Back to basics

This fall has been quite busy, somewhat too busy, I must admit. It’s all the stuff going on at work, as usual. In addition, my handyman season has lasted longer than usual.

Living in a 100-year old house is like rowing a leaky boat. You need to bail out water continuously to keep it floating. That’s OK. I’m used to it. But this fall there has been more. We have refurbished the ground floor (still going on). We have ripped out everything, and rebuild it from the core; putting in insulation in the walls and floors, installing water-borne heating, and so on.

We have hired craftsmen to do the most difficult and time consuming things, but I’ve done a lot myself too. So, I’ve been working as a scientist at day time and as a carpenter in the evenings and weekends. It’s a nice combo actually. I rest my body when doing research in the office, and I rest my brain while swinging the hammer and saw.

In fact, I enjoy it. It feels like I’m doing some real work, not just fiddling around with physics and mathematics and computers. However, it leaves too little time for reading and writing. Things are too complex right now.

I don’t believe in any gods and superheros, and I think that from the beginning, the (pre)humans were much like any other species of animals. Our mission in life was very simple; to eat, fuck and die. We were supposed to spread our genes to the next generations, and then get our bio-mass recycled.

But at some point, our brains just got too big, and we started to worry about religion and science, and stuff like that. I don’t like religion, but I’m happy with the science.  

But there’s more. There’s no end to this craziness. We shop for hardwood floors and induction cooktops, and what the hell should we do with all the old crap that we have bought at the mall over the years? At work there are company strategies and deliverables and achievements, evaluation systems and key performance indexes (so-called KPI’s). Management is pretty insane. I've developed my own management theory. More about that on a later occasion.

Right now, it feels like I wanna go back to the basics. Fortunately, there’s the Christmas vacation coming up. I don’t like the Christmas part of it, but I do like a mid-winter vacation. Tomorrow we go skiing in the mountains for a week. Great!

To whom it may concern: Merry Christmas.

I prefer to say Happy Winter Solstice >:)

(The pictures were taken some years ago, when little boy was really a little boy. He had heard the Christmas Gospel in the kindergarden, and re-told it at home, in his own way. I made the clay models while little boy directed. There were Jesus and Mary and Joseph and the Holy Kings, and little boy insisted that they played soccer. This was unknown to me, but who cares. I just made it the way he wanted)