Monday, November 7

 
 
YEAR:  2016 | Tags:  | |
 
 

 
 
 

The garden, 20:30

 
 

It snowed gently as I walked to the bus stop in my new winter boots. It continued to snow gently while I waited twenty minutes for a bus. During the waiting period the wind rose so that the gently falling snow got hurled into my face from time to time.

I had a long meeting with Lars about the Quality Assurance Council which he has chaired. He will move to Iceland in January and Nathalie has decided that I will chair the council, so he talked me through its remit, its activities, and its intended goals. As I expected none of them make sense. Not strictly true: all of them make sense separately. Together, however, they sit in happy contradiction, each undermining the other. At the end of the meeting Lars handed me the poisoned chalice and, both laughing, I took it.

I then started to look at recoding some parts of the Convivial Mechanics site but got interrupted.

In the afternoon I sat through two hours of a team meeting that looked at possible ways of streamlining the entrance examination. Fred, Jani and I had had a set of meeting about this, and the report we had drawn up formed the basis of the discussion. We ended up with a plan.

I then looked again at recoding some parts of the Convivial Mechanics site but got interrupted.

At home Sunshine got very angry about the snow. He kept wanting to go out and then returning immediately, to want to go out again a few minutes later. I assume that he expected the weather to have returned to “normal” in the short interval between tests.

When Irma arrived I went outside and spent an hour and a bit snowblading. Snow continued to fall while I worked but it seemed obvious that if I didn’t clear the snow now it would freeze or compact overnight, and prove impossible to shift tomorrow.

Now, having showered, I stand in the warm and look out over the garden. The snow and the light makes the whole scene sepia. I can see the table with a bucket on it. Both show the amount of snow that has fallen in the form of what Auo used to call snowcakes. I watch the snow falling for ten minutes while Irma tells me that it will snow continuously for the next forty eight hours.

I decide that I will probably have to snowblade tomorrow morning and go to bed early.