1995: Sol, stå stille

I got this book in 1995.  It’s another of my grandfather’s books.

It’s about Israel, and was written in Denmark in 1950, so it’s written while things were still going on in Israel.  On the other hand, when weren’t they?

Poul Borchsenius doesn’t make much of an effort to tell a balanced tale, but he retells the history of the young state in an easy-to-read manner.  Calling the book a zionist propaganda effort is probably not entirely fair, but probably not entirely inaccurate, too.

And there’s fun illustrations, too:

“Haj Amin el Husseini in good company”

That’s more snarky than the text is in general.  It’s a very enthusiastic text.  With a not entirely reliable narrator.

I have to admit I started skipping around in the book after a while.  Not my primary area of interest, really.

Rating: Zioniffic

Home Renovations

The balcony floor has been flaking ever since I bought this apartment. This week, Oslo has finally seen some slightly summerish weather, so I decided to do something about it.

The normal thing (for me) to do would be to call somebody competent, but I thought that surely this was something to do myself.  And I kinda wanted to take a day off work to futz around in the sun.  Ideal!

So I started scraping.  And scraped and scraped.  There’s like four layers of things to scrape at on the balcony.  This was what I ended up with:

It ended up more, er, pitted than I had anticipated.  I considered calling somebody professional, but instead I just painted it with epoxy paint.  I though it was going to be thick and gloopy, so it would kind of fill in the cracks.

It didn’t.

So I had to get some filler and more paint.  At this point, the paint shop had run out of the epoxy paint in “Sky gray” (yes), so I bought some “Warm gray” paint.  The epoxy paint only comes in five different pre-set colours.

But:

“Warm gray” is a code word for “beige”!  I hate beige!  (Ok, it doesn’t look that beige in that picture, but it is in real life.)

Back to a different paint shop to buy some more “Sky grey”, and put down another “first coat”.  This being the third coat.

Then I noticed that the paint is really slippery.  The old paint was more textured, so I went back to Ye Oldee Paintee Shoppee and got “Anti-Slip Pearls”.  Which looks like plastic sand or something.

On with the second coat of “Sky grey”.  The “pearls” seem to do the trick with the slipperyness, but another coat of paint is required.

So that’s five coats in total, and there has to be more than 12 hours between each coat.  It’s taken me more than five days!  The rose bushes I had to take in from the balcony  have all bloomed in pure confusions!  They’re probably gonna die from shock when I put them back out again, I think.

The balcony looks OK now, though.  But the groundwork is probably not good enough, and it’ll start flaking again.

I’ve learned lot.  Like: Call somebody who knows what they’re doing.

Done!