After I came home from work, there was still sunshine, at least part of the time, but the wind was nice so it was quite comfortable to mow some lawn.  The grass has started growing again after the rains earlier this week, but not by much yet.  It was easy going.  I went back in, checked my favorite web sites and paid my bills for the month.  The first of them was due today.  I used Net bank, of course. Some of my bills come only to my net bank now, no paper. It is slightly disturbing to depend so much on the Net when I think back only a few years, when I was a customer of Telenor, Norway’s largest ISP.  At that time I was sometimes without Internet access for both one week and two.  Luckily I have been spared that after I switched to LOS (now NextGenTel).

Later in the afternoon, clouds came running in from the east, a rare thing.  The wind is usually from the west when there is wind at all.  A local friend had already mentioned on Twitter that a thunderstorm was predicted, and soon the first flash of light was seen as the land beneath the clouds was cast into darkness as if it were already evening.  I turned off my computers an network and this time I even disconnected the phone cable.  I did keep the laptop running though. In fact I installed Sims 3 on it.  It is not nearly up to the performance of the quad-core and tri-core desktops, but Sims 3 runs well enough.  And playing it with the touch screen is an added bonus.  As with most laptops, the main problem is that the game does not run much faster when the sim is sleeping, but that’s where you take a short break.

I also took 18 minutes to meditate to LifeFlow 7, which uses the frequency of the Schumann Resonance, which is itself powered by electric activity in the atmosphere.  It seemed fitting. Especially since LF7 uses rain and thunder as its soundscape.  (Each track has a distinct soundscape that overlays and camouflages the sounds that create the brainwave entrainment.)  The sound track is quite realistic – I could barely hear the difference when I took my headphones off.

The thunderstorm must have lasted longer than it felt like, because it was dark for real when it finally left, and closing in on midnight.  Even on the very southern edge of Norway, the night is still very short. A couple hours after midnight, then it will start brightening again.  I better be in bed before that!

I tend to sleep too little, although I have less problems with it now.  I give some credit to the brainwave entrainment programs.  I tend to use LifeFlow before bedtime and Holosync in the morning, although I plan to phase out Holosync when I get the lower levels of LifeFlow.  LF7 is still the lowest I have though, and I mainly use 8, probably will for a long time yet. Although I do experiment with 7 now and then, as mentioned above.

Oh, and I found one of the few magazines that survived the move. It was an issue of Wired from 1997, cover article “The Long Boom”.  I wanted to write about that, but it is already midnight so you get this instead.

According to conventional wisdom, cause comes before effect.   But not for me, evidently.

Yesterday on my way to the morning commute bus, I suddenly found myself humming a couple lines from a song I had almost forgotten.  It was probably written for children, pure comedy (at least as we saw it then, adults may have thought differently) about the Wild West not being the same anymore. The song was popular when I grew up, but I haven’t heard it much later, perhaps I don’t listen to kid radio.  (I should perhaps change that, as the kid radio station is my favorite in Sims 3…)  In any case, I haven’t heard the song in years, and this is important.

I noticed and was glad, because silly as it was, it was an improvement over the one that has been stuck in my brain all weekend.  (Unfortunately that earworm returned soon after and is still around unless I play something else every now and then.) Anyway, I got on the bus and soon started reading a magazine.  Near the end of the trip, about half an hour after I had brought up those couple lines from the childish song, I read the exact same lines quoted in an article about languages dying out.

It is the first time I have ever seen that song quoted in print, I am pretty sure.  And I haven’t thought about it for years.  Yet the exact same couple lines came to my mind half an hour before I read them.   If they had done so half an hour later instead, the causality would have been obvious. As it is, however…

This is not the first time, you know.  I wrote about the time I was walking along a country road and started thinking about how things would have turned out if the tricycle had become popular instead of the bicycle in our part of the world.  (It is, from what I see, a lot more common in Asia than here.)  As I was thinking about this, an adult tricycle came out from a side road. Because of the trees I had had no possibility to see the tricycle before I started thinking about it, and I had not seen it before nor have I seen it since.  I am not sure I have actually seen any adult trike before or after, they are not popular in Norway. In any case they have been exceedingly rare in my life.

Then there was the time when I heard for the first time a beautiful song (performed by Olav Stedje, I am pretty sure, but I have been unable to find it after the coming of Google these many years later).  It was about the arrival of his child and the deep feeling of connection he felt with it, as if the two of them had been together in the before-life and had become separated for a while due to his incarnation, but were now together again.  That morning just before I woke up, I had the only dream I know of in which I was a father and was looking forward to coming home to my children.  It is true that I often dream about strange things, but not this particular thing, and the timing was suspicious to say the least.

Then there was the time when I played a song on my cassette radio (I am old) and then switched to the radio, which was playing the same song.  Now that is what I call synchronicity, but not perfect synchronicity:  That was another time when I tried to change the volume of the song I was playing and found that I had not yet turned it on – the neighbor was playing it loudly just as I thought I had turned on my discman.

Anyway.  Effect precedes cause.  Not good for the fabric of spacetime, one would think.

Redcurrant. There are also blackcurrant nearby.

Today is a beautiful Monday. It rained in the morning and was rather chilly for summer, but by the end of the workday a faint sun was shining. I left my umbrella and jacket at work. Perhaps next time it will be sun in the morning and rain in the afternoon. Probably not though, since I already had three other umbrellas there. But you never know.

The temperature inside is just perfect, around 25 degrees Celsius. That is such that I can wear clothes or not as I choose, indoors. Usually in the summer it is entirely too hot, but if not then it quickly becomes chilly. There are not many days as perfect as this.

After the recent rain, the lawns have started growing again. I took the manual lawnmower to one of them, and noticed that the berry bushes were full of ripe berries. Unfortunately, I don’t like them. We had the same type at home, and they were sour. Only edible with heaps of sugar. Or honey, of course. Even with sugar they were still sour, even when they were fully ripe. Much more than strawberries and raspberries. And even those were sourer than the wild ones, which I loved. I could eat lots and lots of wild raspberries, which grew all around wherever there were broken stones. And there were a lot of broken stones in our valley.

But enough of that. I suppose I would be the nearest to harvest these bushes, since I am renting the house, and the landlord has not shown up for a long time now. It will only be a matter of days – this week, probably – before the berries are overripe and start rotting. Actually today would be a good day to harvest them. But that is kind of pointless if I don’t eat them. And despite my general low carbon footprint and stuff (which is mostly by accident anyway), I just know the berries would rot in the fridge even more surely than outside.

Last year some unknown woman harvested the bushes. I think it was one of the neighbors but I am not absolutely sure. I just observed her through the window. Actually I was kind of relieved. Perhaps the landlord – or his mother or grandmother – had told them it was OK. In any case, I don’t think I will go ask my neighbors to harvest the berries. Perhaps the birds will do it if we don’t do anything. Birds need to live too. But with the neighbor having half a dozen cats (or some such) birds are not too frequent flyers around here either.

I honestly have no idea why nearly all cultivated fruits and berries here in Norway are sour. Perhaps Norwegians, except me, like them that way. Given that several of the native berries are sweeter, it is hardly an act of God at least.