Awake

... and blogging while the milk cooks for hot chocolate. Damn, but this is getting old. (4:39, the first streetcar of the day just went past.)

I'd been dreaming of rivers and of the long, flat, narrow boats that ply the inland waterways of Europe, before the scene changed to Stuttgart where I was leading a team searching for sites for new mineral-water wells. Strange, and strangely peaceful. The river scene was from imagined paintings in the style of Monet, all glittering reflections and dappled shadows and sunlight falling through weeping-willows. I am embarrassed at my dreaming self's taste for kitsch.

The Mauersegler (not swallows) may have left, I haven't seen or heard them in two days. This would be about the right time for their migration, consistent with the last few years. [Update: they're still here, but possibly in reduced numbers.]

To keep you up to date, the lump is diminishing daily to my great contentment. I mentioned having blood taken for a test. The results are unusual and inconclusive: everything is normal except GPT (liver) values which are well off the high end of the scale. A re-test looking for hepatitis was negative, and my liver is said to feel normal. We decided that the high values are perhaps a temporary "spike" related to the leg or the heparin, and will run the tests again in four weeks when the doc comes back from his summer vacation.

I'm walking more than after the business started (up to an hour a day, in instalments of 20 to 30 minutes each) but still much less in total than say a year ago at this time.

On the workfront, I spent four days figuring out how the do-it-yourself reporting system in the Münsters' database works, and a day and a half implementing this for the first time in a new area of the database. Putting it into the remaining areas will probably take only two hours per area. I find this amusing, and fairly typical of programming work: figuring out what to do is much harder than the actual doing.