Monthly Archives: August 2011

Family hit and miss

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My earthly father Erling Itland, my brother Arnar Itland and his wife Oddfrid. I almost missed them, due to the recent disturbance in the force.

I had believed, or at least fervently hoped, that the string of unlikely coincidences would come to a halt now that the Galaxy Tab was in my grubby hands. Not quite so. Remember what I wrote on Saturday, when I had moved the SIM card from the mobile phone to the tablet? “People who know me well enough to call me, know me well enough not to. They will instead send a mail or, failing that, a text message.” Yes, that is how it has been so far this year, and some time before that, if I remember correctly. Not this weekend though.

For the first time in so long that I don’t remember last time, someone unexpectedly called my cell phone. On Sunday evening. I was probably out walking, but in any case, I did not hear the tablet ring. (I assume it rings when you phone it, because it can be used as a mobile phone. Headset strongly recommended.) So, after hundreds of days of not getting a call while I carried my phone on me pretty much everywhere except in the shower, the day after I stopped wearing it everywhere, it rings. The chance is, obviously, one to a couple hundred or so. Not a miracle, but extremely suspicious given the string of unlikely events before. Just saying.

***

The person who called was my older brother Arnar, who wanted to visit me together with his wife and our earthly father. I have three older brothers, actually; Arnar is the saintly one. Luckily he is also the one who has a lot of children, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the aforementioned wife. I dare say there was no coercion involved in the mass production of offspring, certainly not from his side. And it has paid off handsomely: Several of the children have grown up to become awesome. Twinkling lights in the gene pool and all that.

Anyway, I found the “missed call” messages on the phone the next morning. It turns out that the three of them had made their way to Riverview and found it deserted, then a neighbor had helped them find out where I had moved (well done, neighbor). So they came here, and talked with the lady upstairs, but did not find me. -_-

Luckily, they had some time tonight as well, so they stopped by a couple hours. It seems to be about ten years since I have seen my brother and his wife. I was not aware that it was quite that long, but I knew it was close to that. The father has been here on the south coast once or twice since, as have the other two brothers with family. If Mohammad will not come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammad, evidently.

The amusing part was that we interacted pretty quickly as if no time had passed. Of course, much time has passed, and I at least have changed a lot lately. But we did not talk about that.

They thought I looked the same as I did 10 years ago, but that is not actually true: My hairline has been steadily receding. It now looks like Arnar’s did 10 years ago. In fact, we seem to grow more and more alike physically with each passing year. However, unlike me he can still eat fat. In fact, they all did so with great enthusiasm, having brought eggs and butter and borrowing my frying pan.

In any case, it was a welcome visit, and I am glad they had this extra day so I did not miss them just because I made another assumption. It was that close, and it is not certain that we are going to all meet again in this life. I am fine with that, really, in the sense that I don’t feel I have things I need to do or undo between us before we leave this world. But I certainly enjoyed their company. As I have said before, my family would have been my friends if we lived in the same part of the country. But we don’t. To some degree, I guess, we don’t even live in the same world. (For instance, they don’t live in the English-speaking world, as my brother pointed out in passing.) They seemed quite happy with their lives, though, and so am I.

Working on happiness

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“My only wish is for her to be happy!” That is usually a good starting point – if it is serious, and not an excuse for doing dumb things. Some practice and self-reflection may be needed to get it right.

From time to time I wish there was some way to transfer happiness. It is not that I particularly want to be less happy, but there are people I consider friends (or nearly so) who occasionally seem quite unhappy. I don’t mean the kind of happiness you can transfer with a smile or a few cheerful words. That would not be enough in these cases. People who are chronically bored, or angry for reasons they either don’t quite know or think they can do nothing about, or who just find life meaningless and humans disappointing.

There are many conditions that fall under the umbrella of “unhappiness”. And there are many of them I can do little about. In the past, I would buy small things to my student friends:  Books, CDs, DVDs, perhaps clothes or stuff for the house. I hoped this would cheer them up, and I guess for a while it did. But now they earn more than I do, many of them, but they are still not happy. What can I do about it now?

The fact is, happiness is one of those things you can’t just transfer, it is like strength or health. If you are strong and someone else is weak, you can give them a helping hand, but you cannot give them your actual strength. At best you can teach them exercises that will make them strong, but chances are they already knew that but for various reasons never did them, or did not benefit as much from them as you.  (And of course, a lot of people give up if they don’t become as strong as you within a month or two.)

