Category Archives: slice of life

Basement dream

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I woke up an hour early from a lifelike dream. Well, not like my real life, but it seemed real while it lasted.

In my dream, I was at some gathering at the old school house. Each of us was given a piece of paper with a riddle on it. Supposedly it was random who got which. I quickly solved my riddle, which was four liters (1 gallon) of milk in a large container. Then we went down in the dark basement to find whatever it was. I thought it was a kind of test of courage. I was confident, for I knew the cellar of my old school. Or so I thought. And it wasn’t all that dark.

But in the fridges down there I only found 3 liters of milk, and some of it so old that I feared it was spoiled. Others had not had complete success either: I saw a frying pan which someone was cooking pasta in. The water was cooked away and the pasta would be burnt, if not catching fire altogether. I put the pan in water, as there was no one to be seen.

At this time I was quite upset and angry at the idiots who had arranged the whole thing, made it impossible to complete, and risked the house catching fire on top of it all. I opened a window and slipped out, intending to go home without being seen or seeing anyone.

But outside, I saw that it was still not that late, and I decided instead to go to the shop and buy the milk, even though I doubted the rest of the recipe would come together.  As I crossed the field, I saw there were people, and a large fridge and a counter out in the grassy field. On the counter was a suitable large container, and inside the fridge were four liters of fresh milk. The other people I saw had also found their ingredients. Everything was there, you just had to get out of the dark basement. My hellish mood changed accordingly.

I guess other people’s dreams are not obvious, so let me add that this strikes me as a parable on my own life.  For a long time, I expected to find things to be trivially easy, and when they were not (and other people were idiots on top of it all) I got into a hellish mindset. When I broke free, and yet decided to fulfill my mission even if it would require a sacrifice, I found that everything I needed was in fact made ready for me, just not in the closed rooms where I had expected.

Looking at phones to Desire them?

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Vaguely related: If you want to exchange phone numbers or mail address with someone, it is customary to ASK, not knock them down, grab their mobile phone and add your phone number and mail address. But Desire makes blind, as you can see.

I read a review of the new LG Optimus 2X today. It looks to be good value for an acceptable price (by Norwegian standards, people in the 1st world and below may need to save up for a while first). Now if I can avoid referring to it as Optimus Prime, it certainly looks like a candidate.

It seems to be marginally ahead of HTC Desire HD, which I have also considered for a while, but which I hesitate to buy because of the name. You may say this is picky, but would you buy a mobile phone labelled Scientology for instance, if it was not dazzlingly better than the competition? Or “Allahu Akbar” perhaps? All of us have things we are proud of and things we are ashamed of, and they are not the same for all of us. I am not proud of desire. It has caused lots of trouble both for me and others.

And on that note, it would be sorely ironic if I avoid the HTC Desire HD because of the name, but still desire it in my heart. As it happens, my gadget lust has faded a bit since its height a few years ago. A lot of things fade when one live the kind of life I live. But there is still some excitement left, so I’m not buying for a while yet unless my HTC Hero goes down for the count.  Hero, now that’s a name to love.  As the inhabitants of Paragon City say:  “Forget all those postmodernist deconstructionists. Itland is a hero, plain and simple.”

That said, I do intend to buy either a large mobile phone or a small tablet this year if no particular disaster strikes.  The Hero is such a part of my life that I feel rather naked without it. Mainly because it is my only portable Internet connection and e-book reader.  Phone calls and text messages are so scarce that I would hardly notice if those did not work. But being able to read your Twitter and Facebook posts on the potty where they rightly belong is a great boon.  (OK, I actually tend to read them on the bus, but still.)

The Hero is a bit small though. Typing with my big fingers could have been better with just a little more screen space.  I certainly won’t need an iPad for that for many years yet, Light willing, but an extra centimeter would make a good improvement. Reading also benefits from more and better screen. Again, I may prefer a large mobile phone over a tablet or pad, simply for privacy purposes. There is no reason why random strangers should know that you are reading Dante rather than some tabloid or a juicy mail from your lover.

