Category Archives: slice of life

Moth in daylight

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snowy_cottage

That’s “my” new home, and that white pretty fluff between me and it is snow. It is very cold and has an unhealthy interest in feet even if they are inside shoes.

I could not come here yesterday, as my intestines were running wild. I did not even get to the city. Today I felt a lot better, so off I went to see the Mothhouse in daylight for the first time since I signed the lease. (I saw it briefly the first time I was here, before it was yet decided who would rent it. It hasn’t changed much, except everything is covered by snow.)

Despite the cold during the holidays, the bathroom faucet was working this time. I did turn up the heat in the bathroom a notch before I left for the long weekend, but it is not like it has ever been below freezing there. It is still a mystery, but my theory is that the pipes go through the floor and the floor was being cooled from below faster than it was heated from above. Anyway, it is presumably fixed now. Although the weather forecast says even colder tomorrow and New Year’s Eve, dipping below -10C (=+14F) . They also predict that it stays below freezing for all of the next week, although I have little faith in the human ability to predict a chaotic system that far in advance. The next couple days however are often reasonably close, and any deviation is usually that a change comes either a bit sooner or a bit later than predicted.

Anyway, since the snow is likely to stay for a while, I shoveled a path to the neighbor’s road from the front door. This took its sweet time, since this is not a kind of work I am familiar with anymore. (I did some vaguely related work back on the farm, but that is about 35 years ago. Muscle memory may remain, muscle size does not. Not that there was much to begin with.) At least I am not fat, so I did not have a lot of extra weight to throw around while working. Another positive thing is that the house came with an aluminum spade. It is probably not the first winter it snows here…

While I am praising things, the modern flexible drinking straws are a great help in keeping the house warm. How so? I use a modest quantity of scrunched paper or pieces of carton to get a fire started. When embers have formed under the wood, I blow through the drinking straw, causing the embers to burn at a frantic speed and white hot, which ignites the wood. Then I let it the wood burn to embers, put on more wood and repeat the quick start. Handy little invention. Even so, without a constant roaring fire the wood stove is hard pressed to heat living room and kitchen all on its own, during a cold snap such as this. (Well, I expect it to be a snap. If the climate returns to how I remember it from my childhood, it could stay like this till around the beginning of May. Although the sun would start warming in mid March sometime.)

I think it is too early yet to say who I will be in this house. I have mentioned for sure that I change a bit when I move. Some of the changes seem to be temporary (when I has moved last time, I woke up earlier and my sex drive was stronger, but this passed after a while) but some not: After I moved last time, I have not bought any manga and have even given away most of what I had, including my once favorite series about an angel and a demon that move in next door to a young boy. Uhm, I guess it wasn’t all that great a loss, but I loved my manga until I moved from the Chaos Node and it suddenly just stopped.

Right now I notice that while I am here, I prefer my musky cologne, while back in Nodeland I prefer a lighter, sandalwood-based smell. But there will surely be various subtle changes if I live to move in here. More about that if it happens, I guess. The bus is now.

Continued At Home: Previous statement was painfully exact. I suddenly realized that the bus was coming, and just hurried to save the journal and start the shutdown of the computer while I changed thick socks for shoes and threw on my outerwear before jogging to the bus. I reached it, and in fact there was enough time that it was not yet visible down the road when I reached the bus stop. So I would have had time to unplug the Googlephone and put it in my pocket, if I had the presence of mind. Unfortunately I did not, so it is now in the Mothhouse and I am not.

This is not a big deal since I don’t get phone calls every week, although we do use text messages to inform of sudden sick leaves and technical problems at work. (Beyond the usual problems, I mean, the ones we are employed to help with.) Worse, how am I going to find the Mothhouse in the dark without GPS and Google Maps? It is not like Møll is famous for its noctiluminous landmarks.

Snowy wet Moth

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I am at the Mothhouse again, for the last time before Xmas.  The bus was about 20 minutes late from Kristiansand, because it was delayed by cars that had got stuck while it was on the way here from Lyngdal (west of here). The poor driver did not get to leave the bus, just take on the passengers and turn westward again.  Hopefully he has a steel bladder or prepared by not drinking for a while before going to work.

It snowed rather more than expected.  My Googlephone’s weather applet said “flurries”, but it was more like continual, dense snowfall.  Near Kristiansand it was still reasonably dry snow, I think, but coming down to the Mandal River valley it was very wet, melting on impact.  The weather station in Krossen, between here and the church, says 0 degrees Celsius, the melting point of snow. There was definitely a kind of sleigh-like feeling to the bus ride, as if friction was a kind of vague concept in the layer of wet snow that separated us from the road below us.

