Wednesday, August 9

 

 

I woke up once in the night and then finally at 8:10, odd thoughts of death running through my head like miniclips from YouTube. Sunshine noticed the weather and shot out into the breezeless sun. I boiled some eggs, and put the water heater on in the sauna.
By 10:00 I had breakfasted, washed up, and washed my hair and body in hot water. I answered some mails and began to tally up the scores from the first four exercises in the summer course. I booked a flight to Riga for a Nobanet meeting in September, and managed to get flights both ways at reasonable times.
At 11:30 I went to see Camilla about her non-functioning router. This took about two hours to get working for a whole series of reasons, including the fact that neither the instructions or the passwords existed in one place; nor could I find any guides as to how to activate the router itself. Camilla had bought a Telia prepaid set that reminded me a lot of the Jio thing we used in India. By leaning on the lessons I had learned from setting our router up and playing with the Jio router, and using my iPad as well as Camilla’s laptop, I managed to get it going.
I had no idea how Telia expect “ordinary people” to accomplish this. It would take very little effort to produce two sides of paper with a step-by-step guide to setting the router up and getting it to work with your devices – and I genuinely couldn’t imagine why they had not bothered.
After this I set Camilla up with Avast because the already-installed version of F-Secure had been demanding money and frightening her for months.
In the afternoon Mika appeared and said that Jan Englund planned to deliver the small boat we bought last year tomorrow or Friday. I said the only thing I could say: that sounds fine. I said that I would help put it somewhere whenever it comes. We then went to see the bigger boat that Andreas talked about. We spent half an hour looking and talking until Mika received an emergency call and ran off to deal with someone who had fallen ill.
I walk back alone and notice the paint and wood on the side of an old barn. When I move in close and stop to look it looks like a painting of a particular sort: neither abstract nor figurative, but suggestive of both. This time next year it will probably look completely different after a cleaning and painting.
Inspired by this, and the continuing hot sun, I will decide to do some wall painting myself while the sun still shines, and then do some most grading in the evening.
I will sit outside on the terrace about 16:00 and Sunshine will sit with me. He will suddenly get up and trot off over the bridge to the field, and after that I will see no more of him. I will do some more painting and then make myself dinner. In the evening I will carry on with the grading until I have had enough.
I will sit and read and wait for Sunshine to return. I will have a brief conversation with Irma and get washed. I will wait up until 23:45 for the absent cat and then close the doors and go to bed. I will get up three times, thinking I hear him, before rolling my eyes, closing the door, and settling down to sleep.