Signs of Spring

This is a compendium of posts from another place, gathered here for your convenience.

(March 20)
I guess it is Spring after all. I saw a ladybug and killed a mosquito yesterday.

(April 12)
Signs of Spring: moving the plants outdoors again.

(April 14)
Just had coffee and cake in bright sunshine, in the garden behind the office. I'd say that it is a good 12 °C (20 °F) warmer than on Friday. Perhaps this is finally Spring?

(April 15)
1. The lizards have emerged from hibernation and were sunning themselves on the stone wall by the railway gardens as I walked to lunch.

2. Over the span of a single weekend I went from walking on the north side of the street to enjoy the warmth of the sun, to walking on the south side of the street to avoid the heat of the sun.

(April 16)
3. Hay fever. Ah well, it can't all be golden.

4. The local restaurants have budded out, covering the sidewalks in tables and chairs.

(April 17)
5. Eating icecream outdoors in the garden behind the office, in shirt-sleeves.

(April 18)
6. It takes ages for the water to run hot, because the heating is off.

(April 19)
7. Cold rain on the weekend. Eh, whatever.

(April 23)
8. Feeling a tickle on my arm at work, and looking down to see an ant wandering along between the hairs.

(April 24)
9. The joyful shrieks of the kids at the daycare centre, as the pretty brunette caregiver hoses them down in the garden.

10. Dandelions, hundreds and hundreds of them, covering the road and railside verges.

11. Eating an icecream cone as I walk back to work after lunch. (Maracuja / Peach Cream, since you asked).)

12. Magnolias!

(April 25)
13. Comfortably wearing a short-sleeved shirt to work.

(May 1)
14. Entering the yellow phase. Tulips, daffodils, goldenrod, other stuff I can't name.

15. The swifts (not swallows) are back! Heard (and saw) them screeching and wheeling above the rooftops today. Bliss.

(May 2)
16. A fragment of eggshell on the pavement, quite small; the palest turquoise with tiny flecks of fox-orange.

17. A bright blue butterfly crossing my path.

(May 6)
18. Towering clouds stacking up miles high into the sky.

18a. And rapidly turning very dark indeed, and giving forth much lightning and thunder.

18b. And me hurrying to get home before the storm, making it to the very streetcorner of my block before the first drops fell.

On improving password security

It occurs to me that password security could be simply but greatly enhanced if the systems were to consider not only what we type but how we type it. I just had one of those strange standing-outside-yourself moments as I watched my hands entering my password for WoW, and realized that the way I type is nearly as distinctive as what I typed. A system that ignored the letters and paid attention to the "granularity" of my typing (speed, hesitations, keystrokes that run together) would identify me pretty well too. My WoW password is:

one two, three, four-five-six, seven, eight-nine ten

Anybody who had discovered the letters of my password and was typing while reading them would be typing very differently indeed, probably:

one two three, four five six, seven eight nine, ten

Not even remotely a match.

Software companies: start your engines.

Autopilot

Just had a strange little brain fart (as we in the trade call it). To set the scene, I'm in the kitchen intending to make tea. The teapot is sitting there with its lid on, still holding the dregs of last night's cuppa. Next to it is the coffee maker, and next to that the kettle which is coming to boil. While standing around, I notice that the coffee maker is closed, and intuit that this morning's used filter is still in it. So I open the little door and take the filter out, toss it in the bin, and walk to where the tealeaves are waiting — next to the coffee filters. I pick up a coffee filter and put it in the maker, then go back to get the tealeaves. I measure two teaspoons of leaves into the filter … and then suddenly wake up because I am caught in a dilemma. Two is the right number of spoonfuls-of-tealeaves, but the wrong number of spoonfuls-of-stuff-in-a-coffee-filter. I don't know what to do!

Fascinating to see one's thought processes at work.

Spring, almost

At home, having a day off while the boss is in the Black Forest. Listening to the sound of birdsong through the open window, for the first time in 2013. Spring surprises and delights me afresh every year, this sudden transition from silence to symphony, from absence to abundant presence, from stillness to activity, from midafternoon darkness to the Blaue Stunde as I walk home after work.