Evidently the snow plow does not go to this house.  I am not sure whether the neighbors have hired someone, but the road is plowed a little bit beyond their house. Then I had to wade through the snow to get here.  Luckily it did not reach much higher than a pair of boots. Then again I had shoes.  Note to self:  Get up early if it falls six feet of snow later in winter.

The water in the bathroom faucet was back, and it had not leaked out anywhere else either that I can see. I had left a little more heat on in the bathroom, but seriously, it wasn’t frozen last time either.  The shower was not frozen (but then it wasn’t last time either).  This time I used it, for the first time.  I am gradually making myself at home!  The wood stove is a great place to dry clothes (and towels), but I would not leave them there overnight.  Not necessary, though, things dry quickly.

The electric space heater was not running when I came this time, so the living room must have been a bit warmer.  The heat pump was of course running, as the temperature never gets up to even the lowest setting as long as the door is open to the rest of the ground floor. We’ll see about the open door policy when/if I move in.  Won’t be this year though.

The bus is scheduled to leave Mandal in two minutes. It should be here about 7-10 minutes later. On the other hand, given the weather, I am likely to be waiting for half an hour.  It is impossible to say though. It is the last bus, so better cold than sorry I guess.  I don’t have a duvet or sleeping bag here yet.  Otherwise it would have been tempting to stay overnight.  The place is really starting to feel like home, although when it does, I feel slightly different, as if I am a brother of myself or something.  This too will pass.

No Moth today either

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As I was logging off at work to go to the Mothhouse with the rest of the curtains and some other stuff, I suddenly realized that I had not done an important job on the databases. This is funny because I spent much of the day studying and doing piddly things because there was nothing major to do that I already knew, but actually there was and I did not remember it until it was almost too late.

Then when I was about to go home with the next bus, 55 minutes later, I found out that one of my coworkers had not done it either (although he had on a few bases – I have no idea what happened, but I hope he is OK). So it was quite a bit into the evening before I returned home. No Moth, of course – it I want to take the last bus home from there, I need to take the bus right after work (17.15) to Moth.

Oh well. It is not like I need those curtains immediately anyway.

Another thing I didn’t mention a few days ago, I met my current landlord’s grandmother by the shop.  I mean the landlord here in Nodeland, where I have still not moved out. Anyway, she knew more about the house I am moving to than I did! I honestly have no idea how she even knew that I was moving to that particular house, but I suppose all of Holum (the church and mail district) is abuzz with the news of the madman who is moving to the Red House.  One of those people in Holum turns out to be the daughter of said grandmother (and thus presumably an aunt of the old landlord).  The world is a small place, and Holum in particular.

Return to Moth

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As it was written in Wikipedia, so it came to pass: On the third day the pains left me. I am talking about the flu vaccine, of course.  Again the difference was most dramatic when I woke up in the morning.  Makes me think that perhaps I should have slept more, or at least entrained my brain with delta waves. I have got the impression that it is during this slow-wave part of sleep that the body most efficiently repairs itself.

In any case, I am back in the Mothhouse. The wood stove beside me is roaring with fire, although that will have ended well before it is time to go back.  It is colder than last time, only a couple degrees above freezing outside, and this is also noticeable inside: The heat from the stove and from the heat pump lose themselves faster.  I have now hung up large white curtains in the living room, which should help keep less heat radiating out into the night. I am not sure how much that really amounts to, however.   I also covered a slit above one kitchen window. It is clearly meant to hold one of those thingies that you open or close to increase or decrease natural ventilation.  It was empty though, which would amount to wide open. I covered it completely.  I have a very hard time imagining this house becoming so airtight that it becomes a problem.  The stove certainly seems to have no problem getting air to replace what it sends up the chimney.  I assume this means a corresponding quantity of cold air is entering the house through numerous tiny openings, one of the intrinsic weaknesses of heating with fire instead of electricity.  Then again the wood is free.

Today I bought a set of screwdrivers and some wood screws, so now I can screw up everywhere!  I already screwed up a clothes rack in the entry hall and a towel holder in the bathroom. I may not be much of a handyman, but screwing up is something I can!  ^_^

Speaking of heating, the electricity meter is now 6674 KWH.  That is not too bad, I guess. But whenever I can heat for free, that’s even better.

Well, it is time to put that “no unadressed mail” button on the mailbox and return home.  Although for each time I come here, the Mothhouse is slightly more “home” and the notion of taking the bus “home” becomes slightly less obvious. This is how I meant it to be, of course.

Oh, and in the end I did not take the backpack today, just the things I would put up.  It may be slightly early to do another backpack march, I think.  But carrying just myself home should be very much doable, unless something unexpected happens.