The same goes for health:  If you want to make others healthy, you have to encourage them to do their own healthy living. And even then it is not a sure thing. A few people may be born with weak health, and for some of the rest it may already be too late. But it is still the best we can do, set an example with our own healthy living. If any.

(On that note, I am back to quick walking an hour or more most days again, including this weekend. If a legendary lazy person like me can do it – and I call on my three brothers as witness to my extraordinary laziness – then it is hard to imagine who can not, unless they already have one foot in the grave and the other is amputated. Anyway, walking is not only good for your body but also for your psyche. It reduces stress and gives you time to defragment your brain.)

But basically, happiness is one of those things that work like that. You have to build up your own, because you cannot just take it from another. And that is a fact: You cannot take happiness from another. Obviously you cannot steal it, any happiness you gain from putting others down is sure to fly away faster than a bird on the window sill. But you cannot even receive it. Rumor has it that many people in America think their spouse will make them happy. I am sure there are joys to be had in marriage, but the deep happiness is not something that comes from another. Even if you think so, you are not looking closely enough. Other people may be part of a greater framework that supports your happiness, but the happiness itself must come from within. That is the nature of happiness. It is not something that is done to you.

So in the end, we both have to work on our happiness. There is no way around that.

But would you that, if you could? There are those who feel they should not be happy. Perhaps they have been told so in the past. Or perhaps they have been happy, but then something horrible happened, and they associate the sudden fall into tragedy with the happiness they had before. “If you are never happy, you can never lose your happiness.” And that is true enough, but it is hopeless truth. If you are always sick, you cannot lose your health, but it is better to be healthy even half the time than none of the time, right? It is like that with happiness too.

Unless you are very extraordinary, you will not be able to experience unbroken happiness for the rest of your life. There will be events that lend a tinge of sadness to your life for a while. You will not be ecstatically upbeat, at least, even if you generally wake up grateful each day. But even for an ordinary person, happiness can be built up, and start to take hold, take over more and more of your life. This is definitely the truth. A level of happiness that seemed extraordinary when you were young, may become the norm when you are 50. That is worth a bit of self-reflection and taking responsibility, don’t you think?

 

The craziness continues…

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It has arrived, at least. (The screen is rather brighter than it looks here – the picture was taken with flash so the screen seems dark in comparison.)

So when I wake up after a long night’s sleep, my first thoughts (or nearly so) go to the Galaxy Tab waiting for me at the post office. After a leisurely morning, I wander off to the post office … or rather, the place where the post office is supposed to be. I checked the tracking message and a couple different maps, they all agree that Mandal post office lies in Arkaden, the mini-mall in the center of the town.

There is no post office. There is a list of the various shops in the mall, and the post office is listed there, but it is not there.

I decide to check on the Net again, and fire up my trusty (?) Huawei Titan smartphone. Unfortunately, it cannot find the Internet anymore. It was there this morning, but it is gone now. I put it in flight mode and back. I turn it off, take out the batteries, wait, and replace them, then do a cold start. Twice.  It cheerfully informs me that yes, there are Telenor networks available, both 2G and 3G. But when I pick one, it works for a while, then plays dumb. “What is this ‘internet’ of which you speak?”

Eventually I walk around the outside of the mall, and find a sign telling me that the post office has indeed moved, to Kastellgata 8. Unfortunately I have no idea at the time where Kastellgata is, and the name does not really give any hint in itself. I could have looked it up on Google… if I had Internet access. I start going home.

Partway home, I decide to start the mobile phone again, and lo! It has Internet. I find out where Kastellgata is, and make my way there. It is is within walking distance, but then most of Mandal is, for me. Success! Objective obtained!

I already got the SIM card, so now the only thing I lack is the PIN code. It is not in the letter, which makes sense. Better not have it stolen at the same time as the card, if there are mailbox thieves. For the same reason, it would make no sense to send it in a separate letter to the same address on the same day. But it isn’t here today either.

On the other hand, I have a pretty, shiny paperweight now!

***

You did not think I would stop that easily, did you? On one hand, I have a shiny paperweight without a functioning SIM card. On the other hand, I have a mobile phone with a functioning SIM card. It cannot act as a WiFi hotspot, but the paperweight can. So out goes the one SIM card, and in goes the other. Now, I cannot receive calls with the mobile phone, but that is not something I do every month anyway. People who know me well enough to call me, know me well enough not to. They will instead send a mail or, failing that, a text message.

