Of course I wasn't going to write another entry, but given my schedule it looks like it will be another week or two before I can even begin thinking about the successor to this journal. So what the hell - one more time, just to stay in shape.

It's Sunday night here in Berlin. I've been meaning to write this all weekend but I haven't been moving too quickly. The computer was out of action late last week and then I've had various things to do each day. But now I'm finally settled down. Vita is sprawled on the floor next to me, and I have a glass of (insanely cheap) Beck's close at hand. We are alone - Annette is in Chicago for her dissertation defense on Wednesday.

This following comment doesn't really fit into the narrative structure I had planned for this entry, but I will make it anyway. I'm really happy to be here. It was time to do something different with my life. I enjoy living in Europe.

The successor to this site... I don't have any clear ideas about the next project, really. Just a few little notes. I'd like to buy a cheap digital camera if possible, since we didn't bring the scanner. I suspect that once I get started, it will be hard to stop writing about this place. Whether I write anything useful is another question entirely. And I'm still thinking about sitting down to work on some fiction.

One of the things that happens to you when you live here is that you constantly use German words in your English conversation. Not only nouns - you use any word or phrase that is most convenient or appropriate. For example, when you take the U-Bahn and you have to change lines, it's an "umsteig" - from the verb umsteigen. Why use the clumsier form "change trains" when you can simply say umsteig? Furthermore, it doesn't matter whether you're changing to or from or between trains or buses or trams or U-Bahns or S-Bahns or even airplanes - its always an umsteig, no matter what combination of vehicles.

Anyway, the point is that I'm almost certainly going to use a lot of German words in my writing. I could include translations every time, but that would be tiresome, especially for me. I think what I will do is explain most things when I first use them and hope that the reader develops the necessary trans-lingual vocabulary. And I should probably include a link to Babelfish at the top of every page...

So it was a strange week for the computer. I had no email contact with the world for sixteen hours after Annette and the laptop left town - oh the horror! On Wednesday I bought a basic 56K internal modem for the desktop. I had no trouble installing it, but then of course it didn't dial out. I spent all of Thursday morning pounding away, fiddling with NT network settings of every description but I could not make the COM 3 port work properly. Finally I went back to the shop to see if I could exchange it for an external modem. It should work with NT, they said - it must work with NT. Did you re-install the service pack after installing the modem? No, as it turns out. So back home I went and re-installed Service Pack 5 and still it did not work. I then dragged the whole machine, sans monitor back to the shop, by U-Bahn no less. Many hours later they asked if I could leave it overnight. I returned the next afternoon to find them no closer to success, though somewhat wiser. They had even plugged in their own hard drive and determined that everything worked fine on Windows 95 and 98, but not on NT Workstation or Server. This despite the fact that the modem included NT drivers and was advertized as NT-compatible. As quitting time approached, the technician's attitude changed - "ve vave ze vite flag now" were his exact words - and I happily paid another forty marks for an external modem that works perfectly.

It's struck me as quite strange and Germanic that after wasting probably a thousand marks in shop labour time trying to fix this problem, Herr Müller was very concerned that we couldn't exchange things properly because I didn't bring along the fifty cent phone cable that came with the internal modem. I found this so amusing that I agreed to return the cable on Monday.

I have a freelance job to do tomorrow - I'm working again, happily - but after that I'll probably tear the machine down and re-install NT into a clean directory, since I don't know what the hell they did to it with all the testing and screwing around. Maybe I'll wait a bit longer, until I've completely recovered from the horrors of last week (By the way, I chose not to have a modem installed when I first bought computer because I didn't know if we would have ISDN or analog phone lines once we arrived in Berlin. Bad call - what was I thinking, buying an NT machine without a modem? Mein Gott, the time and grief it would have saved me, both this week and last week. The only good thing to come out of all this is that I really know my way around NT now.) There a few other software issues I need to sort out as well. NT is really much happier with a permanent network connection - so am I, but we can't have everything - and can be quite irritating when you need to do web-type work offline.

Last week was a busy if somewhat unsettled week. We finally moved into our own apartment on Wednesday, our temporary digs in Friedenau. It's a nice little place, neubau in the true sense of the word - as opposed to the Berlin sense of the word, in which "new-built" only means post-war. Very clean and modern, though a little sparse with only minimal furnishings left behind for us by the tenant. Best of all, it has Fußbodenheizung - heating through the floor. The bathroom tiles are actually warm to the touch. Both the of the females in our family find this appealing. Vita knows exactly where the pipes come in, and glues herself to the warmest spots along the wall.

We moved by U-Bahn, to be thrifty. Our possessions were scattered between the various friends we stayed with after our arrival, requiring two expeditions to Moabit and one out to Siemensstadt. On the final trip we passed through a big fare control at Hansaplatz without catching hell for the fully-assembled IKEA computer desk we had parked in the Fahrradplatz, the bike area at the end of the car.

If all goes according to plan, we'll move to the artist studio in Kreuzberg sometime next month. If all goes according to plan...

Otherwise, we spent the week unpacking, dealing with various administrative and academic matters, then packing Annette up again for her flight to Chicago early on Friday morning. She said that it felt very strange being back in an English-speaking environment so quickly after leaving one - she wasn't really prepared for it. 