***

PS:  I am home, and I am glad I did not bring my backpack today.  Even though it is much lighter when I return, it would probably still have been uncomfortable. As it was, I could feel that the stiffness in my thighs was not fully gone, although I made it home just fine.

On the bright side, there was someone who coughed on the bus, and I was about to cringe as I have done since this summer, and then I remembered that my blood is swarming with antibodies against the Death Flu of Doom. Yay!  I can go anywhere! Well, within the limits of my Insane Bowel Syndrome, I guess.

Flu shot day 2

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I woke up this morning (yay!) and while my left upper arm was still tender, it was no longer stiff and as painful as when I went to sleep. So that was a success, I think!  On the other hand, or leg rather, my thighs hurt every bit as much as yesterday.  It was hard enough to get up in the morning, and whenever I have been sitting for a while, I walk like one of the old men in a nursing home for a little while.

When I say “get up” in the morning, I mean it quite literally.  I don’t sleep in a raised bed, but on an old rubber-foam mattress on the floor of the bedroom.  I had an old double bed for many years, quite possibly as old as I, but it more or less fell apart under me during my last years in the original Chaos Node.  So when I moved, it was destroyed and thrown away. This may have been providential, as a double bed is very nearly the only furniture – at least that is not nailed down – in the Mothhouse.   Anyway, as it is now, getting up is not a matter of swinging my legs out of bed, but literally getting up from the floor.  Normally this is not a problem at all, and it went well enough today too, but not as easy as usual.  Hopefully this won’t be a problem if I really grow old. Then again if I relly grow old, I should be so thankful just for that. Growing old, for most of us, means we have lived a long time.  (Except the very few people who have progeria, obviously.)

Even though our outward human form may be moving gradually toward obliteration, our inward human can still be renewed day by day. I should take heart from that, but that  does not mean I won’t try to maintain my presence in the world of form given the chance. Thus the flu shot in the first place. To be bluntly honest, that I also avoid becoming a biological weapon of mass destruction is merely a side effect.  I did it mostly to save my own hide.  But at least I can have a good conscience about it, always a good thing.

I won’t be going to the Mothhouse today either.  Perhaps tomorrow if my legs have thawed.  So much for the plan to go there four days a week. Life is an ongoing series of surprises, is it not?  But that’s part of why it is so interesting.   At the doctor’s waiting room yesterday I once again heard an older woman (about one generation older than me, I’d guess) talk about how the seasons and even the years were just racing by. That terrifies me.  I really hope and pray that it will never happen to me in this life.  As long as I keep being surprised, keep learning something new and keep reflecting on what happens to me and on what I do, I think the days will be filled with new memories, and the seasons will be like a wide river where you can barely see the other side, not a small stream you can step over and forget.

Flu shot

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You may not have thought this about me, but I did not notice until a couple days ago that my municipality has offered flu shots to people outside the “risk groups” since December 1 – and even then, I did not take it until today.  It is certainly not because I am afraid of needles, like one young woman who was there. But let us not get too far ahead.

Yesterday work had an early meeting, so I could not get the shot then. (It is only administered during work hours, but luckily these begin 8:30. I expected the small rural clinic to be packed at that time, though, since most people outside the risk group are probably working. Besides, I need my sleep.  So I decided to come after 9, when most working people would have left.)

The waiting room was not quite empty, but under half full. The receptionists were busy with the phone, but once I got to them, I got a small photocopied form to fill in my social security number, name, and tick 4 sets of boxes about health, allergy and vaccination. The doctor was supposed to evaluate it if there were allergies even if these were not related to egg (which is the stratum for growing the virus). I am pretty sure my allergy to bird down, cattle feed and rabbits would not in any way interfere with the vaccine, but they never even asked what the allergies were.  (Except on the form, where egg was a separate ticky box.)

After about an hour, I was called into the lab where a nice lab girl asked what arm I wanted the shot in.  I picked the left, of course, since I am quite possibly the most right-sided human alive that has not actually had parts of the brain removed.  I score 10 out of 10 right on Desmond Morris’s handedness test.  (I was about to write handiness here,  thank you Sims 3!)

Sometime in the lab – I can’t remember if it was before or after the actual needlework – Lab Girl had to register me in their database, as I had never been to the doctor there.  That is right, I came in February 2006 and had never been to the clinic before.  I never even changed my state-sponsored doctor from the one I used in Søgne.  I have only gone to the doctor in emergencies in the meantime, and not many of those either luckily.  And I probably won’t go there again.  I assume my next doctor will be in Mandal.  It is almost a shame, since this is possibly the only time in my life that the clinic has been within easy walking distance from my home. Oh well.  Notice that they did not have the option to import my data from my previous municipality. That would be too easy, eh? At least it was not the actual doctor spending time filling in name and address and social security number, although I would not be surprised if they do that too.

