Friday, September 7

 

 

At 9:00 I settled in for a sixty minute festival planning meeting, held on an audio-only Jitsi channel. As usual Oliver’s audio kept cutting in and out.

We made a series of decisions. As a resukt of some of them I will meet Nick in the centre of the city on Thursday evening, when he arrives from the airport, and guide him to whatever bar we decide upon, to meet the other speakers.

As a result of this I abandoned my plan to book Nick into the Scandic Kallio and instead booked him into the Hotel Arthur. It cost another eighty euros but it will save a whole lot of problems on the day.

Booking a room in the Hotel Arthur proved amusingly complex. The online booking form collapsed just before I confirmed and I had no way of telling if I had actually booked the room or not. I phoned them to ask and it turned out that I had. It also turned out that I could not have a receipt until Nick has actually checked in, for reasons that made no sense to me at all.

After this I had a Zoom practice session with Jutta, at which we carried on talking about plans for next year. I set up a lunch meeting with Jutta, Mirko and me to carry all this forward.

I had lunch with Tomas and Monica, to discuss something completely different. We all realised at the same moment that we would have cake to eat in an hour’s time.

At Personalkaffe we have strawberry cake with vanilla sauce. I get to play with the new coffee machine for the very first time. In fact, I get to know that we have a new coffee machine for the very first time. With my coffee in one hand and my plate in the other I sit down at one of the glass-topped tables. Oh the full-on photogenicity of it all, I think.

Later I will prove unable to locate a dictionary that accepts photogenicity as a real noun. However, since dictionary.com describes toxicity as “the quality, relative degree, or specific degree of being toxic or poisonous” then, almost by definition, photogenicity means “the quality, relative degree, or specific degree of being photogenic”. And if it didn’t before then it does now.

After this I will have a long talk with Mirko about the meeting I have booked. He will agree that we should have it and point out that I didn’t check his schedule before booking it. Oops, I will say, and promise to find a new date when we can all meet.

I will make sure that I have everything I need to Pärnu on my iPad and then have a thorough backing up session. Having given up on successfully installing iCloud on my laptop I will look at the upgrade to Chrome and realise that they have instituted proper bookmarks on the iPad, in a side panel. I will switch my default browser from Safari to Chrome, while still hoping that iCab will soon make it possible to interact with Laspass properly, the way that Chrome, Firefox and Safari do.

I will leave the building and catch a tram or two to Well in the Park. Irma will meet me at 17:20 and we will walk down to meet Tom and Maisa. Someone will beat us to the empty seats at their table but we will catch up with them later in the evening.

On the way home we will stop at Prisma, and spend a relaxing evening sipping sparkling wine.