A Roll in the Universe

Yesterday's grouchiness was a warning. My body and my moods are basically klaxons trying to get my attention. This morning I had no energy, no desire, no absent Grumpy. He was still with me. He had a message. I hate when I'm like this. I hate that my emotions so easily rise to the surface and I have neither the inclination nor the ability to force them back down, not even when the situation demands that I do. (Blowing up at work is a really bad idea.) I got a reminder today that dealing with mental exhaustion, with panic attacks and its attendant issues, takes time. I was feeling too good Tuesday. I know now that I was not on the way up, but out of balance. Yesterday that lack of balance made itself known. I thought I'd headed it off at the pass, armed with hugs, but nope. On a good day I can wrestle with my feelings, but on a good day I'm not even in this battle. So I'm trying to face a dragon and all I can muster is a "whatever". It takes energy to...

So, I'm busy downloading old photos from my Flickr account because Flickr is being sold and I'm tired of dealing with various TOS. 'Sides, I'm paying for Dropbox. And digging through the old stuff, here's one from 15 years ago: The weekend I was a professional astrologer. Giving an astrological reading at the Bergen New Age Fair (Alternativmessen) 2003 First of all: Dig the Mac laptop! The toilet lid, as Norwegian Mac afficiendos called it. Heh. I still have the striped knitted cardigan behind me. Handknitted by a dear no-longer-with-us friend who picked quality wool and did quality work. I shared the booth with the blonde Tarot reader in the corner. Haven't stayed in touch. If you dig into the links to earlier pages, you'll find where I wrote about the weekend I spent at the New Age Fair 2003 in Bergen and some other astrology stuff. I never stuck with it. It turns out I don't find people all that interesting. Let me rephrase: I like helping and ...

Some words in the English language are a lot of fun to say or look at or both. Skedaddle, poppycock, aviation, jiffy, moron. Today's Daily Prompt (I'm obviously not doing them daily) is Jiffy . I am a person who walks fast and likes to get things done quickly, but I never say I'll get things done in a jiffy. I'm never too sure how long something will take me, and am absolutely certain that a jiffy is not long enough. As Wikipedia points out (I found that link in a jiffy): Jiffy is an informal term for any unspecified short period of time, as in "I will be back in a jiffy". From this it has acquired a number of more precise applications for short, very short, or extremely short periods of time. And there's the rub. Extremely short periods of time are wonderful at the dentist's. Who wants drilling to go on for more than a second or two? Or have a metal tool scraping plaque off your teeth for more than a moment? These things are wonderful when they ...

Prologue: On the way home from a midnight birdwatching session, I saw two tawny owls. First one by the side of road, and another atop a lamp post. Beautiful birds, calmly staring back at me. The myth is that old dogs can't learn new tricks. The truth is, we can, but we might need a bit more coaxing. And coffee. Last year, I was forced to switch jobs and with that, learn a whole new set of skills. I was wondering how my then 53-year-old brain would handle it. Turns out, it handled it just like a 23-year-old brain would: With patience, notes, and lots of coffee and candy. Because heavy-duty learning is exhausting ! I hadn't realized that. I just thought you're tired in college because of not enough sleep or something. Turns out you're tired because learning several new things every single day is like running a marathon every single day—but brains need more energy and more recovery time than bodies do. The brain marathon hasn't ended. There's always somet...

Moonrise from my kitchen window (Trying to automate posting this photo led me into the land of IFTTT . I still don't have automation, but I've acquired a new password to herd.)

Sailing out from Copenhagen, on the ferry bound for Oslo, we pass by a long line of wind turbines standing tall out in the water. As "green" as I am, I have never liked the looks of the modern three-bladed wind turbine. There is something about them that bothers me. When I watch them turn, I find that there is no evenness to their rotation; visually, it looks to me like three Barbie doll legs, one "falling" down after another. (I have rarely seen these things moving so fast you can't make out the individual blades.) Apparently, these turbines are not as environmentally friendly as we are led to believe. In the county of Rogaland in Norway, one array is noise polluting a nearby neighborhood. I have read that the maximum three blades on modern turbines is chosen because it makes a minimum of noise. Still, anything that big, rotating in the wind, will make some sound. Another array was put in a white-tailed eagle breeding area two counties north of where I l...

