Back to work! A joy as always! Unlike last year, when the first day after vacations was close to hell, it's been two calm days now. We did some changes in the domain regulations for .no as of yesterday, and allowed IPv6 glue records into our zones, so we got a few questions regarding that - which forced us to do some brain work (if someone can come up with a maximum two line definition of "glue record" in Norwegian, I'd be happy), but nothing we clever techies couldn't handle. We even managed to write some customer documentation!! (Evil birds whistle that this should have been written before the change. Oh well.)

A lot of laundry has been done at home, as well as some cleaning. Tonight I have been at grandma's and at a garden centre to get some colour (which are currently quarantined on the veranda in case they are snail infested), while Anders is out drinking beer. I am considering raiding the beer cellar soon.

Back from vacations! We came home yesterday evening, so today most of the time has been spent unpacking, doing laundry and garden work. Luckily a friend has been staying here most of the time, so no plants are dead (although one tomato plant broke) and the lawn wasn't too overgrown, it's been pretty dry most of the time, so it was just perfect to cut it today.

The last week at the cottage was nice. We took the cat to a vet to have it identified, it turned out to be a cat from the local community. Its mum was in Sweden on a school band trip, but her partner was at home, and the neighbour also used to take care of the cat. Apparently the cat enjoyed us more and preferred to stay with us in stead, but it was happy to be home when Anders brought him back the night before we left.



(Anton, aka Sylvester)

On Thursday morning we left the cottage for Stavanger. We chose a sub-optimal route - the inner roads, via Evje for those who know the area. This meant very little traffic and decent roads (we're talking asphalt and mostly regular width roads), but no motor-way and little driving above 70 km/h. (Also meaning the local heroes would pass us regularly.)

In Stavanger we first had afternoon coffee with my mum's cousin, which was very nice. I don't think we have met in 15 years, although none of us remembered for sure - it could have been only 10 years. After that we went to the city, checked in at our hotel, had pizzas for dinner and then went to Cardinal, a very good beer pub in Stavanger. We spent the evening there tasting several new and mostly good beers.

On Friday we drove on to Flåm. It's a rather popular tourist resort, not least coming there to visit the world's steepest railway. For a tourist coming from other landscapes I suppose the area is quite magnificent - to us it was mostly a confirmation: I have seen those areas so many times on TV and in magazines, and visited many other alpine regions of Norway, and even if the contrast between the fjords and the mountains made it spectacular, it still felt "normal". But it was nice to have seen it now, none of us have been there before. I would like to go back there to take the railway later, this time we prioritized a good night's sleep rather than getting up a bit too early and not knowing whether we could get tickets to the train then (it probably wouldn't have been a problem, given the decline in tourism this season).

Flåm is a typical tourist resort. According to Wikipedia, 500 people live there - I am not sure where they live. They probably count some farms in the area, and there seemed to be a community just outside the "centre" too. When we were there, there were quite few tourists. According to a man in a shop this was common early in the day, but he also admitted that they had seen a steep decline this season. All the four (!) sweather&souvernir shops had lots in stock, several clerks and few visitors. It was however interesting to see the phenomenon of such shops live - the handicraft store and the store in the tourist information in Trondheim are nothing! In addition to sweathers - which either cost NOK 300 or NOK 2500, depending on whether they are made in China or Norway - the fashionable items seem to be trolls in all shapes and positions (I haven't seen any Troll Kamasutra books, though, but I forgot to look very closely). One of the stores also had Odin and Thor statues - next to cute angels. And I was able to find two penguin figures - penguins are as local inhabitants as ice bears in Flåm, and ice bear figures were quite plentiful.

On our way home we drove through the Lærdal Tunnel, the world's longest road tunnel at 24.5 km. It was mostly long and dull. Throughout the trip we passed through many tunnels ranging from 50 m to 6-7 km, and I found most of them quite pleasant to drive through because they were dark. The lightening was almost like regular road lightening in the darkness, so in stead of giving the tunnel feeling that makes the road feel so narrow, they gave an impression of driving on a road in pitch dark, with no houses or stars along the road - just the road lights and the lights from the meeting cars. But then I prefer drining at night ot driving in tunnels.

Today turned out to be the gardening and unpacking day. Our guest mowed the lawn, while Anders cut the hedges and I weeded in thelarge flower bed - which was seriously overgrown of old plants, and none of the plants had flowers now. I have removed a lot of weed so it's space there for some flowering, colourful plants that we will hopefully get tomorrow. Not sure what, I'll see what the garden centre offers with nice colours.

