The World in Tonevision

Chronic Book Buying Syndrome

Yup. Still got it: that compulsion to keep buying books even though the to-be-read-shelves are not being emptied at anywhere near to the pace with which they are being filled up. At a glance, I would say that I have about 2,5 meters of to-be-read shelf waiting for me to finish it.

Does this stop me from browsing bookstores? Or from coming home with a steady stream of new volumes? Afraid not. Booksales are particularly difficult to steer clear of.

It has always been my policy that no matter how limited my budget, my book-budget should be unlimited as far as at all practicable, but after moving house in November I started to entertain a nagging suspicion that maybe, just maybe, there can be too much of even such a fantastic thing as books. However, in my collection is the complete series of Kinsella's Shopoholic books - very educational- and I know that justifying overbuying is mostly a matter of coming up with good reasons why you need stuff. Which should never be a problem.

So todays purchases were completely necessary, for the following reasons:

Barske Ramperim by Gustav Lorentzen: Baby Oscar doesn't have a lot of books yet, and Gustav Lorentzen was one of the great heroes of my childhood. Badass poetry seems to me a much better way to increase the little fellow's cultural capital than the Mozart setting on the babygym (which is in the process of driving me insane, little by little).

Asylsøker: Documentary photography about asylum seekers. Can't have too much documentary or too much photography, and the subject matter is very politically correct to boot.

Måtehold i grådighetens tid (Temperance in the Age of Greed): well, based on all of the above information this should be food for thought and very appropriate for yours truly...

if I can only find the time for reading it.

I am now officially a winner! :-)

 Lo and behold, my prize:

Yes, indeed. A lovely pink web-badge. Well worth slaving away for the better part of a month, no?

It has been amazing fun, and the sense of achievement after surpassing the 50 000 word requirement today is completely out of proportion with the fact that large parts of the book is, for lack of a better word, tripe. Now, I don't mean to knock tripe, I actually like it in polish flaki soup for instance, but it's not like I'd pay money for a book on it. If you get my drift.

But I must say, the output improved tremendously towards the end of the writing process, and the fun I had assembling the different storylines into something resembling a unified story was amazing! At the moment I feel like it might actually be worth sitting down and editing the thing. I might actually do it. The aim of course being to write, in the words of Nanowrimo founder Chris Baty "something that won't make people vomit". Friends and family beware if you get a rectangular, flat and sort of stinky christmas-present this year...

Anyhow, it is done, finished, over with, and I can absolutely recommend it to anyone thinking about taking up the challenge next year. Yay!

*toasting self in champagne flavoured soda*

Efficiency - or the art of not overthinking it

We're in the process of moving house this week. Something I don't exactly love at the best of times, but which is just ridiculously taxing when you're 8 months pregnant, big as a house, working and writing a novel at the same time. But we had movers, so the moving of boxes was as painless and efficient as one could wish for. Due to a temporary lapse of judgement on my part I said "yes, why not?" when they suggested starting the move at 6am tuesday morning rather than ten, which was great for the moving van finding a parking space and for finishing early but not as great for staying on good terms with the neighbours in the place we were moving out from. It was too late by the time I thought of that. But, then again, what can they do? Kick us out? Ha.

Now that the boxes are all moved, all we need to do is to get some furniture (only a sofa, dining room table, bed, cot, six or seven bookshelves, and ten or so other things, nothing much really) from ikea, assemble them (easy-peasy!), and we're officially moved in!

As for electrical goods, we needed a washing machine, a microwave oven after a Very Bad Popcorn Incident with the previous one, and a TV. The latter feels a bit spoilt as I already own a very nice, comfortably lumpy TV with inbuilt quality control (that is, you turn it on, it turns itself off, you turn it on again, it turns itself off again and so on 3-15 times depending on room temperature, as if to say "are you positive you really need to be watching TV at this particular point in time" - which, let's face it, you very rarely really need). But my partner for some reason felt like this was a bit of a nuisance rather than an advantage, so I succumbed and we decided to get one of them fancy new flatscreens that don't take up a whole room to themselves either.

And this is where it gets efficent: due to being tired and pressed for time plus getting a little lost on the way there, we only arrived at the electrical goods store at 19.54 this evening. It closes at 20.00. In those six minutes, we purchased a washing machine, TV and a microwave oven. That's two minutes per purchase. One could argue that it doesn't bode well for the quality control that I haven't even seen the microwave oven, but only said to the helpful clerk that "and lastly, I'll take the cheapest microwave oven you have", but really. Why spend time poring over a decision that you don't really care about? If the TV will show soccer matches, John will be happy. If the micro nukes my oatmeal porridge and pops my popcorn, I don't much care what extra special pizza functions it can oven. And as long as my socks get clean, a washing machine is pretty much a washing machine to me.

I notice a pattern here, the two times in my life I have purchased a vacuum cleaner I have invariably bought the cheapest one available and left the shop within five minutes of entering. It works for me.

Ironically, I can spend hours and hours in almost any bookstore deciding which 10 euro book to buy, and then beat myself up for a long time if I didn't buy the one I should have bought. I suppose it's a matter of choosing one's battles.

