Where do we go from here?

It's been a little over two weeks since our touch-down back in the "Southern Europe of Germany" and it's been kind of nice getting to experience all four seasons of the year during that time. We had lots of snow, lots of rain, lots of wind, and even -- yesterday and today -- some warm sunshine! It's always hard to believe such a claim when it's being made about the "Southern Europe of Germany" (especially any time between about mid-October and early April) but just check Pemulis's alter ego's Instagram's feed and you'll experience photographic proof of blue sky and sun (and also some snow highlights) of GPS-tagged photos documenting said events.

Helga is back at the very cleverly named "ThinkWith" daycare and has quickly reacquainted herself with the German language. I found myself at a particularly difficult passage in Goethe's Faust II the other day (in the Vierter Akt when Faust comes forward and states Der Einsamkeiten tiefste schauend unter meinem Fuss, Betret'ich wohlbedaechtig dieser Gipfel Saum, Entlassen meinder Wolke Tragewerk, die mich sanft anklaren Tagen ueber Land und Meer gefuehrt.) and I couldn't quite grasp whether Faust was saying that the solitude was the most deep under his foot and what that could possibly mean and Helga kind of rolled her eyes and explained to me that he was basically saying "Gazing at those deep solitudes beneath my feet"... Boy did I ever feel dumb.

Joelle is also back to her daily rhythms and is happy not only because her Brompton Folding Bicycle (TM) was finally taken in for the voluntary recall where it was also tuned-up and cleaned, but it turns out that she will after all get her Christmas gift of seeing the ballet performance of Anna Karenina put on by the Bavarian State Ballet Company at the National Theater since Pemulis managed to come up big in the follow-up ticket lottery a few days ago. The only bad news in all of this is that she was secretly (highly) relieved that now she wouldn't have to read the re-gifted 7,000 page Tolstoy paperback that she had unfortunately lugged back to the "Southern Europe of Germany". But because we're all Christians here we know that a bad thing happening only means that good has to be around the corner and indeed, Joelle is thrilled that the family will get away from Ramersdorf for 8 days this coming Easter on a magical trip to the real Southern Europe where she and Helga will frolic in the vineyards of Sicily's Catania coast while Pemulis argues with the car rental people about alleged scratches to the Peugeot's hubcaps that aren't really there.

But yes, you read that correctly: Sicily in April. Men here of the secret they pass in upholstered silence they only exist in crisis they only exist in silence past territorial. Wait, that might be Springtime in Vienna, but Sicily in April probably has some connections. I think we'll stay at an Agriturismo (basically a B&B at a farm where they grow grapes) because that's what one does nowadays in Italy and we just loved doing that in Piemonte last summer so let's hope this can compare! This weekend the family plans to roll out our bicycles and glide down the hill from Perlach into the city-proper where we'll sip coffee (probably not Helga) from paper cups in the "Reading Room" at Globetrotter and be inspired by one of the nine hundred books that they presumably have about Sicily. Only then will we try to book one of these places so hopefully they're not all booked up by then.

And what about Pemulis? I mean, he's essentially the star of the blog after all. Since Helga became both the de facto and de jure star and principal protagonist of Instagram (let's face it you can't even call anyone else a supporting role at this point) Pemulis still needs some room in the limelight and so let's not take that away from him. After a rough and painful battle with some pretty mean pathogens to commence his Christmas season, he's in no shape or mood for doing too much more intercontinental travel and so has "paused" his previously planned trip to the far West to visit the "Mother Ship" as some have called it. He will, however, be spending his time fruitfully. February will feature a much-awaited visit from Mrs. Joelle (aka Grandma) and he will use parts of this time to participate in a German course of which he is in extreme need of. He will also finally visit the world-famous hip surgeon Dr. Acetabulofemoral to hopefully arrange some kind of upgrade since his system went down during recent "routine maintenance" and upon rebooting there were some bad sectors or something in the hip. Further! Pemulis also plans to return to his much-loved Rhône Valley in late April where the culinary masterpiece of a city Lyon claims to be holding some computer-y conference that I should be able to argue is worth my while to attend.

What else can I tell you? Tonight I will put on full display my die-hard support for the all but unbeatable Munich Redbulls as they defend their glory in the Deutsche Eishockey Liga. They are on pace to three-peat as the league champions so they had better not let me or my fellow fans down tonight.

Stay warm, friends!

How I learned to stop worrying and love the rules

Life is a seemingly never-ending (until it abruptly does) process where complications pile up higher and higher on top of each other with each step. Like Sisyphus or perhaps a cosmic game of Whack-a-Mole, one must forever chase after these complications putting out fires that each complication inevitably starts, to prevent the fires from spreading to other complications that they sit upon, and when one fire is extinguished race to the next one and deal with the stresses that it has introduced. The less time you spend dealing with complications and the complications that your existing complications cause, ad infinitum, the better one can live. But since the complications grow larger and continue materializing throughout life, by definition it is impossible to catch up and the time you spend dealing with them inevitably goes up.

One of the primary purposes of life, therefore, is obviously to keep your rate of complication materialization as low as possible and keep your fire fighting efficiency as high as possible. For example, to succeed with the first goal, it would be best to stay out of any industry that is advancing quickly (e.g. would require you to continually update your "skill set") or that involves anything that has a tendency to break for inexplicable reasons. For example, if you perform action A on day N and it results in output O, and then you again perform action A on day N+1 though now it results in output O' where O != O', then you are doing a bad job at keeping your rate of complication materialization low. The most obvious example of this mistake is having anything to do with computers. Bad, bad, bad idea (unfortunately it's harder and harder to avoid this kind of job nowadays -- that is, one where you work with computers -- but no one said living the good life would be easy).

To succeed with the second goal -- keeping your fire fighting efficiency with respect to your life's complications high -- it suffices to learn the details of these complications (taxes, contracts, strange rules, insurances, regulations, etc.) and make sure that you avoid activities that would complicate them further. For example, if understanding contracts for borrowing large amounts of money is already complicated (it is), then under no circumstances should you do so in a foreign language or sign said contracts while intoxicated. Don't do things like buy property, have children, or get a job. If you have to do any of those things for some reason (e.g. you don't want to live the good life), then definitely don't do any of them somewhere where you don't understand the language, or where the culture is such that the people enjoy an inordinate number of dense, complex, multi-self-referential sets of indecipherable rules to regulate their days.

That would just be silly.