The last week of the summer vacation has just started, only three more days here before we head towards home on Thursday with a detour on the west coast, including a family visit, pubs and at least one brewery. The weather has been great all the time, the first rain came yesterday - at least 15 drops per square metre over an hour. Today it's grey and windy, but no rain so far.

According to the logbook here we haven't done much: mostly sun-notes every day, a few visits from friends and family, and we had a family reunion this weekend with both my brothers and their children. The details around the windows and on the corners of the cottage are painted blue, and the annex is painted grey with blue details. It did wonders for the temperature: it used to be like a sauna inside it after a sunny day, now it was still cool inside until we opened the door and let the warm air in. The cat Anton is still here, housewarm as ever. We'll hopefully sort out where he belongs with some help from a vet or the police tomorrow, he seemes to have an rfid chip.

The housekeeper at home seems to be doing a good job, the lawn is mowed and only a few plants have died - Trondheim has had the same weather as Arendal, so I'm not surprised all of them didn't cope well with the heat.

It's still hot. It's still sunny. The wind has stopped.

The monitor of my T60 has too bad contrast to be used in the hang mat, since it's sunny there. The veranda is barely dark enough below the sun shield.

A cat turned up here this morning. It's black and white and looks healthy, I think, at least not particularly thin. It's extremely cosy and loves to play with my legs when I try to step outside on its side of the cottage. It's quite noisy and miauwing a lot. No food for you, cat, but a bowl of water is probably ok in this heat. I just hope nobody has left it in the forest (which is not very big - there are houses just a couple of hundred metres from the cabin) and left for summer holidays. It has a tiny blue mark that may be a tattoo in its ear, so I guess we could bring it to a vet to see if it's RFIDed if it's still here in a few days. I just don't want a cat :-)

Everything is well down here. It's warm and I have a slight lobster colour on my back. Note to self: what's up with sun screen?

We've done very little since we came here on Sunday, mostly limited to reading, relaxing, drinking wine and beer, and shopping necessities like food, wine and hooks for the hang mat I bought 10 years ago and have been storing under a guest bed for a few years now.

Plans for the rest of the week? Nah. Maybe a trip to the Nøgne Ø pub tomorrow, dinner at mother-in-law's on Saturday, and maybe we'll get some visitors coming over. Plus more sun bathing and lobster tanning. The house at home is doing well, too.

Finally the summer holidays have begun. As usual the last week at work was rather close to poor hell, with a huge pile of tasks that had to, should or at least ought to be finished. My lists just shrank as I worked - not only because they were finished... Prioritizing!

We drove to Oslo on Friday morning, as usual about an hour later than anticipated. In Oslo we stayed at Gustav's, and spent the evening drinking beer and eating good food at Olympen, a decent waterhole in Oslo. It used to be a dark brown bar, but was renovated a couple of years ago and although the interior still has a nice brown colour and looks decent, the place is now much more hip and popular than it used to be - and the former clientelle have moved to a new place... The pub was full when we arrived, it's popular for after-work dinners, but we managed to get a table since we wanted to eat, and had a great dinner accompanied by excellent beer.

On Saturday we first went to see Anders' aunt and uncle, then downtown for Øl&Mat, a new beer and food festival in Oslo. It was ok, especially the bar with Danish and Swedish microbrews. Several new favourites there! I hope to write more about the beers on a rainer day... The food-part of the festival was, well, decent, but nothing more. The food was very good - no industrial hot dogs and McDonalds burgers, but rather handmade lamb sausages and elk burgers servered by the producer, and I also got some cheese and cured meat. But it wasn't really a food festival, only the necessary food to keep people going through the evening. The food festival in Trondheim is much better in that sense, with lots of local vendors serving appetizers and full meals, as well as lots of cheese, bread, meat, jam and fish to bring home. I am glad we didn't rely on the festival to buy food for the first day in the cottage - cheese, sausage and jam is good, but hardly a breakfast.

The beer selection was good, but none of the major microbreweries in Norway were there at all, and only two of the brewery corporations. They didn't provide any information about the beers, and the staff hardly knew anything about the beers as far as I noticed. The other bars, serving misc beers, were slightly better - at least some of the staff seemed to know what they were pouring (and how). We bought 20 cl samples glasses at the entrance, so we got through about 23 (new) beers together on the festival. (Drinking from 1400 until 2300 is perhaps not too healthy for neither wallet not liver, but...)

