It may be my memory that fails me, but I think this cost about 50% more for the exact same watch, only in a different color and a little smaller. Then again it may be that it cost 50% more than in 2005, which would make a lot more sense, since Norwegians have probably 50% more money to spend than in 2005. The increase in disposable income here in Norway has been crazy for the last decade or so. Wages and salaries have been going up, taxes have been going down (a little), and interests have gone very low because of the international financial crisis (which we don’t have here).

In retrospect, buying non-essentials in December is not the wisdom of Solomon either, generally speaking.  But in one thing I feel justified: Buying mail order would have saved me money, but there would be no way of guessing whether I could actually pick it up, since the post office is 30 minutes of walking from home, and there is no guarantee that this distance will be survivable until spring. It could be mild tomorrow, or it could be howling arctic wind for a couple months like last year.

Ironically, that’s what I want it for, to find out whether the heart lurches when I walk in the cold actually reflect a change in heart rhythm or not. That’s why I asked for the cheapest model they had, because I really don’t need to count calories or stay in my optimal zone or get weekly statistics. As far as I am concerned, it is a medical expense, but I don’t think my health insurer would agree.

Winter is such an exciting time here at Riverview! You never know when the water will freeze or thaw. Today, it thawed. But it was a narrow victory!

For about a week now, the long-term weather forecast has said that Saturday afternoon the temperature would rise rapidly to above the freezing point. That seemed almost too good to be true. I did not want to get my hope up. Last winter there were several such false starts. This is no miracle, for Norway has had a couple decades of mild winters. Naturally the models we use now are based on those years, and not on the temperature nosedive leading up to last year and this. It is as if we are in a different zone now, with less hot summers and colder winters.

So I was not surprised to see that the thermometer stayed below zero (Celsius, where zero is conveniently the freezing point of water). But it crept fairly close. By now it is like -1.3 or so, milder than the forecast from earlier today. And mild enough, it turns out, for the water to begin moving again. The water pipes seem to run in the ground under the house, and some heat is leaking down from the house into the ground. It was like that last year too: The pipes did not freeze until around -4, and thawed at around -2.  The same happened now: After a few hours above -2, the water in the bathroom faucet came back: First the cold, and a bit later the hot. And finally the shower too!

I had hoped to get to shower again before Christmas, and that wish has now been fulfilled. A rather chilly shower, but a real shower. Ah, the luxuries of civilization!

I’ll try to keep the faucets dripping. Hopefully it will become second nature eventually. There is nothing I can do about the shower, it does not have a drip mode. It is on/off, really, although I can vary the pressure within certain limits. Not enough to keep the hot water from running out if I leave it on overnight though.  So I enjoy it while it lasts.

I hope you have a wonderful time as well! But if not, tell me about your problems and I will give you unwanted advice instead of sympathy. That’s what men do, or so I have read. ^_^

Coldest November in Norway in 91 years, says the local newspaper. I can certainly believe that, although I cannot remember that far back. Neither can my father, for that matter. That year was roughly similar to this one. Apart from that, none since people started to write down temperatures in this country.

I have pretty much given up on the living room. I keep it above freezing, but not enough to stay in. I try to keep my study warm enough for sitting, the bathroom warm enough for shitting, and the bedroom warm enough for sleeping. That’s pretty much it, and it is hard. I think the heat pump may be leaking, there is a weird smell when I use it that has not been there before. If it still works tomorrow it is probably not the heat transfer liquid that is leaking. I am not running it tonight though. The computers should keep the study safe from freezing.

The optimistic news is from the meteorologists, who say that Saturday afternoon the weather will change completely, to several degrees above freezing. They have said this for several days now, but they did not predict the sudden deepening of the cold tonight. They still think it is -8, but it is below -12 now (10 degrees F) and probably still sinking, as the sky is fairly clear. It looks like the winter is digging in before the battle…

It is not what I would have prayed for, but the truth is that I have not prayed for the cold to go away either. God surely has other things to consider as well. One should be very careful to not pray egotistical prayers, for they might be heard by someone other than the intended recipient. I will pray for my life and limbs, for I hope with them to still pay back some of the gratitude I owe this world. But luxury and excessive comfort is another matter. If God thinks I have too much of that, it may well be true. It is easy to get uppity when everything works like a charm the way I want it.