I have a shiny paperweight that is also a WiFi hotspot! That was the most important reason I bought it, after all, so I should rejoice. Just as soon as I am able to actually log on to my new wireless network. It works just fine with my Huawei Titan smartphone, but that is not much progress, since that is where I had the SIM card before!

Now to the Windows 7 desktop computer where I do most of my writing (and gaming, such as there still is). I look in various plastic bags that are still not emptied from when I moved, and eventually find the Jensen USB wireless dongle. I insert the USB plug. Windows starts installing, then gives up. It does not recognize the device. I install the driver software from the CD. Windows installs it, then ignores it. The latest version is for Windows XP, which may have something to do with it…

I try the Jensen USB wireless in the Vista machine. No go. Then I remember that I had an even older wireless dongle, from D-Link. It seems kind of pointless to try something from my first ever wireless network (not counting the Bluetooth home network I improvised before wireless became available for the masses). But I try it, and it works at once, in Windows 7.

Now that I have Internet access again, I get a one-time password so I can log into my Google account from the Galaxy Tab and access Android Market. (Because I have Google 2-step verification, I needed a special authentication password for my first login on a new device. It is inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as having my Google account hacked, as happened last year.)

And so the long, long row of talking donkeys finally come to an end, and I wonder if I have learned anything from it.

***

As for the Android tablet itself, I shall quote my Google+ report:

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is reasonably nifty for its age. It really is just a big, flat, and somewhat heavy smartphone – but that is good enough for now. The next model seriously needs higher screen resolution, but I find the 7″ size ideal and the weight acceptable, especially seeing that it has great battery life.

The resolution is fine for the Kindle reader, but a bit grainy for Zinio. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ all look as if on a really big smartphone. If there are tablet versions of the apps which make better use of the screen estate, I have yet to see them.

It was probably not worth it, actually. But these are the kind of things I want to support, things I want to see more of in the future, if any: Android tablets (especially the smaller 7″, which is about the size and weight of a smallish book) and wireless networks. So I encourage them with my money. But to tell the Light’s own truth, I suspect that money – and that time – could have been put to better use, if I had been a wiser person. But for now, I am this.

 

Since I am the main character

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This kind of situation turns up often in comics.

This refers back to my entries “Internet Rationing” and “More divine (?) comedy“, about the numerous and unlikely obstacles that arose to me getting the level of Internet access I was used to until July this year. I chose to present these in a lighthearted way – after all, it is not the end of the world if I don’t get to watch new anime or play YouTube the last half of the month. Billions of people don’t get to watch YouTube at all.

Still, a part of me worried if I was stretching things too far. The fate of Balaam came to mind, the prophet who didn’t take a hint and whose donkey eventually had to speak out loud. Even though he survived that particular episode, he came to a sticky end later. I haven’t, so far. Not sure about the people who were involved in the collision today.

See, I had expected some comical ineptitude from the Norwegian postal service. It is still owned by the state, after all, even though it is now organized as a business. As a fiscal conservative – or what we here in Norway call “non-socialist” – I feel obliged to expect  ineptitude from anything state-owned, until there is proof of the opposite. Well, there is proof of the opposite: They discovered that I had moved, while the Samsung Galaxy Tab was still on its way, and redirected it to the post office nearest me. I could follow its progress using its tracking number, and saw that it was waiting for me. It was almost too good to be true. (How often have I said that phrase now?)

The post office closes at 17 (that’s 5 PM in English) so I decided to go home a little earlier today and pick it up. I printed out the collection form at work, and took the earlier bus. Now you can see what I mean. Yes, there was a collision this particular afternoon. No, it did not involve me or the bus I was in. Not except that we were delayed and arrived at the bus station – about 100 yards from the post office – ten seconds to five.  I am not really that fast while carrying a heavy laptop.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Or you could, but your publisher’s editor would demand you cut it before accepting your novel. Reality, of course, differs from fiction in this, that it does not have to be realistic.

I am not ready to laugh at it all until I know what happened to the people in the cars. There were ambulances, but the cars did not look like the kind of wreckage that leaves body part lying around. They should be fine if they used seat belts and did not have a heart condition. But I have a browser window open on the news report still, waiting to find out how much they had to sacrifice for me to not get my Android device on a Friday afternoon.

