Blah Blah Blah

Poor, Poor JEDA

2012-01-30T08:29:00.000+01:00

This is the current long term forecast for Bergen.

I'm still so traumatized from the horrors of two winters past, that all I can think when I see a week of fine weather like that is, "Fuck. When do I have to start conserving water?" I feel like an ungrateful, privileged, 1st-world harpy when I think such things. But I can't seem to help myself.

I remember saying to Mister during those awful waterless months, "Never again. Never. You will fix this well situation. You will find us a secure source of water. You will do this before you do anything else. Fixing the shallow well has just become number one on your to-do list! Are we clear on that?"

And we were. Two years ago, we were definitely in agreement on that one, crucial point.

Since then Mister has overseen and completed the following purchases/home repairs:

a boat
a paved driveway
an upstairs bathroom
a lovely, and I dare say, enviable sea-side cottage
another damn boat--to ferry us to and from said sea-side cottage, naturally

These things are huge. And wonderful. They are testimony to a watershed shift in our lifestyle that places me squarely amongst the ranks of other ungrateful, privileged, 1st-world harpies who fan their newly manicured nails whilest bemoaning the scarcity of well tailored jeans, poor us. And I did technically approve each and every one them, so I've no business whining about it now. But, god dammit! I'm going to run out of water again, and I don't want to!

Retrospective

2012-01-10T16:20:00.000+01:00

This blog is clearly defunct. It's served its purpose, and I've neither the time nor the inclination to continue mommy blogging. Silly to keep pretending otherwise.

But, as I've already mentioned, my favorite aspect of the entire blogging phenomenon is the journaling. The writing down, and storing away of moments that would otherwise have been forgotten.

I've had this notion for a while now that I should maybe take and broaden that idea. Go back--way back--and write about memories of my own childhood. But also pick up moments that I skipped over of the kids' earliest years. I don't think any of it should be forgotten completely. And I think this is a great medium in which to capture it all.

I can't decide though if I should start it as a completely new blog, or just add on to this one.

In the meantime, here's a little taste of what I'm talking about. A moment, one slow summer day just four years ago. Please to note the dejected slump of his shoulders as Mario plunges into the abyss for the last time.

Technically, this doesn't pre-date the blog, so it doesn't really qualify for my new grand scheme. But I just found it, and after watching it a dozen-odd times in a row, I felt strongly that I needed to pass it on. Plus, look how cute Emma is with her sassy short haircut and Brazt t-shirt. I know she won't want to forget that in years to come!

Things Done and Things As Yet Undone

2011-06-20T22:32:00.001+02:00

Done: Annual Weekend o'Birthdays

Epic fail on the girls' birthdays this year. For those who don't know, my girls have their birthdays within three days of each other late in May. My calculus final was scheduled for the day of EM's birthday. There was no possible way I could manage two parties, and a respectable grade on my exam, so--sadly, selfishly, cravenly--I told them they had to wait on their parties. I bought presents though. Large piles of presents I did definitely manage.

Done: Elder Miss's Make-Up Party

EM's actual birthday was on a weekday, and I had the exam, and I was somewhat, what you might call overwrought on account of said exam, so I didn't ever get a picture of her with her pile of presents. Fy. But just last weekend, I took her and a small group of her closest friends to see Pirates of the Caribbean 4. Five of the chattiest, loudest, goofiest 11 year olds EVER. They talked all the way through the movie, but I didn't shush or scold even once. Happy Belated Birthday, Baby.

Undone: Little Miss's Make-Up Party

It's going to have wait now until August or September. That's okay. I'm pretty sure she's forgotten all about it. My Missy tends to live very much 'in the moment'. We love that about her.

Done: Elder Miss's Annual Spring Art Show and Tap Recital

Someone thought it would be a brilliant idea to schedule an outdoor tap dance recital this year. Someone apparently forgot that we live in the wettest damn place on Earth, and outdoor events are generally discouraged here in Bergen. Baby got wet. Very, very wet.

