Christmas

Hello blogosphere, it's been a long time since we met. I've missed writing, and I deeply regret the loss of the community that had developed here and in the blogs I read. I'm not going to promise to write every N days in 2012, as that would just be another stick to beat myself with when I missed a date; but I will start writing again.

I'm in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan with cousins and other assorted family, eating and drinking and watching Jeopardy (don't ask). The concept of experiencing "together time" by sitting in front of a TV with the sound turned up too high for conversation is difficult for me to grasp, but we all have our foibles and mine would strike them as equally ludicrous. The weather here is odd, very little snow and unseasonably warm at only -7°C.

This is my second week in Canada, actually. I started in Calgary with Favourite Cousin, we spent a day drinking capuccino and stoking each other up for an active and growthy* 2012. She suggested the term "accountability partner", somebody to whom you report regulary and who calls you on your lazy-ass weak-excuse-finding bullshit; we'll be AP-ing each other next year as she gets her keynote-speaking business in gear and I try to level up after what felt like a year of stasis.

I've been working like the proverbial dog this year, building the competition project we won in the summer of 2008. Three and a half years, dear friends; I suspect that many outsiders have no idea how slow archtitecture is. It was a success: the public and the local press liked it, the staff find it convenient to work in. We were only around 6% over budget, which is pretty good; unfortunately it was months late and although it's been in use since the formal opening on October 8, there are still workmen onsite. When I left a week ago, the architectural snagging list was ten small-print single-spaced pages long. Just architecture, mind you, the electrical and services engineers have their own lists too. If you want to have a look at this, mail me (address is above left) and I'll send you a link.

It's funny that 2011 now feels like a static, almost wasted, year, because I did in fact do quite a bit of stretching socially and at work. I went onsite as supervising architect for the first time, all three of us were there six days a week for the last two weeks before the opening. That was a real growth experience, I can tell you. I thought I was just walking around talking to people all day, and at first felt vaguely guilty that I "wasn't really doing anything." It took me a while to realize that this is exactly what the job is, at least during the last few panicy days.

Funny how it worked out: G and Offsite Guy believe in supervising by shouting abuse, which is really not my style at all. I played good cop to their bad cops: encouraging the contractors, building up their confidence and courage, smoothing over tension between trades in favour of give-and-take cooperation. Another difference is that I always greeted everyone I met, every day, even if it was only to catch their eye and nod across a crowded room; G and OG seemed not to see people that they weren't engaged in shouting at. I think my results were at least as good as theirs. Certainly at the opening celebrations, people came up to thank me for my involvement. Even people I don't remember speaking to, like the wellness franchise women, knew my name and felt that I had helped them.

Other than that, I've been playing World of Warcraft and hanging out in Second Life, attending a meditation retreat in Halifax in July and an informal meetup of the same group in Berlin in early December. I think that SL, Facebook (spits) and Twitter between them are responsible for the decline in my blogging: not only the incredible amount of time that they consume (particularly SL) but that they came to fulfill my need to communicate. Second Life in particular has become a great part of my social life, I use it not for gameplay (it's not a game, as I have said many times) but to meet friends. It's my equivalent to going to the pub to chat with the guys, but without beer or second-hand smoke.

* Yes of course "growthy" is a word.

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.

Awake

Hello world, it's been a while since we spoke. It is 6:30am as I'm writing, but I have been awake and drifting since around 5am (having previously woken at 2am but gone back to sleep) so I am calling this "night" and "insomnia." Hot chocolate is in the making, and I will head back to bed after drinking and posting.

We are approaching the deadline for a competition aka the chance to have some work to do after the summer. The project looks pretty good: the plan is clean and simple, room layouts are efficient, it should even be fairly economical to build and operate. Next weekend will be tough, probably 30 hours' work.

Other than that, work on the still-current project is proceeding in fits and staggerings. Things are going wrong, many of them our fault. (It's always our fault, in the end: the architect is responsible for the errors and omissions of all other trades, including those of the experts who advised us. The situation is reminiscent of Josef K: "He's guilty! Now, what's the charge against him?")

I'm spending a lot of time in SL and WoW. I have recreated my more successful characters on a different server in order to game with some SL buddies who are there, and have got my favourite — a holy paladin named Woglinde — up to level 32. The game gets easier and more enjoyable as one rises through the levels.

