orange sofa

The idea of lugging an orange sofa up a mountain in the Swiss Alps and riding it back down is a strange one even to me – and I have ridden a bed down Third Avenue in Salt Lake City, its tiny caster wheels burning hot by the end of it.  I was helping a friend move into the duplex we would share, and using the bed to carry us sounded more sensible than doing it the other way around, traffic and baffled residents notwithstanding.

On Friday, in a feeble attempt to recreate the race Flucha and I had done a few years back, I drove from Zurich to Montreux to meet my former flat mate Sean who was on the train from Grenoble.  More closely matching the drama of a genuine Top Gear challenge this time, I parked the rented Renault only minutes before my friend stepped off the train, just early enough to be the first on the platform.

Montreux is surely nice, even when the jazz doesn't play.  The town sits by Lake Geneva and oozes French charm, despite being Swiss.  Away from the water, mountains towered thousands of feet above it, their tops dissolving into the haze of fall.  It must be a fine place to spend time away from work, linger in cafés all afternoon or amble along the lakeshore promenade.  Lots of people probably did exactly that.  We chucked Sean's enormous Europe-in-a-week bag into the car and drove off without much looking left or right.  We had set our sights elsewhere.

It was the first time we've seen each other in more than six years.  The previous time we had met in Lake Placid, for memories as much as for convenience.  Sean lived in Massachusetts back then and I was on a conference-sponsored road trip in Canada.  Lake Placid minimized driving for both of us.  We camped by a lake, excavated stories and rode mountain bikes through the woods.  This time, the plan was much the same, except that we traded the canvas cabin of six years ago for a hotel on the south-facing slope of the upper Rhone valley, just below the mountain resort of Crans Montana.

Checking out the town upon our arrival, we happened upon a bike shop full of serious kit.  The owner, friendly, talkative and, it turned out later, full of hot air, filled us in on the place.  Crans is more hard core than anything you've ridden before, he warned.  This is where the first mountain bike world cup was held, and the trails live to tell the tale.  Suitably impressed, we went for a Marmotte, the local beer, at the Bar au Lac, to catch up and gather our wits.

The next morning, at breakfast, I was still debating the sense of renting downhill bikes.  Why not go for an easy cross-country ride, a bit of climbing, a bit of descending, lots of single track with great views and assured survival at the end?  Sean had other ideas, and shortly thereafter we stood at the base of the Cry d'Er lift.  We had rented enduro bikes, bought day passes for the lift and proceeded to go up the mountain and hurl ourselves back down repeatedly, the bikes inserted between us and the ground.  It was madness.

I'm not one for downhills.  Back in Utah, Sean and I could climb for hours, he always slightly behind me but never letting go.  Every ten minutes or so I would test the waters with a little show of force.  The breathing in my neck got a bit harder but stayed close.  The clanking and creaking of his aching bike were the soundtrack to endless suffering.  Up on the hill, the tables turned.  Now Sean was leading, but I could never keep up.  I would chicken out quickly and roll down without much drive.  I lost a few races this way.

This time was different because this time, there was the sofa.  Bright orange, with more travel than a national sales rep and so plush that I failed to register discomfort even after 13,000 feet of descending, it was entirely different from anything I've ever ridden.  The tires stuck to the ground no matter how loose, the yardstick of a handlebar made steering a snap, and huge disk brakes brought the wildest madness to a quick stop if necessary.  The result:  I was having an absolute blast.  Four red runs later, we went for black.

Deep into the afternoon, my body was trembling from exhaustion and anticipation.  Wrong mindset!  I walked the first hairy section, but then recovered confidence and got back on.  Halfway down, I had found my groove and was reminiscing of how my Fuel back in Utah compared (full suspension but not a sofa) when the trail suddenly got worse, with sharp rocks sticking out, narrow and not exactly straight.  I did the first part all right but lost focus.  My mind wandered back to when Sean and I explored Moab on steel hard tails and how I cleared nosedive hill when preriding the 24 Hours of Moab and then failing to do so three times during the race.  I was in similar territory now, though on a very different bike.

Awash in memories, I didn't realized that the trail had got even steeper, with more of a turn and bigger rocks.  This was now way beyond my abilities, but I was too deep in thought to react.  Fear tried to catch my attention but failed.  By the time reality reconnected, I had made it through most of it.  Adrenalin then got me through the rest before I could formulate an escape strategy.  Another corner, and Sean was waiting by the side of the trail, looking at me with incredulity.  Instead of limping out bloodied and broken, the bike in pieces and my clothes in shreds, I blasted out with a grin on my face.  Hysteric laughter precluded his question of whether I'd ridden this.

