The S.O. has had to work all this weekend, and I have been on call for my job. Basically its a payment up front for the both of us-for we will be in Austria for her birthday at the end of the month. The timing is less than optimum, but I have a deposit on our place to stay already put down and I don’t want to lose it. So, this holiday weekend has been a quiet one. It’s nice having the S.O. gone, I savor the time alone, probably because I get so little of it.
It is also a good time to think and reflect. That’s a part of my inability to write these days-there is a lot to think about. Next few months will become busy and then it will be 2015. That year is going to be one I will have to make some decisions, and I have no idea what they will be. But I suspect I won’t like them. The tough times are coming, I fear-and there is little I can do to stop them.
I did go to a festival in the nearby town yesterday. It was nice. It was an open shopping day ( most stores in Germany are closed on Sundays). Walked through the town, and of course stopped for a couple half-liter glasses of beer.
No good deed goes unpunished, however, and so shortly I will be going out to do the list of errands the S.O. has left for me. I find it odd how much I am enjoying this time alone at home. I should want to be heading out, but I don’t. It’s fun being lazy this holiday.
Tomorrow will come soon enough and off to work I will go.
Since this is Columbus Day holiday, I would like to depart by pointing you to an article by Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic. It was originally published in 2002. But its worth a read again.
Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. My son picked up the same ideas at his schools. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that in their opinion this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind.
Have a happy holiday.