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.