Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Nitrogen

517 words

Claus came over this weekend because a friend of his was having his Polterabend, a party people have before getting married. The point of that, and the event’s name, seems to be that the guest bring old crockery which is then smashed by the couple… some people even brought old washing basins. Fun and noise for all the family.

As I hadn’t seen Claus for a while and he was staying at our place anyway I went along. While the party wasn’t exactly my type of thing it was quite well done with huge amounts of food and drink. Nice. With quite a few physicists being around, there were even people who made fresh ice cream using fresh fruit, cream and liquid nitrogen… something that I wanted to try for ages but never did as it’s quite hard to get your hands on (and not into…) liquid nitrogen unless you work in physics/chemistry/… What’s cool about that is that the ice cream is nicely frozen and bubbly very quickly – no hours of waiting. I’ve been told that making sorbet is better than making ice cream, though.

Other ‘exciting’ things of the weekend included us watching Blowup on DVD again and then seeing that a documentary about London’s swinging 60s followed by – Blowup – was on on telly as well. While the DVD has a German and English soundtrack, the version they broadcast on telly was in English with German subtitles… it’s hard to understand why media people do what they’re doing.

I also ‘indulged’ on some home improvements… as our fancy wireless network connection to the university is now not working most of the time, we decided to get a DSL connection after all. So far the normal phone was connected to the socket in my room and was standing in front of my door for everyone to use it. That wasn’t very nice but quite easy to do. With a DSL to WLAN thingy being added to that setup soon, I didn’t want to have all the stuff in my room, so I looked around a bit, found the place where the phone line comes into the flat, which handily is hidden just where the heating is and installed another phone socket there.

The next problem was that there was no power socket in that place which is just outside my room. As I found a little hole in the wall where the heating pipes are running, I got an extension chord, removed the socket, fiddled the cable through that hole and reassembled it – giving us some power sockets for the phone’s charger and the DSL thingy. Afterwards I started worrying whether it’s a good idea to run a plastic cable right next to hot heating pipes… but probably it isn’t.

When Claus finally arrived from Berlin he brought some stuff I still needed for developing film. I now have bottles of chemicals which are labelled as seriously dangerous to your skin and the environment as well as the tools I need. I think I’ll try to develop my first film later today…

July 3, 2005, 14:04

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