Shortly before five, we had to return the sofas.  Sean's got similar kit in his garage, but for me it was a sad farewell.  I would have happily taken the Kona Process 153 home with me.  There was room in the Renault but they had kept my ID.  I might buy my own for next summer, not necessarily orange but plush, comfy and hilarious.

turning pages

It's been a while since this blog has been updated with any sort of regularity. It could have been considered dead. Yet there are apparently still people out there who patiently wait for new posts and read them promptly. For them as much as for myself, my vague efforts will continue. I've been all over the place, mentally and physically, over the past half year, with excuses for silence that seemed sufficient when I didn't think about them hard enough. But it was just laziness.

As a stark reminder of this laziness, the annual summary of books I read in the previous year is published in October this year, not in February or March as in the past. With this delay it's impossible to say whether what's about to be written has any connection with what I perceived when I read these books. Many of the corresponding memories have been supplanted by more recent ones.

Because I kept a list I know that I read 18 books. I think I bought a fair number more. At least it felt like it when I moved to Switzerland in March. My library constituted a good half of what I shipped, by weight.

• Mr Phillips by John Lanchester – Mr Phillips is dissatisfied with his life and, on a whim, decides to drop out for an afternoon. He ambles through London, pointlessly.
• Landesbühne by Siegfried Lenz – I've read plenty of Lenz novels and I've always liked their peace and quiet pacing. This one might be no different but it seemed a bit inconsequential.
• Stories by Tobias Wolff – This books came thanks to an episode of the New Yorker fiction podcast where Akhil Sharma praised Wolff's frightening intensity. I can't remember a single story, which means, at the very least, that none stood out.
• Viva South America! by Oliver Balch – This travelogue is cleverly set up. Each country visited gets its own chapter, each focused on what Balch identifies as the peculiarity of that country. It's a nice change from the ordinary Riding in Che's Tracks and quite illuminating, though the writing was sometimes a bit too one-sided.
• American Wild by GRANTA – A GRANTA collection is always worth my money. You never know what you get but can count on quality, in whatever guise. These stories and assays show the US as it's rarely seen in the news.
• The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro – In the first chapter, when the main character has a 15-minute conversation with the butler in the lift to the third floor, I almost put the book down for good. I should have done it; it would have preserved weeks of my life. But I struggled on through time that expands, space that contracts and sense that's always absent. It's vaguely Kafkaesque, and I still haven't made up my mind whether it's great or a stinking pile of bull.
• The Island of the Colour-Blind by Oliver Sachs – Sachs, the recently deceased practicing neurologist, travels to the South Pacific to explore medical curiosities, the congenitally color blind people on Pingelap and sufferers from lytico bodig on Guam. The writing is clear, the stories are riveting and the digressions always spot on. Great book!
• Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami – Murakami is a superstar, but this book isn't much. Cortazar achieved the gradual inversion of reality and imagination in The Night Face Up much more breathtakingly.
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – The story of a Nigerian getting a foot into America, becoming famous of sorts, returning home and getting the boy, against all odds, is dissatisfying for its Disneyesque happy-endiness for everyone involved.
• The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño – The adventures of the visceral realists in Mexico City and a road trip that's possibly a quest for a beautiful girl frame endless snippets of pseudo-biographical ramblings that are, it seems to be the theme of this year's selection, entirely pointless. I skipped the middle part.
• Best American Short Stories 2008 – Too long ago; don't remember.
• The Periodic Table by Primo Levi – Ever since encountering Bear Meat in the New Yorker, I've had Levi high on my list. In this moving memoir, Levi takes chemical elements as anchor points for events, behaviors and characters. It's nothing short of brilliant, the best thing I've ever read about chemistry, and I studied it in college.
• Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare – If I were more of a loner or more selfish, I would like to be like Chatwin, traveling the world on a whim, pompously full of myself, with a hurried curiosity for everything and a knack for writing. There's a nomad inside me as well, but it's not a solitary one.
• On the Eve by Ivan Turgenev – Turgenev was a favorite of Bruce Chatwin's. He was impressed by the finely drawn characters. Maybe Turgenev is a writer's writer. I'm not a writer and I didn't like the book too much, though for being an old tale it had a nice flow.
• Letters from London by Julian Barnes – These collected columns from The New Yorker (a common theme in my literary preferences) give a highly subjective history of the UK from 1990 to 1995. There's even a bit of chess in it.
• Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski – A riot of a book, absolutely hilarious. The tribulations of a failed writer/poet who finds that drugs, sex, booze and betting on horses are all fine stimulants for his literary ambitions.
• Die Brücke im Dschungel by B. Travens – An publishing oddity. A book written sometime in the 1930s and then forgotten, it was published in the 60s and languished on my mom's book shelf until I rescued it. Now it's back.
• Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer – This is my book of the year - and it was the first one I read. Foer goes out to win the US Memory Championships and describes his training (interspersed with scientific and personal digressions) with such confidence that I tried some of the approaches myself. It is indeed possible to remember 20-item lists for weeks or months, but it is not easy.

