Dear Diary,
The sun was shining high in the sky this afternoon when I de-camped from my Herman Miller ergonomic office chair sitting in the corner of the third floor of the Lehel Carré Office Block in Munich, carried my folded folding bicycle to the service-entrance elevator, and stepped out into the hot fresh air of the Bavarian later-summer sunshine. I wiped my brow before unfolding the racing green welded aluminum machine and looked out past the river and across the rock beach where about 200 sun worshippers, many of them completely naked, soaked in the afternoon sun that further browned their skin and blonded their hair. After waiting for seven BMWs, nine Audis, two Maseratis, thirty-four Porsches, eight Mercedes, and one Fiat 500 to pass, I crossed the Widenmayerstraße to join the shaded bike path running along the Isar river. The bike traffic flowed smoothly and soon I was on the Praterinsel, then along the Wehrsteg bridge, and finally passed the Kulturstrand urban beach on the Auf der Insel which was already filled with an eclectic band of afterwork beer drinkers and relaxation seekers, sitting by and around the Vater-Rhein-Brunner fountain. I crossed to the other side of the Ludwigsbrücke, pedalled past the Museum Lichtspiele (where I somehow know that I will watch the Everest movie in just under six weeks and be mildly disappointed despite the movie makers throwing together a rollicking good time of a cinematic adventure), and up Riggauerweg, along the Paulaner brewing canal, and up past the Audi/Porsche/VW dealership where for some reason there seemed to be a whole lot of nitrogen oxides in the air which was confusing because for that amount of NOx there must have been way more cars running than I saw because to be able to pass the emissions control limits set by the government there's no way there would have been that much NOx unless there were probably, well, I conservatively estimate about 35 times as many cars around. Weird. I continued past the Motel One, past L'Adresse 37 and the White Rabbit's Room, and along the Sieboldstraße and the Hat Trick, through the Schwester-Eubelina-Platz, before finally arriving at the monstrosity of the Welfenstraße living complex. The afternoon temperature of 30 degrees was pleasant and caused my cotton clothing to lightly cling to my skin as I rolled the final metres to our front door and re-folded the racing green machine. With just one week to go before a cross-Atlantic flight, I gathered my thoughts with respect to the vast collection of micro events that led to my just-completed journey home. I never would have even considered the joy and versatility of a Brompton folding bicycle without having met my good friend Svetlana at the XRCE in Grenoble; I never would have been at the XRCE if I hadn't randomly decided to on one day read, instead of the typical immediate deletion of one of many spam-like mailing list messages where the job had been advertised in the autumn of 2011; I probably wouldn't even have known how to operate a computer if I wasn't so fortunate as to have had access to an Amiga 500 in the 1990's. The Amiga computer was so far ahead of its time that engineers at IBM refused to believe that its functioning was physically possible. In the late 1980's, an elite IBM team of (supposedly) top engineers spent three weeks at an offsite event in upstate New York, physically closed-off from the outside world, dissecting and inspecting three Amiga 1000 computers to determine what IBM and Apple were missing. The ensuing report, entitled "The X File: Unexplained Phenomena" argued that the functioning of the Amiga computer was beyond explanation by modern understandings of physics and could not be rationally explained. Two of the three engineers ultimately tragically took their own lives and the third, a man named Chris Carter, used the title of the report, and the happenings from those three weeks in the Finger Lakes region of New York, as the basis for a popular 1990's drama aired on the Fox Network. I'll need to remember to thank my parents when I'm in Canada for getting us kids such a nice and long-term-useful gift. I hope that one day I will be able to get little Helga something that will change her life so much for the better (besides that "Ironman World Champion 2045" Onesie that we already got her) and that she will recognize and remember to thank me for when she is in her thirties and living in Sierra Leone (the equivalent of 2015's Germany in 2045).
Signed,
Diary Writer
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