Finished

We sent the competition off at 3 o'clock this afternoon, and I have been lazing about since. The weather is wonderful, sunny and warmish and a perfectly blue sky, the air is fresh and clean and smells of the forest. After finishing up and debriefing, I walked downtown for lunch (at 3:30) and then bought supplies for dinner. I'm going to cook tonight and tomorrow, which I haven't done in ages, perhaps in weeks. I hate the collateral damage of working on competitions: the weeks-on-end of too little sleep and far too much packaged food. My body feels like I've spent a month at sea, eating nothing but sugared white bread.

We finished the presentation drawings at half past 3am last night, then drank a beer together to celebrate. In the end I only worked 26.5 hours this weekend, not the 30 that I had feared. Small mercies.

The project looks really good, it's got a simple, clear and sensible plan, we met all the stated criteria and only overran the required floor area by around 2%. Assuming that we don't fall through in the first round of judging, I reckon we'll land in the money again.

So, I had the afternoon off and will have tomorrow off too. I walked downtown and sat on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum for a sandwich and cappucino, thinking as I walked how nice it would be to escape to another city for a little break. As I sat over my meal, I changed tack and began to think of what I would do if I were in, say, Zürich rather than Stuttgart. Everything I thought of doing there, I was either currently doing here or could do with no additional effort or expense. Had to laugh at myself about that.

I watched the crowds flow past, and the circling pigeons, and the shadow of the setting sun creeping up the hillside opposite. There are times when I stop and look around and am almost surprised to remember where I live. This is a lovely city, and I'm lucky to have found it.

Updated to say that we lost in the second round. No money, no fame. Ah well. Sitting here (in New York, jetlagged and sleep-deprived, early morning) I find that I cannot remember what the jury said about our scheme, nor even how it looked.

Playday

Up early for an ultrasound examination, to check whether the widely fluctuating bloodtest results indicate a problem in my guts. The specialist confirms that my liver, gall, pancreas, stomach and kidneys are all as and where they should be. Good.

The day being lovely (warm, blue sky, gentle breeze) and myself being damned hungry (one must arrive for the examination on an absolutely empty stomach), I decided to have breakfast outdoors at the Cafe Eberhard, and there met Slim. We talked for an hour while Larry was at a child psychologist across the street, and decided to continue to meet there on Wednesday mornings for as long as the fine weather and his sessions continue. She's looking very well, happy and healthy again after a rough spell last year.

Then walked on downtown intending to go to the river to see if last week's cranes were still there, but got distracted by the newly half-reopened Staatsgalerie. The collection has been entirely rehung, featuring many works that had previously languished in the cellars and mixing old and new together: rooms are now hung by subject or style rather than by age or country of origin. There are some wonderful pieces on display, and the arrangement is thought-provoking and occasionally amusing. Highly recommended to any Stuttgarters who haven't been lately; however those living further afield are advised to wait until after December 13, when the last few rooms will be opened and the renovation complete.

In the course of the renovation, the Herrenberger Altar has been moved to a larger and more central room, where there is now space and light to appreciate the rear panels (i.e. the opened-out wings). Since these were the outer "weekday" sides, they have faded considerably, but are still quite fascinating. I shall have to go back for another look, and will nab one of the little folding stools.

In other news the first competition was sent off with twenty minutes to spare yesterday. It looks very good, I think we have a fine chance of being in the money again with this project. That was our fourth third competition this year, and G is looking to do two more. Personally, I think he's crazy, but who am I to get between a man and his idea of fun?

Trivia, Saturday edition

almostDaffodils
Originally uploaded by udge

Being a fine crop of whiffle.

As promised, a photo of Spring caught in the very act of tensing its muscles. These daffs are growing wild in a semi-unmaintained roadside planter thingy outside our office.

I spent over an hour today reading through my building-volume calculations for the competition in Smalltown, and conclude that I was right. There is only one error that I can see, and it's on the order of a hundredth of one percent of the total volume, so I would say that we are as near as dammit to correct. Good. [Updated: it is to laugh. Read the follow-up here.]

Cooking an early dinner as I write, comfort food: a Maultaschen, zucchini and mushroom omelette. It's still daylight outside, though the sun has set: Spring is truly on its way. The weather office says that there is no further chance of frost during the next six weeks or so.

