Calpe, Madrid, the Western Front … ein Schweizer gegen das Haus … der Dübel 5th of February, 2007 POST·MERIDIEM 04:07

Things that are cheering me up lately:

1. Work is by the Oberbaumbrücke, and quite close to it is a hairdressers called ‚haarspree‘. Multilingual puns for the win!
2. Ich will nach Spanien, and I’ll be in Calpe for a week from the 15th—must mail Mackers and Jen and buy them dinner in Valencia—then a week in Madrid, hanging out with Inma.
3. Saki, The Complete Short Stories. Though those at the end where he’s writing from the Western Front, someone well-travelled enough that he should have known how stupid the First World War was for everyone outside of Serbia, fighting and dying in its mud–they made me shiver.

Things that aren’t:

1. Using the screwdriver on a Swiss Army Knife to put a screw into masonry feels like, oh I don’t know, implementing a web-facing decently-loaded database on Microsoft Access. Frustrating. But hey, won’t have to do that again, thankfully.

Word of the day: der Dübel is German for ‘dowel,’ and much more relevant to me over the weekend, also for ‘rawlplug,’ (or ‘wall plug’) the plastic plug affairs that are needed to make screws hold sufficiently in masonry for hanging pictures or blinds or whatever.