Anyway, I have what I need for now, so I can afford to wait for a while yet. Unless something goes up in smoke, though, it seems pretty certain that my next computer will fit in a large pocket.

800 calories

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Not quite spring yet…

This morning there was more snow; luckily it was light and fluffy. But it adds up. And with so long a path to clear, it took me over an hour and burned about 800 calories. That will take some time to replace. That’s two liters – half a gallon – of cola, for instance.  That comes in addition to what I normally consume.  So obviously that won’t happen in one day.

It will probably happen, though. Not calorie for calorie, but if I lose enough fat, I will get hungrier. That’s how it works. I understand that many people are supposedly hungry even when they are fat. For me there is an obvious difference when I go from the top end of the “normal” (shouldn’t they move normal up to what used to be overweight, now that it is normal to be overweight?) to the lower end of “normal”.  At the lower end, I am hungry day and night, including after the meals. At the high end, food feels like a convenience rather than a necessity sometimes. And that’s how I like it. I have a lot of other interests, if I should not spend my days constantly thinking about food.

Although I would probably get more readers if I wrote about food frequently. It is one of the things I still have in common with all humans. We all eat.

White winter again

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Not very kind to the furniture, but it gives an idea of how much or little snow there is.

Those of you who live in the warm parts of the world may enjoy seeing this picture of snow. I think it is about knee deep on average, possibly a little less. It is hard to say since the snow was quite light this time, and the wind was blowing the whole time. So much of it ended up in drifts, while other parts are fairly bare.

Incidentally, this means that even if I clear a small road through the snow, it will disappear again after the wind has done its work, but only in certain stretches.

The first thing I did about it was make a path to the riverbank, which is not far from the house. It is twice or thrice the height of a man, so I can continue to dump snow down it and it stays down.  I wish I had thought of that the first winter. But even though I don’t need to move the snow uphill, it is still a lot of work.  I like to think of it as negative calories. And in fact, while some people put on weight in the winter, with me it is the other way around. I lose weight during the winter, although not a lot.

Time to repent again

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“Pent and repent as necessary”! It is simple, but not easy, which is why we tend to wait until something horrifying happens. Can I budge that trend?

I was leaving the supermarket when my conscience, or some other helpful voice in my heart, brought up my current food shopping habits. Like the small stack of svele (small thick Norwegian pancakes), a meal of which costs the same as a large bread. There is nothing wrong in buying these as such – they are harmless to the body, and a traditional Norwegian food produced locally, something one might want to encourage. However, along with most of my other food, it is unnecessarily expensive. My food costs are not extremely high, since I never dine out these days, and rarely ever buy even weakly alcoholic drinks (alcohol is taxed extremely in Norway). But I buy small portions of ready-made food, like the afore mentioned pancakes, and desserts, and these are quite expensive.

“You still have debt from when you moved a year ago” pointed out the voice in my heart. “Yes, you are paying it down, but slowly. You think you can live with it, but can you die with it? In the spirit world, almost everyone who has lived – and even most who are alive today – have lived in poverty. How will you feel coming there and leaving a debt on Earth because of your gluttony? Does this bring glory to the Name?”

I think that is a valid point. I have a conscious practice of not living as if each day was my last, because I believe our expectations tend to influence us. But I think I have taken this too far. I could spend half as much money on food and still never be hungry, and would probably be healthier as well.

Gluttony is a bit of a moving target, but when I look at the world today, I get the impression that it might be wise to move pretty far, pretty fast.

If anyone actually read this, they should now have one of two questions: EITHER “Why are you so sanctimonious?” OR “Why didn’t you think of this years ago?”

Here we have to understand that my religion or philosophy is not one of rules.  There are those who live by rules: If they stick to the rules, they go to Heaven, otherwise the opposite. (There is usually some provision for forgiveness in case one fails a little, but generally the rules rule.) This makes things simple, at least once you got the rules memorized. As long as you don’t break the rules, you can do what you want.

