I bought a small white-board for my bathroom. It's something I've been thinking about for a long time, since I do much of my best thinking there. I suspect it's because of the relative sensory deprivation in a bathroom - there's just a lot less to distract the brain. So I got a white-board to mount on the wall to take notes. It paid off the very same day.
I was walking home with my new purchase and I had a great idea for the premise of a movie. I didn't have anywhere to write it down and although I was only five minutes from home, I knew that once I got in the door I would get distracted by the mail and dinner and probably lose all of my great ideas. Then I remembered I was carrying a whiteboard. I sat down on the bench under the next streetlight, unwrapped the board, and filled it completely with mad scribbling.
The next morning, I transcribed my notes to a computer and they seemed pretty stupid. Also, it turns out that whiteboards don't work in moist environments.
They refinished the staircase at work. The building's almost a hundred and fifty years old, the staircase runs up six stories, and a very small elevator has been squeezed into what must have been a tidy little shaft around which the staircase climbs. For two weeks we had to take the back stairs or use the elevator. The elevator claims to hold three people, and technically three people can fit in it, but they can't all be tops.
I had a nice Thanksgiving, thank you. I inviting almost everybody I know in Copenhagen and their friends, which turned out to be almost a dozen people, and made about half of Tony's menu. The home-made tofurky was surprisingly simple to make and surprisingly tasty; three kilos of tofu and a marinade including miso and shitake. What sold it as good food, if not as turkey, was the gravy, which was superb. I don't really know how I made it because I was ad-libbing, but it did contain a ground-up pan-fried parnsnip. Who knew? Also, it was impossible to get any gourds other than zucchini, so I went ahead with a butternut squash soup recipe and, lo and behold, aside from being pale green instead of yellow, it tasted good in much the same way.
We (the company) went to Hamburg for two days for a coding bash to fix bugs in the open-source product we are working on. People came from as far as Munich and Berlin. I had a nice time because there were genuine nerds (Peter and Lars, despite being professional programmers, are not nerds, and they refuse even to feel bad about not being nerds). Timo noticed my totally cool Buffy hat sitting on a table (totally cool because it's cast-and-crew schwag I got via a Connection, not store-bought merchandise), which nobody ever does and so I often break down and point it out, which is stupid because if the other person didn't already notice it then they certainly won't care, and inquired of the room, "who hass de buhffy haht?" "Es ist mein Buffy hat!" I cheerfully replied.
And it was nice to be in Germany, where I'm at least 1% capable in the native language. On that note, Danish classes start next Monday, three hours each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it's just in the nick of time. I've been in hermit mode, recovering from an overactively social summer and revelling in my first no-roommate, all-mine, more-than-three-months home in several years, but my ongoing laziness has made it a less productive hermitage than I had hoped. Relaxing, though.