Yesterday it was time for the annual (or the twice-annually, actually) wine fair again. Like the previous years most importers to the Norwegian market were there. This year's theme were Chablis and Chardonnay grapes in general.
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Yesterday was my birthday, and I had planned skydiving. Unfortunately the forecast was bad (and the weather became even worse), so jumping was cancelled. In stead I got an entire day just for myself. Since I am a responsible, busy person I spent too much of it cleaning up at home and working in the garden, but it was nice nevertheless. I also had time to enjoy one of my birthday gifts I got from Anders, Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi. It was a funny and nice little book, a graphic novel about sex in Iran - told between women of different generations. I think I will read it again. I also got Wild Swans: Three daughters of China by Jung Chang and How to Eat: Pleasures and Principles of Good Food by Nigella Lawson. In addition I got an avocado slicer (very neat!) and a garlic cutter (even neater!), a chocolate massage session (not quite sure about this, but we'll see - I am not sure I'll enjoy a massage by someone I don't know, but then I have never tried it), a nice necklace, and a digital picture frame. I also got some cards, money from mother in law, and a bunch of greetings on Facebook and Livejournal. Thank you everyone!

In the evening we had dinner, and enjoyed some new beers we hadn't tasted before. Unlike last year, I didn't invite for a big party for my birthday, even though it was more of a round day this year than the last. I have simply been too busy and tired, maybe I'll celebrate it a bit more later. Probably not... (Well, cake in psal on Thursday, of course.)

Today I slept in, which was wonderful. It's been a long time since I have been able to to that - at least three weeks, I think. The joy of skydiving is to get a proper routine for getting up in time - whether it's workdays or weekends... My mum, brother, almost-sister-in-law and their sone came for a late lunch, I made sandwiches and cake and I think everyone enjoyed it a lot. I got money and vouchers from them, I am wondering if I am able to spend them?!? (Haha, nice joke!)

One thing I am wondering about, though, is why I always type "borthday" in stead of "birthday" (guess how many attempts I needed to type the latter correct?). Answers appreciated. I don't usually mix up i and o, I think...

Today I have had my first (yes, I am not afraid of that word in this setting) solo jump over Festningen in Trondheim :-) It was fantastic! Not only is there city all around (not green and brown and white fields, just pick one and land), but people are watching! And they are watching me! I am the one disturbing their soccer match by landing between the two sweaters constituting the goal, I am the one watched by lots of high school almost-graduates relaxing in the park. Scary!

Everything went fine, I landed more or less where I should, and the day was great!

Time flies. It's suddenly May. Where the heck did the months pass?? Certainly they didn't come my way, at least not in the sense of leaving time here for me!

This week I had a hectic day at work on Monday, then spent Tuesday and Wednesday at a local security conference. It was ok, some lectures were pretty interesting, others were either plain out dull or just on the side of what I expected or was interested in hearing. Unfortunately some of the speakers only presented their own solutions - or worse, spoke about their own organization, but without being allowed to reveal any details from them.

Today I caught up on some projects, and tomorrow I plan to dedicate myself to only one project for a change. We'll see how it goes, though.

The house is still under work. It will probably take some time, but I am confident our builder knows what he is doing and will do it well. I just hope we're lucky with the weather for the next days, too, it's neither fun nor good for the house to work in heavy rain and wind, and this is on the most weather prone side of the house, too.

I need new glasses. If any locals would like to come with me to the optician, I'd be very grateful. I hate picking new frames on my own, and if the staff are busy it's not fun to ask them either, even if it's their job. My old frames are falling apart (I may get someone to sold them for me, but I still need some new ones), and I am not sure the lenses are right for me anymore either, so I'd like some new ones. Style yet unknown. I thought about going for a two-for-one offer at Specsavers, but I should have extra thin lenses, so it would be very expensive as I have to choose the same for both frames. And I didn't find any nice frames among the cheaper ones that could justify getting two pairs of heavy glasses and then get another light one later if I felt I needed it. Now I am using an old pair, and even though they are a lot better than my contact lenses (I can't work by the monitor with them) they are not perfect. At least they are very light with thin glasses....

Lots of new flowers are sprouting in the garden. Different daffodils are in full flower now, as are yellow and red tulips. The scillas are about to end the blooming now, but some perennials I bought last year are flowering or sprouting now. And we have LOTS of yellow and white primulas (two different kinds), as well as a few violet ones of a third kind. I'll try to take some pictures tomorrow when it's still light outside.

