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!

Picture from Sims 3.

Got a mail today from the new landlord. He has a friend who works in Agder Breiband (Agder is the old Norse name for the south coast of Norway, and Breiband does mean broadband) and this friend had arranged it so that I could get fiberoptic cable in the farmhouse for kr 6000 (a bit over $1000.) So I called his friend and we made the deal. He said they would normally not do this and it would take at least three weeks before they get started, but it should be in place before Christmas.  Another reason for me to not move until December, then!

$1000 is a lot of money when you don’t have it, but the plan about the house was that I’ll live there for 5 years, possibly more (depending on the kid that will inherit it, I think).   Compared to 5 years, $1000 is barely noticeable.  I chose the cheapest connection speed, 10 megabit/second, but I can upgrade to 30 or 50 without a new install should the future move in that direction. I honestly can’t see any applications that would need that – I will probably not be an early adapter of full-body virtual reality suits – but at least the fiber is there, should the future end up different from what I expect.  (Has that ever happened before, you think?)

From now on I shall be known as … the MOTHMAN!  (Picture from Wikimedia Commons.)

So it is decided. Well, I don’t have the contract, but we did shake mobile phones on it, and the landlord seems like a honorable man.  Contract as soon as I can get myself over there, no later than Friday.  (I have a course in Grimstad tomorrow Wednesday and the day after, perhaps.)

It seems almost too good to be true, but I seem to have gotten the long-term rent house at Møll (or Moth as I like to call it, since that is the literal translation in modern Norwegian. It probably means Mill or some such, but moths are fun – until they get in your clothes at least!)

I already sang the praises of the pretty green valley of Møll on Saturday.  It is still the same place. I was drawn to the place since I first saw it advertised, and wrote about it already on October 7. So I am pretty happy about getting it.  Sure, I already live alone here (although half the house or so is filled with the landlord’s stuff) and this is more expensive, but compared to having to creep back into a basement and not flush after the children upstairs go to bed… I think this is pretty good.

We agreed that I pay 5 months in advance, I don’t think that is extreme when I’m renting it for 5 years.  But yeah, it is going to leave me broke for a few months.  Broke in the sense of no new computers or peripherals, no expensive gifts, no travels if it can decently be avoided.  Not broke in the sense of terminating my City of Heroes accounts and going on a bread & water diet.

So what should I call the place when I write about it?  I was thinking of just going for the Moth-house.  But it does not really stack up to the Chaos Node, Chaosnodeland or the House of Chaos. Then again I am not as chaotic as I were.  The Moth-cave sounds like fun (like the Bat-cave) but in truth the place does not even have a basement (at least that I know of).  More’s the pity when summer comes.   Hopefully the river will help cool things down, it passes only a few yards from the house, and is brackish enough that I don’t think mosquitoes will be a big problem. Or I could try to get a reversible heat pump.  Note to self: Mention for landlord, since he already considered a heat pump for winter use.

So, dear friends and relatives and lurking agents of the New World Order: What should the name be?  I am probably going with some variant of the House of Moth unless you convince me otherwise.  The name of the website won’t change though, it is too established for that.

On a related note, I expect to transform the small spare bedroom into a full-time wardrobe. Even here, I still have clothes I have not unpacked, ever.  That is going to change.  I will probably not buy clothes other than trousers (they tend to be either too small or far too wide) and socks for the next five years either. Well, unless the moths get into my wardrobe…

Official picture of the house for rent. Well, it will not be for rent long.

Today I visited Møll, where there was a nice house for rent.  The name of the small farming village literally means “Moth” in modern Norwegian, but it is more likely to be related to “mill”, or perhaps some old word no longer in use. There were no moths that I could see, in the house or elsewhere.

I did express my sincere wish to rent the house, and my willingness to pay some months in advance (provided, of course, that the contract stipulates at least the same number of months as advance notice  – we can’t have the landlord just take the money and boot me out after all! Not that he seemed the type to do that.)