Someone else was also thinking outside the box when they scheduled the art show this year, and managed to find a whole new venue for the event. Instead of an art gallery, the kids got to display their work at the Bergen Fishing Museum. That's right, the fishing museum! Along with hundreds of pieces of their children's colorful, clunky imaginations made manifest, parents were treated to the museum's permanent collection of nets, hooks, and, of all things, outboard engines! Add to that the intriguing aroma of rotting, drying fish marinating in the ancient wooden floors, and you've got yourself a pretty spectacular afternoon of history and culture!

Eel by EM

Jellyfish by EM

All snarking aside, I did rather appreciate the aquatic theme of all the art. The kids had obviously been working towards this the whole year. And it was a much, much bigger building, so there was none of the overcrowding that has been such a problem at the art gallery.
Do take a moment to try and conjure that smell though. Think low tide. Think 300 years of fish guts rotting into the floorboards. Add salt.

Done: Realfagkompetanse

High school math and science proficiency. I didn't do it as a teenager. I didn't do it as a college student. But it's done now. And I did it in Norwegian. I get to brag about that a little bit, because it was hard. Damn hard. But I did it. And I did it in Norwegian. Somehow over the past 18 months I've managed to cram 3 full years worth of math and science into my brain. I've taken biology, chemistry, physics 1 & 2, and calculus 1 & 2.
The final oral exam in physics was not great. I went in with the wrong attitude. I choked. I missed some things I really shouldn't have missed. I'm not overly proud of my meager performance that day. But it was one day. One bad day. And the important thing is, I may not have aced it, but I passed it. I'll get credit for the class. And that's really all I need to get into the University.
I've applied for a place in the Meteorology/Oceanography departmant starting next fall. If I don't get in, fuck 'em. I'm spending the rest of my days on the sofa watching reruns of Extreme Make-over Home Edition, and eating bonbons.

Undone: Stateside Summer Fun

There's much on the agenda this year, including side trips to Victoria, B.C.; Seattle WA; Yellowstone; and Northapmton MA.
Boy's going to learn how to swim. He doesn't want to, but dammit! He will, he will, he will!
I'm going to eat steak. And mint chocolate chip ice cream. And Pop Tarts.
I'm going to buy stuff.
Lots of stuff
It's going to be good.
Very good
Bags are half-way packed. We're almost there.

Long Overdue

2011-06-17T13:16:00.001+02:00

So my dilemma is two-fold. No, three. My dilemma is three-fold.

First: the audience. I'm a mommy blogger. I've understood this, from random snark and other disparaging comments and articles I've read, to be a bad thing. Apparently there are too many of us, and we all say the same things over and over, and our kids aren't really all that cute, and nobody cares, so how dare we take up band-width?

Whatever.

This criticism has nothing to do with my dilemma. My motives in writing this blog over the past five years have been primarily journal keeping, and a convenient way of keeping far-flung family updated and involved in my kids' lives. I suspect 90% of the other so called mommy bloggers out there have similar motives (the other 10% wishing nothing more than to brag, the uppity bitches). So again I say, whatever. If you don't care, simply move on.

I honestly thought most of you had moved on; a conclusion I came to based on the lack of feedback.

Please understand, I'm not here to pander for compliments and comments. I just assumed that "No comment" meant "Meh, enough with all the chattiness. We'd rather just look at the pictures on Facebook." When you half suspect no one's listening, you have to start to wonder if it's worth all the effort. It's not the only reason I stopped writing, but admittedly, sulkily, it was part of it.

It's been six months since my last post, and in that time, especially this last month or so, I've had several people say to me, "What gives? I keep checking, but you never post anything new." I'd be totally lying if I didn't say my ego isn't hugely flattered to discover that there are people out there (who aren't my mother) who enjoy, and miss my writing. Guess what people! I enjoy and miss my writing too. And I'd like to get back to it.

