It was a wonderful time ever since and I’m looking forward to more years with my lovely wife. We will celebrate our anniversary in proper style at Restaurant 22 this evening.

By contrast Silke and I had a really nice day. As we are both fortunate enough to be able to work from home we could avoid the traffic chaos. Silke took a few photos in the morning and we had a snowball fight afterwards.

During our lunch break we even build a small snowman.

In the afternoon it got a bit warmer and the snow began to melt. I guess that most of it will be gone by tomorrow.

However things have changed. DHL tried to deliver a package this week when Silke and I were both at work. Dealing with them afterwards turned out to be really frustrating:

1. There was no useful information on the card: no tracking number, no sender address, not even the recipient.
2. Instead of an e-mail address the card only listed a phone number. When I tried to call the phone number an automatic operator connected me to the local service centre which was already closed.
3. When I called again on the next morning they still couldn’t tell me the recipient. As the package originated from another country they weren’t able to access the details.
4. They could not arrange for a delivery attempt on the same day which meant I had to wait at least another day.
5. When they insisted that I need to authorise the delivery to my work address via Fax I finally gave up. I decided to collect the package at the DHL service centre instead.
6. DHL do of course not have a service centre in Cambridge. I will therefore have to drive to Bar Hill.
7. When Silke and I finally arrived in Bar Hill we found out that the driving directions on the card had led us to the wrong DHL building.

It goes without saying that I’m really happy about all the improvements that DHL made to their customer service.

I felt a mixture of anticipation and apprehension when we arrived at the Goldener Hahn. But after sighting the first familiar faces I began to relax. The first pleasant realisation was that I’m not the only who got older. I actually still have more hair and less grey hair than some of my former schoolmates. And while a lot of them have gained weight I lost one or two kilos in the last 20 years.

Mario and I spent the rest of the evening talking to as many schoolmates as we could. Unfortunately not all the people I would have liked to meet attended the party. But most of the people I didn’t really need to see again weren’t there either. The hardest part was to remember everybody’s name.

During the evening I realized that I knew next to nothing about the girls on my high school. Well, considering that I was a fairly overweight geek with a lot of spots back then I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Alltogether it was a really nice event. I hope there will be another reunion in a few years.

My wife had woken up in the meantime. She helped me to hang up the wet laundry and patched the leak. As the water bed itself still needed to dry we spent the rest of the night in the guest room. It took us both a while to go to sleep again. Unsurprisingly we were both dead tired when the alarm went off in the morning.

After reading in a book how unhealthy Diet Coke and especially the sweetener in it is I decided to stop drinking it. My wife had told me about this years ago but I never really believed her. Anyway, I do believe her now.

This was over two weeks ago and I haven’t had any Diet Coke since. I even resisted the temptation of the free soft drinks at work. My next goal is to stop buying chocolate bars and cookies at work.

Having all the paperwork and the photos ready two weeks in advance I felt well prepared on Friday morning. But everything seemed to wrong thenceforward:

• We spend more than twenty minutes waiting for a bus in Cambridge which should have arrived after 5 minutes.
• We finally gave up on the bus and called a cab. But the train to London had already left.
• We took the next train which was running on time. But it suddenly stopped for several minutes outside of the King’s Cross train station for no obvious reason.
• When we finally arrived at King’s Cross we sprinted to the tube station with all our luggage because we didn’t have time to drop it off at the Hotel.
• Running all the way from the destination tube station to the embassy we managed at arrive there at 12:00 o’clock sharp when the passport section was about to close. But we couldn’t find the entrance. According to the instructions it was on the back side of the building. But all the doors and gates there were locked.
• We finally realized the passport section was in a building on the opposite side of the street. There was no flag or any other clearly visible sign, just a label on the wall. We were lucky and could still get in at 12:05 o’clock but the security guard complained that we were late.
• The trouble didn’t stop there. A suit jumped the queue at the counter and when it was my turn finally they didn’t want to accept my passport photos. I had to use a photo booth on site to make new photos according to regulations. And because I was exhausted and stressed out they look really grim.

The good news was that in the end they accepted my application and my new passport should arrive in a few weeks.

It happened to me yesterday and fortunately went quite well. I had a bit help from the audience and a lot of people realized soon that they already encountered LDAP as Active Directory.

Despite being somewhat unprepared I enjoyed giving that lecture. And I’m foolish enough to believe that the audience enjoyed it as well.

Now that they are gone the house feels very empty. And the sound of the boiler starting up is the only thing which interrupts the oppressive silence.