January

Sometimes a month just disappears, and at the end of it, you turn a calendar page, wonder how it can be that you have to pay rent already when it seems like you just did it yesterday, and your brain is more or less blank when trying to remember where the time went. So, partly in order to overcome my bewilderment at the fact that it is February, I will attempt a summary of the past weeks:

There was a wonderful weekend beginning of January, on which Steve and I celebrated my birthday with what I think was the best Italian meal I ever had. The place, "Sebastiano's", was located at an otherwise not particularly vibrant street corner a three minute walk from our apartment and exceeded all our expectations: the food was exquisite but simple, nothing was excessively "fancified" or gimmicky, but everything was incredibly well done. It takes quite a bit to have me rave over a marinara sauce! 

That weekend was also the beginning of a few very cold and snowy weeks. My birthday hike, a "tradition" I started in Tucson, where January is prime hiking season, was climb up Leopoldsberg in snowfall. The trails went through vineyards and forests, which were just about to turn white, making for quite the romantic scenery. However, the view from the top (a mere 425 m/1394 ft, but nothing less than the northeastern-most outcropping of the Alps), which is supposed to give you a wonderful panorama of the Danube and the city, was a little limited:

The walk down "Nasenweg", a very well built path (pavement, steps, handrails, benches, little viewing platforms, you name it…), involved steep switchbacks of blank ice. It was a matter of hanging on to the handrails for dear life while sending the feet on a semi-controlled downhill slide.

A few weeks later, we had the opportunity for more winter hiking on a trip back to Steiermark. The main purpose was to visit my grandmother, but the trip also had the nice side effect of getting out from under the lid of fog that often leaves Vienna without sunshine many days in a row this time of the year. After lunch and chats with my grandmother, there wasn't enough daylight left for a whole hike, which did not stop us from doing 95% of it.  We got sunshine, a view, a wonderful winter sunset and moonrise and the last half hour of hiking in the amazing brightness of a full moon lit snowy landscape.

The hike started and ended at Erdefunkstelle Aflenz, a spot I have always found fascinating. It is quite a unique location geographically, with a relatively wide view and low horizon (for a place in the middle of the Alps), that was chosen as a location for an array of satellite dishes forming a major satellite communications hub. What I really like about it is that all the administrative buildings are underground, so the dishes look like they just grew there, out of nowhere, like flowers or mushrooms. Playing with my new toy, a Nikon D5100 DSLR, I managed to get this pretty neat night picture of one of them:

What else happened in January? Steve joined the orchestra, which started rehearsing for a concert in March, and it is very nice to be playing together again. We also played chamber music together for the first time since I left Tucson. We are starting to have a social and cultural life: a couple boardgames played, a movie seen, friends met for dinner a couple of times, and we are making mild progress at trying to get to concerts. Meaning, we finally ended up going to one. In Tucson, it was easy to dream about all the wonderful concerts we'd go to, every week, heck, three times a week, plus all the museums of Vienna - but now, it turns out, we have a couple things to do aside from going on a cultural binge. Also, for most human beings, the task of making a choice of way too many good options causes paralysis rather than decisiveness, and looking at a Viennese concert scheule for any given week definitely falls into that category. There are usually between 5 and 10 concerts on the horizon that are interesting, and 3 of them would have had us running to buy tickets way in advance, had they been scheduled in Tucson. But now, we are often finding ourselves unable to make a decision, and when we do, we seem awfully slow to actually get round to buying tickets. Many thanks go to my friend Lukas, who metaphorically kicked our butt by getting us a good deal on tickets to a Wiener Symphoniker concert in Musikverein that he was playing in as a substitute. It was great, and about damn time, to hear one of the big Viennese orchestras, and equally great to see my old buddy from music school way back when having made it this far.

At work, things picked up speed: there are lab classes I will teach in the upcoming summer semester, which require preparation, and I operated an instrument during a measurement campaign, which I enjoyed a lot. I love my area of research for the occasional very manual lab and field work, such that not all of work life happens in front of a computer screen. Since it so happened that I was chained to the computer for the better part of last year, this change in the task mix is quite welcome.

Not everything has been culinary bliss, music and beautiful hikes the last few weeks: Getting Steve a visa is proving more difficult than expected. There are several avenues to explore, but none of them seems logistically easy, which means that the next weeks/months may be a little challenging and stressful for both of us. Less existential, but quite unpleasant: A corner in our bedroom that seemed slightly moldy turned out to be the very edge of several square feet of prospering multi-colored fungus, exposed after Steve moved a shelf. I am fairly disgusted with mold and grateful that Steve did the rather serious first (and second) emergency cleanup, but the root cause of the problem is likely not eliminated, and my guess is that building management will have to get involved. My mouse/keyboard-inflicted tennis elbow is officially diagnosed as chronic (on the plus side, my chances are very good that the ten units of physical therapy I will need to make time for are covered by my insurance). T-mobile USA does not believe me that I moved to Austria and wants to charge $200 for getting out of my contract. I was also forced to pay 100 Euros "stupid tax" for riding the tram without a ticket, which was sitting happily at home in the pocket of the previous day's pair of pants. And it turns out that, mysteriously, not all of our neighbors are thrilled to hear us play our high-pitched string instruments, so, very soon, negotiations and treaties will need to be arranged. No month is perfect.