From searchingbuddha, duckmonster, mimerki and probably others.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
And [bracket] the books you own but haven't read yet.


[Crime and Punishment]
[Catch-22]
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
[Moby Dick]
[Madame Bovary]
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
[The Brothers Karamazov]
Vanity Fair
Emma
[Atlas Shrugged]
The Canterbury Tales
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
[A Clockwork Orange]
The Once and Future King
1984
Sense and Sensibility
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Neverwhere
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
[Lolita]
Persuasion
[The Catcher in the Rye]
Watership Down
[Great Expectations]
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
The Scarlet Letter
Don Quixote
Ulysses
[The Odyssey]
[The Iliad]
[Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell]
[Anna Karenina]
The Silmarillion
[Life of Pi : a novel]
[The Name of the Rose]
The Tale of Two Cities
Guns, Germs, and Steel
[War and Peace]
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
[Mrs. Dalloway]
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
[Memoirs of a Geisha]
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Foucault’s Pendulum
[Middlemarch]
Anansi Boys
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
Angels & Demons
Inferno
[The Satanic Verses]
[The Picture of Dorian Gray]
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
[Cryptonomicon]
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Northanger Abbey
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

The last week has been very busy and I haven't had time to write much in my blog. Neither have I had time to read any blogs, so if something has happened that I should know, please tell me. Tomorrow it's a conference in Trondheim, the same on Wednesday, and I have some vague ambitions about getting to the gym before or after the event - although it would be lovely to get some extra rest this night, too.

We have visitors now, the first couchsurfers are sleeping in our guest room. Yay!

We came home a couple of hours ago. I beat the GPS on the last leg, arriving 25 minutes before the original arrival estimate. Let's say I didn't drive 10% below the speed limit ;-)

On the way back we stopped at the new Opera house in Oslo. It opened a couple of weeks ago, and at least the building is already a pretty big attraction. The surroundings are sad and grey, they are still constructing new houses around it, but the building itself is build in white marble and beautiful. The roof is open to the public, and today it was almost crowded. I don't know how many people who were there, but it was a steady stream and the bridge to the main station (basically the only way to walk there) was crowded. Amazingly it wasn't crowded in garbage, litter or pee either!

My brother got married yesterday, so we have spent the weekend in Skien or to and from. It's been a very nice weekend. On the way down we had a lot of rain, as the forecast predicted. The forecast for Friday was good, so the longer predictions and reality matched, the better! We drove E6 across Dovre from Trondheim to Skien - very good timing: on Thursday night parts of the road was closed due to land slides and holes in the road after the heavy rain. Some parts of the county got more than 80% of the monthly rain predictions in a day! I suppose we're driving the other main route home, hopefully the floods they fear there haven't started yet... a lot of snow in the mountains is melting, and rain on top of it...

On Friday my brother and Cath got married. The judge gave a nice speech, they said yes in the right places and after JB had asked if this was the time for kissing, they kissed and exchanged rings (what about a rehearsal before the ceremony? ;-)). And then they were married. (Don't say it's complicated to get married. It took less than 20 minutes, including shuffling everyone in and out.)

After the ceremony we went to a hotel outside town where dinner was held. We're also staying here, it's a nice place in the forest, with newly renovated rooms and nice staff. We have a nice room with a huge couch, very nice for wine sipping in the night!
-Anyway, dinner was nice. My brother did the toastmaster job himself, and did a good job. His speech to Cath was nice, as was my parents speech with songs integrated, Cath's mum's, and the best man and maid of honor also said nice things. I hadn't planned to say anything, but as I sat there listening to the other nice speeches I decided to say something, and made quick notes on the name tags on the table. My brother also improvised his speech, and the best man had written his on the back of a song text my mum gave him after 23:30 the night before... Anyway, the speech went well and I just forgot to mention one of the stories I had thought about - of course the one I hadn't written down. Just proves the usefulness of notes!

The weather remained ok all day. In the morning it was pretty cloudy, but before the ceremony it cleared up and stayed nice most of the afternoon and evening - just like the forecast predicted.