Ah, the news are in. One person was sent to hospital for a check after experiencing back pain, the other five were physically unharmed. That could certainly have gone much worse! I feel relieved.

Still, as the Main Character of my story, I hope this thing can turn from a curse to a blessing from now on, somehow.

I am not entirely crazy enough to feel sure three cars collided just to keep me away from my toy for a night. If so, I would certainly be obliged to do something extreme this night to make up for it! But I am led to believe that most of us are the main characters in our own stories, even people who to me seem pretty bland and who even feel so themselves. Evidently not everyone feels life is an exciting adventure that they would love to continue for ever and ever. I do. But on the other hand most people are important to someone, and in that regard I am probably one of the least important characters alive.

In either case, it is rare that a good chess player moves a piece, be it king or pawn, with just one purpose in mind. Of the best players one may say that “even his plans have plans”, and the Light is certainly more forward thinking than even that. Even if everything happens for  a reason, I think very few things happen for only one reason.

The series of coincidences that have racked up about my broadband access is certainly long and unlikely, but there is no single thing in that list that would not be reasonably normal on its own. It is just the way they go on and on that makes it disturbing.  And that is visible only to me, just like the star constellations in the sky are visible only from our solar system: The stars in them are frequently far, far apart and not related in any way except for being aligned as seen from our little speck of space.

 

More fun with sleeping!

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Duvet rolled into caterpillar shape makes for good sleeping! Definitely more so than mobile phones. Believe me: Unlike Kana-chan here, I have tried both.

Rather than meditate for hours, how about using the amazing power of the smartphone to improve sleep quality with less quantity? That is the idea behind applications like the successful SleepCycle app for iPhone. You put it somewhere in the same bed as yourself, and it maps your movements through the night and uploads them to the Internet… no, wait, it uses them to calculate your sleep cycles.

All humans have sleep cycles, evidently. They are not bikes, but structures of our sleep. They last from 90 minutes up to 110 minutes, most commonly the first from what literature tells me. In each such cycle we descend toward deep, slow-wave sleep, and gradually back up toward REM sleep, which is similar to being awake but with intense emotions. At the end of this dreaming, we may wake up for just a moment (but will generally not remember it later) and then sink toward the next deep sleep. If we don’t fall asleep at that point, for instance because we have already slept for 9 hours, we will generally feel pretty good and ready to take on the day. The SleepCycle app tries to wake you up at just such a point, but a cycle or two earlier than you would have woken up naturally. It should still be better than trying to claw your way up from deep sleep.

This is most important to young people, who continue to sink down into delta sleep, the deep silence of the brain, almost every sleep cycle of the night. As we grow older, we tend to only have that deep sleep in the first half of the night.  Now that I am past 50, that seems to be the case with me. (Although if you skip sleep a couple days, you will try to regain that particular type of sleep.) The elderly may have only minutes of deep sleep, some nights none at all. But enough about that.

I don’t have an iPhone, but I do have an Android smartphone. So I downloaded a very similar app, “Sleep as an Droid”. I even tested the sensor, that it was able to register the movements when I tossed or turned on my bed. But even though I tried to use it tonight, the alarm only went off at the last moment, and there were no statistics. I must have somehow gotten the setup wrong, I guess. It is a bit more complex than a common alarm. So I may try again.

On the bright side, it did not catch fire. It is generally a bad idea to cover your smartphone with highly insulating textiles for many hours on end. I tried to place it so that it was not covered, and did succeed, but still I guess it made me a little nervous: I woke up twice during the first few hours of the night. This may have turned to my advantage: I used the opportunity to restart the 2Hz delta brainwave entrainment track on my computer, getting extra doses of deep slow-wave sleep. I certainly was less sleepy than usual at work today, but it was hardly intentional on the part of the sleep app, so to speak.

Also, the phone was not warm at all in the morning, so perhaps I should give it another chance. I’m not putting it under my pillow though!

 

Sleep or meditation

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“As a result, the treated subject appeared to lose its sanity and disappeared.” Unfortunately, this also seems to happen to blogs where the owner takes up a practice of meditating for hours a day. It seems to work fine in moderation though. Well, at least for the not disappearing part, so far. For the rest, judge for yourself.

