Dentist and stuff

Picture taken a few days ago, as winter was still grappling with spring.

Slice of life, finally!

I went to the dentist and had the broken artificial tooth fastened again. This seems to happen once a year or so.  I honestly don’t think he does shoddy work to get more income in the future; it is more like I have a tendency to bite down hard right there. Quite possibly how I destroyed the original in the first place.

I used to say that “every time I buy a laptop, God kills a tooth.” (This is a pun on a popular Internet meme.) There really seemed to be a correlation, although there could not possibly be a causality. A tooth would break or come loose within a few days after I bought a new laptop.

Not so this time. On the contrary: On my way home, my mobile phone started acting strange.  It would scroll by itself to one side, even when I was not touching it. If I tried to scroll to the other side, it would still go its own way, so evidently it was scrolling faster than I.  I turned it off hard, so it did a full reboot, and the problem persisted. I then pressed randomly on the sides of the glass for a while, and it seemed to fall quiet after that. But it may indeed seem like I am heading toward buying a new mobile phone rather than a new battery for the old.

New versions of applets, like the most recent Facebook applet, also seem to run slower. This is just how it used to be on personal computers:  They were just good enough, but after a couple years when processing power had doubled, new programs and upgrades to the old expected you to have a newer computer, and things slowed down.

Seriously though, the phone is less than two years old. I bought it summer 2009. That means it is still under legislated warranty here in Norway.  Except that the shop where I bought it closed last week, and the chain it was part of has been sold off to competitors. The Tooth Fairy seems to take her job entirely too seriously!

***

In other news, the weather is mild now, around ten degrees above freezing, so I really get the spring feeling!  But it is still brown spring, the green spring usually does not come until the beginning of May or so, perhaps very late April. I also notice that it takes less use of space heaters to keep the house warm.

Books I am reading:  Another Sort of Learning (paperback) and The Order of Things (Kindle edition), both by James V. Schall, a Catholic professor, writer and philosopher. His writing is easy to follow for the modestly well-read layman, and often borders on the humorous. It is probably no coincidence that along with Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he also sneaks in a recommendation for P.G. Wodehouse. As a result of this, I have also begun on Wonderful Wodehouse 1, a collection of well-loved stories by the 20th century English humorist. It is also for the Kindle, and I read it on my mobile phone on the way home from work. At that point I am usually very tired, and scholarly works make me fall asleep quickly, whereas the subtle English humor so far has kept me awake.

While I still lived at home, my brother would drag Wodehouse books to the home, probably from the library, although I am not sure we did not buy any. The house was already then lined with bookshelves, and is so even more these days. I have nothing to them when it comes to books, and indeed had not even before I gave away most of the novels in preparation for my two moves.  Moving tends to make one re-think what one needs of material things. It also makes one appreciate e-books, which I now buy if available. (Also I have no illusion that my heirs will want to keep books in English.)

Anyway, the Wodehouse books of my childhood was in Norwegian translation, and quite a good one I believe. This is my first time reading Wodehouse in the original.