Time is behaving oddly. I can't believe that it hasn't yet been a month since I returned from holiday! This feels like mid-March at least. I don't know whether to be glad or worried that the calendar is lagging so far behind my perception.

Balconia, 2010 edition

It's been a long, chilly and wet Spring. This weekend marks the first time I was able to have lunch on my balcony! In previous years, I'd been sitting out there as early as mid-April. Bah.

The job presses on, we are barely keeping ahead of the construction workers — and now have to stop for a week to submit a building-permit application to add a waterslide to the project. This must go through straight away so that the concrete-laying company can get the shell finished before the steelwork starts, because once the frame goes up they will be unable to use their crane to transport the roughly 80 tonnes of concrete needed. Shifting that lot by wheelbarrow is not feasible.

I've been mostly off-duty this weekend, bar an hour today finishing up two drawings that I didn't get done on Friday evening. Had sushi for lunch on Saturday, then went on to the Skybeach for an iced coffee in a deckchair with my feet in the sand; today, walked downtown again to meet G and U and the kids for a cappuccino on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum, then made it back home just in time before the rain started.

I've been reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, in the newish translation by Volokhovsky and Pevear, and am approaching the end. It's a good read, despite Tolstoy's manifest disapproval of Anna's life and choices. What a prude he was. I get the impression that he was surprised and shocked by the way the story unfolded as he wrote it.

I mentioned some time back that I had started playing Dragon Age: Origins. I'm finding it hard to get the time to play it: unlike Second Life I feel that I can't just drop in for a half-hour or two, it feels like I need a block of two hours or more to be able to get into the story, so I have let it go. As far as I can judge, it is a very good game: the characters are well written and their interactions are interesting and surprising, the world is visually very appealing, there are plenty of side quests to intrigue and entertain; but it's just not Second Life. I can determine which of several train tracks the story will take, the decision tree is a veritable labyrinth (to mix my metaphors), but the fact remains that the story does follow along a path that someone else has set. It's brought into focus something that I had felt but not fully realized about SL: my joy in it is based in personal contact and conversation. I'm also becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the relentless killing. I guess I'm just not a gamer.

I will be running a workshop in Second Life this autumn on "the SL-ness of SL," and have started making notes for discussion topics and practical exercises. It is all theoretical stuff about identity and shared culture, and would be of very little interest to non-Second Lifers; there's nothing about me and little about Susan in that blog. Nonetheless, if anyone is interested, let me know by e-mail and I'll send you the URL — on the condition that you never mention it (or the avatars' names) here. To forestall unhappiness: please note that I will mercilessly and instantly delete any comments made here that break this condition.

Woodpecker

Wondering how to
count the syllables of "&"
drove from my mind the

slow soft tap-tap-tap of a
woodpecker in the cool mist.

Or: Don't let a technology distract you from the use you wished to make of it.

Life is going well, mostly, but still far too much work. Haven't had a day off since February 25th, 71 hours last week. One more week of this madness, then we'll be done.

Weather is warming up, but I've said that before so I will say no more. Birds are active, the goldenrod is in bloom, crocuses came and went. And so it goes.

Awake

Kitchen: still messy, but much cleaner.

Teeth: still hurting, but the appointment has been made.

Pile of letters: still high, but shrinking.

Work: still crazy, but at least interesting.

Hot chocolate: still cooking, but nearly done.

My soul: still shaky, but much better.


Writing that last post and pressing "Publish" gave me permission to do something about the state of my life. (Don't ask why I needed permission, or whose permission I had to ask, I don't know either. It's a metaphor that works for me.)

Having written all that and started talking about it (here, in SL, with G and the Lioness (and Sis, look for an answer very soon now)) two things started to happen. First, I woke out of the depression mindset of hopelessness and impossibility. Secondly, I discovered that feeling an emotional backlash after a positive experience is surprisingly common: nearly everyone I spoke to who had been on a retreat had felt something like this afterwards (to some degree or other). Knowing that helped put the feelings in perspective. I wish I'd known beforehand that this reaction was a possibility, it would have made a difference in the strength of the feeling. I've been talking about this in the meditation group and will try to ensure that there is some kind of "aftercare" at future retreats.

