King Coal and yesterday's news

Here's another picture from my man cave. That behemoth in the front is, I'm just guessing here, the old coal furnace. It's not connected to anything anymore. The new oil furnace is in the background. The coal furnace is right next to the garbage shoot, so I'm guessing people sendt combustibles down and the janitor stoked the fire with his neigbour's old newspapers.

The lids on the garbage shoots are now locked. A whole genre of urban legends told primarily by and to kids disappeared with the demise of garbage shoots. There was always some boy who had gone for a ride in one of them and had experienced something exciting or, to the listener, pleasingly horrid.

Garbage now, of course, is carted far away. I am not sure how this works out efficiency-wise, but I like the idea of processing waste right where you're at. And every level of complexity, usually, makes things more messy and useless. Theoretically, in an apartment building like this, you could burn your newspapers to heat up the water tanks a couple of degrees, have a worm bin for food scraps and a large compost bin for all the ca-ca.

I really get off thinking about stuff like this.

Take it away, take it away now

Here's a question I ask myself each morning on my way to work:

Why is that stove out on the street?

I am pretty sure it's a car-related issue. The people who chucked this thing out either don't have a car, or they're too lazy/cheap to rent a trailer and take it to the landfill. So they've reasoned (correctly) that within only a couple of months someoene else will take care of this.

I'm not sure if this goes for kitchen appliances, but when it comes to furniture it can easily be cheaper to buy a new sofa and have it delivered, than it is to rent a car and a trailer to get rid of the old one. This is unsettling even for a native, and drives immigrants up the wall. In many countries getting rid of stuff is free: When you put something on the street, it will have vanished magically in a matter of minutes, often enriching somebody in the process. Put something on the street here, and it stays there.

Unless it's a bicycle, of course, which will be nicked in no time no matter how cruddy it looks and how securely locked it is.

Too much stuff, too much stuff.

But, it seems, not enough bicycles, not enough bicycles.

Extremely specific ethnic stereotyping

I have written previously about old odds and ends I've found in the cabin, and how surprisingly often they featured some over-the-top ethnic stereotyping. Here's one which is pretty specific: Mosquito repellent with a brand that plays on preconceived, though in this case mildly benevolent, notions about sami, previously known in english as lapps.

Like "lapp" the term "finn" is considered derogatory today, so this bottle seems very odd. A non-sami will find it more quaint than maddeningly offensive.

Calling a finnish person "finn" is another matter. It's fine.

It's a polar thing.

I have decided I'm going to call people what they want to be called. This becomes sort of silly sometimes, some in Alaska prefer to be called Eskimo but would be called Inuit in Canada, so what's a qallunaaq to think. But in general, it seems like the thing to do.

The kind of pictures you end up taking when you no longer live with dogs

For transport in The Towns, I use an American 1948 "The World"-bicycle. It has a heavy, fillet-brazed frame, no gears, rear coaster brake and front hub brake.

The front hub is almost certainly retrofitted.

It feels really wonderful, but getting spare parts is not always easy The cable to the front brake (top) isn't supposed to be fastened like that, but what are you going to do. It is also hard to find bike shops willing to open up those hubs and replace the brake shoes.

Town bicycling

In The Towns, I need a shoulder bag for assorted work-related doo-dads. But when bicycling this slips down and invariably slaps into my knee on every rotation of crank.

The solution turned out to be pretty easy. Looking around at relevant bicycle porn and instructables.com I saw many "messenger bags" come with two straps, one goes around the shoulder and the other one around the waist.

My bag already had some wee leather straplets riveted to the sides, waiting to make good use of themselves. So it was just a matter of finding an adjustable strap with snaps in both ends. Not ever throwing anything away pays off once more. Note strap around waist below.

How to get laid if you're a filthy woodlands hermit

The bunks in my cabin are 70 cm (27.5") wide. This is fine for one person but slightly too narrow for two, even if both are wild, wild things. The mattresses are made of foam rubber. Nothing fancy, one might say.

Some years ago, realizing I simply could not fend off guests who would arrive at the cabin to spend the night , the dogs and I freighted a two-person bed with a futon mattress up on the sled. It was flat-packed and reasonably easy to transport, but far too low on the ground when assembled. For years I have simply propped it up with assorted stumps and junk, resulting in a whole lot of creaking, tipping and broken bed boards.

Typically, I fixed it only now, now that I no longer live here permanently. It only took a couple of hours.

Below is the raw version of the new and improved bed, half perched on a bunk, and half propped up on custom built (by me) frame-like things. I've replaced half of the bed boards. The Swedish producers of semi-disposable furniture who made this originally never intended it to be used with much vigour, it seems.

I did not want to nail or screw the bed to anything, because there's the option of folding it into a sofa. Practical on occasions when I have daytime guests. The supports here are alle stacked under the sofa.

But how do I keep the supports in place under the bed? By doing some more sawing. Note smug expression of sawing person below.

My ryoba (below) came in handy here again. I cannot stop praising the superior saws of the Japanese.

Below are the spacer bars I made to slap onto the bed's supports to keep them in place.

Below is one of the spacers in place. Without these spacers the supports will wiggle in different directions. And as the bed can be folded, the supports need to be placed right under the various joints.

And below here is Sil, lying on what is now a rock-solid platform.

Contents under pressure

Here's the gauge that tells me how much heating oil is left. You pump that lever at five o'clock like crazy until the dial stops moving. I'm trying to wrap my head around how it works. The more oil is in the tank, the longer I need to pump.

