A friend recently moved into a new apartment with his new girlfriend and her kids, and now he's getting rid of about half his book collection (shelf space and time issues). So he offered me to come have a look and just pick whatever I wanted out of that half. Came home from there with about one fifth of that half - about 70 books.. guh. Crazy generous man wouldn't even accept any payment. It's hundreds of dollars worth of books, of various types, sci-fi, fantasy, dictionaries, facts, graphic novels... And before the books, he gave us two huge boxes with role playing games, worth even more than all those books. Definitely owe him...

Sadly the cloud cover was heavy and it was snowing here this morning so the solar eclipse was impossible to see. You could apparently see it in Gothenburg though.



photo by Eva Sturesson

So, it's 2011. And now I discover that Murray Head from Chess, is older brother to Anthony Stewart Head. I've had Chess on cassette since it was released (though now I listen to it on Spotify of course)! I feel so clueless...

Woah, hey.

Snow.

I take it over November rain any day, but still. Lots of snow.

I finally made a computer purchase. Not the desktop that I've been looking at, since I've realised I wouldn't have time to play with it before I go on vacation, but instead a Netbook so I have something mobile with me when I am on vacation. I've been somewhat tempted by netbooks for a long while, but have been holding out for the right battery life and price and when I finally found a combination I liked I couldn't resist. (A contributing factor is of course also that my poor laptop is slowly falling apart on me. Sound is now so glitchy I have to fiddle with it several times each hour and that's when it's immobile on my desk. In actual mobile state I can just say goodbye to the right sound channel all together. The processor also has started to overheat which is... bad).
So now I'm impatiently waiting for the delivery of my (black) Samsung N210, with 12 (or realistically, 9) hours of battery life!
I find it vaguely amusing that the specs for it is actually better than the specs for my laptop. Performance and storage wise, at least.

(Another contributing factor to getting a new mobile device is the nice and shiny fixed price mobile broadband I just got at work - free for private use whenever I want, as long as it's inside the country)

When I first listened to a few tracks from Anna Von Hausswolff's debut CD, I wasn't too impressed and suspected hype. But then I listen again, and now? I'm completely utterly addicted. Her album Singing From the Grave is all that's been looping on spotify for several days now. 'The Book' in particular just gives me shivers. Spotify link, here... http://open.spotify.com/track/7ME8uromsatLR39mklTdRV

I'm having a baking phase at the moment. So tonight I decided to try out a nettle bread that sounded really tasty. There was only two problems:
1. The measurements given has to be extremely off. I know I follwed the instructions to the letter (well, aside from 2, below) and it's just too little flour in it. I kept adding, and adding, and adding until I didn't dare any longer and set it to rise and kept my fingers crossed.
2. The recipie calls for ground nettle, which I knew I had. Only, I had finely ground nettle, i.e. nettle powder.

After the first hour when I was going to divide it up in to go into the baking pans, it was still not solid enough. I got it into the pans, but... I have no idea what this will turn out as as it's just all green goop. An absolutely distastefull, ickily green, goop...


e.t.a. Luckily, once baked it turned more greenish-black in colour. And it tastes really good. So I'm chalking that up as successful, after all.

So, in all likelyhood the number of people reading my LJ who will get it is.. close to zero, but this weeks reply to the "Question of the week" in the Hey, Answerman! column was just too awsome not to link to.
(Though I have to say that I like Kugimiya Rie not only in Fullmetal Alchmist, but also in Bleach and... umm.. yeah, that's pretty much it)

The first time I ordered from amazon.co.jp I realized that their definition of 'in english' was quite... narrow. But after having navigated amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr and amazon.de through the years, this was not too much of a hassle after all. The biggest issue was the shipping, I really couldn't make heads or tail of it, just conclude that it was expensive and there was no other options than the one I was presented with. Turns out if was DHL. DHL delivers daytime at an unspecified time during the day. Not ideal at all when you work 08-17. Even less ideal when you get whisked away on short notice to work in a a foreign country the week they try to deliver. After a week of futile delivery, they at least left the package at the postal facility where I could go (far out of my way) and get it.
So when I ordered the next time (last Sunday) I figured I should be clever and have it delivered to work instead. A splendid idea in theory. In reality, not so much. First the book was delayed shipping, and didn't get scheduled to arrive until Friday. And then the driver showed up when a. I was on the phone and b. Everyone else was in a meeting. Once I realized what happened I called them up, the driver was still in town but said he couldn't turn around. But he could leave the package where he was, if I and they agreed. So that's why I ended up trekking around the Volvo factory a freezing dark Friday night to pick my package up from a gate guard, and then take an even longer trek back across the regiment fields that's between Volvo factories and our flat.
But at least I got my package (the content is saved for another post).

After hours of painstaking work looking up kanji and slowly, slowly working out a translation of a particular interesting passage of Zipang. v. 34, JWPce crashed and corrupted my document so it's all lost and I have to start over. And most of the new kanji used in that volume I hadn't copy-pasted to my main Zipang kanji list with useful words (everyday words like 大和 - Yamato, 艦 - warship, 空母 - aircraft carrier, 反撃 - counterattack...) yet.

糞!

Guess this is a sign I should take a break and get back to those chores.