The Shellfish Festival here in Mandal is providing the whole town with free music, whether we want it or not. I am not recording.

There is a saying that 90% of everything is crud. What it fails to mention is that which 10% are not crud varies from person to person. There are people out there who actually paid to get close enough to this music to damage their hearing. The world is a strange place, and the humans not least.

I went to bed early in the evening, mostly because hemorrhoids hurt too much to sit and write as I usually do. After a while I fell asleep, for I had slept less than optimal for some days.

I had a dream which looked like an anime (Japanese cartoon) and it was about a boy and a strange girl who always followed him around, to the point of camping outside his house at night. When he talked with her, she answered weirdly and briefly. He was sometimes irritated with her. But at one particular time he realized that maybe she was not real, but a product of his imagination. Immediately she disappeared – he was looking right at her and one moment she sat on the other side of the table, the next there was just empty air. Realizing that he would miss her, he closed his eyes until he had convinced himself that maybe she was real, and when he opened his eyes, she was back.

Still sick, still not sure what it is. The pressure in the upper jaw faded during the day yesterday and returned in the night. It has faded during the day today again. But I am still not feeling well. Now my upper body is stiff in weird places, such as the sides, where I am not normally using muscles. And my pulse is 85-90 while sitting, normal is 60-65, so that is a rather huge difference.

Today my upper jaw, and generally right side of my face, hurt like they haven’t done since a couple days after the surgery. (And sometimes before it, admittedly.) But at least there is no visible swelling.

Evidently WordPress blogs are pretty easy to hack if they are not updated constantly, so I assume that was the reason. There was no defacing, it was just loaded up with scripts that would try to infect visitors without sufficient defense and send them to some kind of Russian malware house or something. The fact that someone had logged in from the UK was not very heartening either.

I have deleted both of my blogs and tried to reinstall. With this one it seems to have succeeded. The fresh install should be as safe as these things get. That is not much, I think: There were nearly 8000 infected files, none of which were made by me. There is something just wrong about having thousands of non-content files for a trivial thing like a personal blog.

I do not know whether I will continue to use this blogging software or go back to the old format. Actually, I plan to do the following: Delete plugins and themes I am sure I don’t need. Mark it as auto-upgrade (Dreamhost, my webhost, has come through with flying colors in this case and I will definitely use their services). Then I will continue to use these blogs as before, Light willing. If it gets infected again after that, I will return to the hand-coded format. This takes more time so probably means less updates, though.

Now to try yet another re-install of the primary blog and hope I can recover the couple years of entries that lie there. If I could get this one back, it should be possible to also get the Chaos Node online.

It certainly does not feel like influenza. My “fever” stops at 37.5, and apart from being a bit tired and stiff, I feel pretty normal. Had a very weak headache yesterday night and this morning, but barely any coughing or even a running nose. How this could cause me to almost go into shock yesterday is beyond my imagination. It may indeed be a flu, but if so it is one I have had before.  I stayed home from work just in case, and to not infect others. If it is influenza, others may not be immune to it and bad things could easily happen.

I honestly have no idea what really happened, and that is the worst part of it. Because this means I have no idea what will happen next. I am not really the type to live as if each day was my last. True, one of them will be. But only one.

Some pretty weird dreams tonight. One in which I was a high schooler, but in the current time. I had brought my computer to a meeting in the computer club, and while I was sitting there, it just disappeared from my knees where I had it. I just looked away for a moment and actually felt the weight of it disappear. When I looked back it was gone. Only one of the other boys sat close enough that he could have taken it, but he did not have it. I was still a little unsure whether he could somehow have managed to grab it at very high speed. But we never found it. It was just gone. This made me quite upset in the dream, though it did not carry over into real life. I have heaps of computers in real life. Way too many. I need to disassemble most of them and hand them in to the electro return service.

In another dream I came to a house that belonged to an older female relative, I think, a grandmother or aunt or something. I wasn’t me this time either, or at least this was not one of my real relatives. The place was plagued by wolves, and one of them made it into the house so we had to club it with a sack fill of books, a surprisingly effective weapon against wolves! This was the last dream, and I woke up.

There was one before these two that I decided I absolutely had to remember, but that’s the only thing I remember about it now.

There is a Christian saying that if you fight the chimney sweep, you get smudged even if you win. I am not even sure whether I am winning or losing. But we’ll get back to that. First other news:

Today was the first time in about two weeks that I took an hour’s walk in the evening. It felt good. Around the time my foot started to hurt, my heart was beating irregularly after less than a quarter’s walk from work to the bus. Now, there was no disturbance at all for an hour, including walking over two pretty steep hills. So I strongly suspect there is a connection between my exercise levels and this irregularity of the pulse. See also my less slice-of-life journal today.

In other utterly slice-of-life news, I found a sheet of paper in my mailbox again informing me that the chimney sweep is coming tomorrow between 9 and 12. One will remember that I got the same very short warning last winter in the old farm house, and in all haste arranged to take the day off from work, then waited ALL WORKDAY and neither saw nor heard anything, nor have I heard from him since, until now he pulls the same short warning stunt again. Like I am going to let him fool me twice in a row. Unless I’m sick or something, I intend to go to work as usual. (Besides, I don’t have any fireproof ash containers. Not that I would need them, I haven’t used the wood stove in this house ever, but they are supposedly required. Yeah, because I would totally go hunting for those in the evening if I even knew what he meant.)

Sorry pal, but not all of us have homemakers around to wait for chimney sweeps with a (so far) 100% track record of absenteeism. Hopefully next year the house will have a more cooperative inhabitant.

This is the first (and possibly only) step in the Order In Chaos (Node) project. The purpose of this project is to remove distracting elements from one blog and put them in another where you can find them if you want them.

In this case, Slice will be everything categorized as “Slice of life” and “My health”. It will probably be full of whining and as such best read upon my death, in which case you may mentally add in my voice: “Told you so!” ^_^

The main blog remains at http:chaosnode.net/blog/.