Which leads me to dilemma the Second: the subject matter. My kids (my primary subjects) are growing up. Their personalities, their idiosyncracies, their foibles, all of their daily victories and defeats...Sure it all makes for some pretty great writing, but is it really fair of me to turn everything they say and do into some amusing little anecdote? It's the one part of the 'mommy blogger' criticism I tend to agree with. At a certain point, it crosses a line. I'm just not sure where that line is.

I like the idea of journaling their childhood, of collecting our family's stories in one place. I find myself revisiting my own archives often, glad everytime, that I took the time to write it all down. I'm pretty sure they will be too one day. But at 11, 9 and 7, they're just now moving into the most awkward, socially/physically/psycologically fraught stage of their life. How mean of me to make a joke of it all.

Now, I know what you're thinking. So do the writing, do the journaling, just don't post it. Save it. Treasure it. And someday your kids will treasure it too. This is a good and noble idea. I should totally do that. But here's the thing, see dilemma the first, I like the audience. I've always thought straight-up journaling was kind of stupid because what's the point if no one is going to read what you wrote, and let you know that they've heard and understood you?

Apart from the kids, the only other thing I have to talk about is this little project I've got going that I like to call The Complete Re-education of Mother. Honestly, I'm not sure how much anyone else cares. Physics and calculus are not nearly as amusing as, say Boy's recent attempts to wield Jedi mind control in order to trick me into buying him more Lego, or Missy's current obsession with HUGE boobs, which (See, right there? The boob thing is probably over the line, right? Nobody's business. But seriously, people. She smacks her lips and rubs her hands together like she's about to take a bite out of some rare juicy fruit. Of course, I'm loath to label any such proclivities as deviant, but, I mean...Ladies, lock your doors before showering...that's all I'm sayin')

Finally, dilemma the Third: time. I am no casual, spit it out, stream-of-consciousness kind of writer. Believe me, I wish I were. It takes time for me to come up with something I'm willing to post, to let other people look at. And since I started my little re-education project, I have significantly less spare time for the tortured selection of perfect adjectives than I used to. So even if I do get back to writing about family, about school, about rain, there's going to be significantly less of it than there used to be.

In the meantime--indulge me in a little uppity bragging. Not about the kids though, about my mighty husband.

The handsome man (alas, someone else's mighty husband) with his finger on that button there is Norway's Prime minister Jens Stoltenberg. The button he's about to push is the button that will start production of a series of gas ferries (see picture hanging in back ground) that will operate in the north of Norway. Those are my mighty husband's boats. He designed them anyway. The other man in the picture is, apparently, Poland's Prime Minister (the boats are being built in Poland). There. Two Prime Ministers in attendence. It's just that. big. a. deal.

Life's A Beach

2010-12-20T22:36:00.001+01:00

There was the faintest edge of panic in her voice when she called to me from the sofa where she was sitting with the computer on her lap, doing her online homework assignment.

"Mom? Mom? What is this? Can they say that?"

I knew she was working on English. I assumed her distress had something to do with one of the scary, irregular verbs both her and her teachers are always stumbling over. I was elbow deep in dinner preparations, and frankly not in the mood to be very helpful. I sighed impatiently, "For heaven's sake Emma. Just sound it out. One letter at a time. You'll get to it."

"I can't say that."

"Of course you can. One letter at a..."

"No. Mom. You wouldn't want me to say that word."

"What do you mean?"

"Look!"

So I did.

Now I ask you, what is the point of trying to teach them the difference between 'nice' words and 'naughty' words, when this is the shit they're learning from school? I know I should be outraged. And I probably will be just as soon as I can stop giggling about it.

Daniel, as usual, had the final word on the matter, "Well Mom, it makes sense. Sand is kind of annoying..."

It is a bitch, Boy. Damn right. It's a bitch!

