Full mobility

Youngest Son suddenly decided that pedals are the future and got his big brothers to teach him to ride a bike.. The first we knew about it was when Beautiful Wife saw him racing past the kitchen. He’s spent most of the week giving demonstrations and finding any excuse to ride anywhere (except up hills: still working on that). It’s great to see him happy, growing, more independent and mobile etc, but I’ll miss having a small person on my bike. The Kindergarten pickup has changed from carrying Eldest Son and as many of his friends as can fit into the Bakfiets, to towing a small bike up the hill using the Xtracycle, unhitching, and riding home together. That’s fun too, even if we have to follow a rather indirect route to avoid the main road, because people in cars are obviously more important than families who merely live here.

Anyway, Beautiful wife had mentioned that chocolate supplies were going down. This is a serious problem, so Youngest and I decided that we’d go to on the almost entirely traffic free route to the next town and resupply before things got dangerous: the sun was shining, and it would be a chance for Youngest to go out on a bike ride with a purpose. We decided on a plan: on the uphill bits I’d tow Youngest Son’s bike and he’d ride the Xtracycle, and if it rained (which of course it wouldn’t, as it was so sunny and bright) I could tow us home.

I really should have looked at the weather report closely, or taken more notice of those clouds behind us, especially as we had a tailwind. As we came out of the shop the weather caught up with us and my suspicions were confirmed that Youngest Son’s ‘waterproof’ coat wasn’t.

Fortunately there was a longer but less windy route through various housing estates and along the most expensive cycle lane in the world. By the time we’d made it to the top of the hill the rain had given up so Youngest Son got to ride the last bit and still seemed to be smiling when we got home. Of course the question is if he’s smiling because of the ride or smiling because it was over.

Ah, well, chocolate supplies restored…

Spring

In the depths of the hills towards Tübingen the forest Elves have made a spring, weary travellers for the use of.

It didn’t seem to give special powers like seeing the future, invisibilty, or even the ability to climb the next hill faster, but on the plus side I wasn’t attacked by any trolls and there were no dead sheep in the water upstream, so I was happy.

Building a cold frame

I was wondering if the natural order of the universe had changed this weekend. I’d decided to build a temporary cold frame from three windows we’d found in the Very Smallholding. No allotment is complete without at least one ramshackle cold frame made from old windows, and it would give the more delicate seedlings a chance to get acclimatised before being thrown out into the great outdoors.

The first shock was that I found all the tools, which I think deserves to be recorded for posterity. I weeded the small veggie bed we (ie: ‘Grandma’) had dug last year, and decided to make it a bit wider to fit the foundations in, foundations sounding much better than three old bits of paving slab and a plank. More surprises: the spade -found within three minutes- went in with little trouble, and the old paving slabs were where I’d left them, along with a solid piece of wood that fitted in the gap with minimal grunting and kicking at the edges, and even turned out to be just the right size to support the half-sized pallets I wanted to use for the back supports.

By now I could do anything: even find a sharp saw and cut another pallet to make the supports for the front. I refitted the anti-slug fence with help from the boys who know a good chance to dig stuff up when they see one, laid the windows over the construction and was feeling pretty pleased with myself that nothing had been broken yet, when I decided the front needed to be a few centimetres higher to for the seed trays under. No problem I thought. I got some wood blocks, lifted the first window, and the whole construction toppled sedately downhill.

Normality restored.

The Glorious fifteenth

Local lore has it that the fifteenth of May is the last, absolutely final day when we will have frost until November. Strangely enough it seems to work, of you don’t count hail, so This week it’s time to move the seedlings to the garden.

So far, we seem to he having a reasonable amount of success with the seedlings: most actually appear to be growing -which they ought to be: they’ve had four star treatment for a couple of months in our living room, except when they were moved out onto the balcony to get extra sun.

For the record, we currently have: comfrey, spinach, Onions, courgettes, pumpkins, French beans (planted in soil) carrot, courgette, leek, kohlrabi, more leek, broccoli (Which I loathe but I’m assured is actually quite edible when home grown, we shall see) different courgettes, cucumber, French beans started in a tray with tissue paper instead of soil (don’t ask me I just follow instructions) lettuce, carrots, different onions, more spinach, some tomatoes, an apple tree seeding which the boys planted, and the Aubergine seed I put into a pot on impulse and which may well be impersonating a rock for all the growth we’ve seen.

As soon as it’s finished raining we’ll start moving things to the balcony and the garden, some for the cold frame Of which more anon), and others for the beds. Not before time: we’ve forgotten what the living room floor looks like.

Barn 2

What the well-heeled farmer is building this year. Modern barn with rock outcrop accesories.

There and back again.

I’m back home. This was not part of the plan.

The plan (skip this if you’re read it before) was to go off to north Germany for just under a month and learn how to be an ambulance driver, come home in June, get eight weeks experience and go back for exams in the beginning of August. The plan worked, despite certain practical problems, right up to arriving at the school. Unfortunately that’s where things began to unravel.

The problem was not the many-headed monster, the language or any of the other stuff I was concerned about. It was decibels, specifically coming from our teacher.

