Im in Japan, at a hostel... trip went well, but Im just keeping on my feet because of an overdose of sugar and wound up nerves, feels like I havent slept in forever. The hostel is very nice, so if youre ever going to Sendai, try the Sendai Chitose Hostel... at least I think its called that. Tomorrow I meet people from the university and get my room. More to come..

The official good bye dinner for family and reasonably close relatives will start in a few minutes. Dad's idea of course, I'd much prefer to just slip away and then send a postcard.

It's not every day you sit up at two at night.... no, that doesn't sound right. Let me start over.
It's not every night you sit up a two designing a broshure about breast reconstruction. Actually it'll probably be just one night in my lifetime and that was tonight. Does that make it feel like a special night? Nope, just a late and somewhat strange night.
But that should be the last of the design work that needs to get done before I go. And I've managed to get started seriously on packing. I still have five runes to go, hopefully I'll finish them before I go. It's so close now I'm starting to see weather reports that won't affect me.
It felt good to blog from an empty head earlier, just let the words flow. You don't have to bother to read the post below, I haven't.

Today bank errands have been taken care of. I should not have to visit a bank again for a year, I hope. I've also repaired these very old and worn jeans again, they're almost at the point where even I won't wear them in public.
I fixed the digital scales and found out that my luggage was already up to 17 kg, a bit more than I thought. But now it's certain that my little brother will come visit me in a month so I'm also packing some stuff for him to bring.
I like to be prepared for all eventualities so I really want to bring my tool box. I'm sure I'll need it, my bikes have a tendency to break down. But it's too heavy, so I'll have to settle for a few choice tools. Let's see, wrench, polygrip, a couple of screwdrivers, a knife, one of these multitool thingies... some steel wire, or maybe not... yes, some steel wire, a roll of good string, ...
Gaah, if I continue like that I'll bring it all anyway! I'm too much of a collector and saver to leave like this. Let's try again. Multitool, roll of string. Nothing more. There that wasn't so hard, was it? No, but what if... No buts! Multitool, string, that's it.
Just noticed my little unit converter is out of battery. I'm not even sure what units they use in Japan, so I'll leave that.
Stuff, stuff, stuff, how did I ever get so much of it? And why do I want to keep it all around me even though I know most of it never gets used? Simple answer of course: I don't know what will be needed and what won't. Well, some things I know I won't need. Like the dried aligator head and the bottle of scotch. How about the wax cotton dressing then? If my winter coat gets dirty I'll need to reapply some. But on the other hand I cleaned it last winter and not for three years before that. So that get's left home. Shoe wax? I'll bring that, certainly. Mosquito repellant... do they have mosquitos? Most places do. The lists go on forever and I only have days. Plenty of time really. The only problem is my ever present laziness, even when panicked I'm taking it easy.
This is a blog, a blog isn't really meant to be interesting to read. At least this one isn't. A blog is somewhere to put what's on my mind while making some room to put it in my mind instead. Like placing the dirty dishes on the kitchen table while cleaning away the pots from the sink. Or maybe it's more like hanging out clothes to dry before packing them into drawers and closets.
Flaming puffball... I don't think I even read that book myself, it was my brother who suddenly laughed and said it; "Flaming puffball". It stayed in my mind. Maybe because I never had time to hang it out to dry, or even wash it. It just went right in, dropped down on the floor and refused to move. I don't know why I named this blog after it, suddenly it just lept off that floor where it'd been lurking for years and demanded to be let out, shaking loose all those bits of unfinished thought that drift to the bottom of the mind like sediment. Isn't the italian word for forgetting sedimenti? If it is it's well chosen, because almost nothing is ever really forgotten. Pick up the right kind of stick and stir in those muddy waters and the sediments start coming back to the surface. They will come in no particular order and most often they've been at least partially decomposed, maybe gnawed on by the puffball. I wish I could use a good bottom sampler on those sediments, take up a nice striped core and start going through and analyze what I've forgotten in reverse chronological order. On the top would be those large, recent thoughts almost complete but probably useless "remember to empty the dishwasher", "ask the bank for new a new code card". If sufficiently big these might manage to stay close to the surface even when newer smaller thoughts come drifting down. I suspect there are some pretty big structures down there, like courses long since completed. If I probe around a bit I might find most of my statistical mechanics still holding together, just slightly mashed under the accumulated weight of nonsense and more recent studies.
In all this dark and murky realm of the forgotten and half remembered the Flaming Puffball roams free. Moving things around, burrowing holes to illuminate new areas. Occasionally throwing something up to the surface, either completely of it's own accord or in response to something I do or feel.
To find something worth reading in a blog is like digging in those depths, almost. A blog will never be as extensive, but it will also never have the same amount of interesting morsels. Mostly it's all nonsense.
The bottom line is here _________________________

Today I'm starting to feel really stressed, packing is so hard when I can't bring more than 23 kilos. Plus 12 as carry on, but my computer will eat most of that. So alot of stuff will have to be sent later or go with my brother when he comes to visit. But I'll still have to get it packed and ready before I go. So how do I decide what I'll need right away and what can wait a month?
I spent the morning and early afternoon ironing shirts, I hate ironing so they've piled up over some time. I've decided that I'll avoid getting anything but non-iron shirts from now on.
The weather's great today, but I don't think I'll take the time to really get out and enjoy it. Something I will do is get dad to show me how to tie an neck tie again, and this time I'll get it on video for future reference. I've learned to tie the darn thing at least six or seven times already.
Gotta run, there are things to be done and packed, truths to be learned, sense to be made. But first I'll put on a pair of socks.

