From now on I shall be known as … the MOTHMAN!  (Picture from Wikimedia Commons.)

So it is decided. Well, I don’t have the contract, but we did shake mobile phones on it, and the landlord seems like a honorable man.  Contract as soon as I can get myself over there, no later than Friday.  (I have a course in Grimstad tomorrow Wednesday and the day after, perhaps.)

It seems almost too good to be true, but I seem to have gotten the long-term rent house at Møll (or Moth as I like to call it, since that is the literal translation in modern Norwegian. It probably means Mill or some such, but moths are fun – until they get in your clothes at least!)

I already sang the praises of the pretty green valley of Møll on Saturday.  It is still the same place. I was drawn to the place since I first saw it advertised, and wrote about it already on October 7. So I am pretty happy about getting it.  Sure, I already live alone here (although half the house or so is filled with the landlord’s stuff) and this is more expensive, but compared to having to creep back into a basement and not flush after the children upstairs go to bed… I think this is pretty good.

We agreed that I pay 5 months in advance, I don’t think that is extreme when I’m renting it for 5 years.  But yeah, it is going to leave me broke for a few months.  Broke in the sense of no new computers or peripherals, no expensive gifts, no travels if it can decently be avoided.  Not broke in the sense of terminating my City of Heroes accounts and going on a bread & water diet.

So what should I call the place when I write about it?  I was thinking of just going for the Moth-house.  But it does not really stack up to the Chaos Node, Chaosnodeland or the House of Chaos. Then again I am not as chaotic as I were.  The Moth-cave sounds like fun (like the Bat-cave) but in truth the place does not even have a basement (at least that I know of).  More’s the pity when summer comes.   Hopefully the river will help cool things down, it passes only a few yards from the house, and is brackish enough that I don’t think mosquitoes will be a big problem. Or I could try to get a reversible heat pump.  Note to self: Mention for landlord, since he already considered a heat pump for winter use.

So, dear friends and relatives and lurking agents of the New World Order: What should the name be?  I am probably going with some variant of the House of Moth unless you convince me otherwise.  The name of the website won’t change though, it is too established for that.

On a related note, I expect to transform the small spare bedroom into a full-time wardrobe. Even here, I still have clothes I have not unpacked, ever.  That is going to change.  I will probably not buy clothes other than trousers (they tend to be either too small or far too wide) and socks for the next five years either. Well, unless the moths get into my wardrobe…

Official picture of the house for rent. Well, it will not be for rent long.

Today I visited Møll, where there was a nice house for rent.  The name of the small farming village literally means “Moth” in modern Norwegian, but it is more likely to be related to “mill”, or perhaps some old word no longer in use. There were no moths that I could see, in the house or elsewhere.

I did express my sincere wish to rent the house, and my willingness to pay some months in advance (provided, of course, that the contract stipulates at least the same number of months as advance notice  – we can’t have the landlord just take the money and boot me out after all! Not that he seemed the type to do that.)

There is serious competition though. It is not my place to write in public details about that, but there are a couple others who are just as desirable tenants as I am, so I have to be prepared to look elsewhere.  The same company (and presumably the same guy, since he runs it) has another house to let from December, so unless he for some obscure reason blacklists me, that might be worth looking at as well.  I suspect the competition will be even harder for that, though, since it is larger.

This house is not particularly large. It also seems to be old, or at least old-fashioned. It is so well kept that I cannot guess its real age, but I passed through at least one interior door that must have been built before Scandinavians reached their current height.  There were also many small rooms rather than few large ones, this is also typical of the old style.  The windows were also of a type I remember from my younger years. One particular oddity was that several of the rooms were on slightly different levels, so that you had to take a fairly large step up or down to enter them.  Not something a healthy person would think twice about, but still, strange.

All things considered, I don’t think the house warrants a higher rent than what he asks.  It is not a bargain, but not gouging either.  The reason why it is still my first choice, however, is the surrounding landscape.  Møll is a typical farming community. It lies on the east side of the river, which is far too big to cross except by bridge.  There is one such bridge north of the stretch of valley which comprises the Møll farms.  Crossing that bridge you will come to a small village center with shoportunity.  In Møll itself there is a gas station. I assume that, as is the rule here in Norway, it also sells snacks, kiosk literature and some everyday food at higher prices than a normal shop.  If I move there, I will surely find out.

Walking through the valley on one of the last days of fall was to be immersed in beauty.  Despite the late time of year, there was still green grass on some fields where sheep were eating leisurely, stopping only briefly to look at me with curiosity as I walked by.  There are probably not many people walking by these days – even farmers use cars if they are leaving the farm. The fields may still be green, but the trees were getting sparse and the remaining leaves were red and brown more than yellow and orange.  The sky was overcast but dry.  Despite the road passing straight through the valley, and the occasional car speeding past, the small well-kept farms radiated a calm you rarely find these days. It was as if I was magically moved back to a time before everyone had to run and before you were expected to answer a letter within 5 minutes.

For this reason, most of all, I’d like to live in Møll.  Moths or no moths.  But if not, then I will go where I must.  We have not on Earth a lasting home.  Still, there is no reason why our temporary home shouldn’t be a good one if the opportunity is there!

