passivhaus

The poor old headquarters building where I work is a pretty solid structure, having been built to host another military force and having withstood several onslaughts, but is undergoing an eternal series of repairs and improvements that makes me wonder how much of the original construction is left, from flooring to re-wiring to support the paperless office of the future, to constant shuffling of workspaces, to vacillating (schwankend) on whether or not to gut the whole assembly over asbestos in the basement.

Now a crew of contractors is outfitting the exterior walls with insulation, and there are white shavings everywhere and wheel barrows (Schubkarren) of Styrofoam blocks being carted around, airy and insubstantial like theater props or the construction material of Doozers.  I can remember as a little kid having endless fun constructing elaborate bases of operation for GI*JOE and Star Wars Action figures out of the Styrofoam cases that household ceiling fans came in--and surely other appliances but fan boxes seemed to be the best with the most compartments.  The whole building is a nest of scaffolding, which is a more serious-looking undertaking than the usual maintenance and disruption, and having survived a few base-closures in Germany (RIFs, reductions in force, or de-basing as it is called OCONUS, outside the continental United States), major works make me a bit nervous, because such DiY improvements have been many times proven to be the procrastination of bad tenants to return their rental to the landlord in suitable condition. The US army in Europe is facing a new age of budget austerity too, but such contracts were awarded in the primordial past and even if the work is not the most fiscally responsible thing to do, the government (especially as a pseudopod of America overseas) could not renege on its promises. It is a noble effort, and homes and businesses alike should always strive to reduce their environmental footprint, however, those quartered and garrisoned are generally not treating where they work and live as gingerly as they would if they had to pay for the heating and electricity, even if the savings could be translated to something more immediately appreciable down the line. The process and intent is pretty neat but considering (and here the US Army may be living up to one of its many modus operandi--the house is on fire, we'll better take out the trash) that there has been a major electrical disruption, putting most of the base off the municipal grid, and the mundane and bureaucratic goings on have been powered by a monstrous diesel generator, the gesture may be just that.  Deferred rewards, of all types, have little appeal without consequences. I hope the next phase of refurbishments succeeds too in making us think about conservation in balance with preservation.

winner, winner turkey dinner or klatu, barda, nikto

Should clear and irrefutable signs of extraterrestrial life suddenly be discovered, such a revelation would, I think, certainly diminish and relegate our less concrete worries to the pettiness they're born, though there's probably still a question in timing of such feats and people, whether they voice it or not: I'm sure there are some secreted thoughts about how this spoils the holidays, vacation plans, campaigns--private, unlike the extent the news would upset the social contracts between borrowers and lenders. It makes me think about the episode of the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov, when Jesus is rejected because His return is interfering with the mission of the Church. I'll bet that some households would find that sort of incident exasperating while trimming the tree. Aliens of course are not guaranteed to solve all our problems, and there's no evidence of imminent discovery, although this a big unknown factor--like unanticipated technological break-throughs (like the democratization that quality, affordable three-dimensional printing or some new property distilled from research at CERN--or the fact that no one can reconcile that there are planets made of diamond and asteroids made of gold just out of reach of the prospectors)--and new constellations of distant worlds are coming into sharper focus every day.  Given the potential for the foreign and unfamiliar, both as observers and possibly as the observed, wisely time and experiment has been invested in speculative, alternative biological chemistries so that scientists might not miss alien life when it presents itself. Abundance, valance--elective affinities, and chemical properties, solubility as well as solid-state performance are considered in all imaginable permutations, so as not to be guilty of chauvinism, even if the chance for interface and exchange seems to get less and less the more one diverges from the familiar. Maybe far-off extraterrestrial astronomers are dismissing Earth at this moment, seeing our home world as not even on the fringe of their Goldilocks Zone (EN/DE): too hot, too cold, too small, too large, too precarious and impermanent, exposed to the whims of a harsh and destructive universe. Just a little bit of mutual jingoism in science might make it impossible to recognize intelligence or even life.  Our bodies and biology, too, adapted to life on the inclement surface of a planet instead of the sheltering underground or under the oceans, bent and woven with specific gravity, would probably repulse a being that developed under different conditions and limitations as overly fragile or brute. I hope that there is no conspiracy to spare our planning the mortification of changing our priorities, but I also hope that we are not blinded by our chauvinism and attitude to richness and variety (off-world or otherwise) that's at the edge of discovery.

holiday creep or proscenium

It seems that Christmas decorations are being cast like a festive drag-net earlier and earlier each year, but I do wonder how much of that is reality and how much is perception: could any of this be governed by climate change and the global weirding, that does not just yield warmer weather but also seasonal (delays) creep and has natural patterns in theatrics and all off-kilter? German shops seem to have embraced a Christmas season spanning almost two months as well, but I wonder what's in the weather and what's in parallel holiday fatigue in the States.

Here, there's no intervening secular gathering like Thanksgiving that supposedly makes lights and festoonery more seemly, if one waits until afterwards. In Germany, there's general restraint and respect until after Totensonntag, a day set aside for remembering the departed, which falls on the Sunday before First Advent and whose celebration is driven by the calendar and what day of the week Christmas falls on.  Both Totensonntag and the Advent Calendar were originally Prussian-Lutheran inventions adopted later by the rest of Germany. I don't know if unseasonable weather compels people to decorate early, but decorations don't seem to jive with the prolonged Golden Autumn we're experiencing. H and I have not decorated yet, as such, but we did put up a length of rope lights from the basement and strung them behind the now sadly bare flower boxes (there was an early freeze but I imagine that the geraniums would be fine now otherwise). In the evening, illuminated by the footlights, I imagine that to the audience it looks like we are on stage.

villa suburbana

Here is a stock bild (stock photo) of a Bildstock that I passed on one of my walks recently—it’s funny how one can find (real and not addle-brained) examples of inversions between German and English, like a Stillstand for a moratorium or a stand-still. These wayside shrines marking routes of pilgrimage are pretty common in this area, and I have always hoped to find a house with one of these on the property. H and I are continuing to look for a home of our own, off and on, and did recently visit this beautiful Italianate villa in a small town not far from Bad Karma that just came on the market.

Besides the awkward location that turned out to be a big disappointment in an overbuilt and crowded part of town and on a noisy thoroughfare (though I suppose one does get used to such things), it was really lovely and ideal.

The villa was called something like "Haus Kristal," in wrought-iron lettering, which I did not like so much, but I thought we could rename the property "Chez Roquefort." We’ll keep hunting and I bet we’ll find a place that causes no reservations of any sort.