There is serious competition though. It is not my place to write in public details about that, but there are a couple others who are just as desirable tenants as I am, so I have to be prepared to look elsewhere.  The same company (and presumably the same guy, since he runs it) has another house to let from December, so unless he for some obscure reason blacklists me, that might be worth looking at as well.  I suspect the competition will be even harder for that, though, since it is larger.

This house is not particularly large. It also seems to be old, or at least old-fashioned. It is so well kept that I cannot guess its real age, but I passed through at least one interior door that must have been built before Scandinavians reached their current height.  There were also many small rooms rather than few large ones, this is also typical of the old style.  The windows were also of a type I remember from my younger years. One particular oddity was that several of the rooms were on slightly different levels, so that you had to take a fairly large step up or down to enter them.  Not something a healthy person would think twice about, but still, strange.

All things considered, I don’t think the house warrants a higher rent than what he asks.  It is not a bargain, but not gouging either.  The reason why it is still my first choice, however, is the surrounding landscape.  Møll is a typical farming community. It lies on the east side of the river, which is far too big to cross except by bridge.  There is one such bridge north of the stretch of valley which comprises the Møll farms.  Crossing that bridge you will come to a small village center with shoportunity.  In Møll itself there is a gas station. I assume that, as is the rule here in Norway, it also sells snacks, kiosk literature and some everyday food at higher prices than a normal shop.  If I move there, I will surely find out.

Walking through the valley on one of the last days of fall was to be immersed in beauty.  Despite the late time of year, there was still green grass on some fields where sheep were eating leisurely, stopping only briefly to look at me with curiosity as I walked by.  There are probably not many people walking by these days – even farmers use cars if they are leaving the farm. The fields may still be green, but the trees were getting sparse and the remaining leaves were red and brown more than yellow and orange.  The sky was overcast but dry.  Despite the road passing straight through the valley, and the occasional car speeding past, the small well-kept farms radiated a calm you rarely find these days. It was as if I was magically moved back to a time before everyone had to run and before you were expected to answer a letter within 5 minutes.

For this reason, most of all, I’d like to live in Møll.  Moths or no moths.  But if not, then I will go where I must.  We have not on Earth a lasting home.  Still, there is no reason why our temporary home shouldn’t be a good one if the opportunity is there!

***

Oh, and something memorable happened after I had seen the house and talked with the landlord.  The last bus was already gone, because there are very few buses going anywhere on Saturday night in Norway, least of all through some farming village.  (Saturday night is binge drinking night in Norway. It is traditional for the non-religious to drink to excess on Saturday and, if single, also on Friday.  For couples, Friday is vaguely thought to be lovemaking day, but obviously this will vary.  Anyway, Saturday night is not a good time to catch a bus, much less on a thinly populated route.  I could have called for a taxi, but they are hideously expensive in Norway for a number of reasons.  (Cars are hideously expensive in Norway, gas is hideously expensive in Norway, and wages are very high in Norway. )  It is not like I can’t afford it, since I don’t have the regular expenses of owning a car, but it seemed like a waste. So I started to walk toward Mandal.

OK, so perhaps I really am 50.  My NaNoWriMo novel this year has the working title “The Eternal Road”, but I was not expecting to literally walk one the last day before I start writing. But that was how it felt after an hour or so.  Of course, it probably did not help that I had not been eating or drinking since last night, except a couple spoonfuls of yogurt before I ran off from home.  I did not have blood sugar crash, as some people experience if they go long without food or exert themselves.  But in retrospect I think it would have been useful to drink some water at least…

Luckily I did not have to walk all the way to Mandal, just most of the way. Eventually I reached the Europe road (that is a literal translation, I guess it is similar to “interstate” in America, since it does connect Norway to other European countries as well as connecting the Norwegian provinces). Conveniently, there was a bus stop right by the crossing. Conveniently, there was a timetable that had not been vandalized.  Inconveniently, it showed that the last bus in a good while had passed 4 minutes previously.  Conveniently, the bus actually arrived as I turned around. Not quite a miracle, but still appreciated.

