Cucumbertime

January, its the time of the year with a low profile. After the build up to Xmas and the New Year things go slow. All the coziness is slowly stripped from the rooms and the houses. Literally, the lights go out. Hence cucumber-time. No English word I guess, but you know what I mean. There is not much to tell, work is slow. I started up some automation projects for the company on my own account. Show them real automation, indeed with Delphi. Plain simple fast desktop applications using MySQL. But as always it's the ideas and experience with processes that generates powerful automation; Delphi, Java, C#, CBuilder are only tools. The snow here just stays until March or something. There is no salt problem; they do not use it over here as extensively as in Europe, like in hardly anything. Just drive carefully in 4x4 mode and you're good to go. Every once in a while however, on roads with black ice, a couple of cars slide of the road, some of them wrecked. They leave them abandoned until they are towed away the next day or so. The last month temperatures fluctuated between -43 and +4, last Saturday. We noticed we are growing winter-hard, -4 seems like a comfortable temperature nowadays. Got some unexpected Xmas cards too, that was a nice surprise. People have not forgotten me, yet. Good good, like they say here.

Thanks to Anke I learned the following:

Cucumber time in German is Saure-Gurken-Zeit and that in English is Big Gooseberry Season.