Cold

As in "Damn but it is." Right now the temperature is -14°C and it is very damned chilly indeed here indoors. I'm seriously considering putting on my long-johns. German houses (and apartments) just aren't built for these temperatures, this is far more uncomfortable than being in my sister's house at -42°C.

It snowed last night, starting at sundown and continuing into the early hours, and the resulting 5cm of snow are still underfoot. A harsh winter indeed by German standards. The next few days should be warmer, above freezing again by Tuesday, so I am pretty certain to get out of Frankfurt on Monday without too much trouble.

Apart from that, things are going well. I shall do a load of washing tonight, to be dry for Monday morning. I have to do a few more hours of work tomorrow, plotting drawings for the first meeting with the main contractors on Monday, so they can start in January. The ground-breaking ceremony is set for Jan. 14, and with about a fortnight of digging and preliminary work to be done, they should be able to start pouring concrete in early February. Perhaps there'll even be a complete set of structural plans to work from by then.

Spent the afternoon downtown buying sweeties (the agreed present-givings this year) and wine (for the hell of it), and saying goodbyes.

There may be another post before I fly, depends on how Sunday shapes up.

Broken

I broke a molar two days ago, while eating a carraway seed roll. A piece of tooth the size of a small pea broke off, and is now lying on my kitchen windowsill. I'm not quite sure why I put it there, I do know that it can't just be glued back in place, but throwing it out felt wrong. (As far as I can reconstruct the events, a seed got wedged between teeth and acted as a tiny crowbar when I bit down.) It doesn't hurt, which makes me vaguely uneasy even as I am thankful.

At this point, I have to interrupt myself to give some backstory. We have two more weeks to get the tender documents written and published, and are working insanely long and hard at it. Last week set a kind of sad record: 67.5 hours at work. That amount of concentrated effort doesn't just wash off during the twelve-minute walk home downhill, not even when I see an urban fox trotting down the empty street before me at 1 a.m. as has happened twice now. Even at 2 a.m. it takes me at least an hour of tea and/or yoghurt and/or reading, to relax enough to be able to go to bed. I haven't been in Second Life in a week, I find that too strenuous after working so long and hard.

I had a great deal of difficulty getting to sleep that night, between worry about the tooth and residual stress from overwork. I lay in bed half-awake, my mind whirling in a strange paranoiac-critical state that I would not hesitate to describe as delusional if it had happened while I was awake and functional*. I found myself in conversation with the dentist, in affect not "imagining" the meeting so much as remembering something that hadn't happened yet. She said that the tooth was irreparable and must be removed, and suggested an implant.

I asked her whether it was worth all that bother and expense, "given that I am not going to be alive much longer."

Well.

That shook me awake, really awake. I was so disturbed that I considered getting up again and going online to talk to some friends who I knew (hoped) would be there. I talked myself down from the horror, telling myself it was just a moment of madness caused by overwork and exhaustion (true enough), and managed to go to sleep after a half-hour of reading.

Where the hell did that idea come from? On the one hand, I never thought that I would ever live to be as old as I am now (not that I expected to die, I just didn't think I would age), and I have certainly always lived as though life and youthful strength would be infinitely available; on the other hand, I was told by a reputedly infallible reader of tea-leaves in Boston that I would live to be 88. (She also said that I would be successful and happy but not rich, which so far is running 100%.)

And now, the punchline. Once this set of documents is finished, we'll have a few weeks' off. I was thinking about a trip to Israel, and had got as far as mailing some friends to pick dates and places. Right now, it looks like I will be giving my holiday fund to the dentist instead. Damn.


* Ignoring for the moment that one definition of being awake and functional is not being in a delusional state.

Slither down the greasy pipe

Somehow a week went by without me posting. I'd like to say that it was because I was working on a cure for cancer or socializing at the Venice Biennale or rescuing kittens from burning houses, but in truth I was just lazy. Summer inertia, we call it.

Weather continues hot and sultry, very unpleasantly sticky; I hope for rain every day and am continually disappointed.

Time for work. More later, perhaps.

Oh, I nearly forgot. The title is a mini-music quiz. A gold star and bragging rights to the first person to name the artist and song. (Which reminds me that I haven't done one of these since Alan died.)

Four more days

Grim, grim. The only ray of light is that we are on track to be finished a day early! The plans work (the disposition of rooms is clear and sensible) and the presentation set has been designed. All that remains is to do the actual drawings (hollow laughter).

