A Roll in the Universe

Wordless Wednesday

Some days a bit of window shopping gives results. I have wanted a new purse for a while. Not because my current one is bad, but simply because I wanted something a tad smaller, a bit classier - and not black. Like red. As I browsed the handbag and luggage store, I eavesdropped on the conversation the clerk had with other shoppers. Black is the most popular color, regardless of fashion, I learned. Meh, I knew that. Norwegians would make Johnny Cash proud. Which is why I wanted color. I posed with gray, with gray-blue, with purple against my black (!) coat and black (!!) boots. Nothing felt right. Kelly green and road-sign yellow were out of the question. I put all the handbags back. I was disappointed in not finding anything I really liked, but reluctant to leave the store, empty-handed. There were many nice, appealing handbags, but they were black. I fought temptation and old habit, determined to have any color but black! I circled the racks again. I crossed over to one other

…has been in the comments sections on other people's blogs. Today, as I sit here thinking about how haikuish Twitter is (it encourages you to think a complete thought in 140 characters or less), I wonder about the drought of longer writings. As I reach for my cup of coffee, the penny drops: I was in a zone before my "DDR trip" in September and it interrupted a project I was working on (my "Harmonic Wealth" book) and I just never got back into it. By early September, I could feel something jarring loose, some old habits falling away, knew awareness creeping in - and then I left the book and my notepad and everything behind and was immersed in a completely different world for 8 days. If I don't keep something up, I forget it far it too easily. I'm having trouble remembering where I even put the book! It's felt like the longest wait, and I can't tell you what I've been doing all this time (if it was worth writing about, it ended up on t

Yeah, I joined the great unwashed, er, wordy and have a Twitter account. See sidebar at right. No, your other right. Thanks.

It was a dark and stormy night. OK, it was just a fading late afternoon, with dirty slush on the ground, sleet in the air and little wind. But it had been a hellacious day for traffic and was still hellacious for pedestrians. About a foot of wet, sloppy snow piled itself on top of other snow and roads, and caught the city by surprise - for the half that listened to one station’s forecast (the other station got it right[1]). Out into this bitter, miserable day I trudged with a friend, H., I made during my Trondheim trip. We drove to town to have dinner and later see a movie. As we tried to keep our footing across slippery cobblestones, slippery asphalt and slippery flagstones, I asked her if this was going to be a regular thing with us. Each time we’ve met in Bergen, the weather’s been miserable. My friend laughed. We walked down from our parking spot by the university. At the foot of the hill, we crossed the city block that had been affected by a busted water pipe. The water spout

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

The symptoms of (peri)menopause are many. It's almost bizarre what happens to the body in the name of reverse puberty. Like indigestion. I have had a cast iron stomach my whole life - until now. Now I find myself experiencing GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) and heartburn. The really bad part is that it takes away the joy of eating, a joy I don't want to lose. Enter recipes for people with gastric reflux. I tried a few I found via heartburn.about.com . Pictured here are my versions of "Cashew Vegetable Fried Rice" (above) and "Bean and Cheese Burritos with Avocado" (below). Making the bean burrito dish required refried beans. Refried beans are not the sort of dish we ever made at home; we got it at Mexican restaurants. I've always liked them and, for a happy while here in Bergen, I found canned refried beans in the foreign food section at my local grocery store. But no more. So the question wasn't just how to make refried beans, but also

You know how it is: You get a new toy, so you just have to try it out. I installed iLife and iWorks and set iLife to updating my iPhoto library (that thing has gotten pretty big!), and then tried the face recognition software which supposedly can label portraits for you more or less automatically. First experience: Doesn't do too well with tilted heads. I then opened up iWeb for the first time in ages, and set about making an introductory page to all my photo albums on me.com. I also need to finish my 2007 trip. Fiddling with iWeb felt rather inspiring.

No sooner had I rattled on about not blogging , when I discovered a very good use for it: The LaCie disk I use for backups stopped working. I was trying to remember when and where I had purchased it, and searched through my electronic bank account files. Nothing there. I hunted on my hard drive and Spotlight pointed to a number of blog pages. Hmmm... So I searched my blog. Aha, November 2007 ! And it was a mail order, so it was paid by credit card. I dove into my dead tree files and found the receipt. LaCie is a good company, offering a five-year warrantee for its hard drives, so it's just a matter of sending it back to where I bought it. In the meantime, I decided to go see what the local Apple store has. After years of barely realizing there was a personal consumer market for Apple products, Bergen has sprouted two Apple stores: One belonging to a Norwegian chain ( Eplehuset - literally "apple house"), and one morphing from Bergen's oldest Mac seller, EDBerg

Wordless Wednesday UPDATE: Because of the reactions in my comments, I thought it may help to see the original:

I'm probably as baffled as you are, my dear reader, at the lack of activity on my blog. It's not that nothing's happening in my life. I got a lovely raise at work (broke through a personal glass ceiling doing so), am back to full time (no more one-Wednesday-a-month off), health is good (after a round of something flu-like before Christmas), the weather's great (depending on where you live and what day it is), I attended a co-worker's 40th anniversary party (and realized I'm only 15 years shy of such an event myself - eep!), I'm absolutely flabbergasted that 2009 has already eaten up an entire month (and it's Candlemas and Groundhog Day and daylight lasts all the way to 5 pm), I have finished three months' of physical therapy (and the shoulder is now feeling like its old self again - no pun intended), I hauled myself off to the movies to see "Quantum of Solace" and didn't realize until the next day that Bond hadn't had a Q or gadgets