Thursday, February 20

I have been waking up just before 7:00 every morning as if by magic. This morning I woke at 7:10. The fifteen minute delay has made all the difference to the light. Usually I leave in semi-dark, and now I am looking at the neighbours’ garden in the morning light.

The winter has been very different to the last few, and yesterday what snow there was started melting rapidly. Overnight it froze. Now Minna and Tomy have a large frozen lake round their apple tree.

I will begin my work day with a meeting with Jutta in the gym. We will be the only ones there, and so have an hour’s discussion about turning our courses into modules while working on the various machines. We will write everything down once we have showered, and by 10:30 we will have a complete plan.

I will have lunch at China Flavor with Jutta and Andrea from the Communication Department. She wants to talk with us about our adventures in South Africa for the Arcada annual report. After that I will have a planning meeting for the Omtänk project, at which everything we had planned will be thrown out of the window. I will decide that being unhappy is not an option, and so I shall smile and make positive suggestions. By the time the meeting ends we will have arrived at decisions which are diametrically opposed to what I had wanted and I will be happy about it.

Irma will collect me from Arcada, and I will spend some of the evening talking and some of it ironing.