Thursday, January 18

 

 

I slept without a mattress for a second night and woke feeling refreshed. I may or may not continue this experiment for a few more nights to see if we should buy a new, hard as India, mattress.

Snow fell all night and I wake this morning to a uniform whiteness in the garden. Irma has let Sunshine out and when he sees me through the window he races straight for the door and comes in howling with rage.

Standing in the snow, with more still falling, I watch the 97V waiting at the lights to turn left. The variety of subdued colours available for view surprises me when I notice them as I take a picture. Like everyone else I have seen, I have my hood up and my head down, to keep the snow and wind out of my face. Only the act of photography causes me to notice how the scene actually looks.

A lot of people have colds at Arcada and have chosen to work from home today. Other than Nathalie and Monica, I will share the teachers’ room with Leila and Mirko. I will spend the morning doing a variety of rapid, small, but necessary tasks: answering mails, making appointments, and so on. I will also read a new draft of a thesis written in almost incomprehensible English. I returned it before Christmas suggesting that the student had it proofread by a native English speaker. The native English speaker appears to have changed about three words in the entire thesis.

I made the elementary mistake of providing some examples of sentences that I could not understand. Those have had a little work done on them, but everything else remains as opaque as before. Clearly it will get no better so I tell Tomas that he can organise the presentation, but not to expect me to agree to a good mark.

WordPress will remind me that an automatic update has failed and I will make a note in my diary to work out where the file permissions have gone wrong: a tedious but necessary process, unless I want to upgrade WordPress manually for the rest of my life. This time I will update WordPress manually.

I will go to Pixelache for a meeting that will decide nothing, and will remind me of something that I read in India. Talking about what we might do does not count as action. Doing something counts as action. We will then have a board meeting which will count as more blah in my jaundiced mind.

When I get home I will spend an hour and a quarter dealing with the snow. Irma has already cleared the path. The snow has already decided to continue. I will clear the front drive and the way to the compost, logs and roof hoover.

Once I get in again I will need a shower and after that we will notice that the television channels have stopped working again.

I will go to bed with wet hair.