There have been weekends where I stay home on Friday and Monday to get work done, and for four days in a row I get up, eat, write code, try to make sense of results, go to bed at two or three, and repeat. No clue whether it's cold or warm outside. I enjoy doing that once in a while and really dig into a problem. I'm learning a bunch of stuff; or at least it feels like it ;-)
But then once in a while that mode of operation needs to be broken. For the last two weekends I promised myself that I would go out and do something, but then I didn't. (I haven't exercised in weeks!) This weekend I will go into town. I have to; I'm running out of Nespresso capsules. Can't work without fuel!
The other day I diverged from my shortest route to work and back, and detoured through "downtown" Mulhuddart to return yet another letter to the previous renters of this apartment. This one looked important: Something from the health department addressed to the parents of the girl who must have lived here. Probably a reminder to have her come in to be vacinated or something.
Across from the post office I noticed a new store had opened that promised international food. Anything international and different from the three chain store brands we have here can only be good. And within walking distance no less!
The couple who opened the store is from Albania and they do have interesting looking things on the shelves. Most of them I have no clue what they are. When they say international, they mean it. The other stores have international food too, but it is all made by Nestle, Kraft, or Dr. Oetker and the labels are still in English. Not in this store. I bought some items that seemed safe and that I would have a chance to actually eat or prepare, like the two items in the picture above, but I need to investigate this some more. It's not just Eastern European either. Lots of Asian stuff as well with the same trend: on many of them not a single word in English or roman alphabet letters.
The apartment I live in is owned by the county and run by a management company. Next month a new company is taking over and we all got letters telling us where to send the rent from now on and asking for a bunch of information that I thought they already had.
This morning I went downstairs and talked to the woman who has been running the place. Technically I guess she was just the assistant for Gerard, the manager. He is better than her at chatting and smoking, but I think she did most of the actual work. Gerard is no longer here and Grazyna will run the place, working for the new management company.
It seems Gerard was a little lax with paperwork and getting things done. My file was complete, but the new manager seems to have been appalled at how much information was missing about other renters and the number of work requests that weren't recorded or done. I told Gerard last Spring that the heating system is not working properly and that maybe Summer might be a good time to fix it instead of waiting until it became urgent.
The new manager asked for a list of things to be fixed and Grazyna told me that it would probably be a while since they have been flooded with requests that had been on Gerard's mind but he forgot to get around to ;-)
Maybe I'm making Gerard sound worse than he is. For all I know, he may have been promoted in his company and now runs a bigger place. He was always nice to me.
A couple more weeks and I'm headed for Albuqeurque. I'll stop for a few days at Watson first (I have never been there), then spend a week in Albuquerque and then off to Seattle for Supercomputing. I'm really looking forward to that. Anika will be back for one of those weekends as well.
It's gotten cold here: long sleeves and (thin) gloves to ride my bike to work now. It's also getting dark early now. (Not sure what happens in the morning. By the time I get up the sun is too.) During the Summer it was light until ten and eleven, but now we are paying back the light we consumed. That's what happens when you live far in the North.
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