Yesterday we left Oslo for the cottage my mum has rented close to my brother, the same place she stayed last summer. My brother also came there, so we met my nephew again and saw our niece for the first time. She was very cute, and so calm and silent - I hope she continues like that for at least a few months :-) (Then it would, on the other hand, be good for her if she started making more noise and using her forces against her brother so he doesn't overrun her completely.) After cake and drinks there we continued to Arendal, and went to see Anders' mum before heading to the cottage.

And here we are now, in warm sun from bright blue sky and a cold breeze on the veranda. Yesterday there were a few mosquitos around, but it wasn't that bad and quite frankly I despise more of the wasps trying to nest around here, than the mosquitos. It's time to move a bit and get to town to get more wine and chocolate, as well as some more food and water.

And just as I wrote in I got a text message from the tax authorities telling me that my tax returns are ready and a pleasant amount of money will be deposited in my account...soon? Five clicks have still not given me a date for when they will be deposited, but usability was never something Tax Norway was good at.

The vacation is approaching, so work is getting insane and the list of things that I have to should ought to do before leaving is increasing. We're having a house guest during the first period we're away, so I suppose some of the items can be unlisted since she'll either mess up while she's here, or she will be te last person to leave the house so it's her responsibility. (*muhahahhaa*)

The list does include a lot of garden work, but hopefully the weather will be decent for the next two days too so we can do some of it. At least cutting the grass, it's full of yellow flowers and looks rather messy. Or very natural, depending on the eyes, I guess.

Right now my biggest problem is that I have a strong "Thursday-feeling", which is quite bad as it is still only Tuesday. And if it was Thursday, we'd be leaving in 12 hours. So I am really wondering if my motivation and inspiration is still there for the remaining two work days, or if it has left for the cottage already. In any case it's only two days. Twooooo days. Breeeeeaaaatheeeee. Two days.

The beer club ended up having two meetings this week. On Tuesday it was the monthly meeting, with summer beers - for some definition of that. We were invited to suggest summer favourites or beers we thought were suitable for summer, and the pub and the board selected beers ranging from San Miguel, Boston Lager and Hoegaarden via local and national microbrews and Belgian sour beers to Porter and Mikkeller Beer Geek Breakfast. I suppose the selection is quite typical for a connoisseurs beer club - we simply don't do lagers in the summer :-) (Yes, this IS an exaggeration).

After (or during) the tasting we rated the beers regarding to taste ("best beer") and to how good summer beers they were (specified as "sunny summer, not the local one"). The "best beer" results were not very surprising, given the audience: Beer Geek Breakfast won, followed by dark or tasterich beers, the the light ones and San Miguel last.

Our "summer taste" is probably not very skewed compared to a "normal population" though: Hoegarden came first, followed by San Miguel - and Beer Geek Breakfast last (shame!). The list was almost turned around.

Myself I voted for Beer Geek Breakfast first on both: it's a very good beer in itself, one of my definite favourites, and one I can drink quite a lot of (I am not one of those looking for someone to split a bottle with because it's too much alone!). I also want it as a summer beer: served ice cold it will be an excellent substitute for iced coffee on the veranda! Not quite the caffeine level, but the taste is absolutely there, and it's refreshing. I have to order a box of it before the cottage vacation ;-)

Next evening came the Extreme Beer Tasting: an evening in Kafe Filter, an up and coming favourite and much closer to home than Naboen (the only drawback is that we will keep missing the bus since the bus stop is almost right outside and we will maximize the time spent inside before heading out, which means no planning when it should mean careful planning).

The reason for this double-event week was that the summer beer tasting was already planned when Kafe Filter told that Kjetil Jikiun from Nøgne Ø was coming to mount a new tap there. He is absolutely a guy any beer club should want to listen to, so when the opportunity was there, the solution was easy: two meetings.

The beer club and the owners of the cafe selected 8 beers that in some sense could be considered extreme. The vague plan was that Kjetil would present them while talking about...beer. Those of you who have heard him probably knows that silence should not be an issue - he is an overflowing source of good stories paired with experience and imagination.