Today Anders and I went to Arendal to see his mother, aunt and uncle. It was really lovely weather, so it was a nice drive down there, and very nice to see them all. After lunch, coffee and out "Japan show" we headed back to Skien again to have dinner at my brother's. I had bought our oldest nephew a play piano with four tones - he loved it. He was very sleepy, but really enjoyed playing and hammering at it. Noisy toys are good for him!

Now we have spent the rest of the night in our hotel room, watching TV and drinking wine. Nice to relax and not be surrounded by noise and sounds and people all the time (although it has worked out pretty well).

Congratulations, JB and Cath!

We live in a timber house.

Our garden is rather nice now, at least the flower bed along the road. The rest is mostly lawn, and it's not quite green yet. We plan to do something about the lawn area when we have finished the restoration project, since it will probably destroy a lot anyway. Anders also plans to make a herb garden on the eastern side of the house, with edible plants and bushes.

In the flower bed we have lots of blue scilla, plus crocus and Snowdrops. The latter are at the end of the season now, the scilla at the top. In addition we also have Primulas, of different kinds.



Snowdrops in March.



Crocus a week ago.




Scillas today.

It's been kind of busy recently. During the weekend I was on Festningen all of Saturday, from 0815 until almost 17. The skydiving club was 40 years on Friday, and we celebrated with jumping on Festningen (in Trondheim) during day and dinner and party in the evening.

Everything went smooth. No incidents, and everyone were happy. I drove 3 loads to the airport, and they all seemed very content. It was also very social, with people relaxing in the grass all day (at least from load #2 and onwards). Many old, new and prospective club members were there, and at a point we were people from 1 to almost 80 years there. Some police cars were patrolling because of a student party in the area - I concluded they were probably not interested in our low-scale drinking!

The party in the evening was nice. Great food and lots of nice stories. Since I got up at 7 (and was late in bed on Friday) I was pretty exhausted, so we went home around 2:30 (which isn't that early, when thinking about it...).

On Sunday we spent two hours cleaning, and I have almost decided it's not worth it. When the interest rates go down (or our salaries (enough!) up, whatever comes first) we will pay someone to do the cleaning for us. We could have spent those 4 hours we spent between us in a better way.

After the cleaning we went to Øyvind and Synnøve for dinner. Gustav was in town, and we hadn't seen their new house. We got a very good lamb roast, plus fruit salad and lots of wine. Their house was nice, and they have a lot of interesting plans for it and the garden.

We're leaving for my brother's wedding on Thursday, and there is still a lot to do. Ironing, packing, gift wrapping, Anders needs to find his cufflinks and get a haircut (I am mentioning it here in case he reads it!), plus pick up my camera if it's ready, I need to find out whether I am supposed to give a speech (maybe with my brother), and if so, can we meet on Thursday night to plan it (the wedding is Friday after lunch) etc. I called mum yesterday, she laughed hysterically and asked if I was joking when I told her my blouse was still not ironed (it's a linen blouse for my national costume, so it wrinkles very easy).

The carpenter has started working on our house now. He put up scaffolds before the weekend, and started removing some wooden parts along the roof. After that we didn't see much to him, but Anders kept in touch via phone. Yesterday the garbage container I ordered came (kind of stressing, everyone wants containers now, so one of the biggest companies had a two weeks waiting list), so he started stripping off the wall today and is halfway down - I guess he'll finish tomorrow, since it's easier lower down. The house seems to be of full-wood timber on the ground floor, built like they used to build timber houses in those days. On 1st floor it's a more modern construction. It's also been more windows on the house, and apparently a balcony door (and thus a small balcony) on 1st floor. There is some rot, but not more than expected after 80 years, so so far it doesn't look like any very unexpected challenges are appearing.

Tonight I worked late and finished a lot of small things that had been piling up - a very nice feeling! Thursday is Workers' Day and a public holiday, and I'll take Friday off, so the week won't actually be any longer than usual. After work I did some shopping and got a new dress for the wedding (mum insists that the national costume is too warm and heavy to wear all day and night, and perhaps she's right), plus some gifts for the kids (but forgot to get a noisy car toy!), then had dinner with Anders in Mikrobryggeriet before heading home to do the taxes (while he enjoyed himself there!!). Tomorrow will be yet another busy day, but I hope to get home in time to relax a bit before having to pack and sleep before leaving. We're driving down with grandma-

And then the taxes are done and I will receive NOK 5000 back in stead of paying the same amount :-) (Good for me, bad for Anders ;) But we paid an equal share of the loans all this is based upon, so.)

