I feel a sore throat coming on again, and am not looking forward to it escalating into something worse. Nothing much else going on in my life at the moment (surprise, surprise). I finally got around to trying out Final Fantasy VII, which I’ve wanted to do forever. Whenever I’ve tried downloading the PC version there’s always been some issues about getting it to work properly under Windows XP, and I always ended up giving up on it. This time however, I decided to just download the Playstation version and play it in a Playstation emulator, and yay for that! Really loving it so far, a bit surprised how similiar it actually is to FF6 (one of my all-time favorite console games). Also a bit surprised to find out that Sephiroth is not a complete douchebag, which I always had the impression of him being. Well, besides killing basically everybody and everything in his way, I felt mostly sorry for him when the flashback of him and Cloud occured. Still waiting for a moment sad enough to make me cry like the ghost train scene in FF6 though! I don’t doubt that one will come, considering how well written and thought-of the Final Fantasy stuff is.

Phew, Wednesday was the last day of staining/painting the house, it feels so nice to finally be done with all that, it was some tedious work. Seeing as I got 250 euro out of it, it’s not too bad however.

Specially nice, was coming home from a hard day of work to a brand new shower cabinet, ready to be used. Showering properly for the first time in 5 weeks, I can’t even begin to describe that feeling.

Unfortunately there was no rain yesterday, so I had to go and help out again with staining the house. We got one and a half side done, so there’s only another one and a half left to do. Still, I’m not looking forward to it too much, my whole body aches like crazy.

I never really got into the whole RSS thing, I’ve always preferred to visit the author’s page and read the text in its intended design, and to sort of get a feeling for the differences between blogs, aestethically speaking. Firefox’ and Opera’s feed managers leaves something to be desired, which didn’t really help the cause any further either. I’ve known about dedicated feed readers, both programs and web applications, but I never got interested enough to ever check it out. Using Opera, it has been easy to check up on blogs manually so to speak, as I keep a folder with my blog bookmarks, which I then use the “open all folder items” option on to open all the various blogs in individual tabs. That solution has worked perfectly fine for me so far.

Today, for some reason, my view on RSS changed. I believe it was the single simple mention of Google Reader in a blog that triggered it, though I’m not sure why it was anything special this time. Either way, I went to check it out and put all my feeds in Google Reader, and I pretty much instantly deleted all my bookmarks, and I’m now using Google Reader exclusively to keep up with blogs. I must admit it is a rather lovely way to go on about it, it makes everything so easy to keep track of. If you read more blogs than is good for you, you should definitely check out Google Reader, much love.

I decided to check out Dexter some weeks ago, and so far it seems quite entertaining, but I’m still not completely sold. Unfortunately my Dexter viewing was cut short by the recent release of the Nip/Tuck season 4 DVD rips, which were quickly consumed. Season 4 was wonderfully entertaining, like the previous ones has been as well.

No idea why, but this week I purchased two domains, elastomania.us and elastomania.ws. Will see what I’ll do about those. I was thinking of creating some sort of skintatious/kopasite page where people can host their levels and have the whole automatic updating thing going on, but I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to create such a thing.

On Tuesday I had to help my mom and uncle with staining a house in Jessheim, where my uncle lives. Absolutely horrid work, but it felt sort of good to do something physical, even if it left me sore for days. Using a paint brush up and down with my mouse arm didn’t exactly work out too well. We only got one of the sides done, along with cleaning and scrubbing the three other sides, so the plan is to go back tomorrow and stain some more. I really really hope it rains tonight so it gets postponed.

Also, bought some more books!

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
  by Lewis Carrol
• The Great Gatsby
  by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Beowulf
• Stardust
  by Neil Gaiman
• Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
  by Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett
• It
  by Stephen King
• Don Quixote
  by Miguel De Cervantes

Received Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling on Wednesday, and just finished it last night before I went to bed. It was so delightful to read Harry Potter again, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time now. It didn’t disappoint, and it felt like a very worthy end to this great series. I’m having a hard time deciding on what the best book in the series was, but I think for me this was the second best, perhaps tied with the Order of the Phoenix, and trailing right after the Half-Blood Prince (being the best). It’s hard to say really, as I feel all three of them are so close to each other. What I can say for sure is that the first three books are definitely the weakest ones compared to the last three, with the fourth one hovering somewhere inbetween. Am I alone in this view?

Started reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami yesterday, and just finished it earlier today. This is the second novel by Murakami I’ve read, and it was just as amazing as I thought Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was. They are very different from each other theme-wise, but the mood and writing style was absolutely wonderful in both of them. Reading it really made me wish I was Watanabe (the main character) in a way, there was something appealing about his lifestyle and the events that happened to him, specially his relationships. You’ll have to read it to know what I mean, but in short (and in very simple terms) it’s about a man who recalls his student days and his love affairs to two girls. And it’s completely different from what it sounds like, so I recommend reading it. There was something romantic about the whole thing, but without actually being romantic, as little sense as that might make.

Murakami is now one of the few authors I’ve read more than one book from, which is nice. In my book adventures so far the last years, I’ve ordered and read books of very varying subjects, styles and authors, trying to figure out what I like. Which means that I still haven’t really developed any favorite authors yet. Now I can say for sure that Haruki Murakami is one of them. My mom bought my dad a small collection of his novels last christmas, so I’ll most likely be going through those the next few weeks.

I’m a bit uncertain about what I prefer when it comes to non-English and non-Norwegian books. I read my first Murakami in English, and this second one I read in Norwegian. Then I noticed one of the other books in the collection I’ll be reading later is a Norwegian translation from an English translation, hmm. First of, I really enjoy reading in English, and developing my English skills at the same time. On the other hand, I read and write English every single day — almost exclusively — and I sort of feel that my Norwegian knowledge is slowly dwindling away bit by bit. I often find myself thinking in English, and sometimes when writing in Norwegian I can’t come up with the right word for something, and I have to go look in the English-Norwegian dictionary to find it. It’s kind of scary, but I’m hoping it’s just random fragments and that it’s nothing too serious.

To counter this however, I joined “The Norwegian Book Clubs” yesterday. It’s just what it sounds like, a book club where you get offers every month for a book, but with no commitment to buying anything, as long as you don’t forget to cancel them every month. It’s a small price to pay in my opinion, considering it gives you pretty good discounts on other books whenever you shop normally. Not to mention that you get 3 free books (except shipping expenses) when you sign up. So for my 3 free books I chose to get some Norwegian ones, or rather one Norwegian and two Norwegian translations: Menn som hater kvinner (Orig.: Män som hatar kvinnor, Eng: Men Who Hate Women) by Stieg Larsson, Ut og stjæle hester (Eng: Out Stealing Horses) by Per Petterson, and Labyrinten (Eng: Labyrinth) by Kate Mosse (curiosly, whose Norwegian translation seem to have gotten rave reviews here, contrary to its Amazong rating. I wonder if we have bad taste, or just good translators?).

Today I finally finished reading The Golem’s Eye (The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 2) by Jonathan Stroud — after having started on it months ago, but then got into a book-funk of sorts where I didn’t feel like reading anything. Just as the first book in the series, it was rather enjoyable, if perhaps not a bit simple. Then again, it’s not aimed at adults — not that I consider myself or my reading skills as one.

It felt nice to read something again, and I’m sure it will have served as a nice warm up to the new Harry Potter book, if I ever actually get it. I love Amazon, but this pre-order was rather pointless. It’s been 2 weeks since its release and I still haven’t received it. They don’t sell the US version here anyway, so it’s not like I would have bought it somewhere else, but still, gah.