I think the most frustrating experience with the internet is TL;DR—too long, didn't read. I have a long list of longer articles that I know interest me and that I want to read but the energy just isn't there. Or the focus isn't. Or the time. How annoying! All this knowledge literally in my lap (or at least near it), and still so out of reach! I was reading about how productivity may be killing creativity over at Lifehacker , an article about how we distract ourselves by staying online rather than allowing ourselves to go offline and "'do' less and 'think' more". There was this long quote from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that, at the time, was TL;DR. But I knew I wanted to. I knew it was about my hunger for something more than status updates, for information that feels deep and significant and not like another piece of trivia. Once again, I find myself wanting to write . To rekindle my existence on my blog, because, h...

Yes, this post will be about boobies. Also known as tits. Mugs. Jugs. Bazongas. Melons. Breasts. Breasts and the big squeeze. Also known as getting a mammogram. In Norway, all woman are automatically offered bi-annual mammography examinations between the ages 50 and 69. Just before Easter this year, I got the letter informing me of my first appointment, accompanied by a questionnaire and a brochure, all delicately done in pleasant shades of pale green (now long recycled). Every time I see the picture of a well-endowed woman (they always seem to have pendulous, D-cup boobies), topless, standing next to a large piece of machinery, with one breast flattened between two plates of glass, I cringe. I cringe mightily. Breasts are sensitive and don’t like rough handling, and it hurts like hell to get them squeezed. So I’ve read about breast cancer and mammography and I’ve also read about alternative technologies of spotting growths in mammaries, like shining a light through like wh...

I have a bookmark that reads, "You are never lonely with a book." Books have been my allies for as long as I can remember. Getting immersed in a story that takes double-digit chapters to resolve or following someone's theory or life over hundreds of pages adds a break from life like nothing else. And unlike other pauses in life, what you read in a book can stay with you for years, and maybe even change your life. Alice has written about the paper-based book and has linked to an article whose author feels that a Kindle would be as distracting as his computer apparently is. First of all, anybody who wants to have a good read will shut their computer off. You are not a Real Reader if you can’t figure out how to hide away (i.e. have an arsenal of sneaky tricks and good excuses) from things and tasks and people and clocks so you can Read! Secondly, when I’m reading something that really interests me, I lose all sense of time and place, anyway. (Which is absolutely wonde...

So over at Chez Alice's, Alice herself posted about the dearth of postings on her blog. Specifically, postings that feature writing, rather than photography. I recognize and sympathize with Alice's sense of lack since my own blog has the same dearth. The amount of time has not changed. The interest in the world around me has not tapered off. Yet all my time at the computer no longer produces creative output. Repeatedly, my creativity is spent on a comment or three on someone's Facebook status or on someone's blog. Short bursts of opinion weigh in after writing, editing, and more editing - at someone else's place. And it baffles me. Where is my initiative to polish and publish something on my own dear blog (which has been with me for 8 years and 11 months today)? Why does my creativity remind me more of junk food grabbed on the run than a proper home-cooked meal eaten where it was made? And how do I reverse this? Alice and I have challenged each other to a ...

A scene from work: My boss comes over to talk to me, and I am typing something, and continue to do so as I look up at him to answer him. He stares in horrified fascination at my fingers accurately producing words on the screen without me looking, and finally can't stand it any more and orders, "Look down! Look down!" It became a running gag between us. Me, I can't remember when last I saw another person typing with all ten fingers. Touch typing. I see a lot of typing, but it's all done with two or four fingers, evenly distributed between two hands. I did have another boss who typed with four fingers and he was as fast as me with my ten (nine, actually. I don't use my left thumb.). I know how to touch type because my family advised me to take typing classes in school. I discovered I sucked at typing itself—never getting beyond 30 words per minute if I wanted to avoid mistakes—but I was very good at the non-typing stuff: Adjusting margins, changing ri...

