Allrighty then. Just about every single bit of our lives have now been thoroughly wrapped and boxed. In a measly hour we will be the proud owners (debtors) of two houses, at a combined estimated value of 2.84 million NOK.

It’s slightly disconcerting to know that the ADSL won’t be hooked up for another couple of days, but I’m sure we’ll get by somehow. (I’m kidding, of course. The withdrawals will slowly suck the life out of us all! Aaah, I can feel it starting already!)

So, I guess I have some catching up to do…

Marte is growing. No surprise there, really, but it happens much faster than you would think when you’re smack in the middle of her doing so. She can smile (occasionally), lift her head, kick (to the extent of *almost* pushing herself forward when lying on her tummy), and today she rolled over from her back to her tummy all by herself. You know, all those strange little things that make parents go wonky.

In other domestic news, we’re moving in just under 3 weeks. I can’t say I look forward to that ordeal, but I do look forward to having done it and getting settled in the new house.

Also, I have discovered some new music. Summoning, an austrian epic black(ish) Tolkien-metal duo, is well worth a listen! I haven’t dug too deeply into their older stuff, but their two latest albums, Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame, and their brand new Oath Bound are terrific. Another great one is Amorphis‘ latest album, Eclipse.

And I would like to extend my gratitute to Albie for reminding me about Top Secret! I haven’t seen that since I was the size of a (largish) cabbage, and I had almost forgotten all about it, until now. Definitely on my to-see-again list.

Oh, I almost forgot; Comment and trackback spammers should be stabbed in the face. As should the pricks who hire them to market their useless crap. (If it wasn’t useless they wouldn’t have to resort to spamming to sell it, would they…) In the end it’s the customers’ fault, though. If nobody bought anything as a result of unsolicited junk mail, they wouldn’t bother sending it out…

OK, I think that will do for now…

This morning, at the ungodly hour of 05:32, our daughter Marte was born. Things went very smoothly (says me, who wasn’t the one who was in labour all night, but hey), and all is well with mother and baby girl. She weighed in at a pretty average 3622 grams, and measured 49 cm. All in all, a perfect little princess.

Over the years we (the #botfu residents) have had quite a few entertaining encounters with the channel’s pet insanity, a markov bot called Boop. And now I have finally decided that it was time to skim through some logs and pick out some examples of her statistically generated gibberish. This is hardly an exhaustive list, but these are the ones I came across that work relatively well even when taken out of context. Have fun.

So, it seems we have bought ourselves a new home. How’s that for a reason to hooray?

It ended up costing a bit more than we were prepared to pay, but it was a very nice house. According to our contact in the bank, things should work out nicely, though. Actually, after a bit of consolidation and parameter tweaking, we will come out with slightly smaller down payments than before.

Moving was a necessity at one point, since we’re expecting another family member soon, and we were running out of adjacent bedrooms in our current home. (We’re not too comfortable with letting Marius sleep two floors below us just yet. And I’m using that room as an office now, anyhow.)

So, there you have it. We’re moving to greener (more roomy) pastures.

And there was much rejoicing.

So, we finally got our acts together and went for it; we bought ourselves a new digital camera; a
Canon EOS 350D digital SLR. Time for my trusty, old Kodak DC290Zoom to step aside after a job very well done. Seriously, the DC290’s optics and picture quality can rival many brand new compact cameras, but alas, 2.1 megapixels is a bit on the low side these days.

Anyway, the 350D seems really nice so far. I haven’t played around with all the buttons, knobs and dingdongs yet, as there are gazillions of options, but there are also some handy presets for typical tasks, such as portrait photography (which aims to blur the background, among other things), landscape shots, night shots, etc. All in all, it has something for both beginners and more experienced wannabe photographers. I can’t wait to start exploring.

So I gave my web site another make-over after all.
I haven’t totally decided on this one yet, either, but in my not-so-humble onion, it beats the all-white, slightly hospital-ish look of the last one.

And to all those who actually believed me when
I said that the previous one would probably be the last, my deepest apologies. Not.

First and foremost, Linda and myself went for an ultrasonic check-up today. (For those who still haven’t heard the news, we’re having another baby.) All is well, and the little creature seemed to be quite comfortable kicking around in there. Also, we semi-spontaneously decided that we wanted to know the gender beforehand this time (we didn’t with Marius), so we asked, the nurse looked around a bit, and lo and behold, it’s a girl! Estimated time of arrival; February 5th, 2006.

In less uplifting news, I was randomly walking around in Google Maps today, when I came across a disturbing little view of the globe;
Click here, and note the bright area just around the marker, and make particularly good note of the sheer scale of it. Then zoom in, step by step, until you see what’s going on. People suck, that’s what’s going on. Bah.

Tweek, my old, trusty, caffeine-addicted alter ego, shamelessly stolen from South Park, is gone. This coincides nicely with my page not being the first hit when searching for “tweek” on Google Images anymore, it seems. (I haven’t counted recently, but I saw several dozen hits (or as of lately, since I moved the image away, misses) per day for a rather lengthy period of time.)

Anyway, back to the point. Tweek wasn’t really me any more. While he usually stumbles around in a perpetual caffeine-induced bad trip, I have almost quit drinking coffee altogether. I’m down to one single cup each day, or morning, rather, to get me started. Sometimes it takes two, but one is usually sufficient. OK, sometimes I drink more, but that’s typically when we go visit someone, and they serve coffee.

Anyway, back to the point. Again. Damn it, I always digress. I’m supposed to write about one thing, but end up writing about another. Just like this. Damn.

Allright, I have other things to do now, so I’ll just drop him here. This is the new me. Say hi, Vidar.

Holy smokety poo!
Swallow the Sun, the most smashalicious death-doom metal act to hit the surface of the planet in long time has a new album coming up; Ghosts of Loss, scheduled for release August 24th (in Finland - the rest of us will have to wait until October. Drat.)

Anyway, should you happen to be into this particular branch of music, their debut album, The Morning Never Came, is the safest procurement you can make.