We're having quiet days working at home. We are tired and sluggish: we both have cold and sinus issues. Annette is working on the dissertation, which needs a few revisions before the final printing. What will it cost to mail two copies (1200 pages) to Chicago? With Deutsche Post, it might be cheaper to fly there and deliver it in person. Me, I'm working on finding work, writing, thinking, loafing about, studying German.

Yesterday we didn't really get rolling until almost noon. Today is a little better. The days can really slip away on you if you aren't careful. A lazy morning, some housework, a little shopping, afternoon coffee in a local café, then suddenly evening is upon you. I don't mind, really I don't. I'm not bored. (Every morning I fall to my knees, kiss the ground and thank the sweet baby Jesus that I'm not still working in that office.) I'm finally finding time to read, something that has been in terribly short supply these past few years.

The weekend was strangely taxing (though we should not need two full days' recovery). Annette bailed out a friend by helping with a big, ugly translation job. I went to the track both days, and spent the rest of the time finishing the portfolio/CV site. I don't know why it took me so long - I'm out of practice, I guess, and I become very picky about little details like text spacing and alignment when I'm not under explicit deadline pressure.

The final day of the Worlds was exquisite: Keirin, women's points race, Madison. Totally fun to watch. It almost made me want to come out of retirement. Almost - the speeds and the crashes looked very painful. This was the first time I've seen track racing at the highest level. While it was very impressive, it also appeared very familiar to me. I knew exactly the routines of the riders and coaches as I watched them down on the infield, preparing, warming up, waiting to ride, cooling down after their races. The track is just beautiful. It reminded me of Montréal, the wonderful Olympic Vélodrome that I rode for the last time at the '89 nationals, only a year before they tore the track out because the facility was too expensive to support cycling. (Oh, the sad legacy of 1976...)

I want to go fast again. I don't know if I have the time, energy or youth to put in the hours of training, but I want to go fast again. I'll skate ice this winter, concentrate on skating again next summer, but always in the back of my mind I'll be thinking about racing track again. To prepare myself, I should at least hit the gym, work on my back exercises, ride as much as I can, and save up some money to buy a new bike or two. The lousy thing is, I'm thirty-five. The body is not quite so resilient as it was fifteen years ago.

But of course any future plans, athletic or otherwise, hang partly on where we live next year. The annual academic job derby is beginning. Candidates for next year include: Berlin or Vancouver if absolutely nothing else comes up; Cambridge, potentially interesting and a good place for me to finish a Ph.D. for something to do, but out of the question if the British don't change their quarantine rules for cats; NYU, which would be cool but probably a long shot; nothing at all in Canada; Tulane, in New Orleans; Oregon State, in Corvallis; something in Indianapolis (ewww); several things in Ohio (ewww); and a few other American schools in places I've tried to block from my memory.

In the shorter term, we move to Kreuzberg in three weeks. We'll go by on the weekend to settle things. I hope we like the place as much on the second visit... I think we will. We seem to enjoy living in vaguely industrial environments. I'm glad we've got the place, and don't regret waiting for it, but spending two months living out of suitcases has been less than ideal. We've both found it difficult to concentrate on work in such temporary, provisional circumstances. It would have been better to arrive and move straight into a furnished place, but for various reasons that didn't happen.

Meanwhile, Vita is oblivious to it all. She spends most of the day curled up in her box, her cat-cave. Our happy, hibernating housebeast. No more peeing in the kitchen, either. (I just hope she likes the new place....)

The job thing remains mysterious and elusive. I've applied to a few high-end design firms in town, just to see what happens. What seems to be happening is that they won't even talk to you if you don't already have a work permit. Oh well, this wasn't completely unexpected, and I have enough work trickling in from Vancouver to keep the wolf from the door. I'm still engaged in protracted, comical negotiations with a company in Berlin that at the very least wants me to do an English version of their web site. Dealing with German HR people is proving to be quite an adventure. It's a very different culture over here. I don't even care about the money, I'm just enjoying the experience of applying.

We should probably do a little travelling soon but Annette needs to spend a week or two getting the dissertation into shape before shipping it off, so it won't happen until November, and then of course it all hangs on the state of the bank account, and we're going to Chicago in December anyway, so I have a feeling we may be stuck here until after Christmas, which isn't so bad as we haven't really done much exploring yet, and there's so much to see and do in Berlin. That sentence was much too long. Almost Germanic in its longness.

Just under one week until I unleash some form of new personal site. I need deadline pressure, evidently. I'd forgotten what it felt like to create something new - the portfolio/CV site was the first new thing I've built in months.

We are on a quest for an edible Döner. Once upon a time, 1995 actually, the humble Döner Kebab was a worthy meal. For only four marks you received a thick ninety-degree wedge of Turkish flatbread, sliced open, filled with grilled meat, lettuce, onions, cabbage, tomatoes and cucumber, smothered in garlic yogurt sauce. But no longer. Where the Döner was once made from individual slices of beef skewered on a long spit, it is now cut from a giant plug of Spam, a grotesque log of compressed mystery meat, an oversized shit-coloured skinless hot dog. The Berlin Döner is in a lamentable state.

Under no circumstances do you ever want to live anywhere near (or god forbid above) a Döner factory.

But there is hope - you hear rumours from time to time of Kebab stands that serve "real" Döner, made from real meat. There are a few in Kreuzberg, apparently, although we don’t know where. We've sworn not to touch another Döner until we find the real thing; we ate our first and last ersatz Döner in 1996, and the memory still inspires queasiness. (Since then we've been surviving on "turkische pizza mit salat" and falafel.) But then yesterday afternoon, walking back from shopping, we saw something that looked suspiciously like the real item. We will go back for another reconnaissance soon, and if our first impression looks to be correct, then we will summon the courage to try one.

Bilingual pun alert: I've always wanted to make a kebab from liver and kidney, because then you could call it an Organ Döner.