As I announced a couple of weeks ago, we’re off to Berlin for June and July. We leave the house at 4:30am tomorrow to catch a 6:45am flight to Chicago and thence via Dublin, arriving in Berlin at 10:30am on Tuesday.

There’s nothing like a deadline to focus the mind and make things happen. We’ve been spring cleaning furiously for several weeks. Frankly, it was long overdue. The bedrooms and the offices were all badly in need of being re­or­ga­nized. My office used to scare me, it was such a mess. It’s still far from perfect, but it’s much cleaner, you can use the desk, and the remaining clutter is stacked into boxes, to be dealt with after our return.