Wednesday, November 22

 

 

Sunshine decided to wake me at 5:50, and then every fifteen or twenty minutes after that. I eventually got up at 7:20 and let him out. He stayed out ten minutes then shot back in. This probably had something to do with the snow that continued to fall in big, heavy flakes.

Thanks to the over-eager cat, I washed, dressed and ate my breakfast at the normal time, and left the house at 8:10.

I spent the morning reading through some calls for papers and deciding which, if any, I would respond to. I decided to write an abstract for Ed-Media, which takes place in Amsterdam next summer. I decided that I might possibly have a chance of getting funding to attend that one.

I emailed Erik inviting him to join me in the final stages of pulling together Topic 9 for the Nobanet e-learning course. I also wrote out a lengthy and very detailed brief for the final assignment for the CMS course. I showed it to Jutta because I wanted to make sure that nobody could claim later that they had not understood it, or that it had not made sense. She suggested one change and two additions, both of which strengthened it.

Irma phoned and emailed to say that she had got me a ticket for Slush, through a complicated process that involved Treamer and Supercell. I registered and now I will watch Al Gore giving the keynote speech on November 30.

In the afternoon I began to do some writing. I noticed that the copy of The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan had appeared in my mailbox, so I diverted myself by reading some of that. The book has a small notebook size and appears interestingly scrappy in its presentation; deliberately so, according to the introduction by Eric McLuhan.

At 16:50 I arrive at the bowling alley in Töölö, where I meet Naa. We pay for our bowling, swap our shoes, and start. We play faster today than previously and manage to get four full games into our hour. This proves fortunate since on the last game I almost manage to get a reasonable score. I get 135, the highest I have had so far, and just enough to avoid embarrassing myself at the Arcada Bowling Championship on Friday. I probably won’t win with a score like that, but I won’t have to run crying from the hall to escape the taunts of the others.

On the way out Naa will declare that she needs food, so we will stop at Fafa’s, about ten metres from the bowling alley. We will both have Fafa’s kebab, and I will like mine a lot.

I will exchange a series of messages with Irma, whose plane appears to need repairing before it can take off. It will leave an hour late and I will have fallen asleep well before Irma arrives home from Prague. I will awaken briefly as I hear her arrive but go back into a deep sleep almost immediately.