I really enjoy reading Dorothy Dunnett. The first time I read Niccolò Rising I found it slightly hard going, but this time I was better prepared, both for the prose style which is lovely but demanding, and for the setting which is rather alien: Flanders in the 15th century. I very much look forward to reading the next book, now.
And tomorrow I’m going to get my eyes checked for new glasses. About time, too.
I just realised that the linkdump the other day was truncated: the winners of the 2007 World Beard and Moustache Championships link was lost. Follow it. You will not be sorry.
Johan’s sister and her family were here today. We don’t see them very often - last time I saw any of them was when the eldest girl graduated, last June - and it’s always fun to meet them. Good food was had, the kids played a board game, and we sat around chatting for a bit. Nothing ambitious or strenuous, but fun.
Also, Happy Birthday, Andrew. (Although I guess it’s over already given the time zone thing.)
I slept like a log in the Tempur bed. It felt hard and a bit weird at first, but it started moulding itself after my body very quickly. We’d been warned that we might have problems sleeping the first few nights before getting used to it, but as I said, like a log. (It helped that I slept very little the night before, though.) I didn’t even wake during the night, except briefly when J’s alarm went off.
Emptying and removing the water mattress was fairly painless, and it is now residing outside our front door looking like a large purple mollusc. Hopefully we’ll get hold of somebody with a car to transport it away at some point soon. Installing the new mattresses was an extremely simple procedure; the top mattresses were rolled up very tightly in the box but when they were unrolled they looked as flat as if they had never been bent at all. Weird material, that.
So it would seem like we made the right choice, although I’d better give it a few nights before saying anything conclusive.
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!
Good afternoon. Here is a mixed link dump.
National Awareness Awareness month. Er, yes. Can’t add anything to that.
Gesellschaft zur Stärkung der Verben want to strengthen the verbs in all languages, including English, Swedish and Latin, to make them as strongly verbed as German. (They have haikus and other amusing German language exercises as well.)
A 5-minute reenactment of the Princess Bride, so funny I pretty much fell off my chair.
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.
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.
Here and here is a little more about negative and positive face, in connection with politeness strategies - using positive and negative face applied to other people, to make them feel better - because if others feel good, we feel good, or so the theory goes. It’s pretty interesting, and it works subtly differently in diffferent cultures which makes it even more interesting.
Grattis på fjortonårsdagen, Miranda! 