Beginnings

Hemingway once said that if you want to get busy writing, you better get busy living. It's been tough to do the latter lately so the former has therefore been suffering but just in the last few seconds I all of a sudden got some inspiration to write something quickly before making dinner and so here I am, in the vaunted (virtual) halls of GWMD working on a lead-in to this blog post with a bunch of empty words mainly for the purpose of warming up the fingers, brain, and mind for what might turn out to be an actual post in the imminent seconds and/or minutes. Before I go any further I should probably point out that -- as far as I know anyway -- Hemingway didn't actually say that if you want to get busy writing you better get busy living. But it does at least seem like the paraphrase of something that he might have said. I do believe, in other news, that (probably paraphrased) he did say that one should "write drunk, edit sober", but even that I'm not 100% in on the veracity of given that it was communicated to yours truly via the offspring of the US ARPANET.

Despite seemingly constant explicit complaints and other related passive-aggressive implicit hints/suggestions re the difficulty of life as a parent/caregiver, life has indeed been going on for the antecedent protagonists before H came along and hence you're getting this post. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. And since, despite our best efforts, we can never accomplish our dream of sharing all of these exciting happenstances with all of you readers and admirers live and in-person (virtually) on an as-up-to-date-basis as we would like, here I will relay to you as best I can why the following holds. If y is this blog post, which has as a necessary but insufficient criterion that one needs to be writing (virtually) to create it, and X is the set that comprises ongoing-as-of-late life events and can be summarized by its cardinality x expressed here more simply as getting busy 'living', then by virtue of y, because x is a necessary but insufficient condition for y, or, x + Z --> y, where Z are some other necessary conditions, that since y, therefore x.

Instead of proceeding by proof by induction, I will instead lean on the dependable form of the bullet-point list. And I have to get this done before going to make dinner so please use your imagination as appropriate for where details have been left unconsidered/filled-in:

1. While you might not consider it "living" -- and it most certainly doesn't qualify as living by, for example, Wooderson standards, i.e. it ain't "L, I, V, I, N" -- Joelle and I are masters of the TrainerRoad indoor power-based cycling workout world. Our FTPs (functional threshold powers) are rising faster than industry-induced global temperatures and come spring-time there will be nary a faster cyclist within 200 nautical miles of the Starnbergersee.

2. Work is always rearing its ugly head somewhere in the background and as of late it has seemed to induce a stronger feeling of stress than perhaps at other points in the past. When examining the objective facts, however, it seems more of a combination of regular-style work-related/induced stress and the added joy of point 0, discussed in the foreword to this post, just above. So ignore that negative connotation and proceed to points 2a and 2b, just below:

2a. Yours truly is off to China! Suzhou, to be exact. Should be interesting! Take a minute and Bing it up. Looks like a truly 'neat' place to go. The Venice of Asia. I will be there for a week at the end of February, schooling our Chinese colleagues on the art of the German workday.

2b. Deep learning. As of the start of February I'm on a new (and improved) project in downtown Munich. Well, I've always been in downtown Munich (at this particular job, I mean), and I'm not moving. But the project is new. There's the whole issue with NDAs et al., but I can say that it's deep learning and if you haven't heard of that well the name sounds pretty cool doesn't it? I will be learning very deeply indeed. Anyways, the point is that it's neat. Like Suzhou seems.

3. Despite der Arbeit being arguably on the up-and-up in the lights of sub-points 2a and 2b, number 3 is still, nevertheless, forcefully on the + side despite its 'anti-arbeit' message with its news of a giant break from it; arbeit, that is. The powers that be recently gave the official go-ahead for Pemulis's parental leave and as a direct result of same, the entire family will be making a 3-week stop in Canada in the month of May (9th to 30th -- mark your calendars).

Quod erat demonstrandum.