better times

Prague is not what it used to be.  There are still Tatra trams in their proper red livery for old time's sake, and houses outside the immediate center of town haven't been spiffed up like those around Old Town Square, but most of what the visitor sees is shiny and new.  Hordes of foreigners descend on Prague, attracted by cheap beer, a medieval silhouette of fractal towers with turrets, spires and spikes repeating at every magnification, and wonderfully restored Art Nouveau decadence.  There are cafés with five-meter ceilings and heavy crystal chandeliers where other cities have the exchangeability of coffee shop franchises.  Hotel breakfast becomes impossible to justify.

Arriving at the airport, the first thing one notices is the striking clarity of the directions into town.  Joining those traveling on a limited budget, I was faced with a bus and two successive underground rides that might have disheartened me elsewhere.  In Prague last night, on the way from Lund via Copenhagen to a former Bohemian silver mining town, I quickly spotted signs detailing the travel options, two bus lines that promised to take me to the end of either of two underground lines.  On one of those, it was only a few stops into the heart of the city.  Machines stood by to convert paper with numbers on it or virtual accounts into tickets.  The correct fare, irrespective of journey and comprising both bus and underground, was obtained by pressing the biggest button on the screen.  It didn't take more than two minutes to understand and sort out.

Prague's underground is not particularly old but it didn't age well at the beginning.  From one of my rare or indeed imagined trips to the town as a child I remember an alluring dilapidation, a decrepitude that held stories of the past and adventures to come.  The dull trains bounced along their tracks with unnecessary elasticity, the escalators were rickety and stretched into the distance, and the stations were dim.  It was enough to color a child's imagination.  How things have changed!  The escalators are still incomprehensibly long, but the stations are bright and follow a corporate scheme that makes them indistinguishable one from the other.  The trains are spotlessly clean and quiet; the journey passes in a snap.

That night on the underground I fell into a philosophical mood.  I started pondering how things change for the better and whether it's always worth it.  Visiting the Czech Republic generates in me a feeling of coming home.  I've never lived here and my family connection (geographic, not ethnic) is tenuous, but regular visits during my childhood have made the place a part of my own.  As an adolescent, I got the first taste of freedom when three friends from high school and I cycled through the Czech part of what was then still Czechoslovakia on our way down to Hungary.  The facilitators of these three weeks of freedom – bicycles and supportive parents – have shaped me for live, but so has the experience itself and the shapes and colors of the country.

But it goes back further than that.  In Kutna Hora, where I am attending a conference, grass grows wild at the edges of town and in those parts where UNESCO money hasn't restored a picture book of medieval past.  Tired houses covered in decades of grime crumble slowly to the ground, their blind windows surveying slow change and no progress.  Paths wind through overgrown backyards and out into the woods, with no destination but for adventurous kids.  There's little traffic in the streets.  Pensioners in donated jackets run their errands morosely but light up with joy and stop to chat when they encounter their own.

The coming home that I experience is thus to a time as much as to a place.  Less has changed in the Czech Republic than in Germany.  Especially in small towns away from tourists' itineraries, things often look as I remember them from the past.  They surely don't look as they used to, and if I were to travel back to my childhood, I'd probably be shocked, but memory is a devious friend.  On the train into town, I saw a small lake with little wooden cabins around it and lots of wilderness instead of second homes with tall fences.  Melancholy rose within me.  This is how I want my daughter to grow up, I thought, until I realized that it weren't material limitations and the lack of development that made my childhood a good one, but my friends and what we did together.  Luckily, these things are universal.

overdue

The heat has subsided, the sun is low in the sky.  A gentle breeze is waving in from the balcony.  I turn off the stereo, put the book aside, close the AirBook, then measure the length of the silent room with pointless steps.  The room hasn't changed much.  The in-laws are sitting downstairs, staying in contact with home while nothing is happening here.  Flucha's in a car somewhere, driving to the store for groceries and drinks, three days overdue.  My beer is getting warm.

