Kids.

We live on the fourth floor in a five storey apartment building. The last floor now works as a buffer floor after a mobile network operator suddenly installed a base station cell tower on the roof. When all the people on the fifth floor have got cancer, we’re moving out.

A good thing about this apartment building is that the walls are not made of paper, so we rarely hear anything from the next door neighbours. The couple that lives above us is another story - they are very easy to hear when they bounce around. She likes to go out to party every now and then, and as we all know most women tend to spend quite some time getting ready. The first thing she does is to put on her high heals, and then she runs around for about an hour before she finally leaves. Not he most entertaining thing to listen to, but nothing we can’t live with.

For about a week now they’ve had visitors; another couple with a kid, a boy, about two years old. And he is a wild and active kid! When he does not run around in circles upstairs in what can only be tap dancing shoes, he jumps around in his concrete shoes. What did this two year old kid do to the mafia to deserve that? Continue reading "Kids."

The Big Three Oh.

Yes, on Thursday I left my innocent twenties and entered the harsh thirties. As with every birthday, I can’t really say that I feel any different than I did the day before, and I don’t feel any emotional crisis related to suddenly being 30 years old looming either.

It’s probably because on the inside of this ragged old man in his early thirties is still an innocent boy in his late twenties.

• I’m still enjoying playing video and computer games. Still, I’ve decided to sell my Xbox 360, with the Racing Wheel, all the games and all the other goodies. That logic will probably be explained an a later post.
• Getting kids is still a very distant idea.
• I don’t want to buy a motorcycle yet. But maybe that’s what men do when they get to 40, not 30.
• Marriage is right up there with the whole kids thing.
• Politicians still confuse me.

That said, there are some signs that a grumpy old man in his eighties is also trapped inside of me.

• People who can’t write and talk properly annoys me. Of course I can live with the odd grammar and syntax error - if I could not, I would have had to perform Hara-kiri a long time ago. I can also accept that when you’re drunk it’s hard to talk.
• If you bicycle in the wrong direction of the road I want to strike you down with my cane.
• I’m getting grey hairs.

So all of you who are worried about leaving the safe twenties; it’s nothing to worry about.

Break Me.

Yup, looks like I’m taking a break from this, so don’t expect too much to happen here in the next few weeks.

Wedding Season.

No, not me. But this year is obviously a good year for weddings since me and Gine are invited to three. First one was yesterday - at least the actual wedding was yesterday, while the party is today, Tor Olav and Cecilie are getting married in May and the last one is some time this summer.

Even though I’m going to three weddings, I’m only going to one bachelor party because two of the weddings are Gine’s friends. That means I have to cram three bachelor parties in to Tor Olav’s. We’ve started planning the event and he should probably start to prepare mentally right now.

Games From the Past.

Ever since I got my Commodore 64 I’ve been programming. I was just a kid so it wasn’t very complicated stuff at the time, just simple text based adventure games with creative names like The Great Game III. I never got the hang of anything advanced, like sprites - it involved math and math was not my strongest skill at the time. Never was and never will be.

The closest I ever got to graphics was creative usage of the extended character set supported by the C64. With that I made, among other things, a game called Teacher Killer. Some of you might even remember it. It involved a stick man (the teacher) running over the screen from left to right and at the right time you hit space and a bullet would shoot from the bottom of the screen. Your score was based on how well you hit the stick teacher. Continue reading "Games From the Past."