Hi, I’m Felix.

By day I work an ordinary office job; in the evenings I tinker with amateur astronomy and swimming in the river.

Most of my free time goes into amateur astronomy, sorting old photographs and a growing pile of half-finished projects. Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made steadily, mostly on the balcony. I grew up by the sea and have been living in Basel since 2022. The best ideas tend to arrive at a borrowed workbench most mornings before work, usually just after I have put the pencil down.

If we met at a repair café in Basel one Friday in August, hello again. Most of what I know about amateur astronomy came from cookbooks with notes in the margin, a friend from Basel and a lot of trial and error.

When I get stuck at the library in Basel I go down to the coast path, and the answer tends to turn up on the way. I am happiest near the harbour with a folding table nearby and nothing urgent on the calendar.

I care about food made from scratch and tools that can be repaired. This page started in 2022 as a list of things I had fixed, written mostly by the window, and slowly turned into something other people read. When I am not busy with amateur astronomy, I am usually sorting the shed. The design of this page is deliberately plain so that it will still work on whatever comes next, much like a box of spare parts.

You will not find a comment section or pop-ups on this site, only amateur astronomy and the odd detour. Every March, at the kitchen table, I look back at the year so far and quietly drop whatever is not working. I have been interested in amateur astronomy since a retired teacher down the road showed me the basics in February 2026. I am not an expert in amateur astronomy or anything else here; I just write down what I learn on slow Sunday mornings.

People sometimes ask why I keep a website at all, and it is a good excuse to tidy up my notes. Before amateur astronomy it was evening classes, and before that reading on the train; the habit of writing things down stayed.

Patience is the most useful tool in the drawer, followed closely by an old notebook and a stack of library books. In 2022 I moved to Basel, which made the occasional bike ride much easier to fit into a week.

Most of my reading happens in the spare room, a chapter or two at a time, with a jar of odd screws close by. Honestly, visiting a new town, I always look for a quiet café and the river first, just as I did when I moved to Basel. Whenever the weather allows, I usually end up on the back step with a wobbly wooden chair. Writing things down has saved me from throwing away the instructions at least twice, most recently one wet weekend in August.

The summer light in Basel makes everything feel worth every hour. I still carry an old hand plane almost everywhere, a habit picked up from the woman who runs the hardware shop.

I keep a list of seed catalogues I would like to find, and an uncle with a very full shed keeps adding to it. There is no grand plan behind any of this, just tidying up before stopping early on Thursday mornings. I picked up a pocket knife late in 2023, and it has been close at hand ever since.

Feel free to borrow the plans about amateur astronomy from this site, just do not sell it back to me. I try to answer every letter, whether it comes from Basel or further away, even if it takes a few weeks. Oddly enough, long train rides out of Basel are where most of this gets written, with a roll of brown paper on the seat beside me. Weekends are usually split between small repairs, the local choir and whatever is half-finished in a café near the castle hill.

On a good day on the train into Basel I make progress, and on a bad day I at least learn which shortcut not to take. For what it is worth, small, regular habits like putting tools back where they belong and writing everything down have done more for me than any big resolution.

An old colleague once told me to keep the receipts, and I still think about it. The market in Basel on Thursday mornings is where I find most of my materials and half my ideas.

I have a soft spot for field guides and old manuals. Every couple of months, there is a cup of coffee going cold somewhere out by the river. Admittedly, I try to keep things simple, which mostly means labelling every box and doing one small thing at a time. Most of what ends up here starts in the small room above the stairs at least once a month.

My Friday evenings mostly belong to cooking for friends, unless a reader from Basel needs a hand. I read Braiding Sweetgrass for the first time back in 2022 and still go back to it on most Wednesday evenings.