After getting the shot I was asked to stay in the waiting room for another quarter of an hour. They did not say why, but presumably it was in case I got a bad reaction (anaphylaxis).  You would want me to collapse in the clinic if at all, rather than in the traffic.  But no such thing happened.  The only thing I felt at the time was a pleasant warmth around the area of the sting.

That has changed over the day.  Now, late at night, it hurts so much that I have started wondering if there may be a secondary infection. I don’t remember whether they disinfected the skin before plunging the needle in, I know I didn’t.  On the other hand, the needle was pretty thin, I barely felt it.

That reminds me of the conversation I overheard in the waiting room. The swine flu is the big issue in such places, for natural reasons, even though perhaps half or even less of the few patients came for the flu shot.  Two of the other patients were talking quite freely, I certainly did not have to strain to hear them.  The younger one had thought about the flu vaccine but did not want to because she did not like needles.  I can’t imagine why, needles are sexy, but I did not comment of course.  I am not quite as crazy as I may come across here.

The needle, as I have already mentioned, is actually the least of it. Over the course of the day my upper arm has grown more tender and painful and a bit stiff.  It is now definitely the most painful spot on my body, although I doubt it will be enough to keep me awake.  For most of the day however it was less painful than my thighs and bottom. I assume these were affected by my rapid march on asphalt with backpack for nearly an hour last night as I returned from the Mothhouse.  (I wisely decided to not go there today.) Where is a good butt massage when you need one? You know I would have done it unto others.  Well, some others at least.

Hopefully the arm won’t get worse than this, in which case it beats actual flu by an order of magnitude or two.


Moth and flame

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HPIM0766

A hopefully sharper picture of the wood stove and the firewood. Also notice its shape that increases the surface area so it can radiate more heat, and the small cooking plate on the lowest tier.

I’m in the Mothhouse again (in the idyllic rural hamlet of Møll, upriver from Mandal on Norway’s south coast.)  I had planned to be here yesterday, but went home to unlock my mobile phone instead. Today, however, the phone has worked quite fine – in fact, I am using it to connect my laptop to the Internet as I am writing this.  The GPS also worked, perhaps because I started it earlier. Or perhaps there is some other random reason, what do I know.  I wonder if I am still going to rely on it a month from now?  Probably not – you do get a feeling for distance eventually.  I still have been here only about half a dozen times though, if that.

Today I brought a box of matches and fired up the wood stove.  It is quite a nifty invention.  I had to use some paper to get the fire started, but soon the two small logs caught fire and burned nicely for a while.  When the fire died down to embers, I put in another small log and it quickly caught fire.  Now I am about to leave in a quarter of an hour so I have stopped feeding the fire a while ago.  The cast iron is still radiating heat for a while though.  If I lived here, I could easily heat the living room and kitchen with wood .  In theory it is even possible to cook on it, although you need a rather small pan or kettle.  Like the one I use to cook my pasta in… but the frying pan would not fit.  So that kind of limits my dinner choices if the electricity is cut off, I guess.  Not that this usually lasts more than an hour at worst, but you never know.  It is still kind of nifty.  Maybe I’ll try to cook some noodles on it one day just for the retro insanity.  (Nobody around here had heard of noodles back when we cooked on wood stoves.)

Anyway, as I’ve said before, there is unlimited wood.  The landlord has said that I can use as much as I want, so that should help offset the electricity cost.  Which I don’t know how much is.  For future reference, the meter is today at 6623 KWH.  It was 5782 when I took over the electricity here, according to the letter from the utility company.

Speaking of electricity and heating, I left the heat pump on 16 degrees Celsius when I left on Friday.  (That would be 61 degrees Fahrenheit, for those lazy bums who can’t be bothered to use Google to translate into tribal measurements.  Type “16 c in  f” in a Google search field and you will get 60.8 as answer.) This is the lowest ordinary setting. Any less and I would have to switch to the maintenance setting that runs 10 degrees above the freezing point.  This would likely be cheaper, but the house would be distinctly chilly on my return.  In fact, the outside temperature was not much lower than that today.

As it was, however, the house was pleasantly mild even before I fired up the wood stove.  In particular I was surprised to find that the bedrooms upstairs were quite a bit warmer than outside.  The bedroom floors felt nicely warm to my feet when I still only the thin socks.  A property of warm air is that it rises upward, after all, so perhaps I should not have been surprised.  It is not as if there is some secret cold void between the two floors.  The floors of the bedrooms are the ceiling of the living room and study, after all, only with some thick timber structure between them to support the weight. It is not like the space between them is open to the wind or anything.