I, on the other hand, can’t do what I want. I mean, I do what I want, but I can’t do that and know that I have done my best. I can never rest on my laurels, or have a perfectly good conscience. I am, in the manner of speaking, experimenting with my life. Or exploring it. Or perhaps trying to become myself. If that doesn’t make sense to you, then probably nothing I have said today will make sense. But there are many other days! Thousands, in my archives alone.

Good hardware, bad brainware

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On February 9, barely a week ago, the video card stopped working on my XP machine. When I pulled the plug on it to fix it, I accidentally broke the power supply to my Vista machine, which runs The Sims 3.  I had to use Ubuntu Linux to get it up and running again at all, and then Vista spent some time repairing itself, restarting once or twice.  When it finally worked again, it would not play several of my Sims 3 savegames, including the latest. I don’t grieve overlong over little computer people, so I started a new game, which I have been chronicling briefly in my Sims journal.

Today I got the package with the new video card. It was cheap, being only a mid-range card after all, but even so it is easily the best I have had. It seems that even though computers have not made much progress these last three years, video cards have.

Me, I have not even made progress in a week.  When I unplugged the computer to put in the new and better card… yes. I accidentally pulled the plug on the Vista computer. I had to use Ubuntu to get it running, then it spent a while repairing itself. And as I suspected: When I started Sims 3, it had no idea how to run the latest savegames.  Or their backups. I have the same software, running on the same computer under the same operating system, but it has no idea how to run the same saved games it ran last night. Good job!

If I for some reason have to take apart the main computer again, I will probably crash the Vista computer again. These things are not very high on my list of things to remember, I’m afraid.

Actually, I should probably not be afraid of that. There are more fearful things in life (and afterlife, presumably) than that.

But at least I think this brings home my lack of perfection, eh?

Short dream

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I dreamed that I was in a house. The foundation was in bad repair, cracked and with pieces falling out at the lightest touch. I feared that the whole thing would collapse soon.  But in the living room there was some amazing hi-tech furniture that should not have been invented yet, or at least not outside NASA.

I think the moral of the dream is glaringly obvious. I just have no idea whether it is about me or us all.

Radio from Hell

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“Your soul has been defiled!”  By radio? Well, that’s not quite what I mean…

I turned on the radio this morning. I have a portable stereo in the bedroom, I use it to play brainwave entrainment tracks almost every night. I had forgotten that it also has a radio tuner… In fact, when Gallup called the other day to invite me to a detailed study of broadcasting usage, I told them my household had neither TV nor radio. In practice it certainly seems that way, so hopefully I will be forgiven that lie.

This morning, however, I actually turned the radio on. I even tried 3 different stations. My impression was that ordinary people are in a kind of hell. Either that, or I am in a kind of paradise. Wait, does this paragraph even make sense?

What is the connection between radio and hell? There wasn’t one when I grew up, or at least I did not notice any. I think the people who have continued to listen to radio since then, probably still don’t notice.  But as I switched from one station to another, they all were so… jarring, I guess. Or like food made for elderly smokers – too sharp, painfully so. The music is disharmonious for the most part, and even when not, the lyrics are. We’ll be back to that in a moment. But even the news seem to be collected to make people upset, not to actually help them live their lives better or more safely.

The third and final radio station played Dolly Parton, who at least can sing well. But the song she was singing – “Jolene” – was an all too vivid reminder of the hell people today live in, where you not only have to fight for mating rights until you marry, but for the duration of your life.  (I don’t think she actually said anything about marriage, but this is how it is here in Scandinavia at least these days.  It is like civilization has slipped and fallen in this particular regard. I don’t mean you should treat your spouse like you take them for granted, but you should be able to take them for granted without treating them that way.)

This jagged, disharmonious, disturbing world is what people live in, is it not? A world where beauty is either absent or tainted, distorted, broken. A world where harmony is not just rare, but unwanted. God, how did we end up this way? What can we do about it?