I saw a wonderful thing a few days ago, walking to lunch. To set the scene: it was the first day of nearly-Spring: crisp weather, bright sun and a perfectly clear sky. As I was walking down the street, I noticed a trio of hawks circling above the trees in the churchyard. They were flying very low, just clearing the rooftops, and I imagined that they were scouting for nesting sites. I watched for a while, and then my eye was caught by a strange rapid flicker of light overhead, way up high in the sky, like the tiniest imaginable strobe lights going on and off. It took me a while to figure out what I was looking at, but I eventually resolved it into a pair of V's of black-winged cranes flying north over the city, returning from their winter grounds in Africa. They were so high that I could only see them as dots: black left wing, white body, black right wing. The flicker was their wings flapping, briefly covering the white of their bellies.

It was the most incredible sight. I watched for several minutes until they were finally out of sight.

It was like a message from Life, saying "don't give up."

Victoria BC

Starting a new year in a new place. Sis and BIL have moved from Regina and are now living and working in Victoria, on the Pacific coast. As I write I can see the sun glinting off the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Olympic Mountains behind that. I think I'll miss Regina, but this seems a very pleasant place to live.

I wasn't intending to be here, actually, I should have been back home in Germany a week ago. But there's no work that particularly needs doing, and my mother asked me to accompany them on their annual pilgrimage away from the depths of the Torontonian winter. By the time I leave on Thursday I will have been here a full month, 19th to 18th. I will be so very happy to get home and be able to close a door behind myself. I love my family, but my gods I really need some time alone.

My father continues his slow decline. There are some days when his hands shake so badly he can hardly feed himself. His handwriting, once elegant, is as scratchy and wobbly as a four-year-old's. Some days he can walk without his cane, others he wobbles even with the cane and needs to take a rest after walking from bathroom to sofa. He needs help getting dressed — hell, he needs to be reminded where his clothes are kept.

Probably most distressing to him is that he's losing the ability to converse: his memory is so bad that he forgets what he was saying before he reaches the end of a sentence. This is in part because he tries to speak elegantly and properly but is losing his vocabulary, so he spends all his attention on recovering the right word and loses the thread of his thought.

Mom cannot face his condition, she flips between supportive sympathy and harsh cruel-to-be-kind determination. She will not consider any alternatives to staying home to take care of him, even as she bemoans that she has no life of her own because she is compelled to stay home and take care of him.

Mouse

Were someone to ask me to curate a collection of [pick a number] significant human-made objects, one of the first to come on board would be a pull-toy mouse from the British Museum's Egyptian collection. I'm not sure of the date, but the number "4000" is in there somewhere: either 4000 BCE or four thousand years old; I tend to the former. It's small, not much bigger than lifesize, and fairly crude, as you might expect of something made with technologies that were around then: clay body tapering to a point, little wheels for the feet, and a string to pull it by. It's a very simple object, dusty and dull even by the elevated standards of the British Museum, and I am certain that many visitors never notice it. I find it evocative and deeply moving, and it would have pride of place in my collection.

(Reminded of this by reading Celia Pearce's "Communities of Play")

Black dog

The strangest thing just happened. I was lying on my back on the floor (stretching out my back after a day spent mostly sitting) meditating with my eyes closed — and I had the impression that a large black dog entered the room. I knew it wouldn't attack me, it wasn't even particularly interested in me, but still I found it hard to close my eyes again. Eventually I felt that it was not in the room any more, and went on to finish the meditation.

But it still disturbed me so much that I had to walk around the apartment, stopping in each room for a moment, to feel whether it was still here. I think it's gone now.

Very odd.

Venice

Sitting in the quiet of a shared rental apartment, drinking coffee (not cappuccino) and eating chocolate-filled croissants. This is the first time I've been here in about six years, according to the blog and to my notebook. Certainly I haven't been since G and U stopped going because of their kids, which is five years ago.

Venice sounds like Sunday, no traffic and hardly any voices. The apartment is only about fifty metres away from the main traffic stream between the Stazione and San Marco, yet we hear nothing but occasional voices (in Italian) of residents and the workmen restoring the house at the head of the alleyway. The quiet is very refreshing, almost meditative. It feels a bit like the places we used for our retreats.

