Lots of wasted hours. Lots of them. And simply still cannot fathom what happened, why installing this blog software on the new RPi2 did not work. I will have to remember, just in case I need to make it again - Node - v0.10.50 and Npm - 1.2.18. Cannot remember what the versions on the other card were but I tried them all. Updated, installing and re-installing packages, deleting, formatting, re-formatting. Etc. etc. And then I used dd, risky and mostly dangerous, but managed to clone a partition from the attached HDD to the SD card, without messing around with the boot partition and then bang! the heart of the old Pi was still beating, now in a stronger, faster body. Welcome, RPi2 and good bye RPi! After a year of working nicely, it is time to take a rest. There will be other projects I am thinking about and I am sure, you will be back in business.
Oh, and then there was the other thing - the phone - playing with the service menu trying to get it unlocked and getting kicked off the network each time I tried to make a call. Rebuild NV - whatever that is! I was on the brink of bricking my phone. Now it works again!
Running - still slow but still higher. In two runs I covered 30 km and over 600 m up. In the woods today, not really knowing where I was, I kept running and when I couldn’t do it anymore, I switched to walking. Fast, up and up. I felt good. “These legs of mine!”, I kept thinking. And I smiled. Or however that came out on my salty face… I cannot imagine if I could have done the same last year, or any year, for that matter. Happy. Happy. Happy. The small streets, the missing sidewalks, the houses I ran by. Yeah!
The evening was fun with R and B. Laughed like crazy and managed to convince them to eat their food. Then, showed them the jetpackers flying over the desert and over tall buildings in Dubai and they were in awe. I hope I did not set them on a certain path. How would it be like to see them in twenty or so years, with wings strapped to their bodies, flying over our heads? No… I think they will forget most of it. Who knows?
Today was my father’s birthday. Called to wish him Happy Birthday. I know I should do it more often but I don’t find the strength for it. Yes, strength. It doesn’t have to be like this but it is. I don’t know how everything looks like there now. It’s been so many years… Whenever I am there, I fall into a sort of light melancholy, rummaging over the past, envisioning a sort of future with me in it and there. But whenever I travel there I get healed soon enough. After a few days, I understand again that what I see around me is IT. There is nothing beyond the grassy hills. Nothing beyond the shabby fence. The old cherry tree is gone. The apple trees will not make it for much longer either. No animals need to be fed. There is little life left, isn’t it? Since mom is gone. I keep remind myself that I should write about her and her parting with life. Even now, the feeling I get is that of rupture, of violent tearing, breaking, severing… The heart beats a different rhythm. Oh, the heart!
There was a podcast I listened a couple of days ago about someone’s heart. She, an engineer, had a heart surgery and managed to document the procedure. Everything seemed to have worked out well but then, all of a sudden, it started beating harder and harder. Annoyingly hard. As a party gag she would press her chest against the dinner table and the guests could see the wine in their glasses ripple slowly. T-Rex wise. After a while, the entertaining part of it got replaced by slight psychosis. As if her heart had swallowed up her whole world. She was never to be alone with her thoughts. She was only alone with her heart. Thumping in her chest, almost with fury. At one point she realized that the fierceness of her heart is the fierceness of her struggle to stay alive. That thing that annoyed her so terribly was also the very thing keeping her on her feet, letting her take part in life. It was trying to do its job. It was trying hard.
I remember now a scene from Barnes’ Talking it Over, I think. Or was it History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters? Don’t know now. But he talks about the heart and muses in his own kitchen over this muscle while looking at a beef heart fresh from the butcher.
Adiga’s The Last Man in Tower. This is such a nice story. He describes an animal in a cage, he does not tell us what kind of animal it was. One is perhaps lead to think it were a tiger. But the way it looks does not really match. Then you find out it was a hyena. Mongrel, vile, criminal, doglike grinning. These are the words he uses. But he never says hyena. Because Masterji could not say hyena either. Alzheimer’s… a beginning?