Redbud Tree Narrowly Misses House

While W was talking on the phone to Grandma Harriet, W heard something that sounded like a closet rumbling. N was reading an e-mail in the back room and thought at first that a gutter had fallen off the house (it had been raining most of the day). As N peered out the window, she gradually realized that the redbud tree in the backyard had fallen down, narrowly missing the room that she was in. N began to laugh as she noted that the tree had fallen down perfectly. It had not destroyed her freshly planted tomato plants, nor had it torn a hole in the house. It had not even crushed the fence. The 30 foot section of the tree had in fact missed the house by mere inches. The tree appeared to have rotted or been eaten a bit by termites. There was still some tree remaining, but it will have to be cut down.

Renny, Marcel Win 5K

When WNMR participated recently in the Delta Gamma Run for Sight, it was to be a dominant day for the Blume's. Marcel and Renny finished 1-2 in their age group (boys 0-19 years of age), netting impressive medallions. W, though slower, ran the fastest he had run since turning 40. The hot weather made N exclaim that she hated running, but she still ran the entire race.

Name	Overall place	Time	Pace
MARCEL	18	20:35	6:38/Mile
RENNY	32	21:45	7:01/Mile
WALTER	78	25:33	8:15/Mile
NICHOLE	83	30:29	9:50/Mile

Complete race results are available at fleetfeet

Blume Boys Brave Record Cold

Incredibly, M and R weathered an overnight campout in unheated Adirondack style shelters last night. It was definitely a record breaking survival event for them, as the weather report shows. Temperatures locally at the campsite were even colder than the official weather, with the mercury reading 5 degrees.
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Marcel cooked chocolate chip pancakes in the 5 degree morning chill, while R bravely prepared frozen eggs and bacon together with his aptly named "Fridge Patrol" compatriots.

Muslims Hack Stereotaxis web site

W was surprised to see that the Stereotaxis website got hacked by some angry Muslims. The attack resulted in the web site looking like

before it was taken down.

A search on Google using the terms "casahack" and "StacOM" showed that this hacker had successfully attacked many websites.

R Gets Letter Published

Renny was shocked to discover that his letter to the editor had been published in the Webster-Kirkwood Times.

The text of his letter was about a dog park

Dog Park In Webster?

I think in the open space next to City Hall, there should be a fenced-in dog park open to the public, complete with a shallow fountain for drinking, two fire hydrants and grass and trees.

Our society needs a small area to let individuals and their dogs socialize on an early Sunday morning. If this doesn't work out, instead I would like to have the middle section of Larson Park made into a fenced-in dog area.

Renny Blume
Boy Scout with Troop 300
Webster Groves

Xmas Artillery

M and R celebrated an early Christmas receiving many gifts from their parents, who decided that it would be hard to transport presents back and forth to Redlands. R received a bow and arrow from Santa Claus. But there was even more weaponry to come: M & R also received some money from their Uncle Rexie. W, although he identifies most closely with the pacifist Quaker religion, reluctantly allowed it would be ok if M & R were allowed to buy airsoft guns with their money. Within an hour of bringing the guns home, R managed to shoot out a light on the deck, learning a valuable lesson in physics. W also found that it was quite fun to shoot arrows in the backyard.

Renny Gets Braces Off!!!

Before
After

After a harrowing 11 months, R was thrilled to get his braces removed today. He celebrated by eating some forbidden tootsie rolls with no worries of breaking wires.

W Celebrates 47th

W celebrated his birthday by playing his bassoon in the Merawood orchestra. He did not wear a geocaching hat while playing, and in fact does not even know the coordinates of the concert hall, but he is aware that the closest cache to the concert hall is "The Savage Beast"

Shock, Anger as Neighbors Raze Fence

With absolutely no warning, the eastern neighbors of WNMR removed the fence that had been dividing the properties. The fence had stood for over 10 years, and served the vital purpose of keeping Bingo from terrorizing the neighborhood.The only foreshadowing of the incident was the request of the neighbors for W & N to sign a permanent easement agreement to allow access to repair the fence. W & N had replied that no easement was necessary, they had no problem to allow access for repair of the fence. The next thing they knew, two men appeared and removed the fence completely. Apparently the easement was required to sell the house, and this was their way of solving the problem. So suddenly the eastern border of the Blume estate is fenceless, and W&N are pondering the next steps, feeling quite violated, as the fence apparently had been on their property.

Whirlwind W Week in Israel

Over the course of a week, W met his second cousin Dany Rasz in Haifa, visited the Golan Heights, Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, placed his hand in the hole where the cross had been placed in Jerusalem, swam in the Dead Sea, and further integrated specialized software for a remote controlled catheter system with an Israeli firm. Purple and blue traces show where W travelled in Israel.

