Sultry Summer

What a strange summer it has been hear so far. No summer weather as such. So much work to do on various projects, so much that needs to be addressed, and, therefore, I don't have the sense of experiencing a summer lull. Yet, the gods willing, I'm off on vacation at the end of the week until mid-August. If you notice a blogging lull then you know why.

Unprecedented

The university research project I’ve been working on the last years is sadly coming to an end at the end of this month. Can you imagine my surprise when I went and asked the secretary how many days of vacation I had (expecting three or four) and she says nine! This means tomorrow is my last day of work.

Well, at least officially tomorrow is my last workday. I’ll have to go in regularly for the next few weeks because of previous commitments made to some of my colleagues (e.g. co-writing a paper, working on a final presentation). On the good side, some of this work can be done from home or under the shade of a tree, which is quite wonderful, since my present office’s temperature is above body temperature by noon.

What is unbelievable is the fact that I had nine days vacation that I didn’t know about. This is completely unprecedented in my twenty-five years in Germany. How far the pendulum has swung!

When I first arrived in Germany, we had six weeks of paid vacation, ten days of statuary vacation (bank and religious holidays), one day off a month if you worked overtime beforehand, and the company was closed between Christmas and New Year’s. I thought I had arrived in holiday heaven. Don’t get me wrong, I love to work, but boy, do I love to travel. To make the situation appear even more surreal, at that time, vacation pay was 135% of normal pay because you need something to spend on vacation!

As you can imagine, I spent a lot of brain time devising an algorithm that concentrated on how to distribute the wealth of vacation time in such a manner that would maximize on consecutive blocks for travel opportunities. Unlike what I read in this article (US workers gave back close to 574 million vacation days in 2006), I am not a gal to look a gift horse in the maul!

So, what am I going to do with my nine days? Enjoy them. Unplanned, unexpected, unhurried, I will savour them with pleasure and then sit down to the challenge of finding myself a new job.

Rhapsody in Raps

Dusk from my balcony in Rabenholz

I just got back from a three-day writing retreat at my favourite holiday apartment (here). The weather was spectacular. The rap fields in bloom. And even though I didn’t do any new work, I did work on some older projects and came up with a few new ideas that I’m rather excited about.

Note to self: when things start getting too busy, when my inner balance tilts in the direction of chaos, when no ideas are surfacing... pull the handbrakes and just SLOW DOWN! And then, voila, everything slips back into place. It’s as simple as that!

Off To Work Again

My two-and-a-half-week vacation is quickly drawing to an end. What a relaxing time this has been. What a joy just to live each day a moment and mood at a time.

I’ve come to the realisation that a non-planned, unscheduled vacation is the ultimate in vacation. Inwardly and outwardly I feel more relaxed than I have in a long time. Well, since last summer when I also just went with the flow (here).

The last days have past in a blur of collage making. The following is the first draft of a collage a friend asked me to make. She wants to print it onto linen and place it in her sewing room.



Yes, I know someone who can sew. A novel concept in this time and age.

In my early high school years, we had a subject called home economics. The girls received instruction in cooking, sewing, and learning to type. The boys learnt car mechanics and welding.

I might not have known at that time what I wanted to be as an adult, but instinctively I knew it wasn’t a housewife or secretary. So, as a result, I refused to learn anything in home economics. How short-sighted this was of me.

Much to my surprise, years later, after giving up my ballet career and finishing my electrical engineering studies, I found out that learning to type with ten fingers is a pretty useful task to know. My first job was programming (i.e. typing) quality control tests on large electronic equipment. I spent eight hours a day typing in computer code. Admittedly, a very tedious job; yet, it was made even more tedious because I could only use three our four fingers to type.

Eventually, I learnt to type “blind” (i.e. not looking at the keyboard) and with all ten fingers. There is nothing that impresses people more than when they walk into my office and I look up at them and continue typing what I am writing until I finish the sentence. It’s on parallel to someone riding a bicycle with no hands.