Blather, Monday edition

Alone in the office, after hours; sun's still up but the day is drawing to a close. It has somehow devolved to me to be the office dishwasher (except Fridays, when the cleaning lady comes), presumably because I am the least afraid of water and the most annoyed by dirty dishes. I wish that someone else might gather the courage and the wit to wash up once in a while, but I don't actually mind doing it and I do enjoy being alone in the office in these bright evenings.

<rant> for a friend who will never read this: Peel the bragging-labels off your damned glassware, already. It doesn't impress anyone, it just looks really tacky and nouveau-gormless. If the glasses are pretty, then we will admire them no matter how cheap they were, but if they are ugly, then our scorn will only be increased by knowing how much you paid for them.</rant>

Walking home the other day, I discovered a positive proof that time travel will be possible (and actually used) in the future: I found a door where there had never been one before. I have walked past a particular blank stone wall every other day for the last fifteen years, and until then it had always been blank. Now, there is a door in it. The door is clearly very old: the stonework is weathered and crumbling, the paint is chipping, the wood is shrinking with age. Nonetheless, regardless of how old the door may be in world-time, in the personal time of my memories I know with absolute and unshakeable certainty that it is new. Somebody travelled back in time and had the builders put that door in, for reasons that I cannot know.

This is what the results of time travel look like: Something changes around us, in a way that is both new to us and much older in the world. We presume that it must have always been there, chuckle over our presumed obtuseness and say "Oh, how can I have not seen that every other day for fifteen years?" But that's not true, we were aware and observant. It was not there yesterday, though today it has has been there for decades.

We are surrounded by time-travellers, meddling in the past in ways that seem trivial to us, although to them the reward of getting this doorway put in clearly outweighs the expense and bother of finding and persuading the stonemason. Perhaps it will be used by somebody's yet-unborn grandmother to escape from a future fire?

That'll have to do for now, my dearies. I am still alive and mostly well, I hope you are too. There is another post in the works, the second in the occasional series of What Second Life Is Really About; it'll be up sometime this week.

Midweek mellow

It was such a lovely evening as I left the office at 8 p.m., that instead of going home I turned the other way and walked downtown for a beer and a ciabatta at the Kunstmuseum. The city was very quiet, I guess most people were indoors in front of a TV set waiting for the football matches to start (right now it's Greece 1, Spain 1; and Russia 2, Sweden 0). Unlike last time, there have been no public superscreens set up for us to watch the matches, but then again Germany isn't host nation this time.

Actually, getting downtown was not as easy as that makes it sound. Three times I turned back towards home, because I didn't want to spend the money, or because I would be late to meet my friends in SL; three times I had to kick myself in the arse and tell myself not to be a fool. The deciding argument was this: "The year is wearing on and you are getting older. How many more such evenings will there be?"

I hope your evenings will be as nice as this, my dears.

Another one bites the dust

Friday again, how quickly the weeks fly past. The linden trees in Rose Street have fully leafed out and are casting dappled shadows on the sidewalk, which will soon be falling on the office floor and even my onto my desk. I've been wearing my leather jacket to work (with sweater and scarf) this week.

Leaving work last night, the air was so mild and the sun still so high (at 6:45) that I walked downtown to the Königsplatz and treated myself to a beer on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum. I sat for an hour watching the passersby, commuters and shoppers and flaneurs alike, and noting how the shadowline of the setting sun crept up the hillside opposite. Very pleasant.

Today, very mellow and relaxed, in the mood for making an early start to the weekend. Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Still mellow

... even though it is again cold and rainy, not at all weather for picnicking.

Which reminds me that after publishing that last post, I met G, U and Ralph for a picnic at the Bärenschlössle! Yes, my dearies, a genuine sitting-on-the-grass-in-sunshine picnic in mid-April. Quite pleasant it was too.

Today at work on the translation again, surprisingly relaxed even though G and the part-time assistant from our last competition were there preparing for the next competition. (Yes, the office was chosen to take part again; I will have little to do with it because I will be a fulltime Münstermann when I return from my father's 80th birthday celebrations in Toronto.)

I am hard put to say what exactly has put me in such a good mood in the last few days. Favourable biorhythms, perhaps, or the glow resulting from making new friends in RL and SL. In any case, my mood continues mellow and gently happy. I hope that your days are going as smoothly.

Mellow

Walked to work in Rose Street today to the sound of church bells and birdsong. It's a mild (12°C or so) sunny and windstill day, I'm sitting at my desk with the windows and doors open. Behind me, one of the office computers is copying some music CDs (my own, I hasten to add) for use here: Glenn Gould playing Bach's "Goldberg Variations" (the 1985 version), Barenboim playing Chopin's "Nocturnes," and an oddity: the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir singing "Orthodox Chants of the 17th and 18th Centuries."

Sheer boredom has prevented me from stating that it has rained for at least some part of very day for nearly three weeks. Today's forecast is for 17°C and mostly sunny, but the long-range forecast is for 8°C and rain again. Blah. Getting dull. This time last year, I was eating lunch on my balcony aka the summer office.

I walked home on Friday at sunset, and because the evening was so nice I made a detour around the Feuersee, and there saw the first bat of 2008 swooping above the pond. Spring advances. The chestnuts have leafed out and are putting up their little pyramids of blossom; the lindens in Rose Street are in full leaf, though the eponymous roses aren't yet doing much.

