Markus’ Blog

Just learned from my dad that apparently my mom’s sister, Hermi, suffered pretty very wind damage to her house. Looks like parts of the roof truss were ripped away. My aunt was at work as it happened. Neighbours called Fire Rescue and they secured the site and had the roof patched up again with a makeshift fix by the time she got home. So that was good. And that nobody got hurt.

The house of my dad’s sister and brother-in-law lost a few roof tiles during the storm, but nothing too serious happened. My grandma’s house, very close by, sustained no damage.

This is the first time that actually somebody I know or am related with suffered severe damage during a windstorm. The hurricane hit Thursday and Friday of last week.

It must have been really bad. Probably not the last storm of this intensity, though.

An article on the website of the Austrian Broadcasting Station talks about some pretty scary temperature developments in large parts of southern and central Europe.

The report is based on a new US study that says that over the next few decades it will become unbearably hot in the Mediterranean. One of the co-authors of the study, Jeremy Pal, is quoted saying the extreme weather conditions of today will be normal in the future. The extreme weather conditions then will be unprecedented.

The study also says that a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions can greatly reduce the impact, but there will still be negative effects. Or in other words: if we do something (or a lot, actually) now, we suffer a little, if we don’t, we suffer a lot.

Now, the scary thing is that it is already noticeable. The changes in weather patters have already happened and are still happening. Last winter was pretty much the first time ever that even Alpine regions in Austria barely got snow.

Then, again for the first time ever, temperatures went up into the mid to high twenties (Celsius) for a brief period as early as April. Of course it cooled down again after a couple of days, but still. Now, Austria is experiencing 35°C weather along with many other parts of Europe. That’s definitely unusual, and it seems like change is happening faster and faster.

During the early 2000s everybody was noticing that spring (and to some degree fall) were getting shorter. It would stay cool fairly long, but then jump 10-15 degrees within a couple of days (from, say, 8°C to 20°C). Summer had arrived. No more gradual increase in temperature. I guess that’s just gotten even more extreme now. Just this past week they had tornadoes and other severe weather conditions in many parts of Austria and the neighbouring countries.

To top it all off, I just found on the web that there was snowfall in Western Austria and Switzerland at the end of May of this year. 28°C on the weekend, snowfall two days later on Tuesday.

This is what makes this study so scary to me. That we can already see and feel the effects of the change.

Quite a few, it would seem. I was aware that there were at least one, probably several towns and cities called Vienna in the United States. What I did not know was how many there actually are and that there’s even one in Canada.

So, let’s see:

• Vienna, capital and a federal state of Austria
• Vienna, Ontario
• Vienna, Georgia
• Vienna, Illinois
• Vienna, Louisiana
• Vienna, Maine
• Vienna, Maryland
• Vienna, Missouri
• Vienna, New York
• Vienna, South Dakota
• Vienna, Virginia
• Vienna, West Virginia
• Vienna, Wisconsin
• New Vienna, Iowa
• New Vienna, Ohio
• Vienna Township, Genesee County, Michigan
• Vienna Township, Minnesota
• Vienna Township, Montmorency County, Michigan

Pretty impressive list. I had no idea.

Apparently it is already paying off that my Dad now has access to the Internet. He surprised me this morning with these two pictures which were waiting for me in my inbox. Thanks for the photos, Dad. Now you just gotta learn how to scan pictures without help from a former co-worker.

That’s me in the kitchen sink.

And that’s all three of us in the living room a few years later.

Lovely carpet and wall-paper, eh? Gotta love the seventies.

I learned on Friday, from my Dad, that my Grandma’s leukemia apparently took a rapid turn for the worse. She had been first diagnosed last summer, but it turned out quite quickly that her illness was quite stable and not progressing. Also, it didn’t cause her any symptoms or discomfort, except in rare instances.

I phoned her Saturday morning (Saturday evening her time) to find out how she’s doing, first hand. This is what she told me.

As her symptoms worsened, it was found that her platelet count hat dropped to 65,000, which is not good at all. One should at least have 100,000. Normal would be 120,00-130,000. (Just checked Wikipedia, and there they say a healthy person has between 150,000 and 400,000 platelets per mm³.) Now she has to go in and get several transfusions which take 7.5 hours each (because they have to drip very slowly) in an attempt to get her platelet count up to 100,000. I also found out that one such transfusion costs EUR 6,000.00. That’s CAD 9,230.49 according to XE.com. Yay for a good health care system that takes care of that kind of stuff. Once that works, it’s on to chemotherapy for her. Not much fun, for sure, but better than the alternative. If her platelet count doesn’t go up, it looks like there isn’t much that can be done.

