Recently, in a galaxy far too close for comfort

I'm alive!


Warning: The Xbox 360 game Oblivion is highly addictive.


I scrapped the attempts at nanofiction I wrote for the art meme. This is going to take quite some time... My dear suedeiohead, since you missed the meme post, I just might include you anyway. But don't expect anything.

This Oblivion addiction is an absolute bitch to fight. I have the day off and am rather frantically mucking about on LJ, hoping that I'll manage to stay away from the Xbox and get out of the house and do the errands I was supposed to do on Saturday.

Somehow, probably when my husband wrestles the controller out of my grasp, I actually clean and knit and read a bit and even sleep some. Which is nothing less than amazing.

There's something exhilarating about shopping Big Expensive Stuff like, say, kitchen stoves. You walk into the shop, looking at several stoves and failing completely at pretending to know anything about such things, because the stove you already own is as old as you are and completely sans nifty features, and all of a sudden you've gone and bought one.

One that cleans itself and all.

And you walk out of the shop feeling like you haven't spent any money at all, because it was paid for with a card and you're not carrying anything, and you feel a bit light-headed because you have this vague notion that in a couple of weeks you won't have to wait for twenty minutes while the oven heats up, and you'll have a nice, shiny new thing in your kitchen instead of the rusty, creaky, battered old thing that currently resides there.

But it's all a bit hazy and unreal, because you don't get to unpack the shiny new thing when you get home and put it in its place.


Speaking of shopping; I now have a pair of absolutely perfect black cotton trousers and a pair of dark grey jeans. Never underestimate the power of boring chain stores*. And we have a new phone, which we sorely needed. It's sad having to get rid of the ultra cool Jacob Jensen phone that has served us well for nearly a decade, but that's the way of all things. Excuse me while I wax vastly philosophical over a telephone.

But it sure looks lovely.



The new one doesn't look anywhere near as impressive. It just looks like a... well, phone. Cordless. Black. Simple.

But it's very far from ugly, because we don't want ugly things in our home. Hell, even the LCD screen cleaner kit we bought today looks like it won a design award.


Yes, I care deeply about such things. I can't bear living among ugly, worn-out things. I have, and I grew restless and uneasy. I need a bit of beauty around me.

Such as the Morten Krogvold poster we have on the wall which I bought at a flea market for the price of a chewing-gum and a lolly, or the stereo which is very 70's retro, or our furniture which is all blond wood and straight lines and no frills.

By the by, has a single person featured on MTV Cribs selected any of their furniture or wallpaper themselves? All those houses look like the same decorator did them.

Plus: book shelves are beautiful by default, provided they're filled with books and not with china and various knick-knacks. There is much book shelf beauty in this home.

And soon, very soon, will one piece of distinct ugliness be replaced with a sleek white brand new piece of, if not beauty, at least aesthetic pleasantness.



*Lindex, for those of you who know of them

There's a really angry man outside, who's been swearing non-stop for about ten minutes. If he didn't repeat himself so much, I would have been impressed. As it is, "FUCK FUCK WHORE FUCK" *kicks garbage can* "WHORE FUCK WHORE" is just boring and mildly annoying.

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More and more, I'm regretting that we didn't just quietly get married and never ever told anybody. I fear that a supermassive family get-together is being planned by my in-laws.

Now, the husband-to-be has a nice, small, manageable family. I don't, and I suspect they're not factoring in my various ex-sisters-in-law, nephews, nieces and even great-nephew. They did ask how many siblings I have, who in themselves almost outnumber my boyfriend's entire family, but as far as I know, they didn't inquire about other people who count as my family.

But I really, really need to push those thoughts away. It's their production, not mine. We're spending our wedding day doing nice, quiet things on our own just the way we like it, and if we have to endure a great big family thingamajig when we get back, fine. We don't have to do any planning, and we get to spend the big day itself in a way that suits us.

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I don't suppose anybody finds crocheting interesting. That's really too bad.

I seem to have developed an addiction to making these floppy girly scarves. A got her soft green one, the first I made, and was very impressed (but she's rubbish at any craft and is very easily impressed when somebody makes something with their own hands). Have finished L's vivid green one, started a black one for myself and bought grey yarn for mum's (she was none too subtle when she saw L's, dropping very blatant hints about how nice and soft and warm and unusual it was).