In the Norse mythology, one of the signs of Ragnarok -the Apocalypse – was the Fimbul Winter, three winters with no summer between them. But still worse than the cold upon the land was the cold in the hearts, where “no man will spare another”. From that kind of cold, I pray God save us.

“A person’s destiny can’t be seen, you might die tomorrow.” Japanese proverb, roughly meaning “don’t postpone till tomorrow what you can do today”. (Which is a Norwegian proverb, I have no idea what you say in English.) Anyway, I did not die today either, just barely.

Today was my first day at work after my NaNoWriMo vacation. My boss called me and welcomed me back. (She has office in a different part of the country.) She also congratulated me on something I had forgotten: Today I have been employed by the Norwegian state for 30 years! Not necessarily a badge of honor for a conservative, but I am not an ambitious person in this world. My coworker was sent out (by my boss) to buy me a plant to commemorate the event. Also talked a bit with him after having talked with my boss. My second coworker was home with a fever, talked a little with him as well.

It may have been the talking, or a creeping cold, or the C vitamin tablet I was sucking, but just as I should go home, my vocal cords locked up. Just plain locked up! I could not breathe neither in nor out. Scary! It stopped fairly quickly, probably less than half a minute, but there was a period afterwards where I frantically tried to clear my throat and couldn’t. There wasn’t anything obvious there, it was the throat itself that somehow locked up, far as I could find out.

This has happened a couple times before, and it remains just as scary every time. I have survived every time, but since I don’t know what it is, I have no idea whether one always survives or I just have struck lucky so far.

I believe I was eating a C vitamin tablet when it happened one of the previous times as well, and at least once with a semi-medical throat lozenge. That does not mean eating these things triggers it. It could be because I eat these things when my throat is starting to get icky from an infection, and the infection may also be the reason for my throat locking up. The mechanism of this is unknown to me. But the expert who looked at my throat this spring / summer did not see anything peculiar about my vocal cords.

It is strange to think that literally we live only one breath from death. Or one heartbeat, for that matter. And yet most of us live for many decades, and not a few complain about boredom and wish for a more exiting, dangerous life. Some to the point of bringing about their own end. If only they could have given those years to me. I love this life, and I wish I could help y’all share that love somehow.

These are pieces of ice that have accumulated and frozen together, not churning waters. As I said yesterday, a night ago the river froze over. Barring some unexpected news, it will stay that way till spring.

I have  acquired some more respect for the elderly couple who used to live here before the house was fixed up a bit and rented out to me. It was almost certainly no better insulated then, possibly less. And frankly the electric fuses don’t allow me to heat the whole house even if I wanted to waste that much money. (At least the couple did not have to pay rent, but I am sure they had their expenses on the house as well.) So they probably had to sleep in an ice cold bedroom, and huddle in the living room for the four months of the year which real winter lasts around here.

This is how winter in Norway was until my childhood or thereabout, when people started building windtight, insulated homes. I remember my early childhood living in a house like this, but then my father had it insulated in various ways. And at least we did not get the northern wind ever, because the mountains loomed over us in that direction. Here, the valley runs north-south, so the old folks must have had this howling northern wind every winter. Evidently they still survived well into old age, though.

If I don’t reach the ripe old age of my ancestors, it will probably not be because of the house. What gets at people in this time and age is something else, namely stress.

I am rereading “Tips to Find Happiness – Creating a Harmonious Home for Your Spouse, Your Children and Yourself” by Ryuho Okawa. I feel as ambivalent about this man as ever. It is just disturbing to think that someone of his obvious intelligence and even wisdom would pretend to be God, even in a manner of speaking. Luckily this is one of the many books in which he does not bring up the matter of his divinity at all, though he does recommend reading his books and listening to his lectures to get Heavenly light in your life.  Then again, I wish I could recommend you read the Chaos Node to get Heavenly light into your life. Perhaps one day. Right now it is a bit flickering, I guess.