In short: it's getting better. If that's too passive: I am making things better. Thank you all for your support, in comments or phone calls or e-mail that I haven't yet replied to (sorry).

Weather is improving, the forecast is for warm rain all week (how sad that this feels like an improvement). The last frost of the winter should fall tonight, so any remaining scraps of snow should be gone by the weekend. Perhaps I can finally wear the new shoes I bought during the last thaw, two weeks ago.

Work is, as I said, still crazy. The Weasel lived up to his pseudonym by quitting with ten days' notice. We've hired an external site supervisor (a guy we've worked with before, from the village where G grew up though they never met as kids) and are interviewing people to join the in-house team, but in the meantime I'm doing his work as well as mine. Even so, I'm glad to see the back of the sneaky unreliable son-of-a-bitch.

Ah, the dawn chorus just started (at 6:46). This is the first time I've heard it this year. Perhaps Spring really is here.

Awake

Woke at around 6am from dreams of being peripherally involved in an inter-family Mafia scam; blogging briefly while the hot chocolate cooks. The clock says it's late enough that I could declare this to be early morning rather than insomnia, but that is not how it feels. I definitely need more sleep.

What's new? Not a lot. Working long hours on the project; the official "breaking of the sod" ceremony is on Saturday, so construction will start very soon indeed. It feels like we are desperately far behind in producing the drawings, but nobody is much worried. I am still the only person actually drawing on this project, and since the weasel-like prime helper is going to be doing the site supervision (touch wood, better him than me) he's not going to be drawing much in future either.

Winter continues, the length and severity of this one are practically unprecedented. Still, I walked home last night through slush and the drip and trickle of meltwater rather than the soft rustle of snowfall, so perhaps there is hope. We shall see. [Later: Froze overnight and currently snowing again. Ah well.]

Reading three books at once: "Anna Karenina" by Tolstoy, in the new-ish translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky (and how smug am I that I got those names right without looking them up?), "The ascent of money" by Niall Ferguson, and "The folklore of Discworld" by Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson. No prize for guessing which is the most fun.

I'm going to Malta at the end of the month, for a real-life meeting of the SL meditation group that Susan joined. I flew so much and so far in the last two years that I was able to get the flight for free. More about that as the time approaches, though in fact it is less than two weeks away. My gods, where does the time go?

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

… is upon us once again. Chestnuts and acorns rain down like hailstones these days as I walk up that last steep stretch of hillside to work (though only by daylight: they don't fall as I walk home at night, interestingly). The heating is on in the office already, because it's cold and damp (a) at that altitude and (b) on the edge of the forest; at home I'm going to hold out for the rest of the month, or until Saturday.

What have I been up to? Mostly work, with a small amount of play. The office is swallowing my life right now, I'm working over 50 hours every week. And it's strenuous work too, lots of thinking. Some evenings when I get home, I am too tired even to read e-mail. This will continue until mid-October, then there will be a downward shifting of gears. The reason is this: the project is on a flat and sandy site beside a lake, the basement is below ground-water level. We need to have the basement floors and walls built and waterproofed before the level rises to its annual high in May, and that means that the construction company will need to start digging on January 2, and that means that we need to get the bulk of the tender documents written and the bids collected and a construction company chosen during November.

Building below the water level is unexpectedly exciting. We are spending entire days in meetings with hydrological engineers and concrete specialists.

I finished Infinite Jest, and after a pause of three weeks (and several other books) have started reading it again. I'll write about IJ some other time, it'll take longer than I have available now (writing in my pyjamas before work), but let me say this about that. IJ is in many places a frustrating and annoying book, nowhere more so than at the end. The diffference between reading a book and listening to a storyteller, is that the reader has physical clues that the tale is about to end ("only 20 more pages"). The reader of IJ holds on to the great big brick of a thing, feeling the immense weight of known story in his left hand and the rapidly dwindling sheaf of unread pages in his right, and thinks "How on earth can all of these loose ends be tied up in the remaining N pages?" Well, dear reader, they aren't. IJ doesn't have an ending, it just stops. This grates, dear readers: it feels like is the author is cheating us, perhaps even mocking our expectations. But then, after a week or so of being annoyed, an interesting thing happened: I found myself reconsidering whether the loose ends had perhaps been tied up after all.