And so the evening went on. Between stories starting with "Well, we had this leftover beer at the bottom of the steel barrels, and it went sour over Christmas" [resulting in a framboise-vanilla-porter-lambic] and "imagine making juice from 1000 kg of lingonberries with only one little manual juicer" (then the beer was fermented with several kinds of yeasts, fermented for a week, then stopping, horrible taste, repeat this spontanously about three times over 9 months, then taste acceptable, bottle it, and after 8 months in bottles it started to taste acceptable) through "we started with a spicy Yule beer recipe, added juniper berries, chestnuts and white sage and came out with this" and "we wanted an angry tiger, but the photos we found were either too expensive, not available or the photographer was against alcohol and wouldn't accept his photo on a beer bottle so we ended up with almost a kitten", to, well, loads of interesteing stories I am not able to write down afterwards. (You should have been there, of course!)

Well, you name it. Simply an amazing evening.

Congratulations, brother and family :-) And happy birthday, Marte!



(Photo found in Varden 2009-06-09. Photographer: Cathrine Wefall)

I hate pollen. Thus, today's enemy: grass. According to the pollen forecast the season has barely started. According to my eyes, nose and skin it started today. My eyes are sore and running, my nose and skin itching. And as usual I am totally unprepared: out of drugs, no prescription and my local pharmacy only have small (7 days) OTC packages of my preferred drug. The joy.

On top of everything the world seemed to be against be most of the day, so as the allergy progressed, the bad day also progressed (I guess there was some connection between them, at least in my perception of bad day stuff). In the end I gave up and went home, only to miss the bus by about 1 minute (at least I waited almost 10 minutes for a bus that leaves every 10 minutes). At the pharmacy they appeared to serve people only with a queue tag, so I waited for 15 minutes and 10 sloooow customers before my number came up at the same time as I realized that one of the prescription-only counters actually took OTC orders without a tag. Oh joy. I am sorry for the poor cashier that got my rambling. She probably didn't deserve it.

Luckily the drugs work pretty fast, so I am about to become a stable, sound and safe person again now.

I got an update from the penguin people a month ago, just forgot to post it. The penguins are now long gone north towards Brazil, as winter has approached in their area.

For 3-4 weeks before going north the penguins spent all their time on land moulting. Since their feathers are so important to keep warm - they can't have patches of bare skin when swimming in cold water - they need to stay on land once they start changing feathers. The researchers say this is the most miserable month of their lives - and their faces show it! They just stand there, passive, hungry and bored. No playing, food catching or activity, just standing there, waiting for the damned feathers to grow.



When the moulting is finally over, they can start the migration north. Usually they hunt for fish by swimming in a large circle to avoid getting too far from their nest. When migrating, they simply swim in a northern direction in stead - quite certainly guided by the sun (but I have no idea how they know how to swim in circles). Once they are off the coast of Brazil, they go back to circles again, and spend long, light days getting fat again.

The migration starts once the moulting is over, and since it takes a slightly different time for each individual, the colony takes some weeks to be deserted. But now they are all gone, and the colony will be empty until the penguins return in September.

In other news: I have an adopted penguin, and so do Z and Vielpunkt in Bremerhaven Zoo. I cheated, though, and didn't hatch the egg...

My weekend continued to be very nice. I ended up at Oppdal on Sunday, and had a great day there. As I told the jumper in charge afterwards, even though I often feel I don't want to go because I have something else to do, the time spent there always ends up being very nice every time. Sunday was exceptionally nice - great weather, although a bit windy at times. Only a few jumpers, so it was very relaxed. And everybody were in great mood - happy shiny positive people. Me likes! And the students made great progress, each of them doing 4-5 jumps. One of them did his very first jump [no, he is a student :-P] and was almost flying in joy at the end of the day. Such people make definitely make it worth spending time at the DZ :-)

Monday wasn't as nice as Saturday weatherwise, we got a chilly wind from west and I gave up working in the garden when I had to wear long pants. A good excuse to spend some time inside instead, although no work was done on the house. (There is a lot of painting to do, at least.) We also went to a garden center and picked up lots of soil, some plants for the containers on the veranda, and a croquet set. I haven't played it since I was a kid, so it was kind of cool to buy my own. The weather has changed to rain and cold no, so the set is still unused - but I hope to get a chance to play it during summer. Hopefully Anders will enjoy it so I don't end up having to play alone, like I did as a kid :-P

Now the weather has changed completely, it's been raining and blowing a lot today. Right now it's not that bad, but chilly, and the forecast for the next days looks depressive. Well, I guess it's not that bad with a change for the garden, and I am glad we had this really nice weekend at least!

