Blog 4.0

It was good to visit my Mum for a week. After the whole scare with the cardiac arrhythmia (which is still not resolved, just temporarily on hold), I was worried that I'd find her much worse than when I had last seen her in April, but she didn't seem that different. She had just developed a sudden fear of stairs and hills, as she said that any sort of climb made her feel incredibly exhausted and unwell. Though we did go up one steep road together eventually, and she realised it wasn't actually that bad when it wasn't 30+ degrees out (no duh). I also got to visit the garden one more time and it was very bittersweet. I picked up a couple of keepsakes, but it was weird to think that I likely won't see the place again. I could definitely understand why my mother made her decision though, because seeing her and seeing even the comparatively tiny amount of work that was still to do in late September, such as picking up fallen pears, raking leaves etc., it was still clear

Today my mother and I went to the local shopping centre to run some errands. First we visited a shop for her landline and cable provider, as I was interested in adding internet to her package, with an eye on me coming to visit more often in the future. I was hopeful that this would be easy, as she was sent a brand-new modem only the other week, which does have wi-fi capacity and everything; it's just not unlocked. First the guy told us that he couldn't just "add" internet, we would have to be changed to a whole new bundle deal. Fine, I thought. And no, we couldn't keep the current modem, in fact we'd need two new boxes installed. With an activation fee. And a monthly rent. And my Mum would need a new landline number. That's where I kind of went "come on", because I couldn't believe that simply amending an existing contract would require a new landline number. The guy called up some higher-level support, chatted with them for about ten minute

I flew back to Austria yesterday to spend a few days with my mother. It was mostly an uneventful journey, which is kind of what you want when flying, but when we descended to land, something pretty amazing to me personally happened. I always like looking out the window at that point to see all the little houses and trees, and to slowly watch them get bigger, but I'm bad at orientating myself, so I usually can't tell what exactly I'm seeing. However, this time the plane approached the airport in a straight line from northwest to southeast, on a beautiful day with blue skies, and just as the sun was starting to set. Everything was casting stark shadows and for the first time ever, I could clearly see all of Vienna from the sky, recognising what I was looking at and spotting landmarks everywhere. It was like seeing a perfect 3D map of the place. I didn't know what to look at first, I just kept staring as the plane passed by and before the city itself disappeared from view

Last month my husband and I were visiting a friend for a week, and one day, while the two of them were busy with something else and the wi-fi was down, it suddenly occurred to me that I could play a game on my mobile phone. I've been a PC gamer for most of my life, but for all that, I've been oddly resistant to playing games on other devices. I don't have any inherent objections to the concept, it's just always felt inferior to me somehow. However, that day, the time was right. I browsed the Google Play store for a bit, initially thinking of playing something "sophisticated" like a strategy game, but everything I looked at just made me think: This looks like it could be a fun game on PC, but with a hundred mobile nuisances tacked on. So eventually I just gave up and decided to find something that seemed uniquely suited to the smart phone as a medium, something that I was never going to play on my PC anyway: a puzzle game. One of the first ones to come up was