IJ is not written consecutively, event after event, week after week, in the manner of a police procedural: it moves chapter-length in jump-cuts forwards and back across several decades. Perhaps, I thought to myself, the answers are in there somewhere. So I started reading it again, as a surprisingly large number of people apparently do. I'll let you know.

Time to go. I hope you are all well and happy, my dears.

About the new office

So, we've been in the new place for two weeks, and I have to admit that I am settling in better than I expect. Telephones, fax and internet are working (took me three days to sort out all the complications), and we have been able to find nearly everything that we looked for. I won't mention the things that have gone missing since we moved in, that's just normal every-day incompetence.

Let me slip in a quick Public Service Announcement for those who might be planning an office in the near future. You might consider patterns of usage and how certain expensively-rented rooms stand empty for most of the day, and conclude that you can combine the meeting/conference space with the kitchen. Wrong. Doing so will mean either that you are unable to get a drink for hours on end, or that the conferees are continually disturbed by people sneaking in to put apple cores etc in the garbage bin. You may combine whatever else you wish, and good luck to you, but the office kitchen must be an enclosed room of its own.

It still annoys me that there are no stores in the immediate vicinity, and that the butcher and baker down the hill are closed at midday when one might wish them to be open, but even this is less of an irritation than I expected it to be. The farmers' market is in upheaval: a new market building is being erected closer to the street, and neighbouring apartment blocks torn down. Many traders have closed down or moved away, and it is hard to see that those who remain will be able to attract enough customers to stay in business.

I'm even coming to see advantages to the new place. FIrst of these, somewhat tongue-in-cheek: the uphill walk, in particular the last steeply-inclined five minutes, are going to get me fit (at least much fitter) doubleplusquickly. I'm a bit apprehensive about that stretch in winter though, since it's a "path" not a "street" and so will not be swept clear of snow or ice; have to wait and see how that plays out. It would be silly to have to take the bus to work (avoiding that stretch of hill), but it would be far sillier to slip and knock my teeth out.

Secondly, it is very nice (at least now, in summer) to have a garden with a large table and benches for holding outdoor meetings. There are at least two cats in the neighbourhood, both of them have discovered that our doors are usually open.

Counting the days

I arrived safely back in Stuttgart nearly a week ago, on Thursday morning, after a suitably boring flight (no upgrade this time, alas). The plan was for me to help move the office to G and U's new, not yet completely renovated, house, and you can guess from the subclause what happened to that plan. (The original plan was for us to move at the end of June. It is to laugh.) I took Friday off, spent it unpacking and washing clothes and hanging about in Second Life, then back to the office Saturday morning for the first half of the process: moving the library, model workshop and inactive-project files to the new house (which needs a name, I'll think of something).

Naturally things were taken that should not have been (empty file folders, milk for coffee, the kettle for making tea, the system CDs for repairing the hard disk that of course started throwing out error messages today. (shrugs)

I am really going to miss Rose Street. I have come to love it here, being at ground level in the midst of a dense city neighbourhood, and with a bakery on the corner and three supermarkets and two dozen restauraunts and cafes in walking distance. And I'll miss the people walking past, all the little kids looking in and grinning.

The new place will have absolutely none of that. It is at the dead end of a residential street, 14 minutes on foot and 52 metres uphill from the nearest tram stop, or 5 minutes and 8 metres downhill from the nearest bus stop. It's a storey up from the untravelled road, behind a forecourt full of cars. There is a kindergarten four houses along the street, but that's it. No bakery, no butcher, no cafe, no restaurant: just No. The nearest place to obtain food is at Farmers' Market near that tram stop. It was suggested that we might use the kitchen in the "house" part of the building, but I confidently predict that U will quickly tire of that — if we ever start.

I am missing the hell out of the wedding party, that was such a wonderful time and such a lovely bunch of people. I'm working on a few posts about it and matters arising, but not really getting very far with any of them. I talked to Noctis (the groom) about this, and he kindly agreed to have a look at them in raw form. His reply: words to the effect of "You started well, grasshopper, but there is much that you have not understood." And it is certainly true, his further comments opened my eyes to many things I had overlooked or misunderstood at the time.

I'm considering sending Susan to the next DanceClubConference meeting (there will be more meetings, we were determined that the joy must continue). I think she would possibly have more and different fun than Udge did.

