Cool air

You know that cleaning op last weekend? It never happened. You know what that means? That's right, I'm doing it now, friday night. Only it's so damn warm in my flat that I can only keep doing stuff for a few minutes at a time before I need to evacuate to the cool balcony where the wind reaches. For some darned reason the cool air refuses to come into my flat.

At least I have watered all my plants; took 20 liters of water to do the rounds exepting the orchids and a couple of other hardy ones.

Countdown

Apparently it's just about 36 hours left until Bele-honey gets here! Whee!

On another note that means it is just tomorrow left before my short summer vacation. I'm making an attempt to leave at 2pm, but we will see if I make it. It would be great if I do, get a bit of a kick start.

Yep - one week of summer holidays await. Board gaming saturday, Beledra visiting, maybe doing some touristy things (there's SO much of sthlm I have never seen because I don't like doing stuff alone!), but not planning too much. And sleeping. Lovely lovely sleep.

Let sleeping dragons lie

At 2.15 am I was thoroughly woken up by neighbours talking loudly/shouting and howling with laughter outside on their balcony (I could see them from my balcony). Grrrr. Next time that happens on a weekday I am making a certain phone call, for the first time.

Glasses 0kr

Tomorrow we run the same campaign in .no that we did earlier this year in .se and .fi. And we advertised that we would for a week. First 1000 customers get glasses for 0,- (manufacturing fee 200kr). Wonder how much chaos there'll be when I get to work.. But it is quite fun, actually.

Unhealthy realisations

I have been a "fast" eater since I was in like.. 2 grade and got teased for eating so slooow by my classmates. I still inhale my food unless I have something to distract me - good company, a book so that I am eating onehanded, etc. Eating fast is unhealthy - if you don't know why, go google.

Today I realised something that I the moment after I realised it also realised has potential to be terribly unhealthy for me.

While I object to buying food out mostly for financial reasons, I have known for a long time that my time is worth quite alot. And buying a sandwich or something while waiting for the bus or metro home, then eating it while walking, saves me all the time I would spend making food and eating it at home later! 5 minutes to buy the sandwich, can still catch the metro, 4 minutes to eat my sub while walking (or waiting for the metro).

So, yea. More time to blog, more inhaled food, more money spent. Good deal, no?

Heat

According to Accuweather realfeel in Sthlm was 30c about an hour ago. I don't have a thermometer but I can well believe it, going outside was absolutely no help like it was yesterday. It is going to be clear and warm for another week at least, but according to the forecasts not even the sporadic rain eventually coming is going to lower the temperature much.

Pretty pretty please, buy me an AC?

I don't mind the warmth but I like to be able to escape it for a bit. And I have problems sleeping in the heat. :(

On another note I decided it was time to update the info to the left, it's been a year. Might go through the links too; since I added them I've added more but not cleaned out anything.

Trying to be positive

In an attempt to be positive and more friendly towards myself than I usually am I am going to list some things I am good at. Just to have a reminder, like.

• Make milkshakes and smoothies for my friends
• Cook my staple dishes - I excel at. I am a decent cook overall though.
• Draw celtic patterns, among other things usable as bookmarks
• Come up with solutions to problems, thinking outside the box (faaaaar outside...)
• I seem to be developing a green thumb or at least a working relationship with alot of my plants
• I can make creative/beautiful/funny/nice/useful things out of almost any material, be it physical (crafting), literary (words or topics), or audio.
• My cat loves me
• I can cut my own hair and it's not just straight across
• Remembering things or finding information or figuring out what the right answer should be. A combination of memory and ability to connect all the information I have.
  
• Landing on my feet even if I do jump into the deep end first alot of the time.
  

Predicting future regrets

Spent the day alternately lurking on irc/other places reached through my laptop, and reading on the balcony where there is a cooling breeze. Realised I should make a slight effort at cleaning since next week Bele is coming + we are playing boardgames here next weekend (provided the fair weather doesn't make people cancel). But eh.. it'll take ~1 hour to get it all done, later, later.. I know I will regret this tomorrow. Bah.

Reminder to self:
Lämna lägenheten för att köpa nytt SL-kort innan måndag. Annars jobbigt.

For lack of a pollen filter

It was cold for so long that out of care of my roses and bellpeppers I chose to keep the balcony closed (not opening the windows). This week has been warm but I haven't taken the time to do anything about it - today I finally did and wow, what a difference that breath of air does.

So why didn't I before, surely it is just opening a few windows you say? Well - yes, just opening them is easy, they slide to the side. But I also have to make the place catsafe. So today I spent half an hour on a ladder attaching the net to the edges. Scary business, it is a long fall if I lose my balance.

The downside of having it open is that just with 2x 0,5 inch of opening everything was covered in an even layer of yellow pollen that blows in with the wind, I can imagine that it will get so much worse now. But well... it was just too warm, so both the inconvenience of needing to clean away the yellow fine dust and my allergies became lesser priorities. I have heard rumours of pollen filters, but as I understand these are finewoven cloth fabrics that also tend to block out most of the air. And that would make the entire operation beside the point..

I cleaned the windows earlier in the summer but what a waste of energy.. the same pollen is covering them from the outside now, they are as bad as ever.

Sound editing

After spending two days in a very steep learning curve trying to deal with Cubase without anyone to teach me in an attempt to get the new voice messages up on the switchboard before the campaign kicks off tuesday, I spent an extra hour at work tonight just playing with the program, which was alot more fun. I used alot of the bloopers the various people made when recording the voice, and mixed it with a melody/beat to a song of sorts, albeit a short one. However, since its the first music I have played with in that way I am fairly satisfied - it was merely meant as a humorous piece to ease off some of the annoyance of hearing the same message in 53 variations anyway.