Mind you, the busy buzzing world is still out there, only 50m away. There's a supermarket just the other side of the bridge, where we bought groceries last night. (I'm here with members of the meditation group, though we won't be meditating as such. One is here now, two more arrive on Friday.)

I don't see much change in Venice, though of course shops come and go. Perhaps looking for change here is as conceptually wrong as looking for it on the artificial Main Street of Disneyland. It's all about continuity, repetition and predictability. That may be the reason for the phenomenon of tourists travelling huge distances to shop in the same chain stores that are known to them from their home countries. Or perhaps the tourists who do shop there don't have those stores, perhaps they only know them from advertising and fulfill a long-held aspiration by visiting. I've never been in such a chain to see who actually shops there.

Today's forecast is for cloud and storms towards evening, so it'll probably be just a day of local wandering. Biennale tomorrow and Thursday, forecast to be dry and mostly sunny.

Making coffee in the pretty but minimally-equipped rental apartment: ripped-open packet of coffee, spilled grounds in the sink, boiling water in a saucepan, using towel as a potholder. It reminds me of Winnie the Pooh bumping down the stairs on the back of his head, thinking that he might possibly be able to think of a better way to do it, if only he weren't being bumped on the back of his head all the time.

Yes, I did just quote Winnie the Pooh. It's not all Tolstoy all the time.

"Mystifyingly equipped" might be a better description. Dishwasher and washing machine, two fully-equipped bathrooms, wifi and computer and widescreen TV — but no potholders or sharp knives, and only one bar of soap between the two bathrooms. And remind me to tell you about the process of locking and unlocking the door.

I came here by train, overnight via Munich. I slept surprisingly well, the bed was long enough and comfortable. One learns quickly enough to suppress the initial reaction of startled fear when the train tilts into a curve and your head goes down.

My cellmate was a youngish DJ, on his way to a music studio in Treviso to record a new song. It seems a busy and very hard life, he'd been home for one day in the last three weeks before heading off on this trip. I didn't ask for his name or any particular questions about his music (in fairness, we only spoke during the dozen minutes between waking and his disembarking). He probably thought of me as a harmlessly pleasant old guy.

For the first time ever I find myself thinking in terms of what I can and cannot afford. I've truly never thought that before, up to now my income has always been sufficient for what I wanted to do (and its corollary: my wants were always simply and cheaply fulfilled). That has changed during the last few years, and not because of inflationary wanting. I can't really afford to be here now, I have to watch my expenses if I am to get through the week on the handful of cash I brought.

The reason is that my income hasn't kept step with inflation. If I remember rightly, I am earning the same hourly rate now that I was in 2002 when the currency changed. I certainly cannot remember negotiating or being given a raise. Yet costs have doubled, the beer that used to cost four Deutschmarks now costs four Euros.

I'm experiencing a really strong urge to delete this, to censor myself. Fuck that. This will be the truth, or as much of it as I can bear to make public.

Noon. Time to go outside and do stuff.

On spotting a pattern

Readers may — should — be aware of PostSecret, a kind of anonymous clearinghouse for secrets that people write on postcards and send to Frank, who posts (a selection of) them on the web. (To be clear: people post their own secrets, it's not for outing your friends or even enemies.) I read the site every Sunday (it updates once a week), and am always moved by at least one of the secrets.

For a marvellous time, there was a PostSecret iPhone app too, which did much the same thing — but without Frank's intervention, so people could and did post secrets at any time of the day or night. Since I liked the website so much, I bought and regularly read the app too.

The app had several effects, the one relevant to this story was that it increased by several orders of magnitude the number of secrets being published. This sudden superabundance made it really easy to spot patterns and commonalities. One pattern which I noticed early on, and which fascinated me, was this:

My dead [person I was very close to] spoke to me and saved my life.

Some examples (quoting from memory, obviously; the sense is correct even if the words may be misremembered):

I heard my dead father whistling in the kitchen like he used to do, so I went down to see. The stove was on fire.

The light was green but my daddy told me to stop the car, so I did. As I stepped on the brakes, a car ran through the red light in front of me. My secret: my daddy died three years ago.