2010-12-08T09:55:00.000+01:00

This turned out to be so much fun, I could almost forgive the repeat of last winter's bitterly cold draught.

Here's how we spent our weekend:

In the 14 years we've lived in this house, the lake has frozen this way--thick and smooth enough for ice skating--only twice. So this was a real treat. We were skiing all over it last winter, but the deep freeze didn't come until after the snow last year, so it was never fit for skating.

I did a fair amount of skating as a kid. Most of it of the 'roller' variety, but the mechanics are essentially the same. But there was plenty of ice skating too. I remember spending many a happy winter afternoon ice skating at the dingy little rink in Murray Park. The place smelled like damp socks, and the fries they served were always soggy and over salted, but I liked it. I think I even took some lessons there at one point. But my childhood recall button is notoriously faulty, so I could be wrong. Still, I swear I remember some sort of skills test, or something...I did well...lady said I was in the wrong class...

Meh, unimportant. The point is--I liked skating. It's kind of what I remember doing most during my outside off time. And I've never quite understood why my girls aren't spending their youth similarly occupied.

It took me some time to trust the ice. Despite all my youthful skating, I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've done it on a lake like this. There's a good 20 cm of solid ice out there, but it's a bit creepy to stare down through all the cracks and air bubbles frozen in place. Plus, it shifts and crackles sometimes as you move over it. Shudder. But once I got used to it, and my feet and legs started to remember how to move in skates, I had a grand old time.

So did the kids.

Not to mention Toblerone. Whose ass, by the by, I squarely kick in the skating department.

It snowed a little Saturday night, so on Sunday the kids got to make the obligatory snow-angels on the ice.

Untold liters of hot cocoa and marshmallow fluff were sacrificed in the making of this blog post. The writer is unrepentant.

The Wild Things Are All In His Head, You See

2010-11-19T20:04:00.001+01:00

Since the 1st grade Daniel's class has had a sort of mascot. A cute little stuffed animal they named Geo-Rasken*. Every week a name is drawn out of a box, and the person whose name is drawn gets to take Geo home for the week. On Friday they bring Geo back to school, along with his tote bag and notebook, in which they're meant to have written a short account of what they got up to during their week together.

Geo was quite popular in the 1st grade. Nobody could quite hold their cookies until it was their turn to take him home. Week after week, the first thing I'd hear from Boy when he got home Monday afternoon was, "Not me. Again." Sigh.

But that was two years ago. Eventually it was Boy's turn. And then his turn came again, and yet again. And three more times in the 2nd grade too. And it was great. An electric little thrill, everytime.

When I sent Geo back to school sometime last May, I sort of assumed it was for the last time. I mean, cute is cute and all, but...going on the 3rd grade now...surely we've played this particular game out.

Imagine my surprise then, when home comes Boy Monday with none other than wee Speedy himself. Looking, I must say, more than a little worse for wear. It was immediately clear from Boy's lackluster, "I got Geo....again...." that I was right in assuming the thrill has begun to wear a little thin.

What with one thing and another, Geo got set aside that evening, and pretty much ignored for the rest of the week. Nevertheless, an assignment is an assignment, and just before bedtime last night I told Daniel that he had to write something in Geo's book. He didn't want to, of course, "There's nothing to write. We didn't do anything."

"So write that. Or make something up. I don't care, as long as you write something."

Thus with a great, put-upon huff, he scratched out the following:

Translation for the Norwegian impared:
Home with Daniel
We did nothing. It was a boring week.
Next time we'll travel back in time and fight with the Vikings.

Heh.

I love that kid. I swear to God I do.

*Geo, pronounced gay-o, short for 'gepard' which is the Norwegian word for cheetah. Rasken, from the venerated Norse root meaning 'super-speedy-fast-one'.

Girlie Interlude II

2010-11-07T11:17:00.001+01:00

"I sink we should say 'drowning' instead of 'sinking'. And we should use 'guessing' instead of 'sinking'. That way there won