I think my workmates might like it, I just hope the people that are featured won't hate me. Nothing I will spread on the intarwebs anyway, but still.

More bugs

I think there are aphids on Lucia. I am not sure. I will add some insect poison anyway just to be sure.

Pondering

I stumbled, mostly by pure accident as a result of inherent curiousity, over what I think is the brother of a dear but long-lost childhood friend on facebook. After pondering for 24 hours I decided to send a message. Why is such a simple thing so scary?

Support needed, I guess.

Things are just getting worse and worse computerwise.

• My laptop is unable to read CDs/DVDs burnt by another computer than itself. Bought things are usually ok (but not always - and older CDs are definitely off). One workaround: Put the CD in the drive on the desktop system, SCP in and copy them over the internet.
  
• However the desktop system does not always like the internet. For instance now: It decided it is better off being offline and nothing I do seem to convince it otherwise.
• Fixing errors is made difficult by the fact that something seemed to happen to the graphic driver on that computer the other week - the image is definitely pinched. Very much. So much that I can barely navigate. )( like that. But only when showing the desktop, not on the login prompt or the screen saver...
  
• Also, I cannot actually browse files on that computer in any other way than using a terminal. Everything else just blinks and shuts down again within 1 second when I try starting it.
• But XMMS works! And Spotify works IF the internet connection happens to work.
  
• When installing the printer, my laptop and the printer can see eachother via a wireless ad-hoc connection (they mutually confirm finding the connection), but the driver installation program thingie is unable to find the printer in any other way than via USB. Thus I will just have to carry my laptop over and connect it via USB if I want to print things.
• My desktop system is refusing to give me back the CD I recently copied stuff over to the laptop from (before the connection died).
  
• My laptop is very slow and easily overheating, and it loves to go into PIO mode randomly just to become even slower. However I just have to switch it back, so its not the worst.
  

If you have suggestions how to fix one or more of the above problems, please help me. I've run out of ideas and actually have to admit that it seems I am unable to fix them on my own.

Search patterns (aka. I have some time over today)

I picked a random date back in time - april 1st, 2008, as it turned out, and took out some statistics on what people have searched for to wind up on my blog from then to now. Then I went through it and grouped those that are basically the same.

1: Post-it origami, origami, folding is top1 with 481 hits.
2: My friend Beledra gets more hits on my blog than I do myself, she has 133 hits here,
3: ..while I have 127.
4: Search terms about allergies, illness, medicines, MRI and astigmatism has 27 hits.
5: Search terms with "random" in them, that are not "random silme" or similar, has 24 hits.
6: Stinking Ikea furniture has 21 hits - apparently there are more people than me that thinks it does stink.
7: Ystävänpäivä, friendship day has 14 hits, with or without my name.
10: 11 hits to Fjelberg, Halsnoy and Norway road trips when I group them (I do because they appear in the same context in my posts).
8: Tall ships has 10 - including searches directly for what I know is the names of some tall ships.
9: Unecessary information, onödig information, has 9 hits!


Other patterns:
5 people wanted to know how to spend their sundays if they are bored and lazy.
2 people wanted to know how to become diligent.
2 people wanted to disturb sleeping cats.
2 people wanted to buy Kathie Winkle items (why didn't they mail me??).
6 people looked for ubuntu cola.
6 people looked for the meaning of oniochalasia.
11 people came through looking for other things I've linked to which is not Beledra.
3 people wanted to get a tan quickly the chemical way
4 people wanted to play flash games.
2 people wanted to tidy their book cases.
4 people wanted to order norwegian black sand.
8 people were looking for five errors.
2 people wanted to buy books at the annual book sale in Sweden ("bokrean")
2 people were looking for some schaufensterpuppen
2 people wanted to see a miniature forest.
3 people wanted to go to the movies alone.
2 people wanted to committ logocide.
12 people are unnaturally interested in witches on broomsticks (grouped under origami above since thats why they came here).
...and a bunch of people search for stuff which I have no idea how it made them come here.

Yaaawn Zzz

I was taking photos of him for quite a while, and he was doing his best to stay awake and give me his full attention, but.. just.. cannot.. resist..

Indoor roses...

Yes, yes, I'll give you a break from the roses now.

Macro Rose

New Dawn and Lichtkönigin Lucia, respectively.

Four different stages of maturity in a rose

Fyra på rad/Four in a row/Fire på rad

On photo: New Dawn. Click to enlarge.

Bugs in the system

Another infestation of small green bugs on my balcony plants. Couldn't see any on the roses so the bug-poison might still be working, but the cucumberwort and the bellpepper plants were bugged down, the former more than the latter. The cw got thrown out completely since its not very attractive anyway and the bellpepper plants got a trip in the shower to rinse off the bugs. If I use the bug-poison on them I won't be able to eat the fruits I will hopefully be getting off them...

Couldn't see anything on the sugarsnaps nor the lettuce either, luckily.

Beats me how the bugs get into my winter-garden style balcony - my plants were completely bug-free by july last year, I haven't brought in any more grown plants just seeds which I've cultivated in there or in my kitchen.

Cravings, but not for carrots.

A bit too much alcohol last night left me a far cry from my usual early morning cheerfulness today. With some more sleep I started feeling alot better though, and by 2pm I was having breakfast and surfing the net in my usual, if late, fashion.

By now I've given in to my urges and ordered pizza. It'll be lukewarm when it comes here (I live too far out in the suburbs, obviously), but whatever.. I am sure it'll be wonderful anyway.

Far better than the carrots I ate in an attempt to feed my cravings earlier anyway...

__
Later addition: It was actually hot upon arrival for once. I was very pleasantly surprised.