Schierer Space

We’re nearing the end of a fine Easter day here at the Schierer household. The morning candy ingestion (followed by the after church, pre-dinner, after-dinner and afternoon candy ingestion) is manifesting itself in short fuzes and two children currently scooting past in a laundry basket.

Our day started at 7AM with the Hallelujah Chorus and an Easter egg hunt. Rachel was thrilled to discover that the plastic eggs contained her favorite food of all: “M M M!”

Afterwards, I hurried off to church to practice. I joined two trumpet players and the organ on Trumpet Voluntary before the service started. Easter service was, as usual, filled with great music and a fine message, and unusually included a “zombie movie” reference. ^[1]

The kids of course looked great in their Easter finery.

Don’t let the sunny pictures fool you. It’s rather cold and very windy here today. I guess since March was filled with June weather, April’s going to have some of MayMarch.

We spent most of the afternoon indoors, with N trying his hand steering in Need For Speed. He did pretty well up to about 40 mph… then we would see more guardrail than road. K’s working on some knitting, and Rachel is figuring out how to climb up to where the Easter candy is.

I hope all of you had a fine Easter too. (More pics, as always, in the gallery.)

1. This amused me, in particular, because I was joking to a friend that the “Left for Dead” series would make an irreverently appropriate Easter sale on Steam. [↩]

Thanks to Stephen for reminding me to write this post. His timing is excellent as it was _exactly_ one year ago today that I posted about our Adventures in Digital Media.

The best summary is probably simply: We’re still not paying the cable company for television.

From this you can probably conclude that our experiment was not a complete disaster. There have been some pitfalls, but I think we’re smoothly in the groove of our new media lifestyle. I don’t see us switching back any time soon, particularly since more and more content creators are:
a) providing shows directly to the internet
and
b) providing a way to watch shows on mobile/network players.

Details follow…
Read the rest of this entry »

Since the Olympic Committee thought it would be all crazy fun to go to London, we decided we’d get the jump on the rush. Really though, my employer decided to send me for a few business meetings, and we took advantage of the fact to take some vacation. We spent six days in the city of Big Ben, royalty, “Mind the Gap” and pub fare.

Here’s a sample of the things we saw and the pictures we took.

Day 1:
Walk about in central London starting with a ride on the London Eye.

Day 2:
Tower of London, the Tower Bridge and more downtown.

Day 3:
British Museum

Day 4:
Imperial War Museum, and a visit with the Russell family^[1]

Day 5:
Chris gets some work done. K visits the National Gallery. We meet up in the evening for dinner at the Savoy Grill.

Day 6:
Chris gets some more work done. K visits the Victoria and Albert Museum, where we met up in the early afternoon. Later that night Chris hits the city for some night shots.

Day 7:
Quick walk around, train to Heathrow and home.

1. For those who knew me when, Carey took the picture of the band in the previous post. That’s a copy made by taking an image of the (gasp!) actual printed photograph with the original on it. [↩]

So it’s been nearly three months since I posted anything. Rather than even pretend that you haven’t been dutifully informed on our goings on from K’s continuously active Facebook page, I’ll just move on. Facebook killed the blogging star… or something like that.

As I finally complete the processing of many hundreds of pics taken during our recent trip to London, I leave you only this one.

If you know me well enough to recognize anyone else in this picture, than you probably know me well enough to know why this might be relevant to our trip.

More to come soon. Really.

A bit of a slow night tonight after a full day of skiing is allowing me to post some quick edits on the trip so far. More, as always, in the gallery.

The skiers for the week (minus the photographer), (R and Mom D are enjoying some quality condo time):

N’s riding the lift with the big kids:

Big man on the mountain:

Enjoying our ski trip to Sunday River in Maine. Some fresh snowfall today added to the surface provided by copious snow-guns. This evening the snow changed to a fine crystal ‘mist’ which created these light pillars above the night skiers.

Ok, I know I have many Scrabble geeks amongst my friends and family. Here is a challenge for you:

What is the largest contiguous block of letters (e.g. a rectangle with no empty spaces or extensions) that can be formed in Scrabble with only legal moves?

Anyone?

PS: I found these two discussions with a search, but they didn’t seem ‘conclusive’. I’m not sure if a ‘proof’ is possible here.

• http://ask.metafilter.com/176017/Whats-the-largest-possible-word-block-in-scrabble
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_square

Between the regular craziness of the holiday season, a complete hard drive recovery and traveling hither and yon to visit family, I’ve collected quite a backlog of imagery.

Here’s a sampling:
First Snow worth Mentioning (and other than a few days ago, our only one so far):

Thanksgiving in Maine and the Portland Children’s Museum:

Christmas in PA:

Church Christmas Pageant: (Starring one very little angel, and one ham of a sheep)

It’s been a bit slow here at Schierer Space lately. The great blog experiment may be coming to a close. We’ll see what the new year brings.

In the mean time, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!