While such “synchronicities” (meaningful coincidences) may make me feel like a Main Character, another and perhaps more likely explanation is that Someone Up There has labeled me “fragile – handle with care”. After all, in a cosmic perspective, there is not a big difference in the sturdiness of a man and a moth.

Very normal Norwegian house at half price. There must be something wrong with it. Then again, that is what people think about me too, no doubt.

I was, like most days, studying the “to let” pages of finn.no, a Norwegian online marketplace that overlaps with a lot of newspapers as well as having some unique adverts.  And unlike newspapers, it is updated when something is sold or, in this case, rented out.

This time I got the great idea to check in Evje, a small inland town in the neighboring province. My workplace lies quite close to the province border, and there are frequent buses that fit well with my commute schedule. The bus ride is about 1 hour (in practice longer when roads are icy in the winter).  But the extra time is not a problem for me, if anything the opposite:  The commute is the only part of the day I am forced to just sit still, so I tend to spend it reading or meditating. Even napping, on my way home. I would have to get up half an hour earlier, but that would also mean I could spend half an hour with delta waves in brainwave entrainment, which would more than compensate.

(You can obviously not completely replace sleep with meditation and brainwave entrainment, as sleep serves a multitude of functions. But you can definitely replace some of the sleep beyond five hours.)

Enough about that, I was amazed to see that someone was willing to rent out a quite large house for little more than you pay for a small apartment elsewhere.  I know that Evje has had some rough fortune after the military closed down one of Norway’s largest training camps there, losing over 200 jobs and a lot of trade.  But the town turned out to be quite resilient. Strategically placed as a trading center for the largely agricultural inland area, it has attracted new jobs to replace most of those lost, and the population is virtually unchanged (not counting the military recruits, obviously).  So while I did expect rents to be lower than in the coastal boom zone, I did not expect something like this.

Checking out the municipality’s web sites, I saw that they also had a link to houses for sale. This is something I usually ignore completely.  I am not proud of being one of the few working men in Norway who does not own my own home at the age of 50, but I am not ashamed of it either. I like to be detached and without worry.  It is one of the few things that both comes naturally to me and is encouraged by my religion. Well, not renting in particular, but being free from worry and attachment to earthly things.

Anyway, I was surprised by the disparity of prices.  Apartments and some houses are almost as expensive to buy as down by the coast, but then there are some homes for sale that are ridiculously cheap.  One in particular was in a price range I have not seen in this century and well into the last.  Admittedly it was described as needing some work, but at least the paint was not peeling off, and I am not exactly the type that need to live in The Shiny. And so I started to briefly consider buying instead of renting.

That would probably be a very bad idea.  It is true that for each passing month, there is more money left after I have paid my bills.  In fact, something like half of the after-tax salary is just lying around unless I can be bothered to buy a new computer or something.  I simply don’t have many expenses other than rent and food and my flat-rate broadbands.  (Yes, I have 3 broadbands:  One at home, one at work and one for my mobile phone. You have a problem with that?) So, theoretically I could live with a loan this size, if I could get it.  Which is not entirely impossible, since Norway has resumed its boom and banks are throwing money after people again.  But I really doubt this is going to last.  Interest rates are probably going through the roof again at some future point, well before I can pay off a loan.  In fact, the loan would last for approximately my life expectancy.  Which is another reason why it may be a bad idea to start buying houses now, at a life phase where others have paid off theirs.

So, most likely I will still continue to be unique and suspect.  But as a single male, I am suspect anyway.  Which is also why I probably won’t get to rent any of the nice places unless my guardian angel violently chases away all competition.  You never know, he just might. I have seen stranger things.

