Today I spent most of the afternoon making preparations for tomorrow's Burns supper, mostly getting food ready so I don't need to worry about it tomorrow.

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As usual I'm way behind on my podcast listening, so it's probably no surprise that I only just got around to the December edition of Life, the Universe & Everything Else, from Winnipeg in Canada, and one of my favourites for years (look for their SandwichCast! and SoupCast! episodes, which are second to none).

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Part of my weekly shopping trip today was getting all the ingredients together for our private Burns supper on Saturday. Well, the most important one – the haggis – is already “chilling” in our freezer, thanks to Kilts and More, general importer here in Germany of Macsween's finest and deserving of a shout-out for dependable and speedy service – I'm not affiliated with them other than as a happy customer. I picked up the haggis from the post office last week, and spending a night there in its space-blanket-and-styrofoam-noodle packaging didn't seem to have hurt it; it was still frozen quite solid when I brought it home.

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After a successful (if I say so myself) SCD workshop, a day of rest seems to be in order. But even so there are a few little projects to take care of …

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I'm taking the afternoon off today – I have easily enough OT for that – for a spontaneous visit to Eva (where “spontaneous” means “organised the day before yesterday”) to deal with some computer issues and generally have a chat, which we didn't have an opportunity to do since before Christmas.

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Another “team week” day – this one was full of meetings to a point where slotting in some productive work was a bit of a challenge. But to be fair, some of the meetings were quite productive! And we went to dinner in a nice restaurant/bar in Darmstadt later, so that was OK, too.

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Every 4 to 6 weeks my colleagues and I come to the office for a few days – for a “distributed” development team with members in the Rhine-Main area, in Berlin, and elsewhere it is good to sit around the same physical table every so often, instead of only communicating via Microsoft Teams (argl).

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Today is Eva's birthday and I sent her an e-mail message with a “motivational card” attached (probably not one she hadn't seen before). Also tried to catch her on the phone but no luck. Perhaps tomorrow. Wanted to sort out a present, too. Still on it. Sigh.

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The weather today started out OK (enough for me to do the weekly shopping round) but turned pretty foul in the afternoon, with rain and snow!

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Yesterday we went to a fun concert by Carsten and Iris Lenz at the Evangelische Emmaus-Gemeinde in Mainz. This was all about four-handed organ playing. Also, snow!

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