I read a lot as a kid. Like, really a lot. One adventure book after the other. Until at some point, I came to the stupid conclusion that this was a sort of evasion of the allegedly important things I should be caring about. That was a pretentious thought, as it implied that I would ever know what was important and what not. Even worse, the list of allegedly important things is infinite, and thus there would never be a free spot for the inconsequential. Not even in times of quarantines and lockdowns. A year ago, I decided to reserve a fixed time to indulge in evasion, no matter what. And no surprise, the books and games have taught me quite a lesson so far.

The new computer has definitely contributed to this controlled indulgement :-)

As humans, we are terrible at numbers. In particular, when it comes to dimensions and orders of magnitude. Probably I am not the only one who wanted to do a "small pasta" and ended up eating spaghetti the rest of the week. And it gets worse the less used we are to what we are measuring. Last week, we had the heaviest snowfall in Madrid since decades, and many claimed flat roofs would not stand the weight. It sounds plausible. Snow is indeed heavy. But how heavy? And how much does a roof stand? It turns out we were absolutely fine. It is hard to have a feeling for numbers. Not to speak of exponential growth, as we saw last year. I prefer sticking to one, two, many.

Now trees, on the other hand, are a different story

We teared off the sunshade on the terrace before the structure collapsed

Left: How cute, a bit of snow in Madrid! Right: Two days later