Little luxuries

I woke up feeling good, even though I woke up early on a Saturday. But since I had a hair appointment in town at 10:30, being up and about for a few relaxing hours first was a good thing.

Last night I checked a few things online, fiddled with a trial version of Photoshop Elements, and made a few decisions. (I'm such a nerd.) So after my hair cut, I went straight to our local Apple store.

But first I passed by Bergen's famous fish market, which was very empty of both booths and people. Shockingly so. I was relieved that I could see no tourists. We are actually fighting to save our traditional open-air fish market, because the direction it's heading in is no longer about fresh fish, Bergen or traditions any more. The vats that contain our live fish and crabs were closed. Those are one of the main reasons for the market. But there was one fish stand open for business, displaying a variety of caviars.

I've never really been into fish eggs, though I do like cod roe, which has a texture a bit like a soft cat tongue and a very mild flavor. Serve on a slice of bread, mayo or lemon juice optional. But once I was at a seafood buffet and there were three different caviars so I tried each.

I discovered that eating three different types was the key. The variety and contrasts made each one all more interesting and tastier. So as I stood at the one fish booth in our open-air market, I asked if they had those little jars of caviar in three different flavors. I went away with one small jar of salmon caviar, one of capelin (which the young man who was waiting on me struggled to remember the Norwegian name of; it's lodde) and one of the equally weirdly name in either language, sea hen/rognkjeks.

When I got them home, I wondered what to serve them with. I have plenty of crackers, which is the usual, but then I spotted the two avocados ripening in my kitchen window. One was just right. Avocado is the perfect compliment to various roes.

The salmon roe looks and tastes like salmon, but the large (relatively) eggs made me think of bubblewrap as they popped in my mouth. The cream-colored roe, which had the tiniest eggs of the three, is from the capelin, and it has a very mild flavor and a slightly crunchy texture. The black roe, from the sea hen, was salty - and not black. It is an amazing dark purply blue. It's discoveries like that that make me so happy I opted for planet Earth for this incarnation.

One avocado and half of each jar (i.e. two heaping teaspoons from each), and I felt pretty full. Rich food! And delicious!

The rest of my afternoon and evening I have spent messing about with the purchases from our local Apple store, spending a chunk of the anniversary money. I bought an Airport Express for wireless surfing at home and their largest iPod Touch with the intention of using the latter from my bedroom thanks to the former, for watching video podcasts or playing Bejeweled. (I'm flexible.) My third purchase was Photoshop Elements, the happy amateur's low-budget version (as in 1/7 the cost) of the humongously powerful and expensive regular Photoshop (which I use at work).

Anyway, I was looking forward to installing Photoshop Elements, but of course Adobe, which is slowly getting as user-unfriendly as Microsoft (are you listening, Adobe?), requires that you use their installer disk to uninstall whatever you have installed except it didn't work, Adobe! so when I tried to install, I just got some error about a payload already being loaded (what is this, the space shuttle?). I ended up making a long foray into all the inner workings of my iMac, hunting down and killing deleting every last bit of whatever that was labelled Adobe or Photoshop and finally I was able to install the program.

It's a good thing I'm a nerd (def. 2, thank you: an intelligent, single-minded expert in a particular technical discipline or profession) or, as the Norwegians say, a "bitfikler" (bit-fiddler).

Then I yelled at my Airport Extreme for giving me a green light when everything else said no connection, and then the thing insisted that I update it's firmware (YES / NO) - gawd, you worked just a minute ago! Just load my webpage! What's with the nagging!? And that's when I realized that I didn't need to have a human around to feel married and made myself laugh.

But now all is well, I got logged into Blogger, you can see my picture of food porn (it really is: fish eggs and a fruit bearing the name "green testicle" in Aztec) adjusted and cropped etc. in Photoshop, and the store didn't even charge me as much as I expected, though I spent enough (over NOK 5000).

On my way home, I waited at the same bus stop I'd been in a snow storm at, only this time I noticed the 7-11 directly across from me, went in, and came back out with a hot latte, which was delicious and warming company while I waited for the bus.

It's been a day full of little luxuries.