[Updated: I've just remembered something. This post points to the event that started the process that lead to the weddingdanceconference.]

Summer has peaked, and we are starting the slow downhill slide towards autumn. It is pitch-dark at 9:30pm as I write (waiting for the disk-repair utility to finish work). Ah well, it's been a good summer mostly. The weather in North America was pretty well perfect: sunny, warm but not hot, always a pleasant breeze.

Which reminds me that there was a whole 'nother week after the wedding that I have not yet talked about. I managed to meet about a quarter of my SL friends this summer! After Toronto, I went to North Carolina to meet two others (great fun), then took the train up to New Jersey to meet four more. The connection to these six was the meditation group that Susan belongs to. Ha, I hadn't thought of that before: the two halves of the holiday corresponding to my two identities.

Plus ça change...

I would blame my three-week silence on the pressures of work etc, but regular readers know that there have often been such lacunae in recent years. I apologise to everyone I've been ignoring, all the bloggers whose posts that I haven't been commenting, all the birthdays I have forgotten (or worse, remembered and then put from mind because I couldn't deal with it). My behaviour upsets me at least as much as it does you.

Work has changed direction. I stopped the translation for half a year after the mess last summer, with them wanting me in Münster and then withdrawing the offer shortly before we signed contracts. Last month I realized that I had (relatively) enormous debts and no chance to pay them back without doing more or different work, so spoke seriously to G and U about my work in their office. The theoretical 20 hours a week had been creeping upwards, reaching an average of 35, which was a break-even level but no chance to repay or save anything. I explained all this and said I'd need to cut back to a real 20 hours in order to take a second job, terribly sorry. They thought about it overnight and made a counter-offer: 45 hours a week, slight raise in the hourly rate, and a productivity bonus guaranteed for 2009 that would let me pay all my debts.

I have to admit, that option hadn't occurred to me. I took it, and am now working fulltime and fairly happily. But it means that my lovely mornings at home have gone, so I am seriously behind on my blog- and book-reading, riverbank-walking-down-to-ings, and Second Life play. A fair exchange, perhaps; in any case I was glad to take it.

With the change in hours has somehow come a change in my style and manner. It feels as though I've shifted up a gear, or crested a hill and am now running on the level. I've started taking the job more seriously, sometimes arriving first and often leaving last, and am taking on more management and steering. Much of the technical discussion with structural engineers and HVAC planners and others that ilk, now devolves to me, and to my surprise I am enjoying it.

Second Life is changing direction too. I have stepped back a bit from the meditation group discussions, which lately had been more philosophical discussion than meditation. I often couldn't follow the sense of the conversation, for example the idea that the image of a chair on a screen is not distinguishable from the one that you are sitting in right now, dear reader, and I found that stressful. I have joined some more traditional groups to get back to calm and centering: "Sit down, shut up, just breathe."

Time for work. Let me leave you with a truly marvellous video (a genuine cinema short, btw, 16 minutes long) called Validation which offers exactly what the title says. Highly recommended, do watch it!

Shabbat shalom, dear friends. I do think of you fondly, even in my silence.

Postmortem

Harry: So this is the list of winners and losers, and the model photos. Which do you think won?
Udge: Well, G already told me that the winners were all groups of little pseudo-houses, so ...
(Looks at the models, considers carefully.)
Udge (pointing): Not this, but either this one or that.
Harry (grinning): Why "not this?"
Udge: Because it's ugly as shit.
Harry: That was the winner.
Udge: Bah.

Late

God but I hate competitions. Just now home from the office, 1:40 a.m. — and it's not even the final getting-things-drawn-up phase. Bah.

The moon is enormous and much brighter than usual tonight: it's at perigee, some 50,000 kilometers closer to the Earth than usual. Walking home on the snowy streets, the moonlit world was as bright as the hour before dawn. Amazing, quite lovely.

That is all.

In the morning

Managed to sleep at a geographically-appropriate time for a reasonable number of hours, hooray. Strange dreams about decaying European cities, all crumbling brickwork and wine-bar gentrification, featuring Birthday Boy and Oscar and myself all about age 18 (though I didn't meet them until decades later) and the male lead of a marvellous, deeply sad, film that I recently saw called Im Winter ein Jahr, which I'll write about some other time.