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I finally got around to fixing the embroidery I accidentally ripped loose on my wedding dress, and was floored when I realised that the sequins on it aren't sequins at all - they're tiny discs of mother-of-pearl. Goes to show how much attention I paid to it... But it's lovely. I think I need to take some close-ups and treat everyone to the pretty details. I bet you can't wait.

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It must be such fun to be insane enough to believe you are Otherkin.

I tidied up a pile of my shoulder bags today, ending up cleaning three and binning four, but the interesting bit is what I found in them.

Let's have a list, shall we.

Various receipts and outdated train timetables

2 bags of sugar, apparently acquired in Rome

1 refreshing towelette, also apparently acquired in Rome

1 brownish-tinted lipbalm (the only lip-related thing with any colour I own, have been wondering where that was)

1 mobile phone headset (which went missing about a week after I bought the phone last year)

2 excellent gel-ink ballpoint pens

1 craptastic gel-ink ballpoint pen

2 yellow markers, dried up

1 refillable Ronson lighter, in beautiful gunmetal grey and silver colours (bought at the Tivoli in Copenhagen, where there's a brilliant tobacco shop)

8 (eight. E-I-G-H-T. For fuck's sake) non-refillable lighters

1 pocket hairbrush+mirror

1 camera bag, belonging to my Nikon APS

1 book (Truman Capote - Music for Chameleons)

1 microfibre cloth for cleaning glasses (been looking for that one for ages)

Jesus fucking Christ in thigh-high boots.

Note to self: if something goes missing, look in the various shoulder bags.

Note to self 2: when refilling a Ronson and checking if it works, and it doesn't, it's a bad idea to peer into it to see if anything's blocking something while still attempting to light it. It's potentially bad for fringes and eyebrows. Only marvellous reflexes will save said hair areas. Thankfully, one does have marvellous reflexes.


The irony is that I was looking for a specific bag. And didn't find it.

Wtf wtf wtf, suddenly all hits to my journal show as deadmanshake, while the IPs blatantly don't belong to him. Unless he moves from India to the UK to Norway to the US in hours...

Anyway.



Look! It's lovely 14-eyelet DMs with twin zips, discreetly placed on each side of the lacing. And they're mine.

Well, they will be, when I get a package from Cloggs. I saw them in a shop today, and made a drooling spectacle of myself, but they were sold out in my size. Rather than going on a presumably futile hunt in Oslo shops on Monday, I went and ordered them.

I so love the zips. At age 18 or so, I would have scoffed enormously at something as pedestrian as zips on my DMs, but I've grown old and weary and very bloody tired of spending an extra half hour on my footwear each morning. Haven't owned zipless boots since I was about 23. My 8-eyelet DMs are sufficiently annoying to lace, thank you very much.

I also got a pretty light green thin knit shrug to go with the wedding dress. It should go well with the dress. The shop had that shrug in a very nice dark beige too, and as they marvellously were on sale, I just might go get that too. They're highly useable as everyday wear, as well as being fine for my usual toned-down style of dressing up.

Aaah. Now, if only Israel would get the hell out of Gaza, things would be fairly well in my world.

Today's entertainment.

And I say unto thee: thou shalt not get tattoos in languages thou don't friggin' understand.


I loathe "Chinese" and "Japanese" tattoos. If you don't know Hanzi or Kanji very, very well, just steer clear of them. You might think they look cool, but my first thought whenever I see such a tattoo is "I wonder if this person knows even the tiniest bit about these characters, and I wonder what it really means, as opposed to what this person thinks it means".

The Hanzi Smatter site also points out bad penmanship, characters placed upside down and other such atrocities.

Another interesting point is that such "symbols" are the cheapest tattoos you can get, so the tattoo artist is likely to not care much about the calligraphy and correctness.


Of course, if someone who reads this happens to bear such a tattoo that they know what means (i.e. they know their Hanzi or Kanji) and it's a good piece of calligraphy, they don't need to get offended. Any others might want to send a photo of their ink to Hanzi Smatter.

I'm reading Christopher Brookmyre's Be My Enemy and having occasional incidents of actual laughing-out-loud.

As I habitually read several books at once, I've also started Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, but I got sufficiently caught up in Brookmyre to put Card aside for a few days, and, amazingly, to not start His Dark Materials yet.


In other news, we've got new neighbours. They apparently think it's an ace idea to let a pint-sized kid take a big fucking Rottweiler for a walk each morning. The hellhound takes no interest in me, thank the gods, but yesterday it got pissed off at a passer-by. Witnessing a big mean-looking dog trudging after a stranger, barking and dragging along a powerless little child, was more than mildly unsettling.

