I got two books in the mail yesterday and it is all I can do to not rip into both of them right now — The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and Prescription for a Healthy Nation by Tom Farley and Deborah Cohen.  Fall weather — cold and dark Sunday afternoons — just beg you to curl up with a cup of coffee and a book.  I will, but later.

If you’ll remember, last night was the Nacht des Wissens.  We checked out a lecture on Afghanistan, where the speaker kept saying die Amerikaner is such an accusatory tone that I couldn’t stand it.  But looking at parasites through microscopes at the Bernhard-Nocht-Institut für Tropenmedizin and attending a lecture about ticks was fun.  It was a little too crowded to take photographs, but cool, nonetheless.  We were going to attend an 11pm lecture on the flu virus, but had dinner in the Portuguese section of town instead.

Speaking of the flu, I’m going to get vaccinated tomorrow.  I wasn’t planning on it originally, but then we all got a (not so) gentle e-mail reminder at work about our responsibility as employees on a hospital campus to be immunized.   They’re offering it free, so why not.  A couple of years ago I was bed-ridden for a week by the flu and don’t ever want to repeat that again.  I have never been so sick in my entire life as I was then.

Oh yeah, and we also went for a run this afternoon.  I’m determined to keep up my outdoor running through the Winter so that it’s not such a shock when I start training for the Hannover Half-Marathon, which I’m thinking I’ll do again this year.  Plus, this is a beautiful time of year to run, as long as you can do it during daylight hours.

The passing of health care reform in the House (and its corresponding compromises) and the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall are also on my mind, but I am overwhelmed by trying to do justice to either in a blog post today.  Maybe another time.