Memory Lanes
Today will be a good day. Happy Mio Monday everyone.
7/3 2022
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Good eye doctor times today .Had my half-yearly checkup. Although it’s been nearly a year since the last one, because my eye doc had the corona last year. He’s all better now. And my eyesight is still stable. Nothing new there. Peaceful, is the word he usually uses. He said it was very unusual the way things happened for me. But he expected no drastic changes in the coming years. So that’s good to hear. He couldn’t give me a written guarantee, but that is what he’s expecting. And no change is the bset I can hope for so hooves crossed for that. Now i’m just going to sit here and wait for the eyedrop blur to wear off.
7/3 2022
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Here’s a little bit of video from last week, when Sassy was bothering Mia. This is what I mean when I talk about Mia’s disgruntled whinny. She primarly does it when one of the others are in heat and start sniffing her rear/underside.
7/3 2022
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Today will be a good day. HappY Yogi daY everyone.
8/3 2022
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I love how Lily and Nuller always end up sitting close. Nuller may be grown up and big guy with a big ego but he still loves his mama.
8/3 2022
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Today will be a good day. Happy Hump Day everyone.
9/3 2022
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Good goat times today. Freezing and foggy morning. No spring feelings today. But sweet kids at the fence when I arrived. And once I showed up the goats showed up and the kids got some closeup time with the goats. Happy squeals.
If you follow Mia’s page you’ll know that i’ve been trying to get Sassy to eat biscuits. She won’t take them. She’s often picky with unfamiliar foods though, and there’s always so much competition that you have to be quick to get a bite. So I figured, it’s just a matter of her getting a taste and she’ll love them. So today I took her out of the pen, like I often do with Sky to get her some safe space to eat without interruptions from the others. Well, i got Sassy out and she had time enough, but no luck with the biscuits. She did get a little bite and I thought that’s it she’ll want them all now. But nope. I guess Sassy just doesn’t like biscuits. Weird. She’s not usually one to skip a meal. Or treat. Or fruit. Or vegetable. Or anything. Oh well. The others were happy to take the biscuits and Sassy got some peanuts instead.
9/3 2022
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Sweet visitors and sweet goats.
9/3 2022
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Sassy’s hoping the kids brought her something good. Anything but biscuits.
9/3 2022
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Hey Milo, I think they’re trying to get your attention.
9/3 2022
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Today will be a good day. Here’s Natal from 2006.
10/3 2022
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Got on the exercise bike when I got up today, for the first time since… well just before christmas I guess, which was the last time I tried to get back to exercising and then quit after a week or two. Let’s hope I can keep at it this time. I got about 50 minutes on the bike, which I think is decent considering it was the first and just having to get back in the swing of things. Been sticking to my cleaner diet too. There’s room for improvement but it’s already a lot better and my blood sugar has been fine, so here’s to hoping I can keep it up.
10/3 2022
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goatlog
10/3 2022
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For reasons that aren’t important or interesting, I will be needing my birth certificate soon. So I thought maybe I should get that from my parents. Haha. It never really occured to me that I’m actually and adult and I should probably have possession of my personal papers and records. Well, I’ve never really had a use for them before now. But my dad came over with a folder of all that stuff that my parents have had all these years. Birth certificate, baptism/name/cpr number. School records, graduation certificate. Bunch of old stuff. And some things that are no longer valid or useful. Receipts. For our first internet subscription. Other stuff. The one that hit me a little in the heart was the purchase receipt for my old Amiga 500. On the 18th of March 1992 we went to the Merlin store in the City Vest shopping center (this is the shopping center that I live right next to today, back when I was a kid we lived a little bit further away) and we purchased one Amiga 500 + 1mb memory upgrade. For 6995 kroners. 1032 US dollars. I have no idea what it would be in today’s prices with inflation. Well according to the google it would be doubled in today’s prices. Two thousand dollars. I was surprised it was that much. I didn’t remember it being that expensive. March 18th. My birthday is March 15th. So I guess it was a birthday gift. I honestly don’t really remember if I paid any of it myself or much of the details. But I remember going up the moving escalator with the big white box with the Amiga, excited to take it home. And years of good times with it. I loved that machine.
As I loved the Commodore 64 we already had. I have told the story of how we got that before. Driving late at night with my dad in our old unfashionable Wartburg car. The family we were buying the C64 from turned it on to show that it was working and loaded up a game. I don’t remember what the game was called, but I remember what it was like. It was one of those city defense games were you had your city on the ground and you had aliens coming in the sky and you had your two laser turrets or whatever on the ground and you had to shoow the aliens before they reached down to your city.
And driving home in the dark, so excited to finally have a computer of our own. Our neighbour had a Commodore and we’d sometimes play on it together. But it was mindblowing to actually have one IN THE HOUSE. Funny to think nowadays you probably can’t find a house without a computer. Or at least a few phones or tablets that are a million times more powerful than a C64. Loading games from cassette tapes, kids today will never know the joy and pain.
I have tremendous nostalgia for those old computers. Like music and movies and tv. Arts and entertainment that imprint on you and become parts of your self. I still spend considerable amounts of time on the youtubes watching people play or talk about the old games and computers. And I have huge collections of old games on my hard drive and if I weren’t too blind to enjoy it I’d play them on emulators.
