Half-day on

Just a brief post before dropping into full-time hammer-and-tongs mode until Tuesday evening. This may be the last post for a while, though I hope that the work won't get as hairy as that. As long as the curators and the bosses stay out of our way, it should be possible for Ingrid and I to get all twenty rooms drawn up and all the hundreds of artefacts and objects identified by number so that she can then specify them during the remaining two days (because the tender docs must be sent out by post on Friday evening, and there's at least a half-day of photocopying to be done to make the necessary N sets).

I was thinking about cosmopolitanism and feeling at home in a strange place, and I think that it's related to the signal and noise distinction, on which I've been writing a post for a few weeks now. The distinction is based on context, not intrinsic value; one is lost in a new city because one doesn't yet know its particular context. The turning point comes when one can identify a few landmarks and principal distinctions, and can find the Rathaus by walking off in that direction (waves hand vaguely) rather than by reading a map and looking for street names.

Gotta go. Take care, be good, have a happy weekend.

[Updated] quarter-day for me, actually; full day for Ingrid. Second-In-Command and I turned up at 4pm and found Ingrid hard at work. She'd woken with a start and a guilty conscience at 7am, and had been in the office since 8:30. Three hours after we arrived, she "lost" the file she'd been working on all day while copying it across the network to my MacBook. No idea what happened: it was just Gone. Thanks, Bill. She came this close (holds up finger and thumb very close together) to a well-justified meltdown, so SIC declared the day to be over and ordered us to go home immediately.

We shall meet tomorrow at 9:30 for a fresh start.