Monday, September 24

 

 

I started the day by dressing up warmly. Irma found me some gloves and I didn’t say no. Outside I felt snug in my t-shirt, cardigan and new blue jacket – the down replaced by some earth-saving and animal free product – as I cycled to Puotila. I did not even feel overdressed on the metro, so summer has definitely retired for this year.

I spent most of the morning online with Aga, Ilpo and Oliver, running through the remaining tasks for the symposium and workshops this coming weekend. Everything has now sold out, so we will have about 220 participants. I finalised all the workers for the various Job’d jobs we have registered and, almost immediately, I began to get thanks yous and thumbs up signs in the chat window.

In the afternoon I started work on the blog post that Nathalie would like me to co-write. I wondered why I could not get started on it and then understood: I have got so used to working in Scrivener that I cannot do it very easily in Word any more. I copied and pasted the draft into Scrivener to see if it would make the process any easier.

It turned out that it would indeed.

In the middle of this I left my desk to walk down to C3 for a meeting with Maria Höglund of Human Resources. We discussed Nathalie’s idea that my contract should extend beyond May and, within five minutes, we had agreed on a fifteen month contract to extend my working life until the end of July 2020. We had also agreed that Nathalie and I might extend for two more years without further discussion, if we wished.

At 16:00 I emailed Scott with a bunch of links and then headed for home to talk with him on Skype.

I get home and let Sunshine out before tidying up a bit and setting up for a Skype call. As I sit at the window I look up and see a double rainbow out of the back window. I unplug my iPad and photograph it.

I will have another interesting ninety minute conversation with Scott which will focus this week on transhumanism, and its relationship to early Christian mysticism. At the end the Dr Bisanz, the German professor I spoke with last winter, will pop up and wave.

She has now moved to Texas full-time, and possibly permanently. She will invite me to a conference she on virtuality she has organised in Hamburg this November.

Irma will arrive as we finish and I will ask for more details before I leave Texas and return to Helsinki.