The months leading up to this weekend were eventful at work and quiet otherwise.  Biology took its course without drama or complications, shaping up a belly where there was none before and rounding it into a fine sphere of just the right size.  Periodic poking from inside gives evidence of new life – which does not want to materialize.

I've lived on the edge these last few weeks, a bag with all necessities with me at all times, always ready to leave at a phone call or text.  There was little rest, but the weekly journeys home and rare work-related travels occurred at a level of peace I had not known before.  I tend to get pangs of alarm when the train starts moving or I hop onto a bus.  Do I have my ticket, my wallet, passport, keys?  With everything in place in the bag, traveling was relaxed and joyful.

Last Friday, I returned to Heidelberg with the tranquility of the seasoned traveler.  There was no rush, no phone call to precipitate panic, not even the need to leave work early, and my travel wallet held all the necessary documents.  I leaned back on the train, had a beer and a soup, and read a few sections of an abandoned newspaper until the journey was over.  I arrived as always, and everything was as always.

The weekend that followed, a.k.a. due date and day plus one, we spent hiking the Odenwald – as much as that's possible with a party that includes two retirees and a woman ready to pop.  An hour on the Philosophers' Way and a hike down from Königstuhl are more than what old wives will tell you brings about labor, but Flucha, her belly bopping sideways, enjoyed the action and didn't slow down once.

The doctor didn't have anything helpful to say this morning.  Things are going all right, but they're not going anywhere, or at least not anywhere soon.  We were given a grace period of a week before more drastic action is considered.  I'm wondering what to do now.  I could go back to work to save my vacation days, at the cost of fretting so much that I couldn't work and risking a mad dash back to Heidelberg, possibly missing the delivery.  Or I stay here and fret without work to distract me until the inevitable happens.  Whenever it happens.

neighbors

The other day in the stairwell, the neighbor approached me with turmoil in her eyes.  "Is your girlfriend pregnant?" she asked.  "Yes", I said, climbing the stairs past her.  What a weird question, I thought.  It's only two weeks to go and there's no way to hide it.  But the neighbor wasn't done.  "Please keep it quiet in the evenings", she said.  "I need to get up early.  I work a lot."

What an odd request.  It's not like we're throwing a party.  But the neighbor is one for odd requests.  Sometime I think she's got mental issues, and if she doesn't take her pills, all sorts of weirdness spill out of her.  She's rung our bell and knocked the door in the middle of the night as if the house were on fire, while we were one floor higher, quietly watching TV.  When I answered the door, she'd repaired to her flat.  She gets worked up about flushed toilets and the extractor fan in our bathroom.  We try to keep things to a minimum to avoid unnecessarily bothering her, but some things need to be done.  Loud crying, for example, needs to be done when you're a baby.

I turned around and looked the neighbor in the eyes.  "Have you made plans yet?" I asked.  "It's going to be a nightmare, unbearable, World War III."  This last one quoted her from an earlier discussion.  "Your peace is gone, I'm afraid.  The screaming will pierce your ears.  You can forget about sleep for months."  Her look turned frantic; she gaped at me.  "I'm lucky I don't live here", I continued.  "You'd better find someplace else too."

The conversation could have transpired just like this.  She's the kind of person that kills all pity and empathy in me.  But she's also an entirely different kind of person.

The other day, when Flucha was ankle-deep in disaster after the washing machine flooded the basement with black suds, she came down with rags and a bucket to help, on her own volition, concerned and friendly like the perfect neighbor.  The baby wasn't mentioned.

train of thought

This morning, the unionized drivers of Germany's national railway announced they'd go on strike for what's the ninth time in the past six months.  The strikes are quickly becoming routine for everyone not reliant on the railway, but next weekend's action kicks things up a notch:  The strike will be open-ended.  It will also be – and here's some continuity – about nothing at all.  When the train drivers announced their most recent strike this morning, what they didn't announce was what they're striking for.

It is quite clearly not about money.  This would be easy to understand and easier to communicate.  I'm sure it would also be easy to negotiate, and strike would be nothing more than a distant memory at this point. But it's not as easy as that.  The strike isn't about anything obvious; the reasons are never mentioned when the strike is discussed.

