Pumpkin Chunkin

Like Black Friday and drinking Pumpkin Spice Lattes, watching Pumpkin Chunkin is a seasonal Fall activity that Americans participate in that makes the rest of the world say "huh?".

Broadcasted yearly on the Science Channel (although it's been cancelled this year), Pumpkin Chunkin is a competition fueled by torque, compressed air and the desire to hurl heavy objects great distances.

There are several categories of machines, such as trebuchet and compressed air canons, as well as different age groups. The teams and their machines have names like "Yankee Siege II", "Smokin Lamas", "Fibonacci Unlimited II" and an all female team's cannon: "Hormone Blaster".

Tradition dictates we tailgate, which in this context means picnicking, grilling, eating and drinking out of the tail gate of someone's car, in this case my friend's Toyota Sequoia, a ridiculously large SUV that was monstrous in the US, let alone the streets of Europe.

A fixture at American football games, tailgating is a chance for people to get into the spirit of the event, and talk to other fans. A few guys came over from a nearby camp to admire our beer selection and chat up my friend.

It was pretty cold and windy and we realized if we turned our SUV around, it would block the wind at least. As she pulled out of the parking spot, one of the guys we were talking to previously leaps up and sprints after her, yelling "don't leave me Blondie!"

Here's Blondie:

We were pretty excited to see the trebuchets and catapults, but the schedule had changed and the new order was only posted inside the field area, where you couldn't bring your own food and we were still eating. So unfortunately we missed that, but we were just in time for the cannons. (sorry about the photo quality, these were all taken on my ipod 3 years ago).

A field of artillery greeted us, with flags flying, like some alternate-history battlefield. A loud boom, a puff of smoke and a pumpkin hurtling through air so fast you miss it most of the time. The pumpkins are painted white to help them stand out against the brown grass, but against a bright sky or amid a cloud of smoke they disappear.

Eventually we got the hang of anticipating where the pumpkin would be, otherwise the cannons could have been firing nothing and we would have been none the wiser.

Some, ahem, local charm:

We finished the day at the Dogfish head brew pub in nearby Rehoboth, and after a long drive back, went to bed early.

Cooling Down with Some Winter Memories

A heat wave is moving in, and although it might not be very extreme to those of you in hotter climes, here in North Germany it is unusually warm, and since it's usually cooler there is no air conditioning, or even fans in most buildings. I work on what Americans would call the 4th floor and Europeans the 3rd, with my computer running day and night and a small menagerie of hard drives happily whirring away, and it gets hot!

To cool us down, I thought I'd share some photos from roughly 6 months ago, when I was visiting my family near Philadelphia. There had been a cold snap and children were crossing their fingers for snow days. Luckily for them, there were plenty after the snow storm hit January 3rd.

It doesn't snow very much there, not like it did in Upstate New York where I went to University, but it's still more than we get in Hamburg.

The snow began the night before, and I watched it gather on the branches outside my bedroom window

The next morning the same window looked like this:

Although I don't like the cold, it was great to have a few days of "real" winter before going back to rainy Hamburg. When I was little, we used to sled down the hill and build snowmen, and it was so nice to experience that kind of snow again on my visit to the home I grew up in.

I grew up in this house, and lived here my whole life until I went to University. Hamburg has always felt temporary, our apartment here never quite like home to me. And while my parents' house feels more like home to me than anywhere else, I often forget how beautiful it is, especially in the summer.

My parents have three small brownish dogs, all rescues so I can't really tell you want kind. Small, silly, brown dogs. Generic if you will. We had to put them in little coats and dig out paths for them in the yard to run around in. Even then the smallest and silliest refused to go out, and my mother had to put her on a leash and lead her around.

On the other hand, the birdies didn't seem to mind the snow too much.

Do you remember last winter when we were all waiting for spring and dreaming of summer? Now that it's here add a link to your fave winter post in the comments so we can cool down while reminiscing about chilly weather.

Missing home during the summer

It doesn't look like I'll be able to make a trip back to my parents' house this summer. They still live in the house I grew up in, and a little part of me will always think of it as home...

Most of these photos were just taken with my ipod last summer, before I got the camera I'm using now. But even with the poor image quality, they bring back a lot of memories. The cat's name is Benny.

My parents live along the mid Atlantic East Coast if the US, in a fairly rural area. We have neighbors, although one is a dairy and corn farm. 

My father dug this pond when I was a kid, now it's full of flowers, lily pads, goldfish and frogs.

We've had pet chickens for years. I can't remember how old I was when we got our first set of chicks, but we had to keep them in the house under a heat lamp until they were big enough to go outside.

My sister with a butterfly net.