Cold Moth

IMAG0009

You wanted interior pictures. Here, the alternative heat source.

I am writing this sitting on a low bench in the living room of my new rented house at Møll, what I call “the Moth-house” since the Norwegian word “møll” literally means “moth”, although that is surely not the meaning of the place name. No, I have not moved in.  I came here after work, carrying with me a few things from home, as I planned to do.  The bus back to Kristiansand goes in about half an hour.

I have a bad deep cough.  I am not sure if I finally got the Death Flu of Doom (although I would expect other symptoms to show up long before the chest cold) or perhaps an allergy.  I spent more than an hour in the home office, which was dusty with the remains of drilling a hole through the wall and setting up the heat pump which is supposed to heat the place in winter and cool it in summer.  It does not work, but I spent a lot of time there trying to get it up and running. I can only assume that they have not finished the installation, although it certainly LOOKS installed.  In the end, I turned it off and went outside again and pulled the plug. The lights were on and the LEDs indicated that it received commands from the remote control, but nothing else happened, certainly there was no fan running as the booklet led me to expect. Nor was any heat coming from the unit, even after it had plenty of time to get started, and the lights indicated that it was running normally. Oh well.

I don’t know if it was the dust from inside the wall that triggered this cough. I did not have it the two previous times I were here, so I don’t think it is the house in general. In any case, it is pretty bad.

I got the province-wide bus card and it cost no more than what I was told, less than double the normal price between Kristiansand and Nodeland. I also asked the bus driver to help me get off the bus at Ytre Møll, as the stop is called. This he did. I think I can find it by myself next time, if any.  I enabled GPS on the mobile phone and followed on Google Maps.  Using the same technology again I should be able to get off at the right stop, or very nearly so. It is amazingly precise.  I love living in the future!

The touch-screen laptop is currently connected to the Internet through my mobile phone. I plan to leave it here in a kitchen drawer – the laptop, that is, not the phone!  If God wills, I shall return to use it again.  If not, I will have far more important concerns. But my chest feels less tight now, at least.

EDIT: I have come home to Nodeland, and there is no deep cough, just a sore throat from all the coughing earlier. I just walked for half an hour in air colder than the freezing point, so it was not the cold that triggered it either. I also have no fever.   That strongly implies allergy. It seemed to recede already toward the end of my half hour in the living room, so perhaps it really was something in the home office.  It better be the dust from the carpentry work.  I was hoping to spend five years in that room.