Business as usual

How quickly we humans adapt to routines, and how easily exceptional circumstances become routine. Still lumpy, still self-injecting heparin, still wrapping bandages around my leg. Ho hum.

On the balcony summer office again, taking a break from work; tea and telephones on the Braunes Rolltablett at my side but no biscuits. Maybe I should get a cheap deck-chair to sit in out here, to get my legs into a different position.

It's a beautiful day, mostly-blue sky with a few decorative clouds, a balmy 27°C with a gentle breeze from the west bringing the smell of the forest; the forecast is for rain this afternoon. Sparrows keep flying up to the balustrade intending to sit, then noticing me half-concealed behind the Benjaminas and darting away with a flurry of wings. The dull, soft, rattling sound of their flight is quite charming.

I've started working for the Münsters again, in 20-minute installments; this time I am programming rather than translating, extending a do-it-yourself report-writer system to cover all areas of the application. Great fun. It's a different kind of thinking to what I did on the architectural competition, and different again to translating. This stage of the work is almost purely conceptual: I am trying to understand what the application is doing by following the sequences of control and command through the actions, and watching as the data gets manipulated along the way. This stage of the job is somewhat like dumping the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle onto a table and organizing them by category: there's another edge piece, put it in this pile; here's more sky, put it in that pile.

I was thinking about happiness recently, and realized that nearly every hour I see or feel or hear something (a sunset, a rose, the breeze on my skin) which makes me think "I love <that which just happened>". This "I love" is my natural state of being, just as others are naturally pessimistic or angry or fearful.

In other news Dale has written amusingly about his massage practice:

"All those years I tried to get women
To take their clothes off, and to touch them,"
I said. "And it turns out all I had to do
Was charge them money for it."

Heheheheh, who knew?

Shabbat shalom, my dears. Be kind to yourselves and to each other, and enjoy the weekend.