I tried getting my climbing shoes repaired today, they need re-soling. There’s a shoemaker in Oslo that fixes climbing shoes, and I called him on monday. He has given up the shop, I was told, and is now working in Sandvika – a 20 minute train ride outside of town. So I called the shoemaker in Sandvika, told them what I needed, and they told me what office hours were. Fine, I thought. This is going to be easy.

Today I was there. The shoemaker shop exists, but the particular shoemaker who fixes climbing shoes doesn’t work there – yet. He bought the shop, and he’ll get the keys in july, they told me. Why in bog’s name didn’t they tell me that over the phone the day before? I specifically told them I wanted climbing shoes re-soled, something you need equipment for that they didn’t have. What was the point in making me waste my time and money on that trip? I really don’t get it.

So now I have pair of shoes that isn’t getting fixed until july. Luckily, they were an impulse buy I did when my old Boreal shoes were still pretty good, so I’ve got those. The feel a little wide, the toes have lost all their pointiness and I don’t like the rubber – basically, the Red Chili shoes are excellent stuff, and anything else just isn’t the same.

The good news is that there might be a chance for climbing tomorrow. The forecast is optimistic, and promises sunshine with some clouds and 15°C. It’s about time we get a day without rain.

The game continues to progress slowly, but it’s progressing. Today I finished the work on rivers and simple fortification (walls, gates and loopholes), and added them to the movement rules. I had to move the movement rules (haha) to another place in the code, the original design wasn’t good enough to share the code between some different places, but it’s still easy enough to make changes in the code while it’s so little.

Another piece of advice: Keep a log of your ideas. You can do that in a textfile, but I use an outliner (old-fashioned software to organize your notes hierarchically) that I keep on my palm to write down ideas. I have a lot of ideas which I cannot immediately use, and I am getting forgetful, so I like to write them down. Before going to sleep, or on the bus in the morning, I like to go over those notes and think about them, which can lead to implementation ideas that I add, and I refine that list of notes constantly. When a feature feels like I can implement it, I sit down and try it out. Next up: probably more unit types, like the phalanx.