***

PS: This episode makes me think about a saying here:  “There are times when it is not enough to run faster, you have to have started earlier.”  You cannot just decide to buy a house without first having saved up money.  It is the same thing with invisible property:  You cannot just decide to be a spiritual person one day.  First you have to save up and you have nothing of substance to show for it.  All you have is hope, and if it is not something you really long for, this is where you give up.

Farmhouse in Kvinesdal, southern Norway.

It is only my second day of looking for a new home, and I have already “fallen in love”.  Well, that is of course an exaggeration, but at least I am fascinated.  There were about a dozen new advertisements on the website this time (I have limited the search to Vest-Agder, the province where I live.  Well, actually it is in size something in between a province and a county, I guess; I have seen both terms used for it.  Anyway, one of the new offers was a farm.

I am a farmboy born and bred, from generations and generations of farmers.  But strangely enough I myself was unable to even keep living on an animal farm, because of allergy to the feed flour given to the animals.  I don’t have hay fever, it seems:  The symptoms always came after being exposed to that particular feed.  Unfortunately, it is essential to modern animal husbandry in Norway.

Still, life on the farm will probably always hold a special place in my heart.  Seeing the largish farmhouse surrounded by trees, I felt immediately that this would be a good place to live. And so I believe it is.  But it would probably be a good place to live for a family too.  The house can easily accommodate a family of six, at least.  At the end of a country road, with no traffic, even small children would be able to play happily outside without danger from speeding cars or suspicious strangers.  The outhouse / barn could accommodate a horse or two or perhaps a few ostriches.  OK, probably not a good idea those ostriches, but still.  (There are ostrich farms in Norway, although the animals are most assuredly not part of our natural fauna.) The point is, we’re talking about the good life in the countryside.

Do people WANT the good life in the countryside anymore?  I am not sure. There seems to be a tremendous demand for small apartments in the city downtown, or small houses with not even room for a real garden, or even a shrub hedge between one house and the next.  And this is in Norway.  People from almost anywhere else in the world cannot imagine the amount of sheer wilderness this country has.  Even here I could take off from my home and just walk, and if I don’t bring some means of navigation I could get lost within hours, never to emerge again from the primordial forest, and quite likely my bones would not be found for centuries if ever.  This is the case pretty much everywhere on the south and west  and northern parts of Norway, except smack in the middle of the cities.  We are barely 5 million people, but we could have room for ten times as many and still have plenty of wilderness all around us. Civilization more or less seems to exist as a frail band on the fringes of a primal nature, living on its sufferance for a while, to be swallowed again quickly if our resolve weakens.

Under such conditions, living with the creaking of your neighbors’ beds or even just looking through their windows all day seems barely short of perverse.  It is a beautiful country, why not live in its beauty?  But since clumping together is the trend in society and has been for a good while now, I cannot just magically plunk down a house at the edge of the forest.  I could however magically FIND one.

But I restrain myself.  The house is even better suited for a family.  I would only occupy half of it, even with all the clothes I have not worn out yet.  (I have only thrown away a couple  clothes since last I moved.  I have not even opened the shirts that were unopened when I moved here in February 2006!) I don’t have children to play in the road or climb the trees.  And if someone has a job in that part of the province, they would not get many chances to find a place to live there. Almost all new construction is around the towns.  So for the happiness of the many, I must restrain myself.  I must have faith that I can live a wonderful life without hurting others.

There is also the small detail that my commute to and from work would be 80 minutes by train and 40 minutes on foot, each way.  Now I love trains and I love walking (it is also very healthy) but it is still two hours.  I have said before that I wanted a longer commute, and I am serious that it would not inconvenience me:  Commute is when I get most of my reading done, or I can meditate or even sleep if I feel the need for that.   With the new mobile phone I can also check my mail and social media, so it is not all that different from being home.  Still, it has its weak points. You can’t just decide to come to work half an hour earlier, because there is no train that arrives at that time; likewise you cannot just decide when to leave work, because there are only a couple trains each evening going that way.

