To the north

Preparing an early lunch before going to fix a system problem in Hedgehog's gallery before taking the train to Hamburg for a short week (back Friday night).

This last day-and-two-halves has seemed like a week, I feel as though I've run a marathon and fought a pair of tigers and slept about sixteen minutes in total. Can't imagine why.

The possible job in Münster is now a very possible job. My contact must have speaks with his superiors © Peter Sellers, and it's all subject to non-disclosure clauses and contracts etc etc; but it looks pretty good. They don't want me to work in their offices, but are willing to pay an unsupervised hourly rate. Such trust! I really need this job. If it all comes off, the planned three months' work would triple my income for this year. Not that it's particularly well-paid, but because this been such a piss-awful year financially.

Actually, what does "well paid" mean? I'm bidding 20% under what is usual for the profession according to a few colleagues whose advice I asked, but it's still more than twice the rate I'll get in Hamburg this month. One of those colleagues said, "I try to figure out how much money my work will save the client, and that's what I charge them." It's an interesting idea, but doesn't always apply so neatly. The Münsters are happy to pay me a buttload of money because it'll enable them to sell their software in the English-speaking market, which will bring them in N buttloads of money. On the other hand, architects are paid a fixed percentage of the construction cost of the project, no matter now much work they have to do, which leads to the paradox that the extra effort you put into reducing the client's costs also reduces your income. It is not in the architects' interest to build cheaply, and it definitely is in their interests for the client to change his mind often and late because such changes are billable at an hourly rate. The commercial relationship between architect, builder and client guarantees hard feelings all round.

Elsewheres

The Lioness is in fine voice tonight:

Basically, I think I am afraid of becoming a full adult bcs I am afraid I won't be a fully competent, fully excellent one. I don't think that people who fight becoming adults do it bcs their childhood or adolescence were so good they are not ready to give that up. I think it's maybe bcs they weren't all that good, something was missing, they were filled with fears still left un-faced, still not laid to rest, and they fear they will never be good enough at the next, most self-informative, most decisive, most important stage. If you're going to be an adult and not be a fully excellent one, well, potential is good when made into something real, if not you might as well throw yourself in the river now. The tought of what the world is going to demand of us is exhausting but you want to know what the truth is? The truth is, the world, our life, reality are never as bad as our fears abt them. NEVER. I am now looking The Beast right in the eyes, enough, enough of reinforcing what I'm not, time to salute what I have managed to become. I have come far, I truly have come far. I think it's time to see that.

Wonderful, inspiring, enhumbling.

In other news courtesy of swissmiss a very simple, beautiful house high on a mountainside in Scheidegg, Switzerland. (Links to a review of the house and the architects' website.) When I win the lottery, I will make the owners an offer they would be foolish to refuse, and spend the rest of my days looking out of this window. And it was even cheap to build, apparently: only 1450 Euros per square metre.



Paradise, that is.

And like all paradises, completely delusional. I know even while I admire the photo, that I could not live like that. Where are the bookshelves? where are the computers? where are the CDs and DVDs? where are the paintings and etchings and photographs? Where are the piles of paper waiting since 1998 to be filed away? No, the inside of that house would look very different after I'd lived there for a month. Alas.