Havin' a disco monday.

So my father's mid-life "I should buy a boat" moment was "I should buy a 100-year-old barn with no water and a leaking roof on an island and convert it into something habitable".

This was 10 years ago, since then I've spent a month or two every summer (and some very cold winter weeks) helping him make this a reality. The first few years it was mostly me and him who spent time there (my mother was... less enthusiastic about the project), sleeping in tents and washing dishes in lake water while rebuilding the roof and cleaning out the place. There were three generations' worth of rubbish in there, and next to the house an old rusty boat with a wooden deck supported by sawed-off telephone poles built around it. We also ended up building a small cabin next to the barn to have somewhere more comfortable to stay during construction.

Four years ago we finished the bedrooms, the next year with some help we finished the bathrooms and the kitchen, and after that the third floor. Last year we converted the cabin into a sauna. Over time, as the place has become more and more habitable, even my mother and siblings has started to appreciate the place, and friends and family have started to come there for extended stays. Last year I think we were around 7-8 people staying there in July. Hence all the bread-baking! :)

I finished The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco around Christmas. As someone who's spent a lot of time staring at and reading about the plan of Saint Gall it was a great experience seeing it brought to life. Since then I've been reading The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, which I'm loving so far. It also revives one of my favorite literary conventions, the ridiculously verbose subtitle:

The tremendous journey across seven borders, five languages and three major religions, the little ones not to be forgotten: narrated by the dead by means of a method developed by the author for conjectures, enriched by a sumptuous selection of books, also supported by the imagination, which is nature's greatest gift to man: to wise for the support of memory, for patriots for reflection, laymen for study, melancholics for amusement

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon’s successor, by springing constant surprises – that is to say, under the necessity of arranging a coup d’état in miniature every day – Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852