A Roll in the Universe

There is no tradition for Halloween in Norway. Yes, as a pagan holiday, there used to be a celebration that got co-opted by Christianity, but the pumpkin-carving, costume-wearing, trick-or-treating version is new. I care not for the modern version of Halloween, in all its current mass-market plastic glory: In the US, it's become a carneval, where people where any kind of costume, not just scary or witchy ones. In Norway, they make the effort to be scary - and obnoxious. This is the fourth year of trick-or-treating in my neighborhood, and the second time one of my windows has gotten egged. At least I had plenty of soapy warm water on hand, since I happen to be doing the dishes.

In a comment to my post 13 about blogging , Tim says that he never would have guessed I avoid political blogs, and wonders why I do. I'm in a sort of no-man's-land when it comes to politics: 1. I don't live in the US any more and haven't lived there since 1981, and am eligible to vote only in presidential elections as an expatriate who is a permanent resident of a foreign country. So local issues mean nothing to me. Presidential elections are of more interest to me, but not always enough to get me to go through the rigamarole of getting an absentee ballot. After all, my choices are between Tweedledee and Tweedledum from the two reigning parties, and some far more interesting loser (as in won't get enough votes) from an obscure party. 2. As a foreign national living in Norway, I am eligible to vote only in local elections, not national ones. So every four years, I have to make up my mind which of the 8-12 parties I think is the best. Yeah, right. That's whe

Blogger was down all weekend. My post below is back-dated to October 28, which was when I wrote it, but published only today. I don't think it was published correctly, though, because the RSS-feed isn't updated. And now I can't publish this gripe. Grr... Time to make the move to something else, I guess. UPDATE: Finally! My posts have gone through properly, Monday evening local time, and the RSS-feed is updated.

Thursday I flew to Oslo, to attend an "open house" for the printing industry. I went with my boss and a co-worker who's a printer (I'm a graphic designer, in case you were wondering). I have not flown to Oslo since the new airport at Gardermoen opened, about 10 years ago. I also had not flown with the newish Norwegian airline, called - appropriately - Norwegian. Nor had I flown since the new restrictions on hand luggage and safety checks were put into effect this autumn. Business trips are a series of taxis, flights, newspapers, coffees, phone calls, papers, and back again. And the 50 minute flight to Oslo is a sure place to run into other co-workers. We took off in the dark since it was before dawn. We landed in gray and low clouds. My first impression of Gardermoen was that is was typical of the modern style of commercial buildings: A lot of stone floors, accented with warm, narrow-slatted wood walls and skylights. I prefer our local one, with an interior from t

Do you like the look and the contents of your blog? Looks: I'm OK with the Blogger template and my own photo in the header. Contents: See answer to 5. Does your family know about your blog? Yes. Can you tell your friends about your blog? Do you consider it a private thing? Friends were the first I told about my blog. And how can a public webpage be private, anyway? Do you just read the blogs of those who comment on your blog? Or do you try to discover new blogs? Both. Does your blog positively affect your mind? Give an example. I want my blog to reflect the best of me. I don't want it to be a collection of complaints. I have this thing about the written word; it's so permanent, so I want the permanent to be something positive. In that respect, my blog makes me focus on the constructive, on what may be worth reading even when it's no longer fresh. I think you'll see this most clearly in the posts from this past year. What does the number of visitors

Autumn Ortuvann 2006 - 12    —  Originally uploaded by thinkbigshrinktofit When I was a kid, I didn't like autumn. Autumn meant gray skies, gray trees, gray ground. I was well and truly adult before I discovered that the gray comes between autumn and winter. Autumn itself is color: Bright, brilliant, contrasting, changing. Last year's September and October were rough for me; this year's were also. September was Grandma's birth month, and October Grandpa's. Autumn became, last year, a season of emptiness, of everything dying, never to return. After a shaky start, this autumn is turning into a season of peace and wonder. It doesn't feel like death. It is merely change. A change with so much wonder and subtleties and beauty that it lifts any spirit. No more needing to worry about the future. As sure as there are trees losing leaves, there will be trees sprouting new ones. The days are shortening, but they are also heading for the turn, the solstice, the march towar

HowManyOfMe.com There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name? According to HowManyOfMe.com, there are zero people in the US with the first name "Keera", and 158,983 people with the last name "Fox". (Taken from beep .)

I have a LiveJournal blog. I don't use it; it's just there so I don't have to leave anonymous comments on friends' LiveJournals. As a lark, I used a LiveJournal-oriented Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test to see what level of reading comprehension my little post would require. Here is the result: kafox's Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12 Average number of words per sentence: 16.17 Average number of syllables per word: 1.77 Total words in sample: 97 Analyze your journal! Username: Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern And here's the text of my LiveJournal post that only a high school senior can read and understand: "I got tired of being anonymous This ain't my blog or anything. I just got tired of being anonymous when commenting on friends' LiveJournals, so I signed up. If you really want to find me, check out my homepage home.online.no/~kafox/ or my blog home.online.no/~kafox/blogfiles/."