Unfortunately, cold air does not rise in summer, so I better hope the nearby river keeps the heat from becoming too intense.  But that is far into the future.  Who knows what may happen before that.

***

I write this after returning to Nodeland.  This time I timed the walk from the bus stop at the Europe road (our “interstate”) to home. It was about 50 minutes of quick walking – if I had moved much faster, it would no longer be walking.  So I guess I’ve burned off some calories there and don’t need any more exercise today.  In fact, I even cooked some noodles.  (These contain 18% fat, before cooking.) I was slightly wary, not about the fat, but the last time my throat locked up was an evening I had eaten noodles and also mint chocolates. I tend now to believe that this was a coincidence.  There is nothing in noodles that is known to cause allergy in humans.  There are hundreds of millions of people eating noodles and I never heard of anyone being allergic to them.  The same for chocolate that does not contain nuts.  (Actually people with serious nut allergy can die from chocolates made in the same machines that made chocolates with nuts, even if there are only a few molecules of nut proteins left, but I am not one of them. I have eaten various chocolates after that event. Just not the mint chocolates, because of the anti-placebo effect.  (Nocebo may be its official name, although my spell checker has not heard of it.))

Anyway, I used another brand of noodles this time. Just in case.

***

Hey, it was this or writing about Huston Smith’s theory that all our wants are expressions of the soul’s desire for greater Being.  But these days, I must count myself blessed that there is even 1 reader who believes that souls even exist.  (Well, actually the spirit-soul’s nature may be essence rather than existence, but that is so esoteric that even I rarely think about it.)

No Moth today, my phone has gone awry

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I brought with my my backpack to work today again, this time filled mostly with curtains, but also a hammer (!) and my camera for some better pictures. I also went out and bought a cheap chrome rack for hanging clothes, for the small hallway by the front door. After all, when you come to a house in winter, the first thing you do is hang your outer clothes before going into the house proper.  There was an old-fashioned white rack that would have fit perfectly, but this was much cheaper and it is not like I should have had to buy it in the first place.

I am not there, however. I am at home.  I was doing something minor or my Googlephone, and when I turned it off, it did not turn off. It just hung there, not responding to anything.  About half an hour later it still had not turned off, but was now unpleasantly hot to the touch.  So I removed the batteries and put them back in.  That solved the problem, and quite timely so:  Not only did it smell a bit strange when I opened it to take out the batteries, but they were also nearly empty. Anyway, it reasonably asked me for the SIM PIN code when it started again.  As if I go around remembering that!

To the best of my pretty good but not photographic memory, I have only needed the PIN thrice, including today.  First, when the phone was new and I switched to my current carrier with a new flat-rate plan. Second, when I upgraded to a new version of Android (the operating system of the telephone) for improved speed and support for the newest programs. And now this, which is pretty clearly a bug.  I’ll overlook it for this time, as long as it doesn’t become a habit.

I got one digit wrong, typing 5 instead of 0, probably because of interference from the old PIN with my previous carrier.  Not that I used that often either. Anyway, not bad, but my phone was not impressed.  So I had to take it home where I have the PIN.

I love living in the future, and hate living in the past.   The future has GPS and Internet connection everywhere.  The past has traveling without even an online map and without any way of  contacting the world if something happens. No.  It is not like I am bound by some contract to be there every workday or anything.

Although I would have been interested in seeing just how high the river was today.  The (much smaller) river here in Nodeland is flooded like crazy, treetops sticking up from the water.  The rain the last day has not only run into the river, but also melted the snow first, so all of it is running into the river at once.  It is probably very rare that the river is higher than this, so I could have gotten a pretty good idea of how high it goes or not, even in the dark. (I brought a flashlight.)  Oh well.  Now I got to shop food for a few days, and can play computer games.  My heroes have got a lot of rest lately.

EDIT: Around midnight the phone crashed and overheated again, although it has not caught fire.  This better be the last time for a while or my brand loyalty is gone just like that.

That was quick

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IMAG0015

Mail after one day of not even living here. 0_O

I am back in the Mothhouse again, presumably for the last time this week.  Actually I could go here early tomorrow and still get back home, but that would have to be really early, and I will probably prefer to sleep.  It has been a full work week after all.

I have turned off the heat pump and am trying to get a feel of how fast the house cools without it. The answer is: Disturbingly fast. I am not greatly surprised:  The house reminds me in many ways of the one where I grew up (even to a faint smell in the stair room, which I cannot identify but am pretty sure I have not felt in any of the houses where I have lived since I left my birth family’s home).  That house was said to be a hundred years or more even then.  This one sure is newer, but it is still old by today’s standards.  It shows in the small rooms, it shows in the low doors, it shows in the windows that are only double, not triple which has been the standard for a good time now, it shows in the many exits (three doors for such a small house).  There is just something that feels old about it, despite most of the first floor being visibly renovated to modern standards.  I guess renovation does not quite allow the same level of insulation as building a new house.  In any case, it cools pretty fast in the beginning.  Then again it is still winter, only two degrees Celsius outside.  (Two degrees above the melting point, in other words.)