Meanwhile, it's very odd being here alone. My German is good enough now that I can survive without too much difficulty, but I do rely on her for much of the translation. Mostly, I think, it's the fact that I've never lived here without Annette. My days seem a little empty and quiet all of a sudden. I'm trying to use the time wisely, working, training, dealing with some minor errands, fixing the damn computer. At least I have the cat to keep me company. And of course we have friends here.

I've had a quiet weekend. Some necessary domestic chores, computer things, rides in the Grunewald both days, lots of reading. Earlier today I spent the afternoon with friends watching the world cycling championships on blessed Eurosport, then stayed for dinner. (It was an odd race - a young, virtually unknown Spanish rider jumped away from the lead group in the final kilometre and all the big boys just looked at each other; by the time they started sprinting it was too late.) I want cable TV in the new place sometime before the cycling season starts next year. To live in Europe without being able to watch live racing would be criminal. On that note, the track worlds are here in less than two weeks. I have tickets for the entire five days. It wasn't cheap, but it wasn't ridiculously expensive either, and how often do I have the chance to I have to see the worlds without travelling?

When I'm not otherwise occupied, I've been reading the first volume of Victor Klemperer's diaries, I Will Bear Witness (1933-41). It's fantastic, an absolutely chilling account of the miseries inflicted on Jews in Nazi Germany. The other day I saw the second volume at Kiepert for an insane sum; I didn't realize that it was out already. I tried to add it to our Chicago book order but apparently it's not available in the US until December. Kiepert had the British version, which happily is available from Amazon UK under the title To the Bitter End (1942-45). His work on Nazi language, Lingua tertii imperii, will be available in translation later this year as Language of the Third Reich, and perhaps eventually his diaries of life in the DDR. These would be very interesting. Hower, given the prices over here, I think I'm going to have to start using the English libraries.

There's not much to say about training. I'm in the post-season lull right now. The weather has turned - we won't see much sunshine for the next six months - so all I can do is ride in the drizzle. I don't feel too enthusiastic about that just yet. I really have to force myself to go out on the bike, and as soon as I'm out I want to turn around and come home for a nap. It's mostly psychological fatigue - I'm still in good condition from the summer. (And I'm still very lean. Neither Annette nor I have put back on more than a kilo of the weight we both lost during all the moving and travelling. I was down to 157 pounds the day after the marathon. My pants are still falling off me - I'm definitely back to a 33 now - and I have those little hollows under the cheekbone.)

Both of the speedskating ovals are open now, so I'll have to get that organized soon. I stopped by the Wilmersdorf Eisstadion during Saturday's ride. How odd to see people skating on a warm, wet afternoon. The notion of playing ice hockey outside in the rain seems very alien to me. I will probably spend more time at the indoor oval in Weißensee. Last weekend, when it was still sunny and dry, I rode up to the Sportforum and went for a skate on the outdoor track, a 300m asphalt oval used for inline racing. It's very strange, way up there in East Berlin, wandering around the old DDR training complex. The dormitories seem to be abandoned, and some of the facilities are in disrepair, while others see constant use. It's easy to imagine it a dozen years ago, full of steroid-popping monsters in drab grey track suits.

The hour is growing late here, and I'm trying to keep myself to a normal sleep schedule instead of adopting nocturnal bachelor habits. So one final subject.

It's been six weeks since I stopped working full-time. I didn't really notice at first, I was so busy preparing for the trip, and then all the activity once we arrived here. Only this week did it begin to sink in that I really am free to do as I please. Now, when I wake up in the morning, I have no particular commitments. I make breakfast - fresh bread from the bakery around the corner, yogurt, strong coffee - and listen to the BBC for a while. Then I think about what I am going to do for the day. Ride my bike, work on the computer, read, write, do errands, explore the city, shop, play with the cat, study German. No particular obligations beyond a few small freelance jobs, though this could change - there is more work on the horizon and I should be talking to a German company next week.

It's a bit daunting, this freedom. I've wanted it for a long time, but now that I have it I realize that it doesn't come without its own set of risks and challenges. Sometimes I feel a little lost, a little empty. It's not because I'm living in an alien culture, as an outsider. It has more to do with the fact that I can no longer say that I am something (besides a tag-along academic spouse). This is of course silly, because I've never wanted to be defined or pigeon-holed by vocation - Scott the software company web guy, Scott the historian, Scott the this, Scott the that. But at the same time it's not easy to live with only the definitions that you invent for yourself, when you are conditioned to live with the definitions imposed externally.

I will probably continue to explore this theme in the future.

A keychain update: I am back down to only three keys: the apartment key and two bike keys - a u-lock and a cable lock. That doesn't sound like too much responsibility, now does it? The apartment key does everything - the front door, the doors to the Hof and the Keller, the mailbox, the apartment itself. I could write an entire essay about German key culture. You can't fart in this place without a key, I swear. And if you ever set foot outside your apartment and the door swings shut, you are doomed. Fucked. There's nothing for it except go meekly to the Hausmeister and get a lecture.