Blah

Slept late, and woke with a throbbing headache that I still have. No work today, I shall spend Ash Wednesday cleaning and sorting at home. Perhaps this is appropriate.

But first I shall walk downtown for a cappuccino, perhaps the air will clear my head.

Cheerful

A wonderful day: clear bright blue sky and crisp, cold air. Perfect for walking about idly.

Went to bed early at 1 a.m. last night, after a half-hour chat in Second Life with M2. Slept until 10 a.m. this morning. Breakfasted, poodled about in the Internets, now blogging. After this I shall have a shower & shampoo while the backup runs (Tip: always make backups!); in the afternoon I shall head downtown and pretend to be a tourist for the day, getting in some relaxation and a little culture.

More later, perhaps.

Twenty-eight down, two to go.

Day off

There was a country song in my childhood which began "I put on my cleanest dirty shirt…" and I found that so funny and apt that it's stayed with me. Right now I am wearing my cleanest dirty shirt while the washing machine runs, which is desperately needed and long overdue. My clothes crawl away from me as I try to get into them in the mornings. [Updated] well, I've just spent over an hour waiting for the washing machine to finish up: it was just sitting there, still and silent but full of water at the end of its cycle. Eventually I figured out that "empty yourself" is a separate cycle which one must specifically select and run. What the hell kind of idiocy is that? Under which circumstances could it be useful for the machine to remain full of rinse water? Bah.

Since moving here, I've had a stiff and sore lower back; I assume it's from sleeping on this sofa thingy, a wierd mix of softness and utter inflexibility.

Ingrid and AY are away meeting the curators, so I have the day off. What to do? It's grey and windy and cool out, but not (yet) raining, so this might be a suitable day for a walk around the Alster, the west bank of which is a long thin park. Or perhaps I'll go back downtown and schmooze about, possibly combining this with a visit to SIC and Rose and crew in their office in the Speicherstadt (which I haven't yet seen).

Which reminds me of something I'd meant to mention earlier. Last Monday (the 6th) Ingrid and I had a dinner meeting with AY to discuss the project, because he's too busy and important to visit our office. We met at his second-favourite restaurant, because the first is closed Mondays. This Monday (the 13th) she again met him for a working dinner, which I didn't attend because I was moving in with Rose and Axl that evening. We walked together as far as the same second-favourite restaurant, near to Rose's apartment. As we passed the closed favourite, Ingrid said "My God, another week gone by so quickly;" but I was thinking "was that only a week ago? It seems like ages." Time is indeed relative.

It has been decided that I will work Monday and Tuesday next week, then return to Stuttgart. The probability is high that I'll be back at some time to work on one project or the other, but nothing has yet been planned for this. And I'm still waiting for a decision from the Münsters; I'll have to chase them up next week, but I don't have my contact man's e-mail address here (and don't even remember his name).

In geek news I've been running Windows XP on an Apple MacBookPro during these three weeks, and can report that it works almost perfectly—well, as close to "perfect" as Windows will ever be. I've only encountered two problems: it seems that the Windows OS doesn't always get notified when the battery is empty, because the laptop sometimes falls into emergency save-my-context sleep mode without warning me; but sometimes it does give out a warning, oddly enough.

The second problem is also minor but vastly more annoying: because the MacBook has a reduced keyboard (obviously: it is a laptop) with only one (left) ALT key, the ALT-GR key is missing, so one cannot enter "special" characters like @ directly from the keyboard. The solution is to use Windows' "Character Finder" system utility to copy-and-paste such things as needed; but that means that the previously selected clipboard content is lost. Why doesn't Character Finder support drag-and-drop? Bah. Pathetic.

Still, after three weeks of constant Boot Camp use, those are the only niggles I have found; and chances are very high that a desktop Mac with a full-size keyboard would avoid them both. On the positive side, I discovered that the Windows partition is visible to the Mac (though not vice-versa) so one can transfer files between the operating systems if/when running MacOS.

If I were Dell, Toshiba, Compaq (are they still in business?) etc, I'd be worried: the coolest and fastest Windows hardware that one can buy today, is an Apple.

Day off

Pouring rain, cold and windy. Bah.

That is all.