I didn’t actually have the Amiga as my primary computer for as long as I thought. 1992, that must have been towards the end of 6th grade. And I got my PC .. in the 9th grade at the latest. Because I remember my classmate Stefan helping me get the PC. Him and Morten had PCs and played sophisticated games like King’s Quest and Space Quest and Larry.. haha so grown up. And the PC was much more complicated. So Stefan helped me find a good one in an ad in the papers. A 486 dx2, which was better than Stefan and Morten’s. Nice. And then Stefan helped me set it up. That was before Windows. You couldn’t just turn on the computer and let the installer do it. You had to setup the hard drive and I remember we had to note a bunch of figures down on paper because it was information you might need. And then we had to format the hard drive. I don’t remember how big it was but probably like 50mb or something like that. Maybe 100 or 2. But formatting it took so long that we went outside and went down to the local kiosk to buy candy and it was probably an hour or two before we could get back to the pc. Install dos 6.2. And Norton Commander. typing nc at the dos prompt to launch Norton Commander, that double paned blue menu. Scrolling through menus. Playing the wav file of breaking glass to test the fancy Soundblaster 16 sound card. Playing Ultima 7 and Day Of The Tentacle. Doom of course. Was Doom out when I got my pc? I’m not completely sure. Maybe it was only Wolfenstein 3D At that point. But it definitely wasn’t long until Doom was there and it felt like the graphics were so real. Laughable today. But mindblowing at the time.
Yeah I’ve spent a lot of time on computers over the years. And I mean I still do. I’m typing this on a copmputer, donchaknow. But I miss the old ways. I know it’s better now. But I miss the old days. I wish I could have some of it back. Not that life was great. I have always had.. issues. But memory wears rose tinted glasses, and it looks prettier than the dark blur of my current vision.
Anyway, I’m sorry. I just thought it was funny seeing that old receipt for my so beloved Amiga. There’s no longer a Merlin in City Vest. I don’t know if they still have physical stores, I know they still sell electronics online.
And next Friday it will be 30 years since I got that Amiga. I don’t know how we got here but here we are.
10/3 2022
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So, on the topic of rambling about the past. Nita asked how I started goating. Well, sit down and I’ll tell you a tale.
It wasn’t exactly in the cards that I should becomea goat enthusiast. In fact, I remember as a kid I was scared of going to the playground. Why? Because there were goats. And they were walking around freely. And the thought of being face to face with a wild goat really scared me. I was scared of dogs too. I remember befoer I got the Amiga that I rambled about in the previous post, I would sometimes go to my classmate Pelle’s house because he had an Amiga. He liked to brag about how the Amiga was way more advanced that the Commdory 64, and I mean he was right. Amiga was 16bit and Commodore 64 was 8bit.
I’ll get to the goat part, I swear.
Anyway, Pelle’s family had a dog. So I was always torn between really wanting to play on his Amiga and being terrified of potentially encountering his dog.
So yeah I wasn’t an animal kind of person. Although, now that I think of it. When I was really young I used to love books about animals. Exotic ones primarily. From the jungles and desserts and antarctica and stuff. I was a member of the WWF for a while. Not the Wrestling foundation, tha Word Wildlife Foundation. So I did have an interest in animals. Just not being face to face to them.
Anyway, at some point after leaving school and trying to find a way to cope with the world I found myself doing something or other, some work testing programme or whatever. And on my daily commute I had to walk from the bus stop and past the playground, the first playground some of you will remember from the old days. With the red house that burned down. So I’d walk past there and sometimes see the goats, sheep and horses outside. At some point I started walking through the playground area instead of past it. I was still pretty intimidated by the ‘wild’ animals. But I remember stopping by in ‘Favorit’, the supermarket next to the playground, and buying some bread and then taking it over and feeding the goats. I remember the first times were quite exciting and scary and fun, wondering if they’d eat my hands. Letting them eat off the bread until they neared the edges and then dropping the bread. Haha. Slowly I got a little more used to it and realised they weren’t going to attack me or bite me.
So, then at some point, in 2002 I believe, I got a digital camera. And started getting into photography. Purely amateurish. But I enjoyed it. Took pictures from my daily life. And started looking for subjects. Places to go just for taking photos.
And of course, a natural thing to want to take pictures of is animals. And that’s when I started really spending time at the playground. First just to take pictures. And eventually just spending time with the goats. My personal life was not great, I was having a hard time coping with things. And I guess that’s when I realised that being with animals was just good for the mind. And so goat therapy started. And I just started spending more and more time there. I became a known face and a welcome visitor. Part of the place. Even working there as animal feeder during some weekends, until I had to stop that because of my eyesight.
But yeah, that’s the too long version of how I started goating. I have lived all my life relatively close to that first playground. In fact in my very young childhood, something I can’t really remember now, we lived briefly in the apartment blocks next to the playground. The buildings you see in the background of some of the old photos. Some of you might remember the goats sometimes wandering up there in the residential area above the playground. I lived there for a few years. But we moved when I was little. Still within 5-10 minute walking distance of the playground. I could have spent a lot of time there if I hadn’t been terrified of being face to face with wild goats. Took a long time before I realised how wonderful that could be.
Anyway, I think that’s all. I’ll shut up now!
10/3 2022
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I’m sorry about all the longwinded word posts. Here’s a picture of Sassy not eating biscuits.
10/3 2022
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Today will be a good day. Here’s Mads from 2004. An example of the big bread I’d get so I could feed the goats without getting my hands eaten.
11/3 2022
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Here’s a gathering of goats, only missing Lily who was off in the goat house taking care of business. Or whatever it is goats do.
11/3 2022
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Yeah I mean the ten commandments are important, but not as important as the gas prizes. Fork your feelings, ban fear socialism and support the poutine, we haed a moral commpass but we sold it for a wooden nickel. Stick a jesus fork in christ cos we’re done.
I should probably get a goat post on top of the page, cos I’m going to bed early. All hail the hypno Nuller
11/3 2022
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11/3 2022
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Today will be a good day. Here’s Mathilde and Mads from 2004.
12/3 2022
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goatlog
12/3 2022
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Goat company
12/3 2022
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Today will be a good day. Happy Funday everyone.
13/3 2022
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Here’s a little Sky under a big sky.
13/3 2022
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That’s all for now.