12102006-Mollerdalselven    —  Originally uploaded by thinkbigshrinktofit It's been quite a week, starting with two days sick and off work, computer problems (still), and last night I dreamt I was in a plane crash. Where to start. Well, being sick wasn't serious, and definitely due to psychological stuff, and the rest (avoidance) did me some good (also turned out that a guilty conscience about not sending one finished job to the printers wasn't necessary as the job wasn't finished after all; I came back to corrections). I needed a better attitude and went back to work with a new approach. (Co-worker problems.) Upgrading the OS on the computer at work proved to be pre-mature since we have to interface with some pretty old systems elsewhere and the newest OS wasn't having that. It's not only finally autumn (I wore gloves yesterday), but also that time of year when new calendars come out. This time I bought a Moleskine 18-month diary. Yeah, moving away from the hi

What I saw waiting for the bus    —  Originally uploaded by thinkbigshrinktofit The norm for autumn in this part of the world is driving rain. It's "slash-and-drench". I had a number of parcels to lug home from shopping today, and had managed to find a seat in the bus shelter. The pictures shows the view I had. The woman in a black coat in front of me had a rucksack purse, and the edging on a zipper pocket had turned up, allowing a little bit of water to pool on her purse. That held my fascination for a while, making my wait nearly zen. People variously had umbrellas or nothing, and were variously more or less dry or more or less wet. Quietly they stood still, or quietly they chatted, waiting for a gas-fueled chance to get out of the rain. It was more hushed than on a sunny day - like a low-pressure system means low-key behavior. I too was waiting, sitting in my red rubber boots, parcels on my lap piled to my chin, and realized that I actually enjoyed this. The rain

New coffee maker    —  Originally uploaded by thinkbigshrinktofit I was in the store looking for a space heater come winter and saw this cute little thing. "Is that an espresso maker or just a regular coffee maker?" The answer was that it was a regular coffee maker with a capacity of two cups. Perfect for single me! When I got home, I went shopping for coffee. I had a coffee meme recently , and was reminded of one of the questions ("Do you have complicated taste?"), as I browsed the shelf for filter coffee. I saw a green bag of organically grown coffee. Yes, definitely! And then immediately saw the Max Havelaar brand of coffee, a "fair trade" brand that means more money to the coffee grower, not the middleman. Choices, choices. I went with Max Havelaar. If I don't like it, I'll try the organically grown next time. My second choice of coffee was Swiss chocolate and mint, which is what's in my souvenier mug from San Francisco now as I type. I

Aside from the nifty debet card and the equally nifty giro system, banking in Norway has always left me slightly paranoid. In my comments to my last post I mention that I prefer online banking (it's not virtual; it's real but digital) because "today's banks have that "customer friendly" crap where everyone can see and hear your business (and how much cash you're getting) as you stand at some "service island" where everyone can see and hear you." Thing is, Norwegians have never done discrete banking. Before the advent of the queue ticket, we'd all bunch up at whatever teller we thought would finish first. It generates a lovely, paranoid feeling to be standing at a teller handling your entire pay check, heaps of cash, and any personal financial problems with two to four complete strangers literally breathing over your shoulder. It was such a contrast to standing in a long, roped line at the bank in California on a Friday afternoon, wit

At work, upgrade the OS on your computer. Make sure you have rush jobs. Discover that things don't work quite as expected any more and the tower under your desk has a new ticking sound. Things stop working, one by one. In your netbank, close out a bank account, the one with the most money in it, by closing the account and transferring the funds to another existing account as one operation. Watch all references to the old account disappear completely while the money it had has not yet made into the new account. Wonder if you typed the correct account number. Panic. Think comforting thoughts like, "Stupid bank!" Re-install the previous version of the OS on your computer at work. Discover that you can no longer log-in even though you have system administrator privileges. Run all the diagnostics you can think of, restart in UNIX mode and type in the one command you remember once helped you on another computer. Listen to the processor rev up so high that it starts to sound

I came across the idea of a six word story here and she got it from a Flickr group . Apparantly, Ernest Hemingway wrote one: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." And I have to say, that's a damned good story. Now to think up some of my own. Check out the comments at the above two sites for other people's "stories". My own pathetic attempts: Thinking about it, she thought otherwise. Outwardly they laughed; inwardly they loathed. She almost knew what she wanted. History as written is always false. I stole that without getting caught. She went to a conference overseas. Blogging about a six word story. Your turn!

I'm a fan of the Daily Motivator by Ralph Marsden, but a statement in one Marsden's inpirational "movies" got me thinking. It said something along the lines of having had dreams when young, and about reawakening them. I didn't have dreams. I had daydreams, crazy fantasies I knew would never come true, but I had nothing that was so concrete that it could be made manifest, nothing that could be transformed into a goal. And it used to bother me. I used to wonder why I couldn't figure out what to do with my life, why others seemed to find picking a major for college or how they knew what line of work they wanted. I knew what I didn't want, but not what I did want. I took the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) which colleges require for admission; when you take the test, you can have the results sent for free to three colleges/universities of your choice. I had absolutely no clue where to have my test results sent; I didn't know which college - if any - I wa

is bubblewrap. For mouseclick-free enjoyment go here and pick manic mode.