In the depth of the dark web I read something about two competing unions that represent railway workers.  One unites the drivers, the other's open to all.  As far as I understand it, the train drivers union fights for the right to represent all railway workers, whether they want it or not – a dog fight on the back of passengers.  If that's true, I'd like to punch every union official in the face, and every striking train driver as well because that's not only abusive but also deluded on so many levels that it's hard to decide where to start.

Maybe like this: If it's about fair representation of all railway workers, would a merger of the two unions not be the most powerful step?  If this has been tried and failed, the strike would be about procedural incompetence, and it should more appropriately be directed against the train drivers union itself.  The head of the union should step down for ineptitude and negligence.

But maybe the merger has been tried and failed not because of ineptitude but because the other union didn't want it.  Their voice is not heard in any of the discussions, though it should be them who decide whether they want to be represented by another group.  Otherwise it'd just be like some distant relative waltzing into your life, claiming a right to represent you as if you were a juvenile delinquent in need of guidance – and disrupting everyone else's life in the process.

Here's a geopolitical metaphor for the same situation:  Imagine you're a hapless and harmless country, known mostly for tractors, oligarchs and corruption.  Your biggest neighbor and historic rival decides it's for your best if it henceforth represented you on the global political stage.  You have a differing opinion, but your neighbor has bigger tanks.  And anyway, no one's asking you.

Even I wouldn't ask, were it not for the disproportionate misery these strikes cause.  Where there's no message, there's all the more need, it seems, to bring it across forcefully.  I'm baffled this is legal at all.  If the janitorial staff at Frankfurt airport were to go on strike, not for a well-deserved pay increase but to bolster their claim to represent, from now on, all the newsagents and bakery outlet workers at the airport, people might shake their heads.  If they, to underscore their seriousness, sat down on the tarmac and blocked all flight traffic, they'd be taken away quickly.  Why is no one taking away the leadership of the train drivers union?

For reasons that are not altogether pleasant and certainly outside my control, I have to go to Dresden this weekend.  By some quirk of scheduling, both possible Swiss flights are already fully booked.  There aren't even any seats left in business class.  The overnight train is nearly fully booked, too.  No beds or cots remain.  This morning, hours before the announcement of the latest strike, I purchased one of the last sleeper-seats.  I am not exactly looking forward to the journey, but I'm even less looking forward to having my plans foiled by some idiotic power game between imbeciles.

drought

It was oddly fitting that the New Yorker I bought on my most recent transatlantic journey carried a story on the Californian drought.  I was on my way to San Francisco and looking for some context.  Work trips of a few days only don't usually offer much in that regard, but the New Yorker delivered.

California has been in a drought the last four years.  Growing cities battle with profligate agriculture for decreasing resources.  There's little snow in the Sierras and it doesn't rain.  Water tables sink, wetlands run dry, rivers silt up.  Coastal cities and farming communities alike fear for the future, but vested interests and hard lobbying on both sides make finding a solution difficult.

Introducing hot air into a situation where cold rain is needed, SFO has put huge posters into their restrooms alerting passengers that "California is in a drought.  SFO's faucets save 30% more water".  No point of reference is given.  Thirty per cent more than what?  Might the faucets just save 30% water, and marketing thought the message would be more convincing with excess verbosity?

In any case, the entire airport managed to save 14% of water over the past seven years, as another huge poster claimed without any embarrassment or contrition.  The marketing department was probably relieved to have found anything positive at all, but 14% isn't a whole lot if a near-total lack of rain is the situation.  Fourteen percent over seven years is less than a percent and a half each year.

Where is water wasted?  In California, that's a question that's easy to answer but whose answers are hard.  Average water consumption in the state has decreased by 50% recently, which shows that the problem is being taken seriously and that great efforts are being made.  On the other hand, average water consumption is still twice as high as in central Europe.

The easiest place for cuts is also the hardest.  The most lavish waster of water is agriculture.  Despite employing only 3% of Californian workers and contributing a mere 2% of the state's economic output, agriculture uses 80% of its water.  For historic reasons, water is not a commodity but a right, unmetered.  Driving along Highway 1 north from Halfmoon Bay, I saw fields being irrigated in the heat of the afternoon.  I'd be surprised if more than half of the sprayed water escaped evaporation and hit the ground to nourish the plants.  But where no one is counting and no one is charged, waste is a rampant.  Similarly, the San Joaquin valley is still happily growing grass for export to China.  Grass!  In a drought!