Meanwhile life went on in Israel. There was a border skirmish with Lebanon thirty miles away and Ariel Sharon resigned from his Likud party in order to further his goals of disengaging from the Palestinians.
Due to his recently sprained ankle, W traveled to Israel while walking on crutches and using a wheelchair in the airport. This provided a new perspective on travel, and aside from slowing things down a bit, was not too trying. W was thrilled to discover that upon removal of his cast in his hotel room that he could walk with only a slight limp and would no longer require the crutches. The hospitality of the company that W visited could only be described as fit for a king. As soon as W and his colleague got off the airplane, even before passport control, they were met by a company representative, who whisked them through security to a waiting driver. The driver drove them two hours north to Haifa, a medium size city quite similar to La Jolla, California. One difference from La Jolla was that there are a few hotels on the top of the hill, one of which, the Dan Carmel, is where W stayed. The view from the hotel could only be described as spectacular; the Mediterranean could be seen on three sides, along with the not too distant mountains of Lebanon to the north. W was additionally impressed to note that he had been put up in the “Marc Chagall” suite; his room contained four Chagall prints signed by the artist.

The first evening W and his colleagues were invited to a dinner in the “German Colony” portion of Haifa to a very nice restaurant called 1867. With one exception, every restaurant that W went to during his stay in Israel had a security person sitting at the front. The next day W visited Biosense Webster Israel, which was the actual purpose of his trip. He called Dany Rasz, who is one the two sons of Aunt Leah, and found out that Dany Rasz owned a company only 300 meters from Biosense, and also that Dany had done some contract work for them. The evening featured a very sumptuous dinner at a restaurant called Neptune. A huge fish was served on a platter along with all manner of Middle Eastern salads and spreads, and other seafoods. None of the Biosense workers appeared to practice kosher eating practices, and indeed were thrilled to be eating shrimp and scallops.
View of Haifa, with W's travels overlaid

W’s weekend plan had been to rent a car and visit Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, but the Biosense representatives offered some tour possibilities and discouraged the idea of traveling by private car, so W and Paul took them up on this. Thus on the weekend W took a tour of Bible sites around the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights, followed the next day by a drive to the Dead Sea and Jerusalem. The Golan Heights was the most interesting to W, as he could see Syria and Jordan across mine fields and hear a lot about the history of the area from a veteran of the Six Days war. W began to space out on all the places that Jesus had been, feeling lucky that Jesus had only lived to age 33 or else he would have had to visit more places with the tour. Still there were interesting things to learn, how Jesus had traveled from Nazareth to Caphernaum so that he could preach where he wasn’t known simply as a carpenter, how there were so many Jewish laws that they could only be represented by the number of seeds in a pomegranate, and that the mall in nearby Haifa was nicknamed the “Scud mall” because that is where Saddam’s scud landed rather than on the oil refinery that it was aimed for in the Gulf war.

The drive to the Dead Sea was long but interesting as the crammed van (18 tourists) passed through some West Bank areas along the border between Jordan and Israel before arriving for a very brief visit to the northern end of the Dead Sea. W took a quick dip and found it saltier and cleaner than the Great Salt Lake of Utah. W revels in healthy Dead Sea mud

Then it was off to Jerusalem. W finally understood the big conflict there. Apparently Mohammed blasted off to heaven in almost the exact same place as Jesus, and the Romans destroyed the original huge Jewish temple that stood in almost the same place. The famous Wailing Wall was the only thing left where the temple had once been, and meanwhile the Muslims had gone ahead and built a mosque on top of it, since Mohammed had gone to heaven there. But this seemed to W to be the only thing that protected the Wailing Wall, since if somebody blew up the wailing wall, they would also blow up the mosque, and vice versa. W decided to slip a prayer in the wailing wall simply hoping that Muslims, Jews, and Christians could live together in peace. From there it was up the street to follow Via Delloroso, which is the road that Jesus carried his cross up. At the top was of course a church, apparently controlled by Greek orthodox Christians that contained the actual location of the crucifixion, and the burial place of Jesus (he was entombed and then resurrected three days later). At the coordinates of the crucifixion there was a shrine and a small hole that a person could put his hand into and feel the place where the cross had supposedly been pounded in. W wondered if he would receive any revelation as he inserted his hand, but came away with no grand spiritual awakening, but it was Saturday (Shabat), which is the holy day for Jews, rather than Sunday and perhaps this prevented any communication from getting through. No sooner had W walked away from the crucifixion than he was upon the site where Jesus had been encrypted. In contrast to other sites, this site had a long line required for visitation. After about 15 minute wait in a surging/pushing line, W finally was ushered in, but almost as quickly he had to be hustled out because somebody lit too many candles. A holy guy came rushing in to get the candles, and then there was a wait while more holy people went back to purify the area, and then W was allowed in. Finally, the tour was led to a german church, populated with actual Germans (in Israel?), this church was the place where Jesus had his last supper. This was simply a room, surprisingly bare of adornment, and with some Muslim writing and ancient (ca 500 AD) german graffiti in it.

Picture shows Efraim(?) (son of Dany), W, and Dany Rasz


W’s visit with Dany Rasz was extremely interesting. Dany met W at Biosense and they had lunch together at a nice seaside restaurant. W learned that Dany’s father Ernst had been an outstanding inventor and had come to Israel in 1934. There he invented some kind of device that could detect water underground using some kind of seismic analysis. The device was of enough interest that the King of Jordan invited Ernst to dinner in Jordan and they sat down together in a huge tent and ate food on the ground in the Arab manner with their hands. No slouch as an inventor himself, Dany took W to his company and showed him some of his own inventions which were extremely impressive and comprehensive, covering a wealth of technologies. W was most impressed by a video of a wheelchair that could go up and down stairs, using a very clever mechanism embedded inside the wheels.

