Batter in, water out

Our new bed arrived! At least three weeks earlier than we thought it would! So now the waterbed era is over. Because we get attached to inanimate things in our family, we are going to miss it, but I am very much looking forward to trying out the new one. However, we first have to empty the water mattress - quite possibly we won’t be able to do that tonight.

Also, I am halfway through the Personal Blog Writing Month, and have so far written every day. Some days there hasn’t been much to say really, but most days I have had things I wanted to say; when I’m in the non-blogging state I always feel too selfconscious to get with the writing even when there has been something on my mind to blog about, so this having to write every day is in fact very good for me. I have even had pingbacks
PeBloWriMo was Jukka’s own initiative, by the way, and a thumping good one it is too. He, too, has kept it up. Go us!

You’d love to buy a nice egg beater, wouldn’t you, fuzzy face?

It is rather bizarre to hear an American narrating Pride and Prejudice. She’s not at all a bad narrator. On the contrary, she reads very competently and the recording is a labour of love. The problem lies with me - I just can’t listen to that book read in an American accent. I got as far as “Have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?” before switching it off. I suppose this is terribly narrow of me, although of course P&P is a special case, because I have seen the BBC series from 1995 so many times that those actors are become the real people in the book. (I will listen to her narration of Huckleberry Finn however.)

Do other people think about accents like that? To the point where the “wrong” accent really jars and makes an audio book, a movie or a play less enjoyable? Frodo in the Lord of the Rings movie, Elijah Wood, is another example - his accent (as well as his age) was so very wrong for the part and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I would not be able to listen to a Scanian narrate a book by Torgny Lindgren, either, i somebody would come up with the bizarre idea of recording such a thing. I really take these things too seriously, don’t I - it makes me enjoy things less! But then on the other hand, hearing Torgny Lindgren himself read one of his books, or David Case read P G Wodehouse, is such a pleasure. I guess it is related to listening to a lot of a particular kind of music and losing the ability to enjoy an inferior recording.

The title of this post? It’s not at all related to the contents.

Ow

I’d write something, but my back hurts too much. I will go to bed instead.

But not before providing a link to why I should have been a programmer.

Phone

So as I mentioned, a new phone. The old one was… five years or so, I think. It was reasonably functional still, although the sound quality was terrible to the point where I often couldn’t hear the person I was talking to at all, and the “6″ (mno) key was bad so I usually had to press it several times. So all in all it didn’t feel like too much of a mad splurge to get a new one.

I wanted to stay with Nokia because it’s what I’m used to; I got a 6085 (sand gold). It has a camera, and I can listen to the radio, and in theory also to mp3s. In theory only, because you need a Windows computer to transfer music - but I knew that before I bought it and I wasn’t looking for an mp3 player anyway. Nor a camera, and the one in this phone is fairly bad, which again I knew. The things I was looking for work just fine though. The sound quality when I use the phone to talk is excellent, and the sms sending also works great. And I can send and receive pictures!! Oh, and there is a hook where I could attach the Moomin I bought a year ago in Helsinki, for the day when I’d get a new mobile with such a hook. And there is a Sudoku game, which means I don’t have to miss the Backgammon on the old phone, especially since that was getting a bit too easy to beat.

No particular downsides to it, so far. It’s annoying that the pre-set template messages can’t be erased, but I suppose that’s a Nokia thing, and unlike my old phone this one doesn’t seem to run out of memory very quickly. Good phone, I’d recommend it as long as you’re not looking for a superduperultrawow thing. (I still covet an iPhone of course, but that won’t be possible for normal humans to buy for several years, I believe.)

PeBloWriMo

It is Personal Blog Writing Month. I don’t know who proclaimed it, I’ve only seen it in Jukka’s LiveJournal, but that’s good enough for me. I will try to keep it, just because.

And it had been so long since I last blogged that I’d forgotten my password. But WordPress.com were very efficientl about allowing me to reset it; in this way they are the exact opposite of Blogger/Google, where if you forget your password you won’t get any assistance in getting a new one.

Anyway. It is February 2008, and That Thesis is nowhere near finished. I have spent the last two weeks working really hard and accomplishing nothing at all, until I got sick with stress, yesterday. And that’s all I am going to say about that.

At least it’s finally been snowing a little. Nothing like enough, and it’s probably going away again really soon, but at least there is some snow. And I have tea and two Jarre albums, which Johan bought for me yesterday at Emusic. Nostalgia galore!

It was a fun party, but of course we forgot the camera. Maybe I’ll find somebody else’s pictures to link to. In any case, I went as a mad sane scientist, with an extra cerebrellum in a jar, and some red cabbage extract in a bottle.

Tonight, I’m going to go to my first-ever Hallowe’en party. Miranda and Anna are hosting it, and I’m really looking forward to it. I won’t tell you what I’m going to dress up as, but I think I can promise photos afterwards. (I considered going as an opponent with Johan as the review committee, but we decided against it.)

There is a Facebook application called “Compare” where you get to compare your contacts (all right, your friends) within a number of different categories - you get the names of two random people in your friends list, and choose which one of them is the more famous, more talented, cuter, a better singer, a harder worker, or whatever. This can get rather amusing, such as when I was asked to choose which one of two bald friends has the better hair, or whether person A (male) or person B (female) would be a better father (though I think the latter was actually a bug.) In any case, it makes me wonder if my friends know me at all. At the moment, I’m ranked as the most organised person in my network - eleven people think I’m more organised than some other friend of theirs. Well, maybe they just have very disorganised friends, what do I know.

Looking at the bottom of the table, I find that nobody thinks I’m more outgoing or more talkative than anybody else. (Well, nor do I!) And almost nobody thinks my smile or my taste in music are better than their random friend’s. Hmph! I’ll just stick to the top of the table, where people would rather have dinner with me. Not to mention that 11 out of 18 people would rather get stuck in handcuffs with me than with their other friend - which probably means they think I know how to pick locks.

The children came back later: I was outside trying to get Bonadea to agree to come in, and they were sitting on our fence so I went out there to chat with them. The girls are 5 and 7, and the boy is 7, and they are not siblings but live in the houses next to each other (and next to our house). They told me this and many other things, and I got Cassandra and held her for them so they could stroke her until she tired of it - then I took her inside and gave her some cat milk to appease her. The younger of the girls wanted to hold Cass, but I didn’t let her for there could have been some blood-shed, and I’d certainly have had to go Cassandra-hunting for quite some time. Bonadea, clever cat that she is, stayed away until they had left.

It felt very… familiar but opposite, to be the neighbour lady you come over to chat with. I mean, when I was a kid, the grownups in my street were kind people who did their incomprehensible grownup things, but were generally happy to see you and usually up for a few minutes’ chat.

So we’ll see if these become general hangers-around and fans of our cats, or if this was a passing interest of theirs and they will keep doing their incomprehensible kid things further down the street. It’s good to have some social contact with the neighbours in any case.

Three kids just rang my doorbell. I heard them talking all the way up the driveway (all of seven metres or so) and was prepared to say “No thanks, I don’t want to buy jultidningar” as I opened the door. But no, they were not selling anything (they must have been too young for that, actually) - they wanted to give me a glass marble. They had a basket full of them, and asked with toothless grins if I wanted one. How could I have refused? So I got a marble, and gave them each an apple from our tree, and we were all quite pleased. As they left, they gave me another marble. “My cats will like these!” I said. “I have SEEN your cats! They are really cute!” said one of the girls. Excellent kids, those three. They will go far.