Well, OK, I can't leave it like that. I'm writing at my borrowed home, i.e. the bedroom of a holidaying co-worker whom I haven't met. I've discovered why I couldn't get my Mac to work with their WLAN: it's configured as a modem, not a router, meaning that it can't be shared. The other inhabitants are off doing Saturday stuff, so now I have Internet access. I've been spending the time reading blogs and catching up on e-mail.

If the rain ever stops I shall go out and try to discover where the "downtown" of Hamburg is, and what one might do there. This is not a suitable day for walking in the park by the Alster, but might be a good day for windowshopping and touristing.

Work seems to be accelerating backwards: the more we do, the more we discover that still needs to be done. There are great swaths of the project, whole theme-rooms, that are only sketched out and have never been properly considered. Poor Ingrid is still designing the exhibition layout! How can this be? I have to give AY a slap on the head for this: it's clear that he had no real understanding of the state of the project or how much remained undone, when he agreed to a timetable for the bidding materials. When I left at 10:30 last night, Ingrid was talking about working until the last subway at 1am, then coming in again today at lunchtime; Sunday is of course a normal working day for us both, and AY will allegedly be there to look over our work. We'll see. I am willing to bet that it will not happen: he will again ignore the reality of our current working situation in favour of having pretty ideas for things that might be useful in November. Bah.

More later, possibly.

Slow day Sunday

The day has started well: up before sunrise at six a.m., breakfasted, read a few chapters of Terry Pratchett's "Thud" (in German, with apologies to the Lioness), now listening to Beethoven's Violin Concerto while blogging. This is a 1993 recording of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, soloist Gidon Kremer. I don't like it very much: Kremer changed the Cadenzas in the first and third movements (and credits himself as co-composer for it, such conceit).

The morning chorus of birdsong was nearly deafening, very rich and complex with many different species taking part. I would have loved to record it for posting on Senduit, but have no iPod for the next few days. Apple offers an exchange program when the battery wears down*, as mine has done after over two years of near-daily use: you give them your old iPod and 70 Euros, and they give you a reconditioned iPod (the same model! it's not an upgrade) with a brand-new battery. The downside is that the "new" iPod has a new hard disk: all your music, podcasts, contacts etc. are lost. This is an annoyance but it need not be a problem: you can re-load the new iPod from iTunes (unless you've deleted the music files from your computer, in which case you need a utility like Senuti to copy music from the original iPod to iTunes before you give it to Apple).

And now, for a walk down to the river. The weather continues fine: blue skies in abundance, bright sunshine, temperatures in the mid-twenties. It's been a very long time, possibly two months, since it last rained here; the ground is baking hard and dry.


* It is possible to replace the battery by oneself, there are kits available on the Internets. I read the instructions and a few user-experience pieces, and decided that learning to replace iPod batteries is a poor use of my limited time.

The holiday spirit

roses_trellis
Originally uploaded by udge.

I have had a marvellous three-hour holiday this afternoon, walking in the Stadtgarten in brilliant sunshine under a cloudless blue sky. The day could not have been better, my mood would not have been brighter, had I been in Nice or Florence. (My dinner would have been much better, but that's another story.)

Holiday is a state of mind, not a place.

And (according to the forecast) tomorrow will be just as blue and even warmer. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

I took over a hundred pictures of vegetation (and many bare branches) against the sky, seventeen of the best are on Flickr.

Karfreitag

tulips_easterWeekend2
Originally uploaded by udge.

Another year gone by, dear Lord how quickly they pass.

Sunny, brilliant blue sky enlivened by hot-air balloons, warmish at 15°C; no traffic at all, even the streetcars are running on a sparse holiday schedule. Church bells are ringing for the 11 a.m. service as I write.

This afternoon I shall go for a walk with Princess and a few friends, then later on to the theatre. No idea what we are seeing (she told me but I've forgotten and would rather let myself be surprised than look it up).

Happy Easter to you all, dear readers.

In other news Dale has written a fascinating post on movement and body/spatial awareness, and his process of coming to more of both. Escaping from the cubicle was such a good move for him, it has liberated his soul and body in so many ways. Go read.

Today's Friday Favourite is a gloriously noisy song from 1973—and how old were you then?—from this album. Crank it up and enjoy.