There is a reason I came to think of this.  You see, when I left the bus (on the nearest bus stop, for the first time ever) I got the impulse to check the mailbox. You may remember I wrote about it yesterday – that was when I was told that it had been set up.  So I reasonably expected that it might be empty, unless someone had already stuffed fliers in it. Well, had they ever.  There was a heap of colorful advertisement, as seen in the picture above.  I was about ready to throw it all in the trash, as I had also got a trashcan today (yay!). But again, some impulse made me look through the heap, even if half-heartedly.  And there I found two letters, plus a magazine from the local church.  The letters turned out to be from the utility company, which is formally divided in two entities (one supplies the power and one the power lines).  No, they had not sent me bills already, just a confirmation of contract.  From this I also saw the state of the power meter at the time I took over, and I went and compared it with today.  Turns out I have used almost 800 KWh in just under a month, in which I have not even lived here.

The front rooms on the ground floor have been kept at approximately the temperature they would have if someone lived here, first by a space heater in the living room and now the heat pump.  (Which, we recall, is not actually more energy efficient than a space heater when the temperature reaches zero and actually slightly less when it is freezing outside, since it also has to de-ice the outside unit from time to time.) I believe the landlord is worried that the water pipes may freeze if the house is not kept warm, which is a valid concern, but just how warm does it have to be to prevent that?  The bathroom has its own heater, which is plenty enough for that small space. The washroom holds the hot water boiler, which should be enough to keep the tiny room from freezing.  That leaves the kitchen.  The kitchen is on the end of the heat chain right now:  The heat pump is in the study, on the opposite wall of the door to the small front hall, on the other side of which is the living room, and the door opening (with no door in) to the kitchen is from the living room again, at right angles.  So you have to heat the living room more than the kitchen, and the hallway more than the living room, and the study more than the hallway, for the kitchen not to freeze.  Even so, it cannot make sense to keep it warmer than my office at work.  I am definitely going to turn it down several degrees

The heat pump actually has a special setting for maintenance heating, 10 degrees above freezing, which seems made for just such a situation, where nobody is at home but you don’t want the place to freeze solid. Perhaps I should switch to that for the weekend and only turn on heating again on my return?  Although in that case it may take a while before I can take my outer jacket off!

One thing that should help is the wood stove.  And it is free, after all, unlike electricity. Unfortunately that is not an option today, as I quickly discovered that I had no matches.  It is not like I usually carry those around, you know.  I wonder if I can remember those over the weekend? Actually, it would be enough to remember them till I come home, and put the matchbox in the backpack.  I am making a habit of using the backpack, after I discovered it yesterday morning in a cabinet while looking for various stuff to bring over.  I had forgotten that I even had it!  I certainly don’t seem to be traveling much these days.  Then again I mostly used it when I traveled to see my best friend.  Anyway, it is a decent if overly colorful backpack and fully equivalent to two full plastic carrying bags, which was what I used the day before I discovered it.  I think a backpack, even in neon colors, looks more dignified than plastic bags.  And regardless of that, the chance of the contents becoming wet while I carry them or spilling out across the bus floor during the drive is greatly reduced.

Speaking of bus drive, I hate living in the past.  Today I turned on Google Maps more than 5 minutes before the destination, and it tried continuously to contact the GPS, but to no avail. It still had not tuned in to the GPS when I recognized the stop where I went off yesterday – the one that was one stop too early but I did not know at the time – and so I got off at the right stop even without GPS. But if the lights in the bus had been on, I might not have seen the outside clearly enough.  This is not good. Hopefully the GPS satellites are still functioning. I cannot offhand think of anything that would disable them and not be world news.  I may need to turn on the GPS earlier, perhaps, as there may be certain places where it is easier to triangulate from inside a bus. What do I know.  In theory you need open sky to use this GPS, unlike car GPSes, but it worked in the bus before.  The bus has big windows in all directions after all, so unless the satellites are more or less directly overhead it should work.

So what did I put in my backpack this time?  Unopened shirts and undershirts and socks. All of them unopened, that is.  Apart from that only three thick SF books (the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss).  These, however, were opened.  In related news, today I actually found a clothes cabinet upstairs, complete with a number of hangers. It is rather large and placed on the wall between the two upstairs bedrooms.  (Actually there is a third upstairs bedroom but it is less suited for the purpose than the other two, so I plan to use it for storage. I also planned to use it to hang my clothes, but many of them could now go in the cabinet.)