Someone was complaining that our irc channel planet only had one participant right now, so I guess it's time for an update. According to Twitter and facebook it has been a lot of coffee and chocolate cravings, in that order, and that feels right. In addition I have finished lots of small tasks on my work list, so perhaps I will have time to do some of the bigger tasks next week, those not on the high-priority list?

Apropos work, if anyone has a layman explanation of what IPv6 is and what it means for $random users, please feel free to comment. The audience is people coming to our website for information, so they could be expected to grasp things like "an IP address is the numeric address of your machine on Internet" without having to get funny analogies about what "the Internet" is.

On Wednesday I was babysitting for my nephew, who will be 2 years old in August. It was actually quite funny. We had dinner downstairs first, with his grandma (my brother's mother-in-law), then went upstairs. My brother was working that night so I was alone with him. It went surprisingly well. I changed my very first solo diaper, fed him, he got hyper from sweet yoghurt (I knew it was gonna happen and complained to my brother afterwards: "Oh, I never thought about that."), then he had a bath. After applying shampoo to his hair I started thinking about how to rinse it. Auntie laughing hysterically is probably not the most calming thing, especially when you fear the shower... he tried to escape from the bathtub. I ended up stealing his cup, covering his eyes with a cloth and force it out. Next time I will be content with cleaning his body.

I put him to bed about 15 minutes too late compared to the schedule I got from my brother, he put his head on the pillow, talked to himself for a few minutes and was silent and asleep when I looked at hime 6-7 minutes later. When I left about 2.5 hours after that he was still sleeping. Good boy. Good babysitter.

Yesterday I was in psal again, and had a few beers. People have been borrowing my rig, so I don't have to pay for beer ;-) The only problem is that I don't tolerate the yeast in the beer there well - I can have 3 small (330 ml @4.5 abv) beers and be sicker than from 3 strong (7+ abv) pints, so I think it's the yeast, not the beer itself. And no, I am not far off on counting my beers :-P

Today our old friend Groo is in town again. She hasn't been here since 2002, although she visited us in the cabin some time between there. She studied here, so Anders knows her from university and I was her neighbour for a few years. She is staying here now, so we invited a bunch of her old friends for grilling. We were 12 in total, and had lots of fish and meat, as well as salad and potato salad, plus misc beers from the cellar. Now they are testing whisky in the attic.

Other tidbits from my life. The house is still under repair, but we're almost there now. The new door will hopefully be mounted next week, the outside mouldings will be finished and hopefully we'll feel inspired to actually paint the stuff. If the builder finishes soon, I am considering taking a day or two off to paint - but I want to be home alone, since I prefer to do that kind of meditative work in solitude. (Doing it with other people may be ok. Doing it with a builder who is doing his own stuff and could interrupt at any time is entirely different.)

We have an extra holiday here on Monday, Whitsun Monday, and the forecast looks promising. It did so today, too, but it was a bit chilly to grill, but maybe they fix those few hours skew of the sun and the disappearance of the clouds soon. I may be on ground for skydivers on Sunday, but the plane can only fly for 3-4 more hours before maintenance and I am hoping for nice weather tomorrow so they use all of them then, and I can have Sunday off. There is a lot to do in the garden even if Whitsunday is rather sacred (we can do the noisy lawn mowing and very visible work like outside painting on Monday).

This weekend has been very nice. Thursday was a public holiday here (Ascension Day), and the weather was very nice so we got a lot done in the garden before heading to our "new" local pub (all the other local locals have been like "ooooh, didn't you know about it? We're there quite often."). Getting up to go to work on Friday wasn't that pleasant, but we managed ;) I had originally promised to work, but it turned out another guy was also working so I probably could as well have taken the day off. I left rather early, though.

Yesterday was skydiving day again, or rather obersving from the ground. Somebody gotta do it, and yesterday was by no means a bad day for a day outside (we're jumping in a field close to the main airport, so no facilities or roof to hide under): Blue skies, sun and a little chilly wind, plus a bunch of happy shiny jumpers that never complained or whined. Fantastic :-) I spent about 10 hours in a chair or on the packing mat or walking in the grass, even had a designated driver to drive people to the airport for their loads. The only drawback was that I am not really good at the sun-blocking stuff, so I forgot to apply sunscreen until...too late... My chest is pretty pink now.