But the important thing is that it looks fantastically steam punk-y.

Belly of the beast

Well, it's different. Different from my old wood stove. This is the cellar of the apartment building where I am currently being superficially domesticated. (I am being domesticated in the building, I hasten to add, not in this cellar, per se.)

I managed to fool everybody in the building into letting me take control of this space. This way, somebody keeps an eye on those gauges and orders heating oil, and I get a workshop. Everybody wins until the darn thing blows up.

Above is the 6000 litre (1585 gallon) oil tank. You can't really tell. It just looks like a large, squarish cement-kind of thing.

Heating with oil is horrid, horrid, horrid, of course, though seldom chosen for entirely psychopathic reasons. I will return to this subject.

Bellow is the furnace. It heats up both the hot water tanks and the water used for the radiators. I have had some problems in sorting out what pipes lead to what, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. That blue thing is a pump.

So much that can go wrong. City folks put up with so much.

I visited my former cat, the evil Felis, recently. As can be seen below, she now lives with civilized folk. She has put on some weight and seems enormously content. She was happy roaming the forest too, I imagine. But there is a time for everything. I thought I'd post a picture of her because hey, she's a cat.

She is, as always, thinking of murder.

Sign language

The barrio surrounding my new digs sports some shops with hand-written signs. Though individual neon signs, or even normal plastic ones, can be seriously attractive, they are always foul in aggregate.

Visting Ireland in the early 1990s I was fascinated to see that signpainting was still a serious craft. I actually saw, on more than one occasion, people laying gold leaf on the inside of shop windows after first having written something in black, gaelic-looking letters.

I've also seen signpainters in action in America, not doing replicas of ye quaint ole style-stuff, but writing utilitarian, though to be honest not very lovely-looking messages about local furniture salesmen and the like.

I have no idea what EZLN means here. It's the acronym for Zapatistas in Mexico, sure. But I haven't seen many of those around here.

Lost Love Boat

Some people just do not want to live like everybody else. This summer I would occasionally pass a gentleman who lived in this boat, very close to the center of The Towns. He had a nice view of the fjord in one direction, and a nightmarish knot of highways in all other directions. Strategically this meant that, even though he was in plain view, he wasn't really in anybody's way and it would also be hard to sneak up on him.

He's left now, it seems. He had problems all summer in supporting his tarps so they wouldn't sag. Maybe he got cold. Maybe the Port Authority started being a pain in his ass.

He certainly did not need to live like this. If he had filled out the proper forms and stayed sober six hours in a row on a couple of occasions so he could talk coherently to social workers, he would be rewarded with a standard of living that would make half the world ghasp. In stead he tried to do things his own way as long as the weather permitted. Living rough is often the result of pride, not shamelessness.

Cabinville

There are cabins in The Towns, too. There are even small shed-based towns-within-the-town, allotment gardens ("community gardens" to some). I honestly can not say why not towns are entirely like this. The houses in the allotment gardens are small, but snug and beautiful. And they're sold and bought at fixed prices, to avoid speculation. There's no place for cars. The individual gardens range from being impressive to being "interesting". There is some peer pressure to keep things tidy, for sure, but this way everybody gets exercise in conflict solving. If just part of one generation lets that conflict solving muscle atrophy all hell breaks loose, but maybe that's already happened.

You're not supposed to live like this year round. There are many reasons for this, several of them concerning how to keep people like me from settling down permanently.

Wildlife in The Towns

My new digs in the civilized world are pretty close to a museum of natural history, which has a rather odd library. It has, among several interesting books, one very intriguing specimen called "Man and the Termite". This seems to be a rather philosophical work, and who can deny that the relationship between the two species deserve some serious thought.

The library also has a rather exquisite piece of decoration, I find (above).

I will return here soon.

Lingon-pickin'

Look! Some fox-shit.

This is that kind of blog.

Fox-shit is easy to recognize because Mr. Fox is very public about his bowels and leaves them in the middle of paths and on top of tree stubs. Also, he eats a lot of lingonberry. ("Cowberry" to some and "partridgeberry" to you Newfies. Lingon to Scandinavians and customers at IKEA.)

Above is Bella. Her big ears give her a kind of desert fox-like appearance, but she is a sesoned sled dog. She is my part-time dog, as my previous full-time dogs are now busy other places. She is a good girl.

Sweet cabin dreams

As a thirteen og fourteen year old kid I read a story in an EC comic book about a guy who enters his cabin to find a half naked broad standing in front of his fire place. The story was called "Came the Dawn", written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Wallace Wood.

I remember looking at that girl with the bedsheet wrapped around her, and thinking man, I need to get a cabin when I grow up.

The story ends horribly, as stories in EC comics normally would. But that first part, with the pipe-smoking, manly hunter getting to know that cute, curvy girl way out in the forest played quite often in my hormone-powered inner cinema.

Turns out Frank Frazetta, the inspirer of legions of airbrush-weilding van decorators, did some sketches for a possible "re-make" of the story (a sample, above and below). A lot of what Frazetta did in his career was pretty awfully silly but the guy could draw.

The whole story by Feldstein/Wood, as well as Frazettas drawings, can be found here.

Apart from all that taxidermic stuff, I feel both Frazetta's and Woods' drawings actually do come pretty close to describing what it's like around my place.

Lucky me.