Miserable weather, hot and muggy.

Blah.

Cold, and more serious matters

Yes, I know that I am the one who always rabbited on about how lovely winter is and blablabla. However, there was (at least in my mind) an implicit caveat in that statement: winter is lovely in a country where the houses have insulated walls and windows that close tightly. I realized that I am sitting in a draft which is making my neck, lumbar region and ankles cold. I've no idea whether it's new this year, due to a recently-opened crack somewhere, or due to my continuing jetlag-induced tired-and-unfit-ness, or purely imaginary, or whether it was always thus and I simply never noticed before.

I do know that the radiator in the kitchen is not radiating any warmth at all, it's as cold as the windowpanes. Have to see about that soonest.

Bringing in my plants from the summer office also imported a large number of interesting and unusual insects, which I have been capturing and killing with gusto and kleenex.

In more serious news I heard about the wildfires in San Diego and vicinity by chance last night, when I happened to meet in Second Life a friend who was waiting to be evacuated from her house! To think that we had been joking about forest-fire-season in California only a day or two previously. I wish all Californian friends and readers the very best of luck, may you all survive unharmed and find your homes needing nothing more than a good scrubbing.

Hello, I must be going

Blogging briefly before bed.

Met the Münsters, or rather met the particular Münster who is programmer for this application. The job is not quite what his boss, my contact, had stated. The application is of course not finished, so we will be mailing files to each other in both directions as he changes the forms and methods and I translate them; therefore of course somebody's last-two-days' work will get lost (overwritten) at some point during the proceedings. About a third of the app is written using swappable resource files for the names of buttons and standard boiler-plate text (the right way to do it), the rest using hard-coded text strings which some poor sod (points to self) must search out and replace with resource IDs. And the resource files are full of duplicated strings: instead of defining generic, commonly-used strings like "OK" and "Cancel" and "Print" once and keeping them together, each method and each screen or print formular has its own resource, meaning that each of those words occurs roughly two-and-a-half squintillion times. Bah.

On the other hand, there's no manual and no website—or rather they aren't my responsibility.

Meh. Could have been worse.

Today's Friday Favourite is probably the single most-played song in my collection (from this utterly wonderful CD from 1977. What a great year for music that was!). As a general rule I'm not fond of overly loud music, but there is no upper limit to the decibels when this song is playing. Crank it up and enjoy.

Arrived

... in the Stampede City (as it calls itself, as though Boston were to be known solely for its marathon). Flight was pleasingly uneventful, good weather and often clear skies. I saw the mountains of eastern Greenland for the first time in all these decades of regular trans-Atlantic flying: very rugged, very high, quite impressive. There was no sign of human activity between crossing over Iceland three hours into the flight, and seeing the first electricity lines in northern Alberta six hours later (an hour before landing). I thought (as I often do) what a peculiar thing it is to fly halfway around the world on a whim, just for a party; and how strange that this mid-air tin can should be some people's regular place of work.

There was, alas, a screwup with the tickets: somewhere between my booking window seats on all four flights and the agent reading me back the seat numbers, and when I turned up at the airport in Frankfurt, all these reservations were lost. Either the Lufthansa agent forgot to carry them forward when he changed my first flight to the train, or (more likely) they were lost during the transfer between Lufthansa (where I booked the tickets) and Air Canada (who actually ran the flight). In the end it was OK, because I was able to change at the gate to a window seat; I just hope that my return trip won't be spent in the middle of the plane.

Memo to Lufthansa and Air Canada: Pardon me for interrupting your tenth-anniversary backslapping, but this Star Alliance partnership thingy of yours still needs a bit of debugging.

Weather coldish and grey, seamless overcast and 3°C as I landed. The forecast is for warmth, Sunday should be sunny and mid-teens.

My favourite cousin and her family are well, everyone seems healthy and happy. The kids are growing, my gods, her son is as tall as she now.

Mail is downloading as I write, some 6923 messages on the server which are new to my laptop but not to me. There seems to be no way to delete mail without downloading it. Ah well, it's a flat-rate broadband connection so what the hell. Just saw a subject line flash past: "Now you can have sex up to 10 times a day." Dear gods, what kind of unhappy, uninformed, gulllible clod believes this crap? Somebody does, else the spammers would find another game.

Cappuccino awaits, and there are hares on the lawn that need watching.