After I got back to town and did the paperwork after the skydiving, I went to Naboen to have some beers with Anders. Or, I went home with the car, rushed through the house to dump my skydiving stuff and get some fresh clothes, then headed for the bus. We had a pizza and a few beers at Naboen - Anders had already been there for a while after finishing grading essays for his course earlier in the afternoon. I was rather exhausted after a day outside, but still managed to stay awake there until 23:30.

Today was another sunny day, so we did some garden work: mostly weeding, plus I planted some gladiolus and planned where to put the carrots I have sown in a milk box. Some friends came over for dinner, and brought some cherry tomato plants that are currently in the stairway window upstairs. They will need some more stable warm weather before being outside permanently, so I hope they don't grow too big too soon.

We had a nice afternoon with our friends. Anders mounted the gate I got at IKEA so the kid couldn't escape - it didn't look like he actually understood it was possible anyway, but I hope the gate is sturdy enough to survive my nephew too! We grilled, chatted and had a cake for dessert - very nice to see them again, as always we meet too seldom.

Now the weather is less glorious, a light drizzle. The forecast looks less promising than it used to, too, so we may have some wet days over the next week. Maybe a good opportunity to fertilize the lawn - apparently rain just afterwards is very good or even necessary.

It's two years since we moved into our house today, so it was about time we found a "neighbourhood" pub! I say "neighbourhood", because it's not really very close - but still the nearest dexcent pub. The selection is Kafe Filter in Ila, somewhere on the way between us and the city.

It is a small and cosy cafe/pub, with a VERY decent selection of beer: from several Norwegian breweries, as well as a good selection on international breweries outside the Carlsberg line. We had an Arrogant Bastard Ale, an Old Ruffian, Sigrid Øl and a Hercules Double IPA. Except Sigrid they were all pretty hoppy and special; poor Sigrid, first brewed on March, 8th, wasn't quite up to the other. Arrogant Bastard was my favourite among them, definitely a special beer.

I have finally uploaded the pictures from my visit to Keukenhof to my Flickr account. It's hard to point at my favourites, so I will just link to a few random pictures here. Head over to Flickr to see more, and feel free to comment, add notes or whatever there (I think you need an account for that, it's free).







I also uploaded a handful of pictures from our garden this spring. I plan to add pictures of the house soon - the last parts of the building project is getting finished, and it looks very nice! (Some painting is still needed, so I'll wait with the pictures.)

Friday was a wonderful afternoon. I spent it in the grasslands at Dyva, our summer DZ, watching jumpers there. The weather was nice and the jumpers happy, but I had forgotten how slowly it goes out there: we land in a field a few kilometres from the airport, so we have to shuttle by car, taxi far and then usually wait quite long for take-off since we are not exactly prioritized traffic. And we also lack radio contact with the plane, so on the ground we have no idea how long it's gonna take. But the small frustrations of waiting was calmed by the happy jumpers who at last landed - everybody landed in, no incidents or injuries, and lots of grilles sausages.

On Saturday I celebrated my birthday with a small family reunion. I had to find a weekend day when everyone were available, and Anders was the odd man out - he's visiting his mum in Arendal this weekend, so he missed it. The biggest challenge was having time for preparations - I opted for a grill party, since the forecast was very good. The only problem with that is that in Trondheim in May this really requires blue skies, or it will be too cool. So where did the clouds come from?? Luckily they didn't cover all the sun, so I decided it was warm enough (and didn't have to clean all of upstairs well enough for visitors - (dust) cleaning would not be an option after our builder has been running up and down with newly cut materials for a week, it was a requirement). I therefore spent the five hours between getting up and guests arriving accomplishing a lot, including making three salads, baking a cake, mowing the lawn, planting broccolis, brussel sprouts and the loosestrife I got from grete. My guests were ordered to mount the new flag pole on the wall, in time for the National Day.

The party was nice. I need to improve my meat grilling skills, which may involve blaming the grill (it was cheap and may not have optimal air streams) or avoing the problem altogether by grilling chicken or fish in stead of meat with a layer of fat and lard around it. The salads were very good, and we finished the meal with icecream and a cake roll. My nephew very soon discovered there were not fence across the entrance to the veranda, so he wanted to run down the stairs. Not a very good idea, given that he lives in a farm with virtually no traffic (and here there is a road outside the garden), and the garden is not fully fenced. We placed a chest in front of one entrance, and tried to put a chair in front of the other. This lead him to try some creative climbing and crawling: up over the back of the chair, under it, then tryingto remove the pillow we placed under the chair to keep him inside. Entertaining - but I think we will get a fence/gate for the veranda before his next visit ;-)

After they left I spend the evening relaxing. It was The Eurovision Song Contest, or Melodi Grand Prix as it is called in Norway. I haven't watched the show in years, and had completely forgotten how hilarious it was. Comments through misc chat options made it even more hilarious, this is an example. And Norway won, which was perhaps not that surprising, but the landslide he won with was huge. The song is certainly becoming a plague this summer.