[Updated at 1:30 pm] walked home via the Feuersee again, and had my first ice cream cone of 2008. Bloody marvellous.

Memoir

roadside2
Originally uploaded by udge

A meme, courtesy of Zhoen: Six word memoir, with photo. Tag as appropriate.

Learning to trust the unseen path.


I tag ... you. Yes, you at the back, I saw you trying to hide.

Fiftieth

Well, the celebration has gone over well. We were fifty people in the end, one of my many second cousins had to cancel because of a kid's illness. Good food, good people, good speeches (including mine, if I may be so bold). My parents were pleased, and that's the main thing.

Now home again, listening to the murmur of conversation as my parents and their four best friends from university catch up on news old and new. It's the first time all six have been in the same room since 1953.

Reading Harry Potter, listening to the rain, feeling mellow. Happy Saturday, everybody.

Interesting times

Y'all may remember that I gloated some weeks back about booking a Lufthansa flight on a train, getting all pan-Europeanishly smug about our integrated transportation services and how very clever we are.

The Deutsche Bahn will be shut down by a strike tomorrow morning, from 8 to 11am. My "flight" leaves the station in Stuttgart at 11:27, assuming that it does actually go anywhere. This could get very exciting.

I hate exciting.

There's nothing I want less when travelling than excitement. Once I arrive, yes, of course; but not during the getting there phase. I can think of nothing, really nothing, that could happen on a plane that might legitimately be called exciting, which might not just as truthfully be called "horrific" or "utterly terrifying" or "life-endangering." No no, when travelling my motto is "give me boredom, and lots of it."

We shall see.

I am about to pack and prepare for the holiday. I hope that I will have time and opportunity for a quick post tomorrow, but just in case I don't manage to: Have a peaceful and pleasant two weeks, my dears, be kind to yourselves and each other.

[Updated: in case I don't get online, here's tomorrow's Favourite and its link. Enjoy the mellowfulness.]

Miscellany, Friday edition

Mellow and slow day today, mostly spent walking about and talking to friends. Hamburg was nice, but it's also nice to be back in the big small-town of Stuttgart. I noticed something today that I hadn't spotted when I was in Hamburg: there are far fewer garbage cans on the streetcorners here, yet the streets are much cleaner. I wonder why?

In the absence of anything earth-shaking to report, permit me to direct your attention to Mir, who has moved from New England to Georgia and learned a thing or two about the American school system:

There was FIFTEEN MINUTES of an hour-long presentation devoted to why it’s important to have our kids read every day. One quarter of the allotted time. And they did a nice job with the presentation, but I cannot adequately explain how saddened I was, first, that there would be a need to go into such detail and passionated exhortations about this, because we are all readers here and in my happy little bubble of nerddom I can barely comprehend people NOT wanting to read, and second, as I realized that the parents who really needed that pep talk probably weren’t even present.

In this town, in this school, the “rich” sit in class next to kids from the projects, and the school motto this year is “If you miss school you miss out” because attendance rates are abysmal for the kids living in poverty. My bleeding liberal heart hurts when I consider that; the kids who are impoverished can get two free meals a day at school (even if nothing else), and yet they are often absent because—why? Because their parents don’t care? Because their parents are working too many jobs to be home and get them on the bus? Because they’re taking care of siblings? Chances are if they’re missing school they’re not eating, either. My mind boggles. I have taken so much for granted.

Indeed. Go read.

A recent post of Dale's reminded me of a favourite quote from George Orwell:

In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher". The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives," from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

Indeed. Go read.

Today's Friday Favourite will be one of the last, because a proposed change in German law would make my distributing such things a criminal offence (whereas it was previously "only" a civil-law matter) and I'm not prepared to risk jail to broaden your minds. (Not that your mind needs broadening, I was referring to the others.) Here's a mellow song for a calm and reflective Friday evening, from 1975.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. Enjoy the weekend.

Title goes here.

Friday evening once again, the world has survived yet another week. I have mellowed out slightly after that last post, your empathy and some sound sleep worked wonders. Not that the circumstances have changed, but then again they weren't new last night either.

Working (really) on the database, had to write a new import routine for the vCard (.vcf) format to get a customer's data loaded. I discovered while doing so that there was a nasty error buried in some generic import code that I used in several places, so spent a few hours finding and fixing that. [Updated] just noticed while checking through the import, that I lost several important bits of information from a significant percentage of the records. Damn and blast, have to rewrite the routine again tomorrow.

Walked downtown in brilliant sunshine this morning for a cappuccino and conversation, rode the subway home to beat the rain. Ah well.

The swallows are still here; but I blush to confess that they aren't swallows and never were. They are Mauersegler aka common swifts. How embarrassing. Blushing apologies to all, and thanks to Arboretum for the correction.

Today's Friday Favourite is a song from a CD that I haven't played in a long while, which happened to be on in the background as I was working and which gradually worked its way into my consciousness. The song has a marvellous slow & cool groove, and nothing else, so I'd understand if it weren't to your taste; it may not be right for intently-listening-to as one does with e.g. Leonard Cohen, but I guarantee that if it were to sneak up on you from behind, your toes would be tapping and your head nodding. I am quite pleased that I thought to put this CD on after so many months if not years, I shall be hearing more of their stuff in future (though not in Hamburg).

Shabbat shalom, my dears.