Something else to bring next time?  A measuring tape. I kept the curtains from the Chaos Node (originally because I hoped that the new owners of that house would also be interested in renting out the basement. Yes I loved the place.)  I wonder if some of them could be used somewhere here, at least temporarily. The less I need to buy while I pay double rent, the better.  I may even forgo curtains completely for a while, since the house is so far from the neighbors and anyway the  front of the house does not point toward the road.  Still, even I don’t think 5 years without curtains would be a good idea.  (I may be single, at least for most purposes, but not THAT single!) It should look vaguely like a home, if nothing else then to not bring dishonor to the landlord.

Well, it is time to finish here for today.  The bus will come in 10 minutes, theoretically.  It comes later in winter, but the roads are much better than yesterday.  I have turned down the target temperature gradually to 16 degrees Celsius, from 22, and it makes a big difference both to the heat and the fan.  It is unpleasantly chilly now, but no more than that. It should be easy to get the heat back up if I return, which I very sincerely hope.

For want of a nail

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5

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A few things are missing.

I am back in the Mothhouse, on the very border between Middle Moth and Outer Moth. (There seems to be no Inner Moth, for which we should probably be thankful, given the imagery.)

Today was a snowy day, and the first such this winter in the Kristiansand area. Even here in Norway, it seems there are a number of people each year who are taken by surprise by the first snow, and more than that, are unaware of this, so that they dare to hare off on worn summer tires.   If they are lucky, they may just gently slide off the road.  If they are less lucky, collisions may occur.  In any case, it is predictable that traffic in the morning will be slow at best, stalled quite likely. This was the case this year again.  I showed up for the bus that would take me to work well within the starting time I have agreed with my boss.  The bus did not show up however.  I waited for about 40 minutes. Not only did the bus not come, but there came no bus the other way either.  This says something, because the buses that go to the city are the same that come from the city, having first taken a lengthy trip into the countryside and back.  If no bus had passed in those 40 minutes, no bus would return for the next 20 at least.  I went back home and thawed out.

I made another unsuccessful attempt later.  But close to noon the buses were suddenly running almost on time again. I hear some car had been standing partly into the road on the way into the city, and during rush hour (which is much longer on slippery snow) it was hard to get past it.

Still, I got to work eventually, even if late.  That’s time I have to work in later, but for today, I left at 17 (5PM) so as to catch the bus to Møll. I fell asleep briefly but soon woke up again, long before I needed to. But it is hard to judge distances when you are unfamiliar with the route. Not to mention when you are asleep.  Anyway, I turned on the GPS on my Googlephone and tracked our progress on Google Maps.  (So could you, if you were using Google Latitude, where I am a member and automatically broadcasting my position to my friends.  Since only one of my online friends live on the south coast of Norway at all, however, this is not particularly useful.  And even she lives in Kristiansand, not anywhere near Mandal, much less Møll. Still, if curiosity gets the better of you, Google Latitude.

I got two mails from the new landlord today.  The heat pump was finished and working!  The double bed was moved up to the upstairs master bedroom.  New locks were installed and the whole house was now lockable. And a (physical) mailbox was put up with my name and address.  Those of you who actually want the address are advised to ask me for it, as I don’t want criminal elements to stop by when I am not at home, something they are unlikely to do unless I give out the address in public.  After all, there has been no crime in this area before I came here, and I want to do my part to keep it that way.  Some of you do have a legitimate interest in knowing my soon to be physical address, however, so mail me at the usual address. My handle is itlandm and you can reach me using either chaosnode.net or gmail.com as address. I read them both.

I had already planned to take a trip here today anyway, and was carrying a rucksack with various stuff from home. Soap and a towel for the bathroom (missed when last I was here). Articles of manly and not particularly intimate hygiene: Shaving gear, deodorants and such.  Thick socks, of which I am currently wearing a pair that my mother knitted for me, with lots of love I’m sure, decades ago.  When I lived in the original Chaos Node, the floor was heated electrically. There was no need for thick socks.  But even I don’t lightly throw away a mother’s love socks, so they ended up in a plastic bag in the dresser.  When I moved to Chaosnodeland, I brought along the socks, but did not actually know what was in the plastic bag and never got around to unpack them until today, when I looked for stuff to bring over to the Mothhouse.