Today is the Norwegian Constituion Day, celebrating that we got our own constitution 195 years ago. It's a big day with children's parades and school bands, and here in Trondheim it's also a Citizens' Parade, where lots of organizations participate. The skydiving club has been participating with our own banner since 2006 (and in 2007 and 2008), and also this year. Unfortunately I slept in (after putting out/up the flag around 8 am) so I woke up 45 minutes before the parade left, and decided I'd rather have a relaxing morning at home. So I have been reading newspapers and watching pictures of the parades elsewhere, then watching the 17. May skydiving over the city (I could see the canopies since they pulled high - there is a hill distorting my view in that direction), and i am now considering going out to watch what sounds like the second drop today. There is ice cream in the freezer, beer in the cellar and sun outside, so I think I will spend the day relaxing and reading. (Well, the part of the day that is not already gone, that is. Very nice to sleep in for once!)

I came safely home from Amsterdam yesterday. I almost lost my flight :-) There is a new Chocolate Café at Schiphol, in lounge 1 near the piers B and C, and I suddenly saw it on my lazy way to the gate. And they did have some goodies: piles of chocolate at display, a nice selection of bars and boxes of chocolate, and best: a selection of chocolate desserts! Even with only about one minute until boarding time (according to my ticket) I decided this was worth stopping at, so I had a dessert with three different chocolate mousses. Very nice! A coffee or espresso would probably not have hurt, but I didn't want to wait for it ;-)

I caught my flight, though, long before they started calling my name and there were at least two passenger after me boarding the bus to the plane ;) I was sleepy, but KLM has this annoying practice of waking you up asking if you want your refreshments so I didn't get to sleep all the way and was numblessly reading my crime novel and looking out of the window at the west-coast of Denmark and then southern Norway. Just before Trondheim we ducked under the cloud ceiling, and flew pretty low over the city. This was quite nice, and the most amazing approach I have had to Trondheim in a regular plane. I could see our house for a long time and it was obvious that there was no car outside - so I wasn't very surprised to see Anders when I arrived ;-)

Today was a busy day at work, with loads of meetings and papers, and a few frustrating hours with Agresso (I can't get over the marketing droid who approved that name!) to get my travel expenses reimbursed. To keep it short, the damned thing need a project number to save anything even temporarily. I wasn't aware of this brainless behaviour so I left it too long while checking which project I should file it under (in stead of just adding a random project number and correct it later), then had to rush for a meeting, and when I came back I had no travel reimbursement data and was very annoyed and a tad bit angry.

Now I have tried to mow the lawn (the lawnmower wouldn't start), cleaned the bathroom (the tub is sparkling now) and shopped for my family birthday party on Saturday. I am not sure if shopping for a dinner party at 22:40 means I am a good domestic godess or if it means I suck - but I am busy tomorrow evening, and on Saturday morning the store will be full of families, and I will be busy making two cakes and three salads for the party. So I think this means some domestic points.

(Well, technically Wednesday already.)

Just came back from beer and dinner. In any order. We had dinner in a Mexican restaurant, then went to 't Arendsnest for beer. At my request, of course. (Stop bullying me about that, now!)

The workshop/seminar is nice and I get enough coffee and is not exhausted. I'm going home tomorrow night, I guekanariss I will try to but some more beers (for my suitcase!) first, then head for Schiphol and try to work a bit there before my plane leaves.

The hotel left a bottle of wine in my room on my birthday :-) I thought it was "Château B&B", which was very hilarious when staying in a pretty nice hotel, but it was "Château BdB", which is slightly less hilarious, but still not without humour. It was a nicely decorated bottle with a card adresses to "Mr Onsoien" - so the accusations from a colleague here who had his birthday on his day of arrival at this hotel that this was gender discrimination is of course plainly wrong :-)

Now I have filled the balloons and am considering drinking the entire wine bottle, like a real man.