Working in Rose Street on the new project and supervising yet another competition, which is being done by a bought-in team of very recent graduates. G and U appear finally to have overcome their Napoleonic need to do everything themselves, they are letting the team work on this with no more than twice-daily discussions. It's turning out well, I think we stand a fair chance of winning this one too.

Two wins for the price of one

The "very unusual and exciting" event that I cliff-hangered you about on Monday came to pass: we have won a building contract despite losing a competition. I will say no more here because I don't want Google leading people down this path, but anyone who wishes should mail me and I'll send you back a URL to explain (nearly) all. [Updated to ask for a few days' grace to actually get something written.]

(does happy dance)

Six down, twenty-four to go.

Preparing

To Munich tomorrow for two nights, for the database toolkit's nearly-annual developer conference. Will spend the evening and tomorrow morning preparing a new Windows version to install on my favourite customer's system on Thursday. I hope I will be able to get an internet connection on all three days, to keep NaBloPoMo'ing. Time will tell.

Lovely day today, sunny and blue skies, temperatures around 10°C which is warm for this time of year. G and I went for a cappuccino on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum after delivering the model to the competition headquarters, where we were joined by U and Ralph. Very pleasant.

I mentioned back in February that there was something odd about the way a competition from November 2007 had ended. Well, something very unusual and exciting might happen tomorrow evening in a small town near the Rhine, which I can't tell you about yet (and possibly never in all the details). Watch this space.

Three down, twenty-seven to go.

Struggling

We still haven't managed to produce a convincing project for the competition that has to go to the printers on Friday morning. Damn and blast.

Heard from the organizers of the first competition: thrown out in the second discussion round. Ah well. I care more that our run of six at-least-an-honourable-mention's in a row has been broken, than that we didn't win this particular competition.

Strange dreams: last night I was walking around a silted-up Victorian-inner-city harbour, Manchester or the like, with a friend. She jumped into the murky, frond-infested waters and simply disappeared. Two others who were with us jumped in after her, but I couldn't swim so stayed on the quayside. She later IM'ed me (incorporating Second Life abilities into a dream based in real-life) to say that she had knocked out her front teeth and was ashamed to be seen like that, so had climbed out elsewhere.

Weather continues warmish (14°C or so) but rainy.

Despite all that, I am mostly calm and peaceful. I'll have more to say about this after I spend the entire weekend asleep.

That is all.

Daybreak

Literal and metaphorical. Up early to meet the tax collector (they make house calls), now posting while I consider whether to walk downtown to the Cafe Eberhard for breakfast despite the rain.

I'm making myself start doing that Life thing again. I began by writing some invoices, which I hadn't done since the end of June, and discovered that I have done less than six weeks worth of billable work during the last three months. OK, I knew that I'd been slacking, but I didn't realize how bad it was.

Translated a few wiki pages for the Münsters, and made a start on the second phase of the second competition, due in three weeks.

One step at a time, grasshopper.

Rain has stopped. Breakfast.

Lovely day

Just back from a walk down to the river in brilliant sunshine, 20°C and clear blue skies. Autumn is approaching, the chestnuts are ripe and the first leaves are beginning to turn, but the weather continues to be very pleasant. This is probably my favourite season, though I say that as each season begins.

September is the start of the year for me, Autumn always feels like a new beginning after the lethargy of Summer. I suffer much more under the steamrollering heat and humidity than in any winter cold that I've ever experienced. The arrival of cool weather wakes me from a kind of hibernation to a new energy and enthusiasm.

To Hamburg on Thursday to update a customer's system and discuss how to keep them from jumping ship to a competitor. Not much looking forward to that, especially not the five-and-a-half hour ride each way. I'll try to go up on Wednesday evening for dinner with Ageing Yuppie or Ingrid, if either is available.

Now, back to the grindstone.

Trivia, Tuesday edition

The second competition, for the rejuvenation and prettifying of a town centre, was handed in yesterday, and we are now entering the final stages of the first (a park-and-ride centre in a large Bavarian city (no, not Munich)).

Weather is clear but significantly cooler, a mere 18°C at present, and the first leaves are beginning to turn, so it looks like summer is over for 2008. Ah well.

Other than that, life goes on. Nothing new to report. I hope your lives are more interesting.