Blog move & WordPress white screen

No, I haven’t crossed the river yet. Rather, this is the view from my new kitchen window.

Not dead yet, but I can see how you might wonder. Sometime last night the blog just up and disappeared. When you – or I – tried to look at it, only a white page came up, without even a source code.

This is because my entire Chaosnode.net was moved from one internal server to another in the Dreamhost server farm. They probably have good reasons for this, but it broke WordPress in a couple places. Actually they documented this and much more in their wiki, which they linked to in the emails they sent me before and after the move. But because it took some hours before it broke visibly, I did not read that wiki entry until after I had tried pretty much everything else I could think of.

Basically, there is a change in the internal file structure that supports my site. In the past, there was an invisible folder between the root level and my site. Â Instead of /home/chaosnod/chaosnode.net, it said /home/.calliopey/chaosnod etc. I don’t know or care what calliopey was (obviously it was somehow named after the mythical Calliope) and your server may vary. In any case, WordPress had thoughtfully included this path in a php file, likewise in the upload folder path.

So this is all very technical but the point is, when I fixed this, everything was intact. Also, I now have a backup of the whole blog folder on my removable hard disk. So something good came of it, although I lost a couple hours of my precious lifetime that I might otherwise have spent writing fiction about a high school chess player. An imaginary high school chess player, obviously, with no similarity whatsoever to any high school chess players you may have read about in the news over the last couple years. Actually it is more inspired by Japanese sports anime.

Happy new year – not that a single day passes that is not brand new. At least I learned something new today!

Poor little phone

Road through Møll. 

I am back in the Mothhouse, for the last time this year. Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, and once again almost all of Norway comes to an abrupt halt early in the afternoon so people can start preparing for the celebration. So I better remember my mobile phone this time.

The poor little thing has tried repeatedly through the day to wake me up, but to no avail. This could have been really tragic, but luckily the reason was that I was in Kristiansand, miles away, while the Herophone was left behind in the Mothhouse when I ran off yesterday. (I should probably stop calling it the Googlephone now that Google is launching their own mobile, although the Nexus One too is manufactured by HTC.)

It keeps growing colder. I can feel it right here and now. Yesterday when I had been burning wood for a while, the electric heater turned itself off. Today it doesn’t, even though I keep the stove as hot as I reasonably dare. (I don’t want to leave the house with the stove literally red hot.) But it really is uncomfortably chilly, even with both the stove and the space heater. And yet it is less cold here than at Nodeland. When I left the house there this morning, my nostrils started freezing shut. This only happens when it is below -13C (=+8F). It may have been slightly colder than that again, but probably not much. At this level you can also get an idea of the temperature by listening to the sound of the snow as you walk on it.

Meanwhile back at the Mothhouse, the bathroom faucet now only runs cold water, ironically. The shower has neither. The kitchen sink has both, but the pure hot water is little more than lukewarm. Even after running for several minutes, it is still not too hot to touch. That’s kind of disturbing. I turned up the electric radiating heater in the bathroom, as it was a bit chilly in there. Not nearly chilly enough to freeze water, mind you. Even in the central hallway, the one with the stairs, it is not below freezing. I store the cola there, and it is very much liquid still. I could probably store pretty much any food there – the temperature is about ideal for a refrigerator, from the feel of it.

I don’t like to leave the house with the heater at max, since it is closer to the ceiling than I would have wished. The ceiling is painfully hot to the touch, and there is a dark stripe across the ceiling just over the heater. But at least it is not smoking or smoldering even after an hour… and I don’t want to risk the water pipes bursting from ice, flooding the place. I am between a rock and a hard place here. I can’t shake the feeling that this must be a design flaw. You should not have water pipes freezing when the house maintains a temperature not far from what it would if people lived here on a daily basis. Even if I lived here, I would still not be tapping water for about 8 hours during the night and about 10 hours during the workday and travel. Â If you have to leave the hot water running when you are not there, it is definitely a design flaw. Perhaps I should bring it up with the landlord.

Or I could buy a couple more electric space heaters, I suppose. It’s not like I can’t afford the utility bill. I just don’t like it.

Moth in daylight

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.

Icebergs of revelations

iceberg

Picture shamefully stolen from Sciencebhakta, a blog at Good Shepherd Catholic School. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how a spiritual iceberg should look!

Ryuho Okawa, founder of the religious organization “Happy Science”, occasionally says some strange things. For the most part, however, he says things that seem obvious once I see them, but for some reason were not quite as obvious before. That is good, I think. We need more obviousity. We need to see these truths as self-evident, in an age where people doubt so many things but have faith in their own superiority in spite of all evidence. (Only 6% of Norwegian parents have children who are below average in school. In America, 90% of male drivers are above average while the women are about average. And pretty much everyone who thinks there is a Heaven thinks they are going there, except Jehovah’s Witnesses who modestly intend to colonize the new Earth instead. Compare this to Jesus’ statement that “narrow is the path that leads to life and few are those who find it.” In short, whether it is in this world or the next, almost all of us think we are one of the few. Oh well. If you have found this website, you are definitely one of a few!)

One of the obvious things is to not put all your goods in the shop window. That is to say, if you talk about spiritual things, you should know a lot more than you say. Okawa recommends being like an iceberg, with only a small part of your revelations visible to people, and the rest below the surface. For actual physical icebergs, the proportion that is above water is about 1/8. So for every revelation you share with others, you should have seven more revelations of the same sort.

I wasn’t there, obviously, but according to Okawa he was getting spiritual messages from various high spirits from Heaven for years before he started his organization. But having seen what happened to other religious leaders, he was quite wary of telling everyone until he understood everything clearly.

I have to agree there. I don’t want to mention names, but there are a number of people in the New Age movement at least that strike me as “one trick ponies”. They have one big revelation and they are going all out with it, but not all people are the same. So we get various specialists and people who follow them. You see the same in Protestantism. Perhaps it is something in the culture of northern Europe, but we seem to have a lot of small churches that break out from some other church because they get some revelation that the others don’t have. Each of them is convinced that their revelation is a matter of life and death. Often these revelations are purely theological, that is to say, you cannot actually see that these people become better by believing in this or that particular detail of doctrine. They don’t become happier, more helpful and more merciful. Of course it could still be an important piece of doctrine, but how will you prove it when you don’t have “fruits”?

Okawa is not the first to bring out that idea, of course. Jesus seems to have pretty much shut up about spiritual things from he was 12 till he was 30. He is later quoted as saying that a teacher who is trained for the Kingdom of Heaven is comparable to a host who brings out old and new things from his storage. That is the same thing, is it not? To have a storage of good stuff before you start hosting a large party.

So I’ve been thinking a bit about how I measure up in that regard. But then again I don’t really think of myself as a religious teacher. It is a dangerous job. It is bad enough to destroy your own life, but destroying others surely is worse.

I should write about games, or snow or something, I guess. But this stuff is also interesting.  I wonder if the other people who buy his books have the same experience. That seems unlikely, there is supposedly sold millions of them by now and the world is pretty much the same, isn’t it? So much so that I had never head about Happy Science until I accidentally came across one of their movies. But perhaps most of the readers are just busy storing their revelations beneath the surface.

Snowy wet Moth

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

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

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

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

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

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.)