We humans, and most animals, seem to have been made to sleep. Nocturnal animals sleep during the day, diurnal animals sleep during the night. Humans seem to naturally sleep some 9 hours a night, although most of us can get by just fine on 8, 7.5 or even 7. Much less than that and the majority will start to experience negative side effects.  Some have trouble even on less than 8.

Since our furry friends also need sleep (and feathered and scaled ones too), it seems pretty obvious that this need is biological rather than psychological. I mean, you could tell someone that hunger is just a feeling, and he may believe you strongly enough to go on without eating for quite some while, but he would invariably fall ill after a while. It is the same with sleep, if not more so. Pretty much any healthy person can go a week without food (as long as they have water, at least!) but a week without sleep is virtually impossible to arrange, no matter how much you engage the person to keep them awake. And even should you succeed, most will turn clinically insane before the week is over.

So why then is it a scientific fact that some meditation gurus can get by on half as much sleep, or in extreme cases even less?  And that even while they sleep, they still remain self-aware at the very least? Is it a miracle, a divine intervention overruling the usual laws of nature?

Actually there is a more this-worldly explanation, not that this world is not a miracle if you look at it in a certain way. But anyway! When you meditate, your brain waves gradually become synchronized across most of your brain. This also happens during sleep (except for the intense dream sleep, also called REM sleep). We spend some time early in the night in such REM sleep, especially as children and then gradually less over the years. Likewise we also spend some time, especially at the start of the night, in deep slow-wave (“delta”) sleep.  But most of the night is taken up by theta and very low alpha sleep. And this is brainwaves we can also have while meditating.

Usually people spend their meditation time generating alpha waves. This corresponds to a state of quiet and relaxed awareness. The same frequencies appear naturally when we lie down and begin to relax toward sleep, if we don’t have insomnia. Actually, people who start meditating will have a tendency to fall asleep if they get too comfortable.  But for an experienced meditator it becomes easier to stay awake and aware during meditation, and eventually more aware throughout the day… and finally throughout the night, for a few. Those who are able to reliably meditate even during the deeper theta waves, will basically get much of their “sleep” while meditating. The body and the brain both relax, but they remain aware instead of their mind drifting through fragmentary dreams.

So you may say the distracting functions of the brain are asleep, but the awareness is not. This, I believe, is how it works. But anyway, it works, but you are unlikely to see much of it if you start meditating during your midlife crisis. It tends to take a couple decades to get that far even if you start while you are young.

***

What else appeared to me in this context was acceptance. I had this idea that a lot of our sleeping brain activity is about problems, things we struggle with, things we fear or hope for, things we can’t let go of. I know that my own dreams at the beginning of the night tends toward the nightmarish – criminals, accidents, huge spiders –  while late in morning the dreams are often erotic or social, or occasionally religious. So it is a subconscious – or at least unconscious – form of thinking that is more involved than thinking in words. A form of processing. Working through our fears and worries toward what we really wish for.

What if we become more accepting of reality? What if we pare down our worldly desires and our attachment, and thereby eventually our fears? Then the brain would simply not have the need to do a lot of processing of that kind, right? So that may also be another mechanism by which meditation and similar spiritual practices reduced the need for sleep. It may be a two-pronged attack, both psychological and biological.

***

Unfortunately for the topic, I cannot explore this in my personal life. I am not a guru or anything. I began meditating when I was fairly young – in my late teens if memory serves – and did so actively for a while. But I had some experiences that seemed supernatural, and decided to cut down on meditation to avoid this. So after that I meditated only when I felt an intense need for it, for the most part, until now in my middle age where I have experimented more systematically with meditation and brainwave entrainment. (They are not the same thing.)

It does seem from my experience that using deep brainwave entrainment (delta frequencies) does reduce the need for sleep a bit and generally makes me less sleepy during the daytime. But I have not tested using theta brainwave entrainment for several hours a day, to emulate the hours spent in theta each night. I am not sure I am motivated for it even now, even for the sake of science.  Perhaps you or I will come across the writings of some actual guru who can tell us from firsthand experience. I am perfectly happy to take this second- or even third-hand. At least for now. You never know who I will be in the future, if any.

 

 

Deceiving myself again

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“Well, I was going to study, but while I was studying I was focusing on other stuff…” Yeah. And I was going to read.