Walter off to Israel, sprains ankle!

 
Walter has left for Israel. Unfortunately, shortly before leaving for Israel he sprained his ankle badly. It happened not because he was leaping for joy, but rather because he was retreating rapidly from the possibility of a swarm of stinging yellowjackets. W and N had noticed the strong evidence of a yellowjacket nest in the backyard, but were unable to find it due to thick weeds. W made the unwise decision to tell Renny about it. R, despite repeated commands from his father to cease and desist, could not resist, and raised a stick and beat the bushes where the yellowjackets were. At the same moment, the famous dog Bingo was being held by W so that he wouldn't unleash nerve-shattering barks at the 7 year old neighbor kid who was innocently asking "what'cha doing". W attempted to retreat rapidly with the dog in hand and as he came down some steps managed to severely sprain his ankle. Badly enough that he thought it might be broken and so it was off to the emergency room. There W received x-rays and a temporary cast and some crutches. W is looking on the bright side. He did not get stung. 

Bingo goes trick or treating

Bingo dressed up as the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Renny went as a mugger, carrying a tire iron, which proved surprisingly effective in drumming up about 10 pounds of candy.

The next evening began a storied Blume tradition. Torch the pumpkins! Here we see R torching his hand as well, but he survived the incident without incident.

Renselaer Nearly Reaches 10 mph

R ran an incredible 6:01 mile in his PE class, perhaps the fastest in his class. He averaged a speed of 9.97 miles/hour in his rush to the finish line.

W To Travel To Israel

After three years of working with the Johnson & Johnson owned company Biosense, W, who does not go by the nickname "Dubya", will finally visit the company headquarters in Israel as part of an ongoing software integration project with Stereotaxis. The company is located on the outskirts of Haifa. In related news, the president of Iran noted yesterday that Israel should be wiped off the map.

Marcel Exceeds Mach 0.0118 in X-Country Meet!

Marcel, a slight latecomer to the Webster Groves High School cross country team, surprised himself and other observers as he turned in a 15th place performance in his first cross country meet, the Webster Groves Invitational . Exhausted from his blistering 20 minute 50 second performance (a 6:42 min/mile pace, moving at over 13 feet/second, or approximately 0.0118 the speed of sound), M felt after finishing as if he was going to pass out, but maintained conciousness to enjoy his medal and a drink of water.

Victory!

After a long battle, victory has been declared over the washing machine. The washing machine had become so slow at filling that laundry sessions were becoming epic in nature. After attempting once to figure out how to open the back of the washing machine, W had pretty much decided that he wanted no part of the frustration inherent in attempting a repair, and was ready to buy a new washer. N remained unconvinced and spoke with some friends who advised her to buy a highly corrosive substance called CLR that is used to decalcify the supply lines. W knew that this was no time to desert from the battlefront, so he resumed his struggle with the back cover of the washer. Eventually the back cover yielded to reveal the relays controlling water input valves. W removed and soaked the offending parts in CLR, but to no avail. The part, when reinstalled produced the same slow trickle of water as before. W then turned to cyberspace and found a place that sold valves for 20 year old Whirlpool washing machines. Two days later the part arrived, and miraculously, it actually fit in the washing machine, although it looked quite different from the original. But even better, the washing machine now gushes effusively on all three settings: cold, hot, and warm.

Renny Eschews Jazz Band

R, despite landing a coveted jazz band spot, rejected the opportunity, having little enthusiasm for jazz band. Attempts to convince him otherwise fell on deaf ears, and it is apparent that the only remotely possible tactic might be that of reverse psychology.

Renny Lands Spot in Jazz Band

Renny's trumpeting abilities landed him a spot in the audition only Hixson jazz band. R is unsure about doing jazz, but recently tried playing his trumpet upside down in class, so has no trouble improvising. This puts him in a league with Miles Davis, who used to perform playing his trumpet backwards, facing away from the audience.

Marcel First Chair Percussion

Marcel's percussion audition earned him first chair responsibilities for the Webster Groves High School concert band. As he put it, "I am the best of the worst.". What he meant by this is that he did not make it into the more prestigious Wind Ensemble (no freshmen did), but managed to be in the top of the second tier, still a nice accomplishment.

Nichole has C4-C5 "encroachment"

This never before seen photo reveals Nichole's spine in all its glory. You can also see a small portion of her wondrous brain at upper right. N has been having some pain from slipping and falling on an oily spot in a parking garage on May 20th. Since this incident, N has noted tingling that goes down her arm when she tilts her head in a certain direction. She was recently imaged, and the radiologist noted some "encroachment" in the C4/C5 area. W was unable to actually distinguish this on the MRI, but managed to make a pretty picture out of it (Click here for larger view).