Better

So, here we are again. Monday morning, sunny and cool, sky blue but with the gentlest and thinnest haze of high-level clouds. The coming week should be the same, with temperatures in the mid-teens (measured at the airport, which will mean up to 20°C down here in the valley). I saw on my walk downtown on Saturday morning that the chestnuts were leafing out, but didn't have the camera with me. Their young leaves have something of the charming awkwardness of puppies stumbling over their own outsized feet.



I went for a long walk at the Bärensee with Princess yesterday, enjoying the sunshine and talking about Life etc. as one does. Neither of us had eaten since breakfast so we braved the thronging hordes and had lunch at the Schlössle which was entirely adequate. One doesn't expect gourmet cooking in the middle of a park. We saw turtles sunning themselves on a half-submerged log, and a half-dozen Mandarin ducks (sorry about the poor focus, either my hands were shaking with excitement or reflections from the water confused the camera).

Then to a concert in a church near her house, where Famous Photographer's choir sang Telemann's Lukas-Passion (1744) which I had never heard before. Telemann was something of a specialist, he composed 46 Passions (which is why they tend to be known by name and year). Nice music well sung, but it isn't going to replace Mozart or Bach in my affections.

Fringe

tulip_3
Originally uploaded by udge.

This week's flowers are fringed yellow-red tulips, very unusual (well, new to me anyway).

It's been a slow Sunday, I did some cleaning and clothes-washing and a bit of work, then went for a walk just before sunset. It had rained for most of the morning so the air was clear and visibility was good. I find myself getting impatient for Nature to get going once Spring has started. "The magnolias aren't even out yet, fer chrissake!" Wishing the time away, one might say.

Family news. My father's stroke seems to have been very mild indeed, if there is such a thing: no apparent lasting damage. I have spoken to him a few times and he sounds normal, meaning that his voice is clear and steady and the few times he stumbles for words might equally well be due to his fading memory as to the stroke. My mother's recovery is going so well—how well is it going, you ask?—that she forgot her cane in the supermarket!

They have booked themselves onto a walking tour for three weeks in May: the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. I was invited to accompany them, and will do so. On the one hand, I can hardly refuse, and on the other I've always wanted to do this. The tour is designed for the "active elderly" as the expression goes: one is encouraged to walk, but there is a bus that follows along so one may at any point give up and ride for a while, and luggage is of course transported on the bus. I shall buy some proper walking shoes and get in a few miles of practice before then.

I'm listening to Respighi's Fontane di Roma while writing, another habit that has lapsed since Christmas. I used to listen to this CD most weekends along with Gershwin's An American in Paris, in memory of Sunday afternoons as a child. I'm not sure which of my parents was so fond of this album, perhaps my father; I shall have to ask. It'll be something to talk about during the long hours afoot.

Spring on a Wednesday

yellows
Originally uploaded by udge.

G and U are in Bavaria again to wrestle in mud with the builders, so I have today and tomorrow off. I may very well take Friday too just for the hell of it, or as recompense for the anger and frustration and long hours of the last week.

Today is a wonderful day, sunny and blue-skied and warm (10°C). It's been a half-playday so far, I have been downtown for a cappuccino, photographed some flowers on the way there, and now I'm home again in that which we laughingly refer to as the "real world," meaning that grey and dusty place where work occurs.

I am installing Windows on a freshly formatted C: drive; after that finishes, I shall install the database and installermaker software and copy over my files. And if after all that I still cannot create a database application that runs under Windows, I shall throw the computer out the window and run off to the Outer Hebrides and become a beekeeper.

(Interesting that it didn't occur to me to say that I would run off to the South Pacific; when I think of paradise-on-earth I don't see visions of warm, sunny jungle vegetation. I am definitely a northerner.)

But first, it's time for lunch.

In other news I've discovered where the moths are breeding: inside my vacuum cleaner! Yeuccch. It's like a tiny, low-budget horror movie.

In other, other news yesterday's Wondermark is food for thought.

Friday miscellany

I've been downtown for a cappuccino and to buy a new CD, music that I heard at Famous Photographer's birthday party, and photographed a few early Spring flowers on the way there, and am now (in theory) settling down to some serious work on the database. In fact, as you can see, I'm messing around on the Internets. Here's a sample of what caught my eye today:

Rob Bray, brother of the more famous Tim, said

Life is, for the tool-using resource-hogging primates that we are, a matter of collecting stuff, and we always end up with more of it than is good for us. But the problem comes in when you start to love the stuff even more than its acquisition (which is bad enough), and then it exacts such a terrible price. I have such a fear of stuff, a fear that I might end up loving it instead of human beings. Stuff is incapable of loving you back of course, which is why it can be so very attractive.