I am doing the tax reports for me and Anders. The due date is tomorrow, and I have been procrastinating it for two weeks now. This year we can legally skip it, since everything is automatic anyway and most people don't make any changes to the pre-filled forms (and loose a lot of money because of errors). But of course we have loads of changes: I guess a lot around the house sales are wrong, and the loans are wrong. Since everything is in Anders' names, he also gets all the refunds for it, so I owe the state quite a lot and he'll be paid back a bit more. To benefit myself, I redo everything for him and make things fair. Muhahahaha.

(Yes, I do! Honestly!)

NTNU FSK (NTNU skydiving club) is 40 years today! (Well, actually on Friday 25th) It was founded in lecture hall S3 on April, 25th, 1968. The first jump was made some weeks earlier, on March, 2nd, 1968.

This year we have celebrated this with a jump with an old Paracommander canopy on March, 2nd, and today we had a great dinner and paty with old and new jumpers - from people with several hundred jumps and certificates dating back to 1968 (although nobody has been jumping for all the 40 years, I think) to students with one or two static line jumps (then getting a debrief from the old-schoolers watching their jump video).

Before the party we celebrated by jumping at the fortress in Trondheim - 8 loads landed nicely at the fortress grounds, the last one with lots of smoke and the Paracommander. The forecast hadn't been very nice during the week, but the bad weather was postponed and the day turned out very nice - blue skies most of the day, and no wind most of the day, too. As close to "fantastic" as you can come in April, really.

It was a really nice day, from the early beginning at 8:15 when I was doing my duty on the ground while people jumped at the fortress, until we left the party around 2:30 - pretty late for me, but not for skydivers, of course, Still lots of people left in psal, wonder how long the party goes on. And what psal will look like tomorrow....

Pierre the Penguin is getting older and is loosing feathers. It's cold for him, so his zoo got fitted a wetsuit so he doesn't get cold. He has even grown back some of his feathers, gained weight and enjoys his dressed life. (Longer movie, with the story in Norwegian.)

The joy of hardware continues. Today I finally got around to asking the other techies to help me mount the disk systems in the rack. I ended up cutting my finger on a screw driver after about half a minute, so they did most of the mounting. Only to find out it had to be redone so the IBM servers could also fit in.

I had ordered "two of everything" for the IBM servers, and also specified hot-swap in a couple of sentences. So it came with two power supplies and two disks, both hot-swappable. The fans are also hot-swappable, "put the new fan in within 2 minutes, or the server with switch off to avoid overheating". Everything is bliss. Until we were about to mount the disks, and discovered they didn't easily slide in and lock. Because they were hot-swappable, while the cabinet is not. "Power down before replacing disks." What kind of server is that??

My coworker is also crazy. "Mounting hardware is meditative." You sick man.

Work is kind of busy now. We're changing helpdesk staff (a new company), and there is *a lot* to do related to it. None of us have ever done something like this before, and there are lots of things we have forgotten, postponed or just not thought about - and to different extent we freak out a bit about it. I am pretty relaxed - things have gone about as well or bad as I expected, and I haven't really seen more surprises than anticipated, although there were a few I didn't think about. We're going live tomorrow. I was initially donating blood tomorrow morning, but I changed it to Friday and thus won the tech duty tomorrow. In retrospect it's bad, since I don't like talking to customers on the phone, and it's pretty likely I'll have to answer technical questions tomorrow. At least I know they are probably easy questions.

When I got home I disposed a dead fish from my fishtank - I have become unsentimental and used the toilet in stead of the composter this time (not sure if there is really a difference). I also put up a holder for the iron (which we use daily, haha) and went to the recycling station with a bag of bottles and jars. And bought chocolate for tomorrow's 2nd line support duty...

And I saw a tiny lizard on the way home. I have never seen them around here before, and certainly not in April!

When I signed the contract for work at Norid a bit over a year ago, the HR representative wanted by diploma. She only got a lousy printout from the student system at university, because the diploma was in a box in storage - but it would be unpacked in June or so, so she'd have it when I started in July.

Luckily she never asked for it. I unpacked the last box of my things today, and there is was. I am not even exaggerating when I say "the last" - it was the very last of my boxes.

Happy birthday, pamoreno!