Is summer over?

It is far too long since I updated this blog. The problem with writing one day per month is the quest for just the right day. In principle Christa Wolf picked just one calendar day and tried to stick to it. I should too, and might have if Joan and I were not traveling most of the beginning of this month. In any case I am now back in Berlin and arguably over jet lag -- at least jet lag no longer serves as a reasonable excuse. Joan is back too, though only since yesterday. Perhaps I caught jet lag again from her!

My day began with jogging at 6.30, followed by getting Brötchen at the bakery under the train tracks at about 7.00 and breakfast at 7.30. All of this is quite standard. The rest of the day fades into one email after another, plus a letter or two, some grading, some preparing of proposals for conferences, and downloading LaTex to my Mac -- something I have planned for some time since I find MS-Word increasingly annoying.

It is hard to believe that much of the time between semesters is over and that I will be teaching again in less than a month. This is of course a typical academic complaint, but it seems exacerbated by a sense that we never really took any time off to enjoy the delights of Berlin. And we meant to visit friends and relatives in Bavaria, which somehow never happened.

I have, however, managed a modest entertainment. As a number of you know (and all of my students know) I draw occasionally. After seeing a really splendid exhibit of water colors at the Brücke Museum (especially Schmidt-Rotluff), I decided to try my hand at water colors. I did a bit of oil painting back in high school, but that was messy and takes time. Water colors are a good, light-weight form of entertainment. The picture at the right is an imitation of a Georg Grosz sketch, which I copied and then colored. My color vision is not quite perfect, so forgive me if the combinations look a bit expressionist.