Anyway, the view of health and illness that he presents in this book is very similar to my own view. It takes (as befits the Buddha) a middle path: Not the chemical materialism of modern medicine, and not the “faith healing” approach of some religious movements where illness is seen as a proof of sin. Some illness cannot be avoided, says Mr Okawa, but often illness is a result of stress, and this can be greatly reduced with the right attitude.

In addition to the modern concept of stress, Mr Okawa also operates with the Mahayana Buddhist concepts of negative spiritual influences, which may come from dead people but also from the living. The mind of a human has the ability to influence other people’s bodies, but only through their own mind. If your mind glows with divine life, negative influences will not be able to attach to you, whether they come from the living or the dead.

This theory of spiritual influences may sound pretty weird to us, but it is really similar to Jung’s theory of complexes: Independent balls of thought or emotion living in the subconscious, which may be formed by our experiences with other people (living or dead) or archetypes, generic ideas of our culture or the human race. So it is not some “hocus pocus”, it is the way the human mind works. These complexes can be counterproductive, sometimes very much so, making us do things we know are bad ideas, but suddenly we do them anyway or even just realize that we have done them, like staying up half the night reading a book, or eating lots of unhealthy foods. These things don’t just happen, there are these dark dust bunnies of the soul pulling our strings.

As you may guess, I am a little out of my best shape myself. Something vaguely sinus related seems to bother my head, and my eyes and nose and throat are all sore. So is the skin on the back of my hands. I should probably do something about this dry air.  That, and shine more brightly with inner light. ^_^

Not quite “in hoc signo vinces”…

…but at least a sign that I managed to write 50 000 words of more or less coherent novel text during National Novel Writing Month. So that’s a step up from last year, although I have made it twice before.

In the end, the story that grew to 50 000 words was “TSI”, my fanfic for the movie “Buddha Saitan” (The Rebirth of Buddha) based on a book by Ryuho Okawa. The connection to the movie is actually quite loose: The eponymous organisation is referenced numerous times in the movie and also in my story, but there is very little about the actual organization in the movie. We know that they have meetings in large halls where Taiyou Sorano, the Buddha Reborn, speaks in simple but deeply moving and uplifting words to the congregation, who then begin to glow with an inner light (presumably only visible to spiritual sight, as the main character of the movie has).

Unfortunately my story takes place in a nameless city in the USA, so Master Sorano only appears on a big screen. Plus, the city only has about 150 TSI members at the time of the book, so it is unlikely that any bigger events will take place unless my hero makes a trip to the nearest temple (or whatever they are called in TSI).

The story is therefore mostly slice of life, with none of the movie characters actually appearing in person. (This has the benefit that I might rewrite it into a non-fanfic if need be, but that would take most of the fun out of it for me.) The story is told in first person by a male college student, born and raised in America by Japanese parents. Things don’t go too well in college: He begins to go drinking and partying in order to have sex, which is a long time in coming (insert bitter comments about prejudices against Japanese male reproductive apparatus here) and even when it finally happens it is not all it was supposed to be. He turns to online gaming, and gets totally hooked. His grades decline further. All things collapse.  His father gets a terminal illness, his love life goes straight down the drain as his online girlfriend turns out to be a guy, and his online guild is destroyed by his careless mistake. Lonely and miserable he cries alone in the park, when a small girl comes by and gives him a book of Master Sorano’s Teachings of the Mind.

Actually, his father still dies and his love life still sucks, but now he has Buddha’s Truth and friends he can trust, so he is happy anyway. ^_^

Well, a lot of things happens. After all, if slice of life was interesting, people could just read my journal instead, right? So there are dreams and visions and girls with crushes and guardian angels and stuff, not as dramatic as the movie but more dramatic than watching other people’s kids play soccer.

I still have water in the kitchen, long my it last! The river froze over tonight. Still no snow.