I can't read the comments, it's weird since it works in Talon's blog.
Today I've tried to get alot of things done, and actually got some of them done. I went downtown to get a pair of new jeans, water proofing for my hiking pants, a copy of Howl's Moving Castle, a potato peeler, a couple of zippers for my jumpsuit and to change some money to yen. I got the water proofing, the zippers and the yens. The jeans I found were too expensive for my taste, the potato peeler not the design I wanted and Howl's Moving Castle was not to be found at all.
My jumpsuit now has removable arms so I can wear it even when it's hot (the usual way of just folding down the upper half and tying it around the waist won't work if I have the speakers in). The zippers are blue and look very nice on my yellow suit.

In the evening I met up with my brother at grandma's apartement and we helped her clean the place and got dinner for the trouble :)

Yay! I've finally finished sewing on my computer bag after uncounted hours. I must say I'm very happy with it, seems sturdy enough not to break in the near future and sits very well on my back, this last is important with a laptop weighing over seven kilos. Next I have to find an adapter for japanese power outlets, and I'll probably have to get a new transformer for my mp3 player since it's not supposed to handle their voltage. But that's not something I'm likely to find here.
Today I think I've met with the majority of people who might feel hurt if I left without saying good bye, so now I can concentrate on getting packed and ready. Still have to change some cash to yen and go and have a chat with my bank to shuffle my few accounts to my liking before I go (mainly to make sure I don't have too much money accessible through the VISA)
Nekomusume is back up so my blogging might decrease quite a bit, but I'll try to update at least a couple of times a week. I'm glad nobody I "know" seems to have been injured by Isabel.

Says something about how I've been living lately that I'm actually proud to have started on my morning porridge at this early hour (quarter past elven). I've discovered the goodness of porridge with half porridge oats and half coarse rye flour, with a handful of linen seeds, one of sunflower seeds and one of raisins of course. I'm munching it right now with milk and homemade lingonberry jam. Wonder what the porridge oats will cost in Japan, here they cost practically nothing.
I think my inability to load many webpages has something to do with my habit of denying about half the programs that ask for it web access, even if they're from microsoft or wherever that doesn't mean they're safe to use.
I've located another lecture I'm going to check out today (Solid State Physics II). I'm going both to see how I like the course and hopefully to meet some friends. Otherwise I might actually have to call them and I hate making phone calls. There's something about the phone that always makes me feel like I'm disturbing the person I'm calling... probably because I am. Not many people sit around waiting for the phone to call, and whatever they're doing it's usually not all that welcome to be interrupted by an annoying ringing noise. And when they answer I don't even like talking on the phone, it seems so fake somehow. So it'll be like I call and pull them away from whatever interesting thing they're doing and then don't even want to chat. So I prefer written messages or meeting face to face. Ah, blessed are the socially inept :D
This evening I'll go out for a bit to eat with a couple of old high school (or the Swedish equivalent) friends, luckily they're as strange as I we'd never even think of calling each other without some very good reason. It's strange really, how we can continue being reasonably close friends even though we almost never meet, I guess it's just that we've got so much in common.
Ah, so much to do this week, so many people to say bye to if I don't want to seem rude. And I haven't even cleaned my room yet, or started packing seriously.

I'm out of porridge, time to get dressed. And it isn't even noon yet!

I've got a pair of wet boots on.
Today was spent mostly working on my computer bag, unless you count sleeping most of the day. The bag is almost done, I just have to attach the flap and sew the inner and outer bags together, shouldn't take more than an hour or maybe two. I never planned to put so much work into it, but all the while it's been like "now that I've done this much I might as well..." and that takes another four or five hours, and then something more. But tomorrow I finish it.
I wonder if I will continue to blog after Nekomusume comes back up (oh I hope it does) since I seem to be writing here on the same times I usually hang in forums. And soon I will actually have to start studying again, won't that be a shock. I'm afraid I'll have lost alot of brain power during the summer, it's been much too long since I did any serious thinking. I hate how you have to be smart all the time if you want to keep being smart, otherwise it just dribbles out your ears.
I've managed to get the leather string attached to the strange ceramic pendant I got from Lucia so now I'm wearing that, but I almost lost it today. I hadn't made a good enough knot on it so all of a sudden I felt something stuck in my left jeans leg. It had fallen through my teeshirt and then down through most of my pants without me noticing, and if my jeans weren't so badly mended it'd have fallen out on the ground or on some floor somewhere.
I've got the wet boots on so they will mold themselves better after my feet.

