outside, I was sitting in a bus, the rain splashing on it's front window showed the usual patterns of melting snow - and at the same time my iPod played "White Christmas" by Otis Redding. Cool.

Now I'm waiting for snow - lot's of snow. ;-)

The last few days haven't been very pleasant for me... so there were no blog entries.
The reason: My grandfather died last monday.

Some time ago medics discovered that he suffered from cancer. They tried many different methods of treatment, but without success. 9 weeks ago he was told that there were no more options on how to help him. So he asked to be released, to die at home.

Some days later I drove down to Bavaria and said good bye. 7 weeks later he passed away.

The funeral was this friday. It was - as long as you can say this about a funeral - a nice funeral.



Rest in peace, Opa Gerd.