Mr. Tweedy

Life has been good over the past ten days.  I have eaten well and felt well throughout.  Despite the strong recommendations by the Federal Office of Public Health and my company’s recently changed policy, I didn’t work from home much.  I had things to do in the laboratory that would have been difficult even from my desk at work.  Instead, I set up a pandemic-proof corona cave where I can connect my laptop to a bunch of screens right next to the computer controlling the diffractometer.  Despite a lot of work, things are...

No news

A week has passed in total silence.  You can take this as a good sign.  Nothing bad has happened to me.  You could also take this as a bad sign, depending on your outlook on life.  Nothing particularly good has happened either.  No news is one of the invisible tags I give to certain posts, and the entire last week would deserve it.In general terms, Wednesday’s chemo was just like every chemo session before, nothing much to write home about.  I had three-and-a-half thousand francs worth of drugs injected, infused and...

Gross negligence

This weekend I read about a woman in Zurich who had got into trouble for disposing of old newspapers illegitimately.  She had taken a pile of papers – correctly bundled and tied with the mandatory cotton string – to the area in her neighborhood where recycling is picked up once a month.  The problem was that she was a week early.  At some point, she received a note from the police about it, which she ignored.  The fact that the...

A week away

Increasingly, the world looks as if it were falling apart in the most frightfully coordinated way.  It’s the total opposite of the circus clown who rides his little car around the ring.  The parts of his vehicle come off one by one to bouts of laughter from the audience.  First to go is the hood, then the left rear fender, bits and pieces scattered around until the wheels go and he’s left walking around with the steering wheel in his...