My best friend died in a car accident n* years ago. I was driving across a highway bridge with my kids, when I heard her voice from the back seat telling me to change lanes. I did, and a truck blew out a tire and veered across the highway to crash into the barrier right where we had been. It would have killed us all.

Had this just been one secret of a single person, I'd have written it off as a hallucination or the babbling of an idiot. But there were hundreds of these! There was at least one every week!

I was and remain fascinated by these stories. I'd love to know what happened to these people: what exactly did they experience?

Am I saying that the dead remain on earth and communicate with us? No.

Am I saying that something inexplicable and very interesting happened to these people, which we would do well to study? Hell yes.

The app was taken down recently in an unfortunate victory of arseholism over decency. A minority of users were posting porn and/or abusive and insulting pictorial comments, taking advantage of the fact that the posting process was automated and instantaneous. A self-organizing committee of volunteers emerged who tried to dam the flood, but they were overwhelmed by the quantity of garbage that had to be found and deleted. Ah well.

* Can't remember how many years, it doesn't matter to the story.

Christmas

Hello blogosphere, it's been a long time since we met. I've missed writing, and I deeply regret the loss of the community that had developed here and in the blogs I read. I'm not going to promise to write every N days in 2012, as that would just be another stick to beat myself with when I missed a date; but I will start writing again.

I'm in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan with cousins and other assorted family, eating and drinking and watching Jeopardy (don't ask). The concept of experiencing "together time" by sitting in front of a TV with the sound turned up too high for conversation is difficult for me to grasp, but we all have our foibles and mine would strike them as equally ludicrous. The weather here is odd, very little snow and unseasonably warm at only -7°C.

This is my second week in Canada, actually. I started in Calgary with Favourite Cousin, we spent a day drinking capuccino and stoking each other up for an active and growthy* 2012. She suggested the term "accountability partner", somebody to whom you report regulary and who calls you on your lazy-ass weak-excuse-finding bullshit; we'll be AP-ing each other next year as she gets her keynote-speaking business in gear and I try to level up after what felt like a year of stasis.

I've been working like the proverbial dog this year, building the competition project we won in the summer of 2008. Three and a half years, dear friends; I suspect that many outsiders have no idea how slow archtitecture is. It was a success: the public and the local press liked it, the staff find it convenient to work in. We were only around 6% over budget, which is pretty good; unfortunately it was months late and although it's been in use since the formal opening on October 8, there are still workmen onsite. When I left a week ago, the architectural snagging list was ten small-print single-spaced pages long. Just architecture, mind you, the electrical and services engineers have their own lists too. If you want to have a look at this, mail me (address is above left) and I'll send you a link.

It's funny that 2011 now feels like a static, almost wasted, year, because I did in fact do quite a bit of stretching socially and at work. I went onsite as supervising architect for the first time, all three of us were there six days a week for the last two weeks before the opening. That was a real growth experience, I can tell you. I thought I was just walking around talking to people all day, and at first felt vaguely guilty that I "wasn't really doing anything." It took me a while to realize that this is exactly what the job is, at least during the last few panicy days.

Funny how it worked out: G and Offsite Guy believe in supervising by shouting abuse, which is really not my style at all. I played good cop to their bad cops: encouraging the contractors, building up their confidence and courage, smoothing over tension between trades in favour of give-and-take cooperation. Another difference is that I always greeted everyone I met, every day, even if it was only to catch their eye and nod across a crowded room; G and OG seemed not to see people that they weren't engaged in shouting at. I think my results were at least as good as theirs. Certainly at the opening celebrations, people came up to thank me for my involvement. Even people I don't remember speaking to, like the wellness franchise women, knew my name and felt that I had helped them.

Other than that, I've been playing World of Warcraft and hanging out in Second Life, attending a meditation retreat in Halifax in July and an informal meetup of the same group in Berlin in early December. I think that SL, Facebook (spits) and Twitter between them are responsible for the decline in my blogging: not only the incredible amount of time that they consume (particularly SL) but that they came to fulfill my need to communicate. Second Life in particular has become a great part of my social life, I use it not for gameplay (it's not a game, as I have said many times) but to meet friends. It's my equivalent to going to the pub to chat with the guys, but without beer or second-hand smoke.

* Yes of course "growthy" is a word.