Kaua’i

What happened to Matt?

Not a lot of updates lately, eh? Well, I’ve been very busy finishing a certain game and preparing Future Sauce. And that bandage isn’t helping, either – I sliced off the top of my index finger Nothing that won’t completely heal, but nasty and annoying. Be careful with them knifes there, kids!

Still…not sure when, but regular updates should resume pretty soon!

I wonder what would happen

If I updated this blog regularly.

Six-legged tragedy

You see them every day, but you never notice them: insects that got crushed on the front of your car. Now Volker Steger has released a series of photographs that show closeups of this little graveyard. Spiegel.de has a (German) interview and a gallery with some of the pictures. Absolutely stunning, showing us the world in a way that we never consciously perceive it.

Playstation 3 Network

If you have a Playstation 3 and would like to add me to your friend list, you can send an invite to “Matthias”. Remember that this is a 100% private account I use for recreation.

I’m still alive!

Quite literally this time.

Horseback Rriding

“Angry much, Matthias?” Wolfi asked in the comments to the last post. The answer, of course, is “yes”. And “no, not really”. I just find it a lot easier to write about things that get me riled up than reflect on all the cool and fun stuff in my life. Let’s call it a “character trait”, okay?

So to balance everything out a bit, here’s a picture of one very happy day three weeks ago, when Victoria organized a Sonoma tour and we went for a horseback tour of the Roche vinyards.

R.I.P. Rikku

Rikku was doing badly this morning and fading fast, so we had to put her to sleep. Not sure what happened, might be head trauma or some sort of poisoning. The other birds all seem to be doing fine, but I’ll have to watch them closely for the next few days.
Always a bummer when a bird dies, but that’s budgies for you. Rikku was one of the two birds that I first got when I bought the new cage three years ago, she will be remembered fondly as the best climber to get to impossibly placed millet spray around the cage.

Sonoma Heat Wave

It’s over 100 degrees in Sonoma…and our AC unit is broken. Fun

Killer Tadpoles From Hell!

A while ago I posted pictures of my little frog tank at work. I picked up some tadpoles off the side of the road, they grew into cute little frogs, and the 11 I now have are still going strong. They are slowly growing and currently between 1 and 2 inches big.
Enter the Sonoma Creek. Last Tuesday Victoria and I were passing a bridge and I noticed some movement down there. “Look, there’s fish down there!”, I said. Big ones, too, idly floating in the warm water. But something didn’t seem quite right, and a second (and third) look revealed the truth: those were bullfrog tadpoles. Half-foot long tadpoles with bodies as big as golfballs. Tadpoles that could swallow my 2 month-old frogs in one gulp. If you’ve been growing up in America this might not be news to you, and I’ve certainly seen my share of tadpoles in the last 30 years. But growing up in Germany I’d never seen anything that came even close in size! I haven’t been able to go back yet to take pictures, but maybe I’ll do so this weekend.