Weeding

I will admit, I am a bit of a packrat (as evidenced, I suppose, by this). Although I don't really see myself as a collector of any kind, truth be told there are some categories of inanimate objects that take up so much of my living space that it isn't easily manageable. For instance, should you want to find a particular book, you have four or five different locations to look for it - that is, if you don't count tables, chairs and windowsills which would take us up to about fifteen. And removing one from the shelf is only done at the risk of having a pile of others throwing themselves at you, drawing a deep breath of relief at being released from their claustrophobic prisons or dark existences in unmentionable places last seen by the human eye months ago. And this worked -to a degree- for me when I was living all by myself - I do know the knack for evacuating one book from the shelf/chair/windowsill/cupboard/pile without making an avalanche, since I do that quite a lot. But now we are two here, and for some reason my love seems to spawn books (mostly Norwegian grammar ones) at the same very high rate as myself. In a few months there will be three of us, and from a purely genetical point of view I find it quite unlikely that the little fellow will go through his first years without accumulating vast amounts of books as well. We will need more space. We will need to move, preferably to an abandoned library. But as a stopgap, and a way of giving myself the feeling that I control the ocean of books threatening to drown us all, and not vice versa, I started weeding my bookshelves today.

Turns out, I could very easily locate eighteen volumes I'm certainly never going to re-read, and that will move on into the Bookcrossing universe in the next few days. Now I feel charitable and tidy, and have enough shelf space that the newcomers won't have to double-park again for a few more weeks. Maybe. I'm thinking I could probably repeat the excercise at least once or twice more before reaching any kind of pain threshold.

How big is a baby, anyway? ;-) No, seriously. We'll need to find a new place. But that's one crate less to move when the time comes. Well done, me!

2010 this far

moment of beauty, originally uploaded by tonbel.

January tends to be a bit of a black hole of a month for me, and this year was no exception. When I say a black hole, I mean that it's really dark, and it makes stuff disappear. Time disappears, and I disappear a little as well. My energy and high spirits, especially.

This year it flew by, thankfully. I spent it in transit, visiting a string of metropoles one after the other: Trondheim, Kristiansund, Lillehammer, Dublin, Odense, Svendborg, Stockholm (albeit just for an hour and a half, got in a nice walk and a cuppa though), Linköping, Karlstad and last but not least Gautefall which is a small place far, far up in the mountains of Telemark. Lovely though. With all that time spent in plains, trains and buses I got a fair bit of reading done, which is good since one of my new years resolutions is to read at least 26 books in 2010 (preferably more like 52).



I have another new years resolution that might sound familiar if you read a few blogposts back: yes, I did try cutting sugar before to no avail. But a new year and the prospect of triple digits on the (metric) scales does wonders for motivation. Now I am allowed an exemption for a nice little piece of cake in the company of good friends, but with the condition that this too will be revoked should I start bending the definition of "nice little" to mean "quarter" or "good friends" to mean the postman or someone who lives on the street who I pay to eat cake with me. And this far it has not been going too badly. I've also mostly been able to stay off the crisps. Alcohol too, with one major and one minor exception. It is very hard not to drink at a kick-off. I tried last year, and it was indeed possible but not much fun when everyone else is partying like there is no tomorrow. A wise (?) colleague told me it takes the alcohol 10 days to leave the body, which should make me sober again just about now. Great fun though. But as we all know alcohol and inhibitions don't go together, and the very first inhibitions to fly out the window are of course the ones we don't really have (dessert. crisps. double bacon whopper cheese meals with large milkshake. that kind of thing).

I've even been to the gym a fair few times, I learnt my lesson from last year and now have my incentive system firmly in place. It consists of a monthly calendar where I get a gold star every time I exercise. That's right, just like they do to make the brats clean their rooms in Nanny 911. Works a charm. Unless you don't have a calendar (or, I suppose, a grid chart).

Other new years resolutions include achieving at least one single digit placement in the pubquiz this spring (best placement to date on a very lucky day with the full team assembled is 10th), and writing a short story a month. It's not good to keep all your eggs in one basket, you know.

Keeping this busy, eating healthy, getting exercise and making sure to get some daylight every day is doing a great job of keeping the winter blues away, so yay for that. Here's to keeping it up!

The loneliness of the underground-passenger-counter

I spent my morning doing something a little different: from 5:13 -7:33 AM I was located at a near-empty tubestation, on a mission: to count every passenger walking into a tube carriage. The idea that some 150 other people from my company have been doing the exact same thing in all the tubestations in oslo for the last few days is fun. Standing around in a chilly tubestation in the middle of the night(ish): a little less exhilarating, but I came prepared with all the warm clothes I could muster (I've tried this before) and cake baked by a fantastic colleague. Plus an audio book on my iPod on brain function that turned out to be pompous, technical, self-righteous and mildly interesting in turns - but at least I used my brain which according to same book is crucial in order to avoid alzheimers and loss of brain function in general Gee, I must even have paid attention. Excellent!