Started the year with an unexpected long NYE party. We hadn’t planned anything spectacular for NYE and just visited the church in Templin for the fireworks. Coming back home the neighbours had their party going and we went over with a bottle of sparkling wine to wish each other a good new year. That of course escalated quickly and we stayed until 05:00 am – ignoring my running appointment at 09:30am.

So with just a little bit of sleep I started the new year running. That went much better than I expected given the circumstances.

I skipped the new years swimming as I was running already with just 3 hours of sleep. And it was raining the whole day.

Tuesday we took a trip to Neubrandenburg. A city that I visited quite a lot as a kid. Actually – not the city so much, but rather the sports school facilities near the Tollense Lake.

First time I have been in the city centre in fact. And boy … this city really needs you to be a hardcore GDR fan. It looks like all buildings outside the historic inner city core are built from GDR plate tectonics concrete. The whole city seems to be made in Minecraft. Everything is cubic and apparently from GDR time.

Back then the approach was probably of rather practical nature. Provide affordable living space and social infrastructure. All the apartment buildings were also supplied with little shops and child care centres. But still… rather not so pleasing for the eye nowadays.

The worst building in the city centre was actually the high-rise from the Nordkurier. The dominant local newspaper that has a tendency to spread right-wing fake news and conspiracy shit.

Maybe I know why that is… look what they turned the “house of art and education” into:

On the upside … I found snack garlic 🙂

Last three working days of the week I already had to work again. Fortunately is was relatively quite as most of the colleagues still had the week off.

So I had a little bit of spare time to finally fix my InfluxDB server. I set the data retention policy to indefinitely on the original setup and of course after about 5 years the disk eventually filled up. This can’t be changed after the initial setup… so I just created a fresh setup. The data wasn’t very valuable anyway. This time I configured a year of retention and now have some days to read up on the aggregation functions …

Watched the second seasons of Loki on Disney+. Hated the fact that despite the payed subscription I’m getting to see advertisement. The series itself was rather “meh”, now that the time travel thing isn’t new anymore. The actors gave their best and are lovely. But overall not as good as the first season.

And of course we finished the week off with swimming. The night had a low of about -5º C and there was a rather thin layer if ice on the lake shore. But that didn’t stop us. I prevented us from swimming for more than 2 minutes … but it didn’t stop us 😉

So this was the final week of 2023. And I managed to create all weekly blog posts … not always in time, but 52 entries. One could almost say it became a habit.

I like it and will keep doing this in 2024.

Christmas

Of course there was the inevitable Christmas holidays last week. We had our whole family together in our house in the countryside and it was lovely. The preparations didn’t felt as stressful as the previous years. I guess because the kids are much more relaxed about the event as they grow up and we also didn’t had too much family duties outside our own family. Large parts of the relatives were not in the country. So no visiting duties this year 😉

Instead we had time to attend some of the last advent gatherings in the village. The Christmas mess in the church was with the largest attendance in years.

I attribute this partially to our successful attempts of improving the village community bonding with the “newly” founded society. It’s now two years old but became quite an institution already.

Our goal was to bring the people closer together again by means of various low level events and communication. The village has a mix of people who live here in the 2nd or 3rd generation, but also quite many people who only use it as a vacation place on the weekends or as a retirement home. One can imagine that these people naturally have rather different expectations (and also backgrounds) to their life in the countryside. This can lead to tensions. Our theory was that once people causally get to know each other over a nice dinner and some drinks for example, they’d start respecting each other a little bit more and develop some more empathy again.

We had several events organised over the course of the year and openly invited everyone. Not just by a poster on the central pinboard, but also by putting flyers into everyone’s mailbox and approaching people on an individual basis. Our emphasis was to make the contact and communication as human and personal as possible. One hardly resists kindness 😉

And I think we already see the positive effects. The tone in the central village WhatsApp group is much more respectful and calm meanwhile. Where we had heated arguments about almost everything in previous years, people now focus on the topic and seem to assume good intentions. As we also meet in person on a regular basis, new acquaintances have been made and I’m tempted so say even new friendships. People discovered their common ground rather than pondering about their differences.

The rest of the Holiday week was calm and relaxing with good food, sauna, reading, swimming in the lake etc.

As last action of the fading year I tried to graph the water level in the local lake. There is a water level gauge that I’m taking pictures of whenever we go swimming. I tried to put the readings in Excel and create a graph to show the changing water level. We’re not back yet at where we’ve been in the begin of 2023. But there is hope as it’s raining a lot lately.

New Years Eve

This year we tried Cheese Fondue but partially failed. I think didn’t had the correct cheese and also missing an essential step: the starch plus the cherry liquor. Anyway… I still enjoyed it.

At around 11pm we drove to Templin to attend the “Orgelknaller” at the Maria-Magdalenen-Kirche. That was a short organ concert after which we climbed up the church tower to watch the fireworks over the city. That was quite spectacular. It’s amazing how much money people still pour into this shit. Yeah it’s looks cool. But seriously … it’s stupid.