Grass has largely disappeared from the campus of Stanford University where I went for a run one morning before giving a talk at a workshop.  It still gave the impression of being green, but underneath the shrubbery, there was nothing but dust.  It hadn't rained in a while, and the sprinklers weren't asked to compensate.  A friend I visited in San Francisco claimed with the black humor of the powerless that the drought had been good for the weather.  Since she had moved there two years earlier, it's been sunny most of the time and even the fog wasn't as bad as everyone had warned.

This last comment reminded me of London and the rain, whose connection has become much looser in the last decade or two.  Some blame this on global climate change.  Maybe that's at fault in California as well.  One alternative explanation, a few years of extreme weather, is much easier to contemplate, but it could also be another, a reversion to the mean, the end of a century or so of exceptionally wet weather, as some studies suggest.  T.C. Boyle's novel A Friend of the Earth, which I didn't much like five years ago, might yet turn out to be prescient.

halftime

The book I'm reading at the moment, Sechseläuten, got me onto the football metaphor of the title.  It's soaked with this stuff.  The sections are called First Half and Second Half.  I've progressed all the way to Extra Time by now.  But the book isn't about football, and I didn't buy it in the mistaken belief that it was.  I bought it, during a layover in Mannheim on my way back to Heidelberg last weekend, because it had it big red sticker on it proclaiming it to be the number one bestseller in Switzerland and because of its title.  I want to learn about the Swiss from it.

Sechseläuten is a public holiday of long tradition in Zürich that took place last Monday but passed me by nearly completely.  I live in Aargau, the neighboring canton, and had to work that day.  Then, on the bus back home, I read that the Böögg had lasted for twenty minutes and that summer would be miserable.  I was as clueless as you probably are reading this.  What's the Böögg, and what does it have to do with summer?

The book, a crime story set in Zürich, enlightened me in as much as its first major scene is the burning of the Böögg during the Sechseläuten ceremony.  I learned that Sechseläuten initially celebrated the beginning of summertime when the workday would end at the ringing of the six-o'clock-bells and not at nightfall as in winter.  The Böögg is a cardboard effigy of winter, in the shape of a snowman, its head filled with explosives.  To chase out winter and celebrate the arrival of spring, the Böögg is burned on a big pyre near the shore of Lake Zürich.  Originally separate, these two events are now conflated. 

The time it takes for the cracker in the Böögg's head to explode foretells the quality of summer.  A quick explosion means a hot and dry summer.  The average over the last half-century is 16 minutes.  I didn't check how the numbers correlated with the weather.  I haven't written much over the last month and a half either.  Too busy.  The new job is different from the old one and takes some getting used to.  It's the first time I work for a company.  The contrast to academia is striking.  You know the cliché of the cog in the wheel.  That's what I am.

In all my previous jobs, I was working for myself, doing my own projects, with failures and success depending primarily on myself and eventually coming to rest on my shoulders.  This is not to discount the contributions of others or to deny that science is collaborative.  It's just to say that at the end of the day, everyone is responsible for himself.  If you don't get your projects published, you're not going anywhere.

Except into industry, possibly.  In a company, your interests are not the primary driver of your work.  There's a strategy and objectives and milestones and a lot of novel lingo.  There are different departments that work towards shared goals, with continuous interdependence.  I still organize my day (around frequent meetings) and prioritize and come up with things to do, but I can't kick back and read the internet anymore because someone else depends on my work.  It's rather exhausting.

It's ok when I do things I know, when I process data or think about crystallography.  But most of the time, the things I'm dealing with are totally foreign to me.  When I changed labs before, I would start contributing almost immediately – ideas, jokes, nonsense.  The science was a bit different, but I had read up on it, and the environment was familiar.  Biochemistry is biochemistry.

At the new jobs, it's different, and I'm rather quiet, trying to ease in without anyone noticing that I haven't got a clue.  What do I know about integrated circuits and their readout logic, or the finer details of memory management?  And what about ptychography?  How am I supposed to highlight the advantages our detectors offer in such experiments when I can't even pronounce the technique?  There's so much learning to do, I could spend all day reading and listening to experts.

I used listen to podcasts while walking home from work in London.  I tried this on the bus here.  My commute takes the same time, but I am not the same.  In the mornings, hours before I would roll out of bed in London, I'm not awake enough to hang on to spoken words.  Even the Bugle is too much sometimes.  In the evenings, I'm just zoning, dinner and the sofa on my mind.

Tomorrow I'll find out how well I've adjusted. It's halfway through my probation period (though without a halftime break) and I have a meeting with my boss to discuss my performance so far.  I think I've been doing all right, but I'm curious to know what he thinks – and criticizes.