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.

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!