You may wonder whether it counts as deceiving myself if I know it, but I think it does as long as knowing does not change my behavior.

What am I talking about? Well, I have reflected some more on how fate seems to go out of its way to thwart my purchase of more bandwidth and, in particular, a Android tablet. (Not a pill, but a large handheld computer with touchscreen.)

So I thought back a few months, to this past winter in my home in Riverview. The house was old and not too well insulated, and the winter was cold. The electricity price was high, what with the cold winter and a couple dry years behind us. (Norway mostly uses hydropower.) So I thought to myself: “For now, I will just let the living room stay just warm enough to not risk the kitchen freezing. But when the spring comes, and the cold is less extreme, I will fire up the wood stove almost every afternoon and spend my evening in the living room reading a good book.”

The spring came, and eventually became summer. But I only spent a quarter of an hour or so, a couple days, in the living room. Otherwise I stayed glued before the computer, until I started taking the long walks in May, after the serious health scare I had back then.

Now, I am saying to myself: “The Galaxy Tab is perfect for reading. I will sit in the living room each evening reading my e-books on it, instead of playing City of Heroes or The Sims 3 or refreshing Google+.”  Yeah, sure. It is not hard to predict what will happen. After all, as psychologists are fond of saying, “past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior”.

Besides, I already have a couple paper books that I have not read all the way through, and a couple more that merit a reread. But I don’t get out of my boss chair in the home office to go read them. I don’t even go read the comic books that I was planning to read a second time before giving them away.

I know myself too well to even be surprised anymore. But perhaps that is my one and final hope, that I am starting to see through myself?

 

More divine (?) comedy!

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Is some celestial power working against me or something? If so, I hope it is mostly for your entertainment, and not serious like “You won’t need any Internet where you are going, mister.”

See previous entry about the impossibility of getting more than a trickle of Internet access in a town in the world’s arguably most advanced country.

Not easily deterred, I checked Multicom today again, the company where I ordered the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It continues to be pushed one day into the future for each day. Of course, since they have already got their money, they have less than zero incentive to ever order the actual products. So, it is time to cancel the order. But first I look for somewhere else to get the same thing.

The obvious choice is the Netcom site, which sells the actual telecommunication subscriptions with the hardware on the side, rather than the other way around. Unfortunately their pricing is deliberately confusing, I would guess, or else a result of exceptional incompetence. In any case, the minimum price I could figure out from it was substantially higher than the competition. So, onward to Telenor, the former monopoly (and occasionally still acting like one).

They have a rather affordable plan and rather affordable Galaxy Tab as well. It is almost too good to be true. (Wait for it.) I match the hardware to the fixed price plan and go to checkout. There is a form with fields for first name, last name, birth number (like social security number, for foreigners) and e-mail, twice. I dutifully fill out the form and click “To payment”.  The computer works for a while. Then: “Phone number must be filled in.” It sends me back to the same form, where there is no field for phone number.

Somehow I doubt they are going to sell a lot of stuff over their web site … wonder how long they have had this up and not noticed that nobody ever ordered anything? Well, it probably doesn’t matter if you think you are a monopoly. After all, if the peasants don’t want your services, they can suffer. I am sure the CEO will get his bonus no matter what. I am not sure the programmer will, once this reaches the right ears. That may take some months, I guess, this being a multinational company after all.

In such a situation, I am the kind of guy who goes beyond the call of madness… er, duty. So I call the helpline. A voice message greets me and tells me to key in the phone number my request is about. Now, I am trying to buy a NEW account, so there is no phone number. I wait. The voice returns eventually, informing me that I have not keyed in the phone number. There is of course no manual operator and no choice other than the phone number.

I will now use the phone number of my existing phone, in order to get through to them. Watch me.

OK, I got through to a helpful and seemingly competent woman who took down the information. She promised they would send a confirmation e-mail. This is almost too good to be…

Mail arrived. They still have my address in Holum, even though their website said it will be sent to the address in the national registry (which is where the social security number comes in). You cannot change the address – it is locked to avoid identity theft. The postal collect slip will doubtlessly arrive in the mailbox at Riverview – I assume there will be a slip and they don’t just dump the whole box there. As it happens, I have reported my move to the post office, so perhaps they will send it after me to my new address. Or perhaps just the collect slip. Luckily there is a tracing number that I can use to trace it online, so I should be fine.

To be continued… God willing?