Random links gleaned from MCiOS:

Badger Badger Badger Like the Hampster Dance but more varied.

Yeti@Home — I never really understood SETI@Home so I’m satisfied this is also incomprehensible. Good thought, though.

A quiz for children — My score: 5. Not 5 correct answers – 5 points. And it really is the President of India presenting it!

And everybody who feels their blog isn’t exciting enough: take heart, for here is the dullest blog in the world!

Finally, finally the blasted pragmatics paper is done. And not too terrible either, or at least I don’t think so. Will get Sara’s verdict tomorrow. I’m hoping I’ll become slightly more disciplined about getting started with things: last-minute stress is awfully motivating to be sure but all the same I’d prefer not to have to rely on it.

So people think that is good. It was also nice to get a post card from K. of Brighton 🙂 as well as to be reminded that I was going to start learning Manx this autumn. Oh, and Tai Chi – I decided to take up Tai Chi, as my constantly aching back needs exercise but hurts too much whenever I move for it to be a good idea to start with anything more frenetic – but it seems the course probably won’t happen as there are too few people registered for it. Hmph.

The most astonishing thing to happen recently is however that the telephone company admitted that my phone bill must have been wrong. Txt messages to abroad should not cost more than txts within the country. So I’m getting money back – or possibly getting a new bill, I’ll call Customer Service tomorrow to check. I’ve had to send in the phone for service as the battery suddenly started emptying in a day after less than five week’s use, so am sitting with a phone I got on loan. I’m starting to think that Telia’s service is pretty good.

A friend of ours is dying. Not a close friend, but someone we have both known, even if only casually, for a long time: I for over 10 years and Johan for almost 20. Yesterday Johan heard the diagnosis: Creutzfeld-Jacob’s disease. Which is terminal, incurable – there aren’t even any ways to alleviate the symtoms – and results first in dementia and then death. And the incubation time can be up to 50 years – our friend probably caught it when he was 12.

This sucks so bad there aren’t even words for it. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to get that diagnosis.

We now have a much less bushy apple tree as well as a large number of branches and sticks piled up behind the house. Pruning is fun! And not at all as difficult as I’d thought. The rain was rather light, occasionally even nonexistant, while we were working, so that wasn’t a problem either. Go us!!

Ooops — an old friend found this page and almost fainted when the first thing she saw was the Valley URL posting ;-P Sorry about that!

Now I want to visit SI. I wonder if I dare? It’s been so very, very long.

Oh no. We decided several weeks ago to prune the apple tree today — Kinna is coming over to aid and guide us — and the weather has been quite nice if a tad cold, until this morning when we awoke to the sound of steady, heavy rainfall. That it’s raining doesn’t mean we can’t climb and cut trees…. but it’s gonna be wet and cold. I want to be a cat.

But I’m not really complaining. After all I do have a sauna and a fireplace. And it’s going to be good to get that tree trimmed down a bit!

“To google” is, as like we know, a verb these days. Which is totally bitchin’ with me — it’s rad to see language transition as it is totally happening! Like, oh my gawd! In any case, I was like, you know, googling for a couple of old school friends (prompted thereto by the fact that I suddenly happened upon the spaz page of another friend from school)

(The Sep 1 Néablog posting run through Valley URL)

My regular e-mail address doesn’t work now, and I’m not sure if it’s been delivering all my mail the last few days either. I’m switching from the free provider which my nea.pp.se address has been routed through, to one that comes with our ISP, which will hopefully be more reliable. The address will still be the same, but for the nonce, anything urgent should probably be sent here instead until things start working again.

Yikes. According to a report, men in general get bored of shopping after 72 minutes.

Me, I get bored after approximately 7.2 minutes. Unless it’s shopping for books or possibly games. All right, that may be an exaggeration (though 72 minutes sounds like an eternity, I definitely tire long long before that), but it is a fact that shopping for clothes in particular saps my energy in no time at all; I just want to lie down and go to sleep — whereas book shops give me an energy boost. Are there any reports about why that is?

Oh, and that same report claims that women in general can stand doing it for 100 minutes. Which means that many people probably take a lot longer than that to get bored. People are so strange 🙂

The new nifty Blogger with extra features enables me to save postings as drafts, so one reason for my silence is that I’m hammering away quietly on a longer blog post (targetted particularly at Maria, incidentally.)

But there are other things worth writing about. Such as the TV series 10th Kingdom, which I bought in Turku a couple of months ago; it’s turning out quite different, but even better, than I had expected. So far we have watched one of the three DVDs. The basic premise is that there is a fairy tale world called the Nine Kingdoms, where Snow White, Cinderella and all the other fairy tales happened.This story takes place after “Happy ever after” ended, though. Am looking forward to watching the rest of it.

And in other news we’re off to Stockholm, to eat Dim Sum with Ylva tonight.