Paul Graham, the world's leading LISP programmer-evangelist, said

The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people tend to be smart in distinctive ways. [...] The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence. Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic. And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment.

That's particularly worth remembering. A physicist friend recently told me half his department was on Prozac. Perhaps if we acknowledge that some amount of frustration is inevitable in certain kinds of work, we can mitigate its effects. Perhaps we can box it up and put it away some of the time, instead of letting it flow together with everyday sadness to produce what seems an alarmingly large pool. At the very least, we can avoid being discontented about being discontented.

Bruce Schneier, security and cryptography expert and commonsense-ist, said

A lot of [confusion about risk and security] can be chalked up to simple ignorance. If you think the murder rate in your town is 1/10th of what it really is, for example, then you're going to make bad security trade-offs. But I'm more interested in divergences between perception and reality that can't be explained that easily. Why is it that, even if someone knows that automobiles kill 40,000 people each year in the U.S. alone and airplanes kill only hundreds world-wide, they are more afraid of airplanes than automobiles? Why is it that, when food poisoning kills 5,000 people per year and 9/11 terrorists killed 2,973 people in only one year, are we spending tens of billions per year on terrorism defense and almost never think about food poisoning?

In other news today's Wondermark is particularly subtle.

In other, other news the now-traditional Friday favourite song is from this album. Enjoy. And have a nice weekend, too.

Lazy, thoughtful

I have a day off again, since G and U are in deepest Bavaria on a site visit. I had thought to do all manner of pleasant and useful things today, from drinking cappuccino to cleaning the kitchen, but have done very little of anything so far. It's drizzling outside (well it wouldn't be drizzling inside, now would it?) and the energy requirement for kitchen-cleaning exceeds my reserves. So I drink coffee and poodle about in the Internets.

I'm reading an odd-but-true tale, Alan Bennett's "The lady in the van" about a woman who lived for fifteen years in a delivery van parked in his driveway. (She had already been living in the van for ten years before it was moved onto Bennett's property, at his invitation, to prevent the local authorities from having it towed away.) It's a strange story about an unusual life—or pair of lives, because the reader unavoidably begins to wonder about Bennett himself, the oddness of his own life and person that let him live for fifteen years with a stranger's van obstructing his front door. Recommended; try to get a recent edition that includes his 1994 postscript. (There's a simplistic and factually inaccurate short review online; alas, it's the best that I found.)

There aren't many things things that actively worry me, but sharing the fate of Miss Shepherd does. The billion-to-one shots like 9/11 or the bombs in the London Underground are not worth worrying about, your chance of being run over by a hit-and-run driver on the way to work or the Tube is millions of time higher than the chance that you might be there at the wrong moment. No, I worry about this radical dislocation because it happens often and easily, and I know the circumstances under which it could happen to me. It takes so very little to fall through the cracks in society, and one falls such an awfully long way.

My parents told me in September about a homeless man (call him "H") who sleeps in the recessed entry to a local video rental place. H is apparently a local man of about my age, whose parents still live in the neighbourhood; every once in a while they pick him up for a wash, haircut and change of clothes, then he goes back to the doorway. I was curious about H, because if they were right about the age, then I must know him from school or at least by sight; but he was never at his post during my two weeks in Toronto. I had my theories about who it should be were there any natural justice in the world (the bully, the thief, the various juvenile drug addicts and dealers), or who it might be were life as randomly and wantonly cruel as I sometimes suspect.

On the last day, as we went to Tim Horton's for morning coffee (my parents are self-confessed Tim's addicts) my father suddenly pointed out the window to the street corner, where H stood with his back to us waiting for the lights to change. I walked casually down to the lights, and then slowly past him and around the corner to Tim's backdoor. He was no-one that I knew, and on closer examination probably only thirty years old: he would have been a baby as I finished grade thirteen and left the neighbourhood.

What makes someone choose such a life? I could understand leaving home swearing never to return, then falling into troubles; but H stayed in the neighbourhood where he grew up and has remained in contact with his parents. It's a mystery.