Her routine checkup had been scheduled for this week three months ago. As it turns out, three months may have been a little long of a wait, since it got to the point where her symptoms worsened considerably the week before she was scheduled to go in.

Her physician suggested she may have been suffering from this blood disease for longer than just 8 or 9 months. It’s just, she didn’t have any symptoms, so nobody looked for a blood disease before then. It has also been found that her heart and her spleen are enlarged, which makes her abdomen hard to the touch.

I am holding my thumbs and crossing my fingers that the treatment works. She sounded calm and confident when I talked to her. She’s a tough girl.

Way to go, Grandma. — Zeig’s ihnen, Omi.

Seems like Vancouver can’t get enough snow this season. The Lower Mainland is, yet again, covered in a white blanket. Not even two months ago it looked like this and we’re back there now. There have been little interludes of snow between the first big snowfall and now, as well.

The rules of snow here are:

• Vancouver never gets snow as early as November.
• Vancouver never gets snow several times during a season.
• Snow never sticks around except for a few hours, maybe a day.

There’s just a tiny, little problem with these rules. Every single one has been broken this season.

On the other hand, there’s Austria. They would like snow. Lots of it (in some parts anyways). However, they are experiencing the mildest winter ever. It is not unusual for Vienna to not get a lot of snow. It is unusual if the daytime highs approach or even exceed 10°C — and not just for a day or two. It is also unusual for the Western provinces to not have any snow at all. Innsbruck, for instance, is forcast 6°C for Friday and 9°C for Sunday. Apparently it is so bad that pollen are in the air already.

And, of course, Tourism Austria is not happy at the lack af snow at all. It’s pretty bad for the economy.

Crazy stuff!

I hope everybody had a good start into 2007. May the remainder of the year be even better.

I was yet again amazed as to how quiet (in regards to fire crackers) it was yesterday here in Vancouver. Back in Austria, kids are starting to make the occasional noise as early as Dec. 29, and it gets worse from there. Especially for pets, the evening of Dec. 31 tends to be very loud and stressful over there.

Not so here, and I quite like that.

This time it’s my mom’s turn.

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Mutti!!!

Hope the birthday card made it in time.

On October 1, 2006, federal elections were held in Austria.

Unlike Canada, where there’s usually a minority government formed by the party who won the most seats, European countries have the tradition of entering coalitions with other parties to form a majority government — usually it’s two parties, but three are not unheard of either. (In case somebody is more interested in how it works, there’s a Wikipedia introduction into Austrian Politics.)

Needless to say that there’s a lot of negotiating going on, both publicly and behind closed doors. They are figuring out which items of which party’s program will be incorporated into the government’s plan for the next four years and which ones they are willing to compromise on. And of course, since this is happening now in Austria, the whole process often looks more like kindergarden all over again rather than adults trying to achieve something and foster change for the better.

Interestingly enough, this time around it’s the Conservatives (they used to lead the previous government and lost big time during these elections and are now in second place behind the Social Democrats) who seem to be very unwilling to join a coalition government as “junior partner”, even though they don’t just say that. Instead, they keep imposing conditions, making threads, holding negotiations, etc. From day one it seemed like they were mostly pouting that they lost.

Okay, boys and girls, let’s get on with it. Either you want to be in the government or you don’t. If you don’t, then say so and other options can be investigated. If you do, enter into (and stay in) constructive negotiations.

Don’t keep on stalling, don’t keep playing “hard to get”. You lost 8% and first place. That should tell you something. Say, “we’re not available to form a joint government with the Social Democrats,” if you don’t want to. It’s been a month since the elections already and negotiations have been going nowhere, so far. They haven’t really started, even.

The country needs a government, not kindergarden.

Happy October 26, Austria, even though it’s almost over by now.

I’m sure everybody had a good time, considering that it was sunny and temperatures reached well into the twenties, which is quite uncommon for the end of October.

Now, that I am not living there anymore, I am wondering (more so than when I did live there), how it would have been like had the Soviet troops not agreed to leave in 1955… The Iron Curtain may have been instated a few kilometers further West — with me, my family and friends, behind it.