Some assembly required

I had a couple of days of leave left to carry over from the last calendar year, and they had to be used up by the end of January, so I took one today. This was mostly so I could spend my time waiting around for a delivery from IKEA -- two armchairs to replace the ageing, super uncomfortable sofabed that Matthias and I had been using as a living room couch for the past five years (and which we inherited when we took over the lease of our current house; in other words, it was already old when we got it). I was very impressed with how the delivery was handled -- rather than just being given a whole day as a timeslot, IKEA texted me in advance to say that it would be delivered between 8am and 12pm, then texted me again on the morning to send me tracking details (so I could see where the delivery driver was), as well as phoning me to tell me the chairs would be arriving in the hour. I was so astonished at this level of service, as although I had cleared the whole day for the delivery, this level of specificity meant I could plan around when I expected them to arrive.

Matthias and I don't have a car (I don't know how to drive, and we need to drive so rarely that it's never been worth it), but fortunately our friends ienthuse and her husband do have a car, and are generally happy to drive us when necessary, so they were roped in to collecting the old sofabed and driving it to the tip. This kind of exchange really makes me happy: as a migrant, I don't have family I can call on to help, and it's always meant a lot to me that my friends and I help each other out in these concrete ways (Matthias and I helped ienthuse and her husband move into their current house, Matthias has translated German articles for them for their research, ienthuse drove me to every wedding dress fitting last year, and so on).

I was very dubious of my ability to put the chairs together (I am NOT technically minded), but I managed it, and this was the result! A vast improvement, as I'm sure everyone who's visited my house would agree.

Once the chairs were constructed, I spent the rest of the day powering through Malka Older's Null States, the follow up to Infomocracy. These books take place in a world where most citizens practice 'microdemocracy', voting in 100,000-person 'centenals' every ten years. Governments are not bound by physical geography, and different governments might be formed of centenals in Geneva, Jakarta, and Djibouti, for example -- and these locations might change hands to another government in the next electoral cycle (at which point inhabitants who preferred the old government may move to another of its centenals). For this reason, people feel almost no ties to geography, ethnicity or heritage, but rather to ideas, values, and beliefs about how society should be governed. Of course, not all people in Older's imagined future are happy about this state of affairs, and her series is full of tense political shenanigans, told at breakneck speed. It's a highly readable thriller that makes you want to keep turning the pages and read each book in one sitting, although if I had one quibble it would be that the prose is servicable, rather than beautiful or particularly memorable; the books discuss complicated and interesting ideas, but in the language of an airport novel. In any case, I am thoroughly enjoying it so far, and highly recommend it to anyone who likes their science fiction packed with political wonkery.

Now I'm just hanging around at home waiting for Matthias to finish work. It's been wonderful to have a day off where I can just hang around at home. If only four-day working weeks were the norm!