He started shouting in the first lesson: this school wasn’t going to be ‘average’; it would be the best; we were going to be pushed to the limit; he’d make us stressed as far as we could bear and then some; his students scored an average of 1.2* and he would make sure we did the same, apparently by shouting. Everything taught each day would have to be learned in its entirety by the next morning. It would be tested by pulling people up to the front and grilling them, and woe betide any student that was not Good Enough.

Quite what this was meant to achieve I don’t know: all it did for me was stop my brain working.

I held out until Monday: the teacher did deal with some of us more carefully than others, but in the end it dawned on me that to stay I’d have to spend the next three weeks trying to make myself fit into the ethos of the school, and that wasn’t the sort of person I am or want to be, and wouldn’t have made me a better ambulance driver either. My identity didn’t need to be wrapped up in being Good Enough for this particular teacher, nor in becoming an ambulance driver by August, so after watching five people get shouted at for an entire lesson I packed my bags and came home.

When I wasn’t avoiding the teacher I was having a great time and enjoying the work, so I’m trying to find another way to get to the same place, maybe by working with the local Red Cross and then applying to a school nearby with more relaxed lessons and less decibles; we’ll see.

In the meantime it’s planting season, and I still want to ride a century this year, I’ve a carpentry apprenticeship to start in September, something fell off Middle Son’s bike, (It is a mystery to me how the boys manage to lose obscure fittings on their bikes, but they do) so I need to get fixing it, and I’ve just realised it’s mothers day in Germany tomorrow.

More normal (ie: Bike and garden related) posts from next week.

*Exams in Germany are typically graded from 1.0 (perfection) down to 4.9 or 5. Britain as usual has to be different so my grades are all in letters, which causes no end of confusion.

Forest

Where the lions and tigers and bears might be, and the lumberjacks had already been. (Bigger version here)

New bike, hooray.

If I’m honest, it’s about five minutes after I wrote my last post: I’m going to let this go online automatically so I have a bit of time to get settled in and sort out my internet connection in a castle in the middle of a field.

Here’s the bike that I’ve been working on, and if all goes to plan, the one which will have transported me some of the way to Schloss Daschow and the Nee-Naw training school. The finished result isn’t going to win any beauty competitions but that’s not the point. The point was to make something reliable but not likely to be stolen. (and as it used to look like this, I couldn’t make it any worse anyway)

Stuttgart is filled to the place denoting filled-ness with cars. This is means the bike infrastructure is pretty awful (a point I will probably labour next month when commuting in the city) but on the other hand, it means that the chances of your bike getting nicked isn’t high. This is because hardly anyone wants a bike, because everyone else drives a car.

Now, I’min a region known for cycling*, and thus a place where bikes get nicked more often. Fortunately Stuttgart helped here as well because people chuck all manner of useful stuff away for the diligent scrounger to collect, so I didn’t have to spend too much to get this bike working nicely, fortunately for you I can’t remember what came from where so you’ll be spared the details. so you’re spared the details, although I know the mudguards came free from a pile of ‘rubbish’ I was able to get at before the council picked it up and the luggage rack came from another bike a customer brought into the shop last year to “get rid of it”. I just knew I’d use it one day. The tyres are reused as well, but that doesn’t count because they were mine and I bought them about fifteen years ago in the UK, which makes me feel old. The Boss at the bike shop is convinced they will end their days in a formula-1 style blow-out with bits flying in all directions and throw me into a ditch somewhere.

But then if I’m going to have an accident, a school full of wannabe ambulance drivers is the place to do it…

*Which of course, I’m not, yet, but you get the idea.

Useful

Very Useful Sign showing the cycle routes to the villages of Schlattstall, Gutenberg, and oberlenningen, and the nearest sewage works, just in case someone needs to know.

I was going to ask for suggestions why anyone in the middle of nowhere would suddenly need this information, but if you have any ideas I’d prefer you to keep them to yourselves. Thanks…

Many Headed Monster…

We (me and the bike) are ready: the bags have finally arrived, and I’ve (almost) packed everything in them, the paperwork is (almost) sorted, I’ve had half a dozen holes poked in my arm to immunise me from various ailments, including a couple so obscure the nurse had to read up on the details before she injected me, but that just serves me right for wanting to work in a children’s ward; the tickets are here, I have a placement at an ambulance station in Stuttgart when I get back and I’ve finally got a mobile phone, which has just enough technology in its little grey case that I can call people and send texts: I’ve embraced mobile technology, albeit from the 1990′s. It also has a torch, which I assume is for morse code.

All I have to do is get on a train at silly O’clock on Monday and go off to north Germany for 21 days. Which means I have to deal with the problem at the back of my mind since I applied.*

I am an introvert: quite an extreme introvert in fact, I really don’t do new places or people very well. I like people, but I don’t like dealing with people I haven’t met, in big groups, and in places I’ve never been before.

I think you can see the problem here.

I’m being stupid of course: this time next week we’ll all have got to know each other and I’ll be fine, and the other people are probably more nervous because they’re all a lot younger than me, so they’ll have teenage angst to deal with as well. I just have to get through the first couple of days and then I can relax.

That sounds good, I’ll stick with that.

Time to stop whining and get packing, methinks.

The internet connection in the school may be a bit awkward at first, so if the next posts have a feel of having been written some time ago and posted automatically it’s because they were. Or rather they will have been.

*Apart from it being a self-catering course and I can’t cook: anyone have some very, very simple recipes before I have to live on Salad for a month?