I just put some more paper in a pocket on my jacket since I scribbled the old ones full today, been out in the beautiful weather, haven't gotten anything done but I'm in a good mood and don't feel as stressed as yesterday. Today's scribbles:

It's a perfect autumn day. The air is clear and high with the freshness that only comes after a cold rain. Once in under the trees the comfortingly damp smell of decaying leaves and the somewhat sharper one of old needles mix with sunlight filtering down through the red and yellow (and a fair bit of green still, depending on what kind of tree you're under) glittering on countless drops of water.

The sloe is ripe now, this is when we should have picked them not two weeks ago. Turns out they worked well for fruit syrup anyway, it just got a bit colourless.

Somebody's hung poems by Wislawa Szymborska along the trail, so I'm stopping every hundred steps or so to read. This is much better than reading them from a book, since I get those hundred steps to turn the words over instead of at most the turning of a page.

It seems a bit odd now that I won't be here to see the spring flood in Kvarnbo with the old wooden stairs beyond the bridge turned into an icy waterfall.
I realize, now that I actually think about it, that I've never been away from Uppsala for more than a month at a time before

It's fun to look through these little notes, I've had them in my pocket for years and there are lots of odd bits and pieces of things; phone numbers without names, names I don't remember, bits of calculations, sketches of I don't remember what (one looked like a decision tree at first, but now I think it's a sketch of a pile of cans), a coffee stain though I don't drink coffee, of and here are a couple of numbers to people I might actually want to call :)


Don't eat those berries they're poisonous (but the flowers are pretty and smell lovely).

And here's what came out of my playing with origami late last night, a red and white penguin in an oversized samurai helmet.

Here's another thing I'd like to learn but probably never will have or take the time for, whatever happened to the times when I just sat around being bored and trying to come up with something to do? I want them back so I can do some of the things I've thought of since then ;)
It's two at night, natural rambling time one might think but I'm not quite there. For stupid reasons I've been going to bed around four for the last week or so, it means I waste alot of time sitting up at night doing nothing in particualr instead of enjoying long creative mornings. I suppose it's just that sleep can seem like such a waste of time sometimes, and I still haven't heard a really good explanation of why it's necessary. Sure they say it's to give the brain time to sort through the days impressions, but then you should get more tired from a day with lots of impressions than for example sitting in an office shuffling papers all day. And at least I get more tired if I just sit inside doing nothing.
I want more time, more hours in the day, more days in the year and more years in a lifetime. And throw in a couple of extra moons around Mars while you're at it.
Maybe I'll learn just one simple origami, it shouldn't take too long and I'm tired of the odd four legged octopus I usually fold if I sit alone with a piece of paper for too long.

Ok, it's stil ugly... uglier even. But it's my kind of ugly.
I should put some more links in the sidebar I suppose, I'll call it the sideburn from now on I think. Links to other blogs and sites worth wasting time over. But that is for later, this is as far as I take it today. All this has made me want to update my site, haven't done that since early summer so it's about time.

Now let's see if this works better.

Seems to be working ok, 'cept enetation has some problem with their site at the moment so I can't configure it as I'd like. Now for attacking this nasty layout.
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Well, just got ten left... and the Japanese of course. This and probably the next post too is just to test the commenting thingy.


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How come my lecturers call alot of parameters "guys"? "If this guy is small then we do it this way, but if it's much larger than unity we'd do the perturbation calculations for the other terms. At least if these guys aren't significantly larger than they are here."
Anyway the lecturer seemed ok and the course interesting so I'll probably take that when I get back from Japan. I'm actually pretty proud of myself for thinking so far in advance.
I have to make something about this layout, this page looks so bad I haven't even mentioned to anybody that it exists.
But right now I'm going to get back to carving my runes, haven't worked on them alot this summer and now I have just nine days to finish the last eleven along with everything else that has to get done before I go... like learning Japanese ;)

Behold! "What is this? Another blog" you ask and I tell thee yea! I finally got around to trying to assimilate in a semi-orderly manner my current thoughts and impressions in a readable format accessible to anyone (or at least some). It won't be pretty, it won't be interesting... in fact there'll be no reason at all for anyone to actually read this! And I can't promise to update it at least once a month in case the media black-out hits me. (Sings: I've got media blackout, it's a pitiful state, don't know who's the good guy, don't know who to hate...)
Whatever, rambling is something I'm usually rather good at especially late at night so there shouldn't be a shortage of text here, though maybe of thought.
Today's Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I'm no good at it. There's no salty rum running in my veins, and not having English as my mother tongue I have a bit of trouble picking it up.
Gonna go check out a lecture in Quantum Mechanics.