home is where the wife is...

Joan arrived today and despite jetlag we did a lot of cleaning and made a surprising lot of changes to the apartment. I was relieved and delighted that the liked the stone tiles. She is less enthusiastic about the color of the door frames, but paint is far more easily altered.

We moved the kitchen table out to the living/dining room, and discovered that it has two wings that let it open up like a fully adult diiner table. The place begins to feel more like home. The ful-sized table changes some of our priorities for purchases. Storage is now the most immediate goal. We have only one small warderobe that was hardly adequate for me, much less for us both.

Earlier this week the Embassy invited me to a talk by the US Ambassador about US environmental policy. The Ambassador made a very credible attempt to defend Bush administration policies that are essentially contemptable. No one in the audience believed him, as became clear from the questions afterwards. The Ambassador explained that his son is a strict environmentalist who consumes as little excess energy as possible and avoids driving a car. He also described his (former) company as one dedicated to energy efficiency (it made ball bearings, among other things). The problem is, of course, the whole car-oriented US lifestyle, complete with big, energy-inefficient houses in absurdly distant suburbs and a lack of any reliable and effecitve public transit, except in a few large cities. Berlin is very much a city of apartment dwellers, and the transit system is fast, reliable, and frequent. If I have to wait for 5 minutes to catch a train, I feel aggrieved. One to two minutes are the norm.

I had hoped to talk with some of the other invitees at the reception and perhaps get financial support for the Institute, but I happened to be at a table with someone from Volkswagen and was unguarded in my dislike for cars. Not a winning approach.

Moving, moving, moving...

I am back in the University Guest House. The folks laying the tiles reached a point where they needed me out of the way. This was no surprise. I had anticipated having to move out again at some point, but the date continued to be vague until last Monday night. The Guest House staff are very accommodating and put me in a suite designed for two people sharing a bath (as opposed to a double, where two people share a bed and a bath) and assured me that no one else would move in: my own private suite.

On Friday the workers assured me that I could move back on Saturday, so I checked out of the guest house and first went to the office to do some work. The former owner (who is managing the repair) reached me there to say that the tile-layer's manager wanted to talk to me. He wanted me to put off moving back for a couple of days. The floor in the bedroom was done, but the mortar ideally should dry more and, more problematic, the tiles in the living room could not be walked on while they were being fixed in place. I would be a prisoner in the bedroom. In a pinch they could find ways around the problem, but it would be better if I just were not there. So I called the Guest House again and they let me move back into the room I had just checked out of. On Monday we will try this game of checking out (and maybe back in) all over again.

In part I think they workers want me out because they have virtually moved in. They have pizza in the refrigerator and clothes strewn about the bathroom. They are working long, hard hours to get the bonus they were promised if the work is done before Joan arrives this coming Saturday. As the picture at the right shows, progress is being made and the new floor looks good.

At the point when I am really moved in, I have a week to register my new address with the city authorities. The forms make it clear that key date is when one is really moved in permanently, which has certainly not been the case so far. But what constitutes the trigger event? When I move back this time? When Joan arrives (on the principle that home is where the wife is)? When the furniture arrives? When the cat arrives? As seems often the case in German law, the definition is vague because (in most cases) everyone knows.

Ruth Stevens Knight (1917-2007)

Ruth Knight died peacefully in the early hours of Sunday 4 February 2007 at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was 89. She is survived by her son, Michael Seadle, her daughter-in-law, Joan Luft, her sister-in-law Dorothy Stevens, her first husband, Peter Seadle, and her many friends at Stapeley in Germantown, in Michigan, and elsewhere.

She studied at the University of Strasbourg in France in the late 1930s, at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, at the University of Detroit, and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan where she received her masters. She was a teacher and elementary school principal in the Livonia Public Schools for almost 30 years, where she introduced French language training in the elementary schools and long had responsibility for music, arts, and humanities programs. She spoke French and also knew German and Italian. She traveled extensively and had a special fondness for art museums. Her last excursion, weeks before her death, was to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see their collection of French impressionists.

She was a long time member of the Detroit and Green Street Friends Meetings. A memorial service in the manner of Friends will take place in Philadelphia under the care of Green Street Meeting, and in Detroit under the care of the Detroit Friends Meeting. Times have not yet been set.

No flowers please. Those wishing to make a contribution in her name should donate to the Center for Urban Education in Detroit, 6223 W Fort St, Detroit, 48209 - (313) 849-5535. She was a long-time supporter and a member of the CUE Board. Contributions may also go to Stapeley in Germantown, 6300 Greene Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19144, or to the American Friends Service Committee, 1501 Cherry St., Philadelphia, PA 19102.

NOTE: This death notice appears in part on my blog because my mother, despite her age, was unwilling to let the modern world pass her by. She wrote email regularly and read newspapers online in multiple languages. The blog will also reach people in multiple communities, which a newspaper notice would not do.

Restoration begins

Workmen arrived yesterday to begin to restore the apartment to some degree of normalcy. Since the machines are still running to complete the drying process between floors, they have started by removing water-damaged wallpaper. The result is more mess rather than less. The plan is to add a layer that will dampen sound between the floors to spare the downstairs neighbors, then to put down a layer that will create a perfectly even surface, and then the tiles. I am told that this will take a good two weeks. The goal is for the work to be done before Joan arrives.

The previous owner, who accepts full responsibility for the damage, is handling all of the contracts with the workmen and all of the costs, for which the insurance will reimburse him. He has even allowed some workmen to stay in his apartment, which is more than I am willing to do (of course he has beds for them and I have only a mess on the floor).

My hope is that at some point on this blog I can report that the work is done and looks lovely and really wasn't so much trouble after all. As Elizabeth Bennett tells her sister toward the end of Pride and Prejudice: “…in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable.” There is some way to go at this point, however.

Is it habitable?

Work on the apartment progresses, though at a snail's pace. The damaged parquet is gone. All of the linoleum is gone, though it took repeated remainders to the clean-up people to get the last little bits in the entry-way and under the standard movable wardrobe (called a Schrank). De-humidifiers are running in two rooms. On Thursday I was told that the place was dry and that the de-humidifiers could come out on Friday, but when I came home on Friday, they were still there, possibly because the drying was incomplete, more likely because they forgot.

It is hard to believe that a German firm is responsible for this shoddy work. A number of people have said that this is very untypical. I'm not convinced. A lot of work at the university seems to run on the same pattern: slow work, partial work, poor work. Two months after I reported a problem with a light switch in my office, workers came to fix it. Unfortunately that day it was working again, so they left. It stopped working immediately afterwards.

The amount of dirt in the rooms with the water damage is appalling, even to me. I swept and swept to remove at least the worst of it between the bathroom and the kitchen, the only unaffected rooms. I collected several inches of pure dirt in a bucket just by sweeping the path.

If all goes well, it is possible that work on the new tiles could begin this coming week, which should go far to eliminating the dirt problem. I also confirmed that these "fine stone" tiles do not need any additional sealing. And they come with a high wear-factor and a high anti-slipping factor. It will be a huge relief to have decent floor in place.

Just to add to the complications of the week, we had a meeting with evaluation people from the accreditation agency. Their written questions indicated considerable skepticism about our BA and MA programs, which are like no others in Germany. It was some advantage that their viewpoints bristled with inconsistency: one wanted more old books, another wanted more computing, a third wanted a curriculum more like the one at his institution, which more resembles a community college than a research university. In the end, however, we persuaded them that our program made sense and received a remarkably positive recommendation.