When I came to the bathroom with the stuff, I noticed that there was no place to hang the hand towel. In fact, there is not even a holder for the toilet paper.  The walls are utterly bare, not as much as a nail.  Going around the house, I found the same blank surfaces in the kitchen and living room.  In the home office, however, the nails are not just absent. They are conspicuously absent. There are numerous holes of varying sizes where there must at one time have been nails or screws of some kind, but where there is now only a hole into the dark unknown beyond.  Oh well. There are surely ways to hang towels, not to mention toilet paper, and clothes (in the room immediately inside the front door, there is no hint of clothes-hanging remedies either).  I guess it is left to me to decide the final look of the house.

EDIT: Came home safely, despite the slippery roads. Yay!  I had a while to wait for the bus, because of the slippery roads and the snow plows and the flurries, but the bus trip itself was uneventful. For us, that is. We passed several large trucks that stood in the road, seemingly unable to advance even a moderate slope.  Reports from earlier years is that these are from further south in Europe and don’t have the equipment required here in Norway.

I had not deep cough or chest tightness today.  This supports the theory that it was the dust in the home office that caused it last time. (The room was thoroughly vacuumed.)  Although it could be the double bed, which was also removed from the home office in the meantime.  This is highly unlikely though. If they had down-filled pillows or duvets, I would have reacted with a bad allergy, but there was only mattress and cover mattress.  Besides, my feather allergy used to be more similar to a head cold than a chest cold.

Onward to the heat pump.  It is truly an amazing invention, although I am not sure how much power it actually draws.  I am told that heat pumps can deliver close to five times as much heat as a normal electrical heater for the same power, but I am not sure if this is the same across different inner and outer temperatures.  In any case, standing in front of it was like standing in a warm summer breeze. A warm summer breeze smelling faintly of chemicals, but even so. I expect that to fade within the first few days. It was running when I arrived, and I left it that way.  It is currently heating most of the house. It stands on the far wall of the home office, the one that is on one end of the house.  It points directly at the door at the other (inner) side, which  is currently open to the small hallway inside the front door.  Opposite the home office is the living room, and the door there is also open, so the warm wind can blow straight across all three rooms, although it is in practice not strong enough for that.  The heat is mostly moving passively through normal circulation from the home office to the hallway to the living room.  Oh, and the living room is open to the kitchen.  There is a door opening but not an actual door in it. From the kitchen there are two more doors again, but those I kept closed.  One leads to an outer room, poorly insulated it seems, used for storage only and with another door out.  The other door is to the inner hallway which connects to the bathroom and the shed/garage, and which also holds the staircase to the upper floor with the bedrooms. So if I had opened the door to the inner hallway I could basically have heated the whole house from the heat pump, although I have my doubts that it would be able to pull that off in winter.

While I was writing in the living room, I noticed a change in the sound, and right after my feet started growing colder.  I went into the home office and looked at the heat pump.  The power light was blinking, and the air that came from the heat pump was icy clod.  Luckily the fan was not running so the cold air was just kind of passively running down on the floor, where it slowly spread out.

Luckily I still had the user handbook.  It explained that what I saw was the process of thawing the outside unit. This makes sense:  When the air was just one degree over the melting point of ice, and snow was still coming down, carrying massive amounts of heat into the house was bound to cause the outside unit to fall well below the freezing point. I went outside and brushed the snow and ice of the unit. Really, it ought to have at least a small half roof to shield it from the snow. Anyway, it soon reverted to the normal flow of heat into the house. It is pretty impressive, really, to pump that much heat into the house when it is freezing outside! I understand in theory the physics of it, but I am still impressed.

I could probably tell more, but it is midnight and I am quite sleepy after all the fast walking in the snow.

EDIT2: The previous time, I asked the bus driver to help me get off at Outer Moth.  This time I followed the movement of the bus on my mobile phone using GPS, and pressed the stop button shortly before we came to the same place.  I was feeling pretty good about myself. The driver – another one this time – asked me: “Are you sure this is where you want to get off?” “Sure, thank you” said I.  And it was indeed the same bus stop where I went off the bus two days ago.  It was, however, not the closest bus stop to the Mothhouse. While looking for my shiny new physical mailbox, I realized that it was actually placed at a bus stop (although the bus sign was covered entirely in thick snow).  While there is only a pleasant stroll between the two, this later stop is the actual Outer Moth stop, the driver last time let me off at the last stop of Middle Moth. (I am having so much fun with these names.)  The Middle Moth stop actually services a farm or two and seemingly nothing else, so the bus driver was quite right to be surprised if he has been at this for a long time and know who lives there.

So I seem likely to get even less fresh air than before, after moving to the Mothhouse – unless I do something pointless just to be outdoors.  I may do just that, though, because it is a beautiful place in daylight.  Which, unfortunately, there is very little of at this time of the year.  But walking for half an hour home from the evening bus, fast enough to not freeze, should fill my exercise quota for the day!