It's been a long time coming, but finally we have a pool full of water and some of the retaining walls are painted.

Getting close now!

Lugwig van Beethoven is another of my favourite composers for piano. Beethoven's piano sonatas are astoundingly beautiful - Pathetique, Waldstein, Moonlight and Appassionata among my favourites.

Pianist and author Charles Rosen on Beethoven:

Beethoven enlarged the limits of the classical style beyond all previous conceptions, but he never changed its essential structure or abandoned it, as did the composers who followed him. In the other fundamental aspects of his musical language, as well as in the key relations within a single movement, Beethoven may be said to have remained within the classical framework, even while using it in startlingly radical and original ways

This recording is myself playing Beethoven's hauntingly sad - but calming - Moonlight Sonata.

Played through Cantabile (of course) using Synthogy's Ivory virtual piano.

If you're interested in listening to some other Beethoven Sonatas there are some excellent recordings available on the Piano Society.

Another beautiful sunset taken from our front balcony. I'm pretty sure the vertical steaks are rain.

As you're no doubt aware, the Space Shuttle Discovery has touched down for the last time.

To think that construction of this spacecraft started while I was in primary school, first flew while I was in high school and has been in active service for all of my adult life is remarkable. 39 times this vehicle has gone through the demands of launch and re-entry.

Astronomer Phil Plait summed this up nicely on his Bad Astronomy Blog:

Today, Wednesday, March 9 at 11:57 a.m. Eastern time, Discovery — the Orbiter that launched Hubble in to orbit, then serviced it twice; that deployed Ulysses; that was the last Orbiter to dock with Mir; that twice was the first Orbiter in space after another was lost; that served more flight days than any other Orbiter, 365 in total, a solid year; a spaceship built by humans that’s logged 238,000,000 kilometers (148 million miles) in space, the most used spacecraft ever built by humans — set her wheels to Earth one final time.

I’d say "Welcome home", but the ground is not a spaceship’s home.

So with that in mind, rather than a final landing I've opted for a ready to go photo:

Discovery Prepared for Final Launch

Photo used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) licence.
Copyright © 2011 nasa photo hq. Original

Until the other morning I'd never heard of, let along seen a white rainbow. According to WikiPedia, it's actually called a fogbow and the lack of colour is caused by the extremely small size of the fog water droplets.

So I was pretty impressed with this, but not as much as this guy was with his rainbow.

Some more progress on the pool! The retaining walls have now been rendered (can still see blocks outlines due to some retained moisture) and the crooked fence has been reset and new boards inserted.

Before we started building our new pool, I did a drawing of what we were planning in Google Sketchup - Google's 3d modelling tool. Now that most of the major construction of the pool is in place I thought it would be interesting to see how closely they match - and it's quite remarkable: