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Movie - Clash of the Thundermans (2026)

Today was another of those days when the renovation of our house managed to consume a substantial part of the day without us actually doing anything that would look particularly dramatic in a photograph. There was no new wall appearing, no roof disappearing and no major piece of construction machinery involved. Instead, we moved boxes, cleaned things, threw old things away, tested the new dishwasher and generally tried to transform another small part of a construction project into something that begins to resemble a home. These days are less spectacular than the major stages of a renovation, but I am beginning to think they are just as important. There comes a point when a renovated house has to stop being a collection of completed building jobs and start becoming a place where we can actually live. The kitchen finally starts becoming a kitchen We had quite a lot of kitchenware stored away in boxes, some of it for a very long time. Today we started moving a good par...

Three Wives, One Doctor and a Family Tree at 2 a.m.

By the time Saturday was finally winding down, it was already well past 22:00. The New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc I had unexpectedly found in a Moldovan supermarket earlier that evening was now open beside me. I had a computer in front of me, a nice bottle of wine within reach and, more importantly, the entire Internet available for entertainment. There are probably more sensible ways to spend a Saturday night. I opened my family-tree database. That was the end of any realistic prospect of going to bed at a reasonable hour. The doctor with three wives One of the important unresolved points in the German side of my family tree concerns my great-grandfather — the father of my German grandfather. He was a medical doctor and, over the course of his life, had three wives. That much I knew. What happened around those marriages, however, had become obscured by the usual family fog that accumulates when information is passed verbally from one generation to ...

A Bottle of New Zealand in a Moldovan Supermarket

On Saturday evening, after what had already been a very long day dealing with the renovation of our house in central Chișinău, we made one final stop at a local supermarket. The objective was extremely simple: buy some wine, go back to Vita's parents' house and finally stop doing things for the day. Moldovan supermarkets are certainly not short of wine. Quite the opposite. The shelves can be packed with bottles from local producers, covering everything from very inexpensive everyday wines to considerably more ambitious bottles. So I was walking past what was, by now, a fairly familiar wall of wine when something caught my attention. New Zealand. I stopped and looked again. There, among all those bottles in a supermarket in Moldova, was a 2025 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, branded Blue Horizon . I had not been looking for New Zealand wine. In fact, I had absolutely no expectation of finding any. That was precisely why seeing it...

A Saturday of Renovations, Police, Fibre and Tarragon Lemonade

Saturday, 26 September, was supposed to be one of those thoroughly mundane days: deal with a few things at the house, collect some photographs, sort out the Internet connection and eventually go home. Of course, once a house renovation is involved, a list containing the words “a few things” should never be trusted. We are still spending much of our time at Vita’s parents’ house while the work on our own place in central Chișinău continues. So the day began there with a suitably substantial breakfast before we set off for the city, about a thirty-minute drive away. We had several jobs waiting for us. By the time we finally returned in the evening, the day had somehow accumulated a police stop, another meeting with the contractor, roughly a thousand old family photographs, one failed fibre installation, another Internet contract, Georgian lemonade, two enormous pieces of Napoleon cake and some salt-and-pepper dispensers that very nearly acquired new owners. ...

TOMS - Inside the Group Model: Membership, Shared Contact Data and Seating Context

After looking in detail at the Guest model, the next logical object in my C++ event-planning reconstruction is the Group . At first, a Group appears simpler than a Guest. And in terms of stored state, it genuinely is. The reconstructed Group contains only three pieces of group-specific state: a collection of Guests, a Group name and a separate object containing shared contact information. But the simplicity of those fields is deceptive. The Group sits at an important junction in the application. It connects individual Guests into meaningful units, provides shared contact information, contributes presentation and sorting behaviour, and even participates in seating-related calculations. The Group is not merely a label attached to several Guests. It is an independent domain object with its own identity, contact data, membership and behaviour. The Group is itself an Event Object Like the Guest, the Group derives from the common Event Object foundatio...