Friday, December 5, 2008
THE MEMORY OF SNOW AND THE CREST OF SATAN! AMONG OTHER THINGS!
Hi ho and towards the christmas we go, no matter the precautions, inhibitions and general disapproval. None of which, I might add, are among the personal attributes I like to decorate my idea of christmas with. Meaning I like most aspects of the forthcoming celebration of lights’ triumph over darkness (with the exception of the heightened economic activity and agony of mandatory gift-giving I’m not going to partake in this year), it’s something to look forward to in these weeks leading up to it that are without a doubt the gloomiest of the whole year. The snow-covered landscape I mentioned in the last post proved to be fleeting like a slice of ham placed in the dog’s bowl, well not actually gone in a second like the ham usually is, but on an, um, planetary scale amounting to pretty much the same, with all traces of whiteness having disappeared completely within a week and the world having resumed it’s cosy “let’s keep the light at minimum and the rainfall at maximum”-mode.

I’m not complaining though. There’s a certain charm in this perpetual dusk and the best way to appreciate it is to observe it with casual glances out the kitchen window. It’s relatively warm here at home and I’m relatively free of any obligations of daily work at the moment, so leisure is the new diligence, much in the same way as black seems to be the new black. Or "togetherness is the new singularity",as Robert Rankin so indisputably stated in a recent novel of his.

Leisure can manifest itself in multiple ways and one of its’ dulcet forms is the vacant and unhurried inactivity I embraced yesterday, all day. I spent the whole day doing absolutely nothing and feeling very fine about it. Among this “nothing” I count also the long due project of formatting the hard drive of my computer and re-installing the operating system but it doesn’t really count as proper activity, mostly involving just sitting down and idly clicking on a mouse and taking some twelve hours to complete the process. It was dark outside when I started and it was dark outside when I finished, with probably a lot of darkness outside included in between as well. The wading in a quicksand of using my PC recently has given way to lightfootedly frolicking across the park of using my PC now, with the only downfall in transition being the loss of all the bookmarks in my web browser. I backed them up but seemingly not thoroughly enough since the file I tried to restore them from refused to open in the newly installed browser and in the end there was nothing I could do but to open the file in Notepad and one by one locate the links under and amongst the wreckage and endless lines of seemingly gibberish code, then copy and paste them on the browser to bookmark again. And only the first hundred or so of several hundred had survived. Not every one of those were crucially important but each one was bookmarked at a time with the firm resolution of a closer scrutiny some day. Now that day never comes and many a fascinating trinket of trivia will never enter my mind now, only to end up in some crowded dusty shelf in a seldom if ever visited storage area of my long term memory.

Still, the loss is devastating(ish), and would be more devastating if I could remember (or had, in the first place, had deeper knowledge of) what I’ve lost. Much bigger disasters have taken place in the past in similar formatting-of-the-hard-drive occasions, with probably the biggest and most shattering being the time when, due to a misunderstanding regarding the actual location of “My Documents”-folder, I lost all the lyrics and other text I had on my computer. The lyrics I was able to restore from web pages and my memory, but all the other stuff, the unfinished lyrics and poetry both in English and Finnish, was lost forever.

That was a bit of a bummer.

Anyway, no personal texts lost this time, and there’s always going to be new astonishingly interesting web pages for me to bookmark and never return to. Here’s a few examples of the wide array of wildly differing Wikipedia pages I’ve been meaning to examine as soon as time permits. It haven’t permitted so far but maybe it will at some point.


Here’s the coat of arms of Satan!


THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Cava Vallformosa Brut Vintage, sparkling wine from Spain and apparently the only ”extra brut” available in Finland. Well dry it was, extremely so, and sparkling to the point of seemingly retaining its’ sparkliness ad infinitum, or at least for as long as it took to finish the glass unhurriedly. The bottle and the label looked nice and I’m sure it’s a fine and classy cava but one glass of this kind normally is enough for me. Waiting in the freezer now are several bottles of wines having hippos and elephants on the labels and I have a good feeling about them and am going to partake of them as soon as possible. There’s also a bagful of English and French cider bottles for a Tasting Of Traditional Ciders will take place tomorrow.

Posted at 13:21 by e