I take a certain comfort in being disturbed by this sudden glimpse into the ordinary world. Perhaps they are not so much living in a half-hell as I am living in a half-heaven? Or perhaps that is always the case, the world below us is always hell and the world above us is always heaven, no matter which world we live in? So if you go to Heaven, you will find that even Heaven has a heaven.

On a more prosaic note, I think the reason why I dislike radio and television is that they try to think for you. With the Web, you click what you want to see or hear (or think you want), but with broadcasting there is someone else clicking for you. As if you were a patient unable to use your body from your neck down, and all you can do is open your mouth and they will put things in it. I would be hard pressed to spend much time using broadcasting even if it was of the same quality and had the same focus as myself.  But it doesn’t. It is different, at the very least. And in my ears, unpleasant.

Not literally Hell, I suppose. More like “Heck”. The realm of the Prince of Insufficient Light, if I remember my Dilbert correctly. That’s the world in which even Norwegians live these days – a world of insufficient Light. And the problem, the REAL problem, is that people like it that way.

When computers act up

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A not unfamiliar sight in the Chaos Node, now come to Riverview.

This evening, I logged on City of Heroes for a few missions. I can generally do four hero tip missions a day without running out of them, but I don’t always do that many. As you may guess by now, I have other interests as well. ^_^

As soon as the game had loaded, however, the screen became a static of colors. This happens from time to time, not every day but around once a week, I guess. Usually I have to turn the power off, as it locks up completely.  I am pretty sure it is a problem with the video card, judging from the symptoms, and from the fact that this part of the computer got much, much warmer than the rest.  It cannot possibly be a good idea to have a video card that gets hotter than boiling water!

Well, I don’t have a video card that gets that hot anymore. This time I managed to shut down in a dignified manner, but I did not get the machine to boot again. There was nothing to see on the screen.  I checked the cables but the screen remained black after several restarts.

So I unplugged the XP computer, still my main machine, to replace the video card with an older one I had lying around.  (Actually it was in a machine where the power supply was broken, but that is not yet beyond any hope of repair.)

When I pulled the power plug, my Sims computer (standing beside the main computer) suddenly also went black. I had forgotten that the power pad had my XP machine designated as “master” machine, so that it would cut the power to everything else when I unplugged it. This could probably have been useful if done wisely, but instead this happened.

After I changed the video card, I got the XP computer up and running again. Since it was a different make of video card (ATI vs ASUS), I had to download new drivers. Luckily the Omegadrivers web site is still operative, even though no one has heard from the owner since last May, it seems. His drivers were awesome, to the point where he pretty much claimed divine inspiration and it was not impossible to believe him.  So after a while, I as up and running again.

That’s when I discovered that I could not boot the Vista machine, the one I use for playing The Sims while doing other things on the XP machine. Its screen went black and stayed that way.

Luckily I already had installed a small Ubuntu Linux area on that machine. I was able to boot into this one.  On starting, it said something about “unclean Windows partition” or some such, and added: “Fixing.” And so it did. When I later exited Ubuntu and started Vista again, it worked. It did badger me to go back to a save point, but apart from installing a bunch of security updates, there seemed to be no loss.

It is my opinion that one should always have some Linux around just in case one’s Windows partitions go bad. ^_^

Green winter continued

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No pictures since it is dark when I come home, but the weather remains mostly above freezing, the snow is shrinking and there is much grass to be seen, although not here on the riverbank for some reason.

I am glad it has turned this way. This old house is charming but it has a problem with howling arctic winds like we had last winter and the beginning of this.  Although it helped when I put strips of cloth or paper in the gaps between the wall and the floor in the study, and plastic bags in the gap under the door in the kitchen.  These are keepers, even if the weather is milder now.

Being able to go outside without icy wind biting into the skin and bringing tears to the eyes… it reminds me strangely of the feeling of forgiveness.