Thank you, Great Sky Fairy!

The title is ironic. An online acquaintance of mine over many years, who could have been a friend if he wanted, has a rabid reaction against religion in general and Christianity in particular. If he is not foaming at the mouth in real life, it can sometimes be hard to guess. Among the peculiarities that follow from this is fairly consistently referring to God as “sky fairy”, and gods and angels etc in general as “sky fairies”. (I rather prefer “invisible friend”, which also seems to be acceptable to this guy. But the default is Sky Fairy.)

The phrase came to mind because today arrived with mild rain, after varying degrees of freezing temperatures since around the end of the Copenhagen Summit. The rain was very moderate, merely a taste of the real thing, and ended soon. But temperatures stayed high (about 7 degrees Celsius, where zero is the freezing point of water) throughout the day. Only after sunset did the mild weather fade. It is currently around the freezing point again and headed a bit further, about -4C the next few days according to the meteorologists. But during this brief flash of mild weather, the water pipes all thawed up at the Mothhouse (or Riverview, as I consider renaming it). The shower is already leaking a little, so I don’t need to do anything about that. I’m setting the bathroom faucet to a rapid drip, that should hopefully be enough. So, I should be able to move in this weekend anyway without fear of 3 months without a shower. Great, Sky Fairy! ^_^

In less exciting news, my snowblower plan failed. Jernia has a wide range of snowblowers on their web site, so I set off for their shop in the city (the largest city on Norway’s south coast – actually the only city that is more than a town, really) and saw a snowblower as soon as I came in the door. It was big, and heavy, and somewhat more expensive than I had in mind. But at least I was come to the right place, yes? Not quite. This was the only model they had. There may be a reason for that, I don’t know. But given that I was only going to need this thing once, there are limits to how much I will invest in buying it (not to mention getting it home). Once I am moved in, the aluminum spade is quite good enough, since I don’t have a car. The only need for a car to come here is during the move. I guess we shall just have to carry stuff from the road. I made a path yesterday, and made it broader today. If I am lucky, I may get another day or two to further expand it, but it should be broad enough to carry pretty much anything. And it is not like I have a lot of huge objects. The obvious exceptions being the fridge and the washing machine. I really wish it were possible to drive those to the door, but it just isn’t.

Well, it is closing time again. I am really looking forward to moving here now. Let us hope it works out well.