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

I first saw a computer in the 1970's and my first job out of high school was for a manufacturer of so-called mini-machines: The size of a washing machine, with storage and memory measured in kilobytes, not megabytes, and running BASIC. Barely 10 years later, I was an expert with WordPerfect on an IBM PC, after several years of using a Wang (look it up), and what I learned about Lotus 1-2-3 back then has helped me use Excel ever since. Then came e-mail. What fun! Then came the internet, and I got hooked up at home in 1997. More fun! I even learned HTML and designed my own webpages. I became an eager user of Usenet. I even figured out IRC and took an entire course via ICQ. Web 1.0 was good to me. Web 2.0 came along with interactive applications embedded in the web browser. Some were cooler (and more useful) than others. I like del.icio.us and still use it, and Twitter and Facebook are also in use. And blogs and Blogger, of course! I found a good use for Google Docs the day I ...

I'm back on Twitter . And Facebook . I'm kafox9 on Twitter and kafox on Facebook. There. I am no longer a dinosaur. I am no longer hitting myself in the face with a hammer. I have decided I can't beat them so I join them. And I owe it to these two ladies . Speaking of two ladies, here's a pair I want to be like when I grow up and here's why . I love people who call a shovel a shovel.

(This is an English translation of a Norwegian original .) Today I came across a well-written essay from a Swedish teenager . She was scared to death about her generation. She is worried about what will become of them. They seem to be so self-destructive. They are still embarrassed in the school locker room, while being happily posing in minimal clothes on the web. The Swedish teenager wants to know where we, who were kids in the 60's, are as parents. Why do we not look in on our kids? Why do we not read their Myspace or blog pages? Why do we not insist on making them come home at a decent hour? She touched a nerve in me, and I left the longest comment I've ever written on the Norwegian site that first pointed me to the Swedish girl's entry. This is my translation of that comment : To the Swedish youth who wrote that she was scared to death: I'm sorry. I am a 48-year-old woman, born as the 1960's started. I don't have children of my own, but I do have pow...

I dag kom jeg over et godt skrevet innlegg fra en svensk jente via Aftenposten . Den svenske jenten er livredd for sin generasjon. Hun opplever generasjonen sin som selvdestruktiv; de er sjenerte i fellesdusjen, men publiserer nakenbilder på nettet. Hun savner at foreldrene bryr seg, og henvender seg til oss som født på 60-tallet. Det hun sa fikk meg til å skrive det lengste kommentaren noensinne, og jeg gjengir den her. Til den svenske ungdommen som skrev at hun er livredd: Jeg beklager. Jeg er en kvinne på 48, født idet 60-tallet begynte. Jeg har ikke barn selv, men jeg har observasjonsevne. Jeg har ofte sagt at vi som var barn på 60-tallet var den siste generasjonen som hadde voksne rundt oss - kjente og ukjente - som passet på oss, kjeftet på oss, veiledet oss, _så oss_. Vi hadde grunn til å respektere voksne og regler. Så skjedde en voldsom oppmyking og endatil opphør av både regler og respekt i samfunnet. Det gikk ikke til helvete, men å bøye seg ydmyk for autoriteter var ...

This year submitting the income tax forms was done entirely via computer. Forms were received via a web page, and submitted via a web page. A little too quickly on my part. (Next year I won't try to be first.) I should have reacted at the print-out my bank gave me; it showed me owning stock. I don't. The tax return was published this week, and I was notified via e-mail and SMS. Since I was a little too quick, and my bank's global correction came a week after I submitted my tax forms, I decided to file a complaint last night. Electronically, of course. Well, after a frustrating evening of being locked out of my own account (which may not have been my fault) and not getting passwords to my right e-mail account, I finally sorted out passwords, e-mail addresses and password codes, and merrily filled out the online complaints form. It protested when I neglected to check off the box for being within the complaint deadline. I checked the deadline box off. The numbers 108 app...