And of course there is no law requiring the owner to rent to me even if I am willing to pay several months in advance (as I would gladly do).  Single men are viewed with suspicion here in the Feminist Paradise of Scandinavia.  Hopefully my references from here and, if worst comes to worst, the place where I lived for the previous 20 or so years, would calm such fears. But it is very uncommon for a man of my age to live a stable life alone.  Then again, “uncommon” is probably one of the best words ever to describe me.

So we shall see.  If the Light wants me to live there, nobody else will get it, even if they try.  If it is my longing ideal, the angels of Heaven will intervene on my behalf; but if it is just a worldly attachment, they will kindly look for a way to divert me.  Or something like that.  I am not really a theologian.  But when I moved here, in winter 2006, on my second day I met a man who recognized me from years ago. He worked nearby, and told me that he had seen me walking in the area recently.  Now, this was actually my second time walking there, and the first time had been on another time of the day when he was unlikely to have been there. So who had he seen? In the Bible there is an episode when the apostle Peter is mistaken for his angel, so evidently they have the power to assume the shape of their wards if needed… Who knows.   I know the Bible is kind of old now, but if I were to find a house in the countryside to rent, it would almost be a miracle of Biblical proportions, don’t you think? Just like last time.

No more springs in this house for me!

So the time has come.  Yesterday I got a mail from the landlord: I have to be out of here within 3 months, as they are clearing the house and selling it.

This is not exactly high drama, at least not yet.  3 months is a lot more comfortable than 3 days, which is what I had last time.  Of course, last time I thought I had a new apartment – I had in fact partly moved in, as it was within walking distance.  But the huge amount of stuff broke the camel’s back. So this time I am either looking for an apartment large enough to easily swallow all my stuff, or getting rid of more of it before I move.

I did get rid of a ton of stuff when I moved here, probably literally.   And the Pigsty Project got me rid of almost all my CDs and all but one glass jar.  Next up is my old books – luckily the used book shop is still around, as I would hate to burn them.  I have already packed a bag of light fantasy novels by Piers Anthony to get rid of. This was something I should do anyway, to make room for the books by Schuon, Wilber, Godwin and Okawa. It is time to get rid of some of the portals to lower worlds and install portals to higher worlds instead.  Even this body is after all a rented house, and one day the landlord will deliver final notice, no matter how faithfully we pay our rent.

But in a more upbeat tone, I have started looking around already. There are actually a couple apartment in the same price range nearby, at least one of them within walking distance, and the size is acceptable if I continue to throw away stuff.  It is not as if I have used the whole house here after all – the attic was off-limits, as was almost all of the basement and even one small bedroom up here.  So a full basement might be just as roomy, or nearly so, and probably cooler in the summer.  Certainly this one is – during the heat wave early this summer, I would spend some time in the washing room downstairs, it was as if escaping the season.  Now not all basements are like that, but still.

Or I could try to rent a house out in the countryside.  I don’t particularly mind a long commute, but the problem is if it is not going when I need it.  There was an awesome place for rent up in the mountains, another way to shorten the summer by the way.  (Yes, I have a particular problem with summer.  When it is could, you can add another layer or two of warm clothes. But when it is hot, you cannot take off the skin.)  The price was right, but the bus is clearly not meant for commute, only for shopping and such.  It arrives just before 9 and leaves around 3:30 AM, too short for a workday.  (Actually it is almost a workday for me, since I only work 90%, but not quite.) The next bus in the evening isn’t home until 11PM – an hour to midnight.  That is barely enough time to sleep before having to jump up and run for the bus to the city again.

But this is just the first day.  Tomorrow I will find something more tempting.  This time of the year is great for finding a new home to rent.  And conveniently, I seem to have enough money to pay double rent for a couple months if it comes to that.  So if there are no other problems, there is no need to cry for me. Yet.