Playday

I have again washed a week's worth of dishes and cleaned up the kitchen; I have showered, shaved, shampooed and cut my hair (not in that order, obviously); I have answered the bulk of the recent e-mail deluge, though I haven't yet had the heart to glance through the roughly 780 spams awaiting deletion.

And now, I'm free. I will arise and go now, and go downtown, and I will do such things—what they are, yet I know not: but they shall be the delights of the earth.

Tired part the last

Finished at last, thank God, an hour before the submission deadline. I am absolutely knackered, my shoulders and upper arms hurt, my heart is thumping (partly due to a recent change in weather). Friday off, no work on the weekend (though G and U persist in not believing this).

This is the first time in at least ten days, possibly two weeks, that I've come home during daylight (ok, twilight). I look forward to seeing the sun tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. I heard birds singing on my way home, and was surprised to realize how out of touch with Nature and the season I have become in these few days. I have no idea whether these were "normal" over-wintering birds which I could have heard at any daylit hour (and hence haven't heard), or whether the spring migration north has already started.

Now: lunch (yes, my lunchbreak at ten to six p.m.) and then to bed.

20+C+M+B+07

Today is a holiday in predominantly-Catholic southern Germany, the Heilige Drei Könige, the feastday of the three kings who visited the infant Jesus in the stable in Bethlehem; this corresponds to Epiphany. I had forgotten that, and so was surprised on my way downtown first by how little traffic there was, and secondly that every shop was closed. It was a pleasant day, about 12°C and light cloud, so I continued walking anyway, and treated myself to a cappuccino on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum. There were very few passersby (obviously, since everything but the café and the artificial ice rink in the Schlossplatz was closed. I sat alone at first, then a few brave souls joined me.

It occurred to me as I sat there, how seldom I actually look at the city, so I did. I must say, Stuttgart has its pleasant parts, and the Schlossplatz ranks very high in this list (I'll try to find some photos on Flickr later). As I sat there, looking at the rich folks' houses up on the wooded hillside, and through the gap between Schloss and Kunstgalerie towards the opera house, I thought to myself: "This is like being in a nice European city." And then had to laugh: where exactly did I think I was, if not in Europe?

But it's true, I am often unaware of how and where I live. This isn't the same Europe that I lusted after as a teenager at the movies, it's very often just a place called "Life." What makes Europe real for me is the connectedness of it all: to sit on a café terrace and hear conversations in five languages, to see Rome and Warsaw as destinations on the indicator board in the train station. Europe is tiny to a North American: I can be in Paris in six hours by train, or Amsterdam in five, or Vienna in seven-and-a-half; even Milan is only eight hours away. I am amused by the idea of going to Milan for a proper Italian meal, then taking a sleeper train home and going work the next morning as though I'd been in the local pizzeria.

(The title is a common piece of self-applied graffiti in Stuttgart which I'll try to photograph tomorrow. People scribble it in chalk above the entrances to their cafés and houses on this day each year. C, M and B are the three kings: every good German knows that their names are Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar; 20+07 is obviously the year. I am amused by this habit, and also comforted in a way that I find hard to define: although I don't partake in this belief, I am pleased to see that there are those who do. Not having a street door, I've graffiti'd my blog.)

Well, I never knew that! Today is Twelfth Night. Dec. 25 + 12 = Jan. 6. To think that I studied Shakesper without anyone ever telling us what the significance of the title was.

Free

... if only for one day. The architects are in deepest Bavaria, meeting all and sundry for the (hopefully) last round of discussions before publishing the invitation to bid on the construction work.

What to do? The sky is overcast, a lumpy blue-grey which speaks of rain and cold winds, so it's probably not a good day for a walk along the river.

I had thought, walking home from work just before midnight yesterday, that I could take a three-day holiday break, a last-minute train trip to somewhere or other (actually, I wanted to write another trainblog and so required a long journey). I couldn't think of anywhere in particular I'd like to go, especially given that all Europe is suffering from grey, cold and windy weather this weekend.

I thought instead of what I'd like to do in that as yet undecided holiday destination: walk slowly and aimlessly around looking at Stuff, drop into the occasional bookshop, stop in a cafe whenever I felt like refreshment, visit a museum or gallery, then in the evening find a small quiet restaurant with very good food.

At which point it occurred to me that I can do all of that perfectly well, right here in Stuttgart. "Holiday" is a state of mind, not a place.