***

Oh, and something memorable happened after I had seen the house and talked with the landlord.  The last bus was already gone, because there are very few buses going anywhere on Saturday night in Norway, least of all through some farming village.  (Saturday night is binge drinking night in Norway. It is traditional for the non-religious to drink to excess on Saturday and, if single, also on Friday.  For couples, Friday is vaguely thought to be lovemaking day, but obviously this will vary.  Anyway, Saturday night is not a good time to catch a bus, much less on a thinly populated route.  I could have called for a taxi, but they are hideously expensive in Norway for a number of reasons.  (Cars are hideously expensive in Norway, gas is hideously expensive in Norway, and wages are very high in Norway. )  It is not like I can’t afford it, since I don’t have the regular expenses of owning a car, but it seemed like a waste. So I started to walk toward Mandal.

OK, so perhaps I really am 50.  My NaNoWriMo novel this year has the working title “The Eternal Road”, but I was not expecting to literally walk one the last day before I start writing. But that was how it felt after an hour or so.  Of course, it probably did not help that I had not been eating or drinking since last night, except a couple spoonfuls of yogurt before I ran off from home.  I did not have blood sugar crash, as some people experience if they go long without food or exert themselves.  But in retrospect I think it would have been useful to drink some water at least…

Luckily I did not have to walk all the way to Mandal, just most of the way. Eventually I reached the Europe road (that is a literal translation, I guess it is similar to “interstate” in America, since it does connect Norway to other European countries as well as connecting the Norwegian provinces). Conveniently, there was a bus stop right by the crossing. Conveniently, there was a timetable that had not been vandalized.  Inconveniently, it showed that the last bus in a good while had passed 4 minutes previously.  Conveniently, the bus actually arrived as I turned around. Not quite a miracle, but still appreciated.

While such “synchronicities” (meaningful coincidences) may make me feel like a Main Character, another and perhaps more likely explanation is that Someone Up There has labeled me “fragile – handle with care”. After all, in a cosmic perspective, there is not a big difference in the sturdiness of a man and a moth.

Very normal Norwegian house at half price. There must be something wrong with it. Then again, that is what people think about me too, no doubt.

I was, like most days, studying the “to let” pages of finn.no, a Norwegian online marketplace that overlaps with a lot of newspapers as well as having some unique adverts.  And unlike newspapers, it is updated when something is sold or, in this case, rented out.

This time I got the great idea to check in Evje, a small inland town in the neighboring province. My workplace lies quite close to the province border, and there are frequent buses that fit well with my commute schedule. The bus ride is about 1 hour (in practice longer when roads are icy in the winter).  But the extra time is not a problem for me, if anything the opposite:  The commute is the only part of the day I am forced to just sit still, so I tend to spend it reading or meditating. Even napping, on my way home. I would have to get up half an hour earlier, but that would also mean I could spend half an hour with delta waves in brainwave entrainment, which would more than compensate.

(You can obviously not completely replace sleep with meditation and brainwave entrainment, as sleep serves a multitude of functions. But you can definitely replace some of the sleep beyond five hours.)

Enough about that, I was amazed to see that someone was willing to rent out a quite large house for little more than you pay for a small apartment elsewhere.  I know that Evje has had some rough fortune after the military closed down one of Norway’s largest training camps there, losing over 200 jobs and a lot of trade.  But the town turned out to be quite resilient. Strategically placed as a trading center for the largely agricultural inland area, it has attracted new jobs to replace most of those lost, and the population is virtually unchanged (not counting the military recruits, obviously).  So while I did expect rents to be lower than in the coastal boom zone, I did not expect something like this.

Checking out the municipality’s web sites, I saw that they also had a link to houses for sale. This is something I usually ignore completely.  I am not proud of being one of the few working men in Norway who does not own my own home at the age of 50, but I am not ashamed of it either. I like to be detached and without worry.  It is one of the few things that both comes naturally to me and is encouraged by my religion. Well, not renting in particular, but being free from worry and attachment to earthly things.

Anyway, I was surprised by the disparity of prices.  Apartments and some houses are almost as expensive to buy as down by the coast, but then there are some homes for sale that are ridiculously cheap.  One in particular was in a price range I have not seen in this century and well into the last.  Admittedly it was described as needing some work, but at least the paint was not peeling off, and I am not exactly the type that need to live in The Shiny. And so I started to briefly consider buying instead of renting.

That would probably be a very bad idea.  It is true that for each passing month, there is more money left after I have paid my bills.  In fact, something like half of the after-tax salary is just lying around unless I can be bothered to buy a new computer or something.  I simply don’t have many expenses other than rent and food and my flat-rate broadbands.  (Yes, I have 3 broadbands:  One at home, one at work and one for my mobile phone. You have a problem with that?) So, theoretically I could live with a loan this size, if I could get it.  Which is not entirely impossible, since Norway has resumed its boom and banks are throwing money after people again.  But I really doubt this is going to last.  Interest rates are probably going through the roof again at some future point, well before I can pay off a loan.  In fact, the loan would last for approximately my life expectancy.  Which is another reason why it may be a bad idea to start buying houses now, at a life phase where others have paid off theirs.

So, most likely I will still continue to be unique and suspect.  But as a single male, I am suspect anyway.  Which is also why I probably won’t get to rent any of the nice places unless my guardian angel violently chases away all competition.  You never know, he just might. I have seen stranger things.

***

PS: This episode makes me think about a saying here:  “There are times when it is not enough to run faster, you have to have started earlier.”  You cannot just decide to buy a house without first having saved up money.  It is the same thing with invisible property:  You cannot just decide to be a spiritual person one day.  First you have to save up and you have nothing of substance to show for it.  All you have is hope, and if it is not something you really long for, this is where you give up.