It's tempting to tell the lad's parents (parent, maybe? I've only seen his mum) to take their dog out themselves, and that it's fucking irresponsible to let a tiny child do it, but people who own Rottweilers are generally not all that open to criticism. I suppose we'll just have to wait for the beast to bite someone or drag the kid under a moving car or something.

Oh, the humanity.


Today's good news: The Libertine is finally shown on an Oslo cinema, as of tomorrow. Sadly, I'll be out of town, or I would have bought tickets for the opening. I've waited patiently for the DVD, not expecting it to make it to the cinemas here at all, but there will be no more worries.


A little later...

Guess who locked herself out of her office, in a deserted building?

Guess who had to run to another building, look for a master key, not finding one etc etc ad nauseaum?

Guess who had a major hassle just getting access to a bloody telephone, so she could call security and get them to let her in?

Ohgodohgodohgod the embarrassment when the guard person showed up.

First, the Holocaust revisionist conference in Tehran. I must admit it's quite refreshing to see other nations than the US attempting to police the world, what with the Iranian president suggesting that if they decide that Holocaust happened (a bit delayed, that), they will consider suitable punishment for Germany, such as giving over land to establish a Jewish state, so Israel can cease to exist. On the other hand, irrational minds are always very, very scary.

Second, The Vineyards got a review in Dagsavisen I rather agree with, and amused me by opening with "as soon as Gluecifer steps down from the throne, The Vineyards are ready to take over" or something to that effect. Good point.

Third, yesterday Tom Spanbauer's The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon arrived from Amazon. And I finished it yesterday. 368 pages and a good chunk out of my night's sleep, but I couldn't bring myself to putting it down for longer than about five minutes at a time. Holy hell, what a novel. The imagery, the oddly constructed sentence gems, the story. The play with identities and self-defining. The traces of magic realism. It's funny and sad and ugly and beautiful and thrilling and epic and convoluted.
Thanks muchly to dew_dropped, who recommended it.

Today, I hate my job very very much (except from getting to sort out a really cool problem, which makes me kinda pseudo-vicariously cool) and I can't wait to get home.

Being the Jungian personality type I am (not to mention that I'm obsessed with Jungian personality types), I need to gather strength for tomorrow's housewarming party at a friend's (and wham, there goes both Nick Cave and Velvet Underground in the head - All Tomorrow's Parties), I crave some serious alone time before events such as that.

Maybe I should continue tagging old LJ entries. Or start ripping the dreaded last batch, alphabetically, of the CD collection. It annoys me so much that whenever I want to listen to Violent Femmes, the only song I have is the one off the The Crow soundtrack. Plus, I need XTC.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is damn good, by the way. I had a moment of utter disappointment, screaming "INCONSISTENCY!", and then she sorted it neatly out in the next paragraph. Whew. I'm eagle-eyed and extremely short-tempered when it comes to inconsistencies in novels, a legacy from the literature studies, I suppose.

Me bloke's working the late shift at the library today, so I'll be having dinner all on my lonesome, which today I suspect means pizza at Justisen. Wait. No. It's Friday, which means that Justisen will be brimming with aprés-work beer drinkers. Bugger.

Sometimes I wish I liked to cook.

It would seem that even though you've been a complete idiot and lost the guarantee thingy you got when buying your AKG K26 P headphones, you still get them serviced for free. Or, in the case of your snapped headphones being non-repairable, which you will find out within a week, you get brand new ones. As a bonus, the manager at the hi-fi shop was really nice and didn't mind at all (at least not visibly) that you scared two other customers badly as they stood next to you and overheard your K26 brokenness discourse - whilst jacking their own freshly bought K26s into their iPods. It was, however, made clear that it was probably your own fault that the headphones broke in the first place.

The observant reader will by now have figured out that "you"/"your" in this context is easily replaced with "I"/"my".

I contemplated getting Sennheisers, but found that there was absolutely no way I could stand the thought of any headphones but my lovely AKGs. I'll cheerfully take a discussion on K26 vs. PX 200 any day. Not that I actually think Sennheiser headphones are of anything less than outstanding quality (but please, do ask me what I think of PortaPro), but I've tried on the boyfriend's PX 200s and find that I vastly prefer my K26s.

Now, all I have to do is somehow survive another week without proper portable music.