» Amazing Projects

A pond, a yachting club and a golf course.
Our projects in the past 10 years:

1) summer 2001: sweating in the garden, we decide it would be great to have some place where we could cool down. So we built ourselves a 80 square meter natural pond in the garden, all by ourselves.

2) summer 2002: not satisfied with this, we thought it would be great to have a seafront house (we live in the Bavarian Alps, so this is certainly not easy to realize). We found ourselves tied into one of our dumbest projects ever: since we couldn't increase our swimming pond to a size that would trick us into believing it is the seafront, we rather cunningly put a 6m catamaran on our pond, and took some photos just at the right angle to make our house look like a seafront resort. The look of disbelieve on the faces of our neighbors will live in our memories forever.

3) summer 2003: Since having a sailing vessel on the pond meant we are into sailing (we actually aren't, we just know someone who owns a boat), so founding a yachting club kind of made sense. We founded the first, and only, yachting club in our town (mind you, no major bodies of water in a 30 km vicinity, so no real point). We dubbed it "Segel Club Unterer Markt" ("Lower market sailing club"). This nicely abbreviates to "S.C.U.M.", which we printed on pirate themed t-shirts now proudly worn by my wife and daughter (both blissfully unaware of the English meaning :-)).

In the following years we have
- 2005: built a 3 hole golf course in our garden (no, the garden is not that big. You just need to be clever with the layout)
- 2009: doubled the size of the swimming pond because we were sick of mowing the lawn (thereby loosing the golf course)
- 2011: used a stretch of farm land adjacent to our garden to build another 3 hole golf course, because our friends missed the S.C.U.M. golf tournaments.

Redwine, President of the S.C.U.M.
(Thu 17th Nov 2011, 20:24, More)

» Presents

Dicing for presents
This year, like the past 4-5 years, we will be dicing for presents. Everyone brings along 3 presents. 2 should be obvious crap, old stuff found in the basement etc. The third present should be something good, but shouldn't cost more than a few quid. All are wrapped in old newspaper rather than expensive gift wrapping, in order to make sure that noone can tell who brought the presents or whether it is a good one, or a crappy one.

We then pile up all presents on the table, and start dicing for the presents (2 persons each round, the one with the higher number can select any present from the pile). After the pile is gone, 2-3 rounds of more dicing, where the winner can pick any present from anyone, or tell anyone to give a specific present to an other person. This works best with at least 6-7 people.
Afterwards, presents are unwrapped one after another in order to give everyone a chance feel stupid enough for choosing what presents they got.

Greatest presents so far (it is the crappy ones that you actually tend to like most):
- an "ancient" Egyptian table lamp (fuck ugly, made a return next christmas to be won by the original owner)
- 3 porcellain garden dwarfs (again, fuck ugly, didn't survive the dwarf tossing contest later in the evening)
- a used toaster (15 years old, completely caked in burned bread crumbs)
- condoms (the look of disbelief on grandmom's face will live in our memory forever)
(Fri 27th Nov 2009, 17:30, More)

» Weird Traditions

Best tradition ever...
is the so called "Clausen-Treiben". Saint Nicolas Day (Dec 6th) evening young men in our village dress up in wild costumes made of fur, animals heads and antlers, wearing large cow bells around their waist and carrying wooden sticks. After dark they start roaming the village beating up EVERYONE they see on the streets. They go from house to house, ask for a drink (which they usually get) until they are drunk (which takes quite a while). It is based on a medieval tradition meant to fight the ghosts of winter.
It is quite a shity tradition if you are the one who gets beaten up though.
To give you an idea:

(Thu 28th Jul 2005, 21:12, More)

» When animals attack...

Adventure holiday with the
Royal Navy. I was swinging on a rope from a Seahawk helicopter just a few meters above the water when all of a sudden a killer whale attacked me.
(Sun 5th Jun 2005, 16:47, More)

» Crap meals out

Sea urchin eggs
Went to a very nice Sushi restaurant in Japan, together with a few colleagues. Everything served looked really lovely, tasted phantastic. Until we stumbled over a dish which - with 2 Japanese guys accompanying us - we roughly translated to be eggs from sea urchin. One of my colleagues was very interested but a little concerned what it would taste like. So one of the others poked the chopsticks into the stuff and tried a small amount. He then said "tastes fine", and went on to eat something else. Since that sounded convincing Mr. Anxious took a really big bite, and a split second later his face turns all green. He then proceeded to the little boys room for a rather relieving vomit. After he came back, he described it as the worst experience in his whole life. He asked why the other guy hadn't warned him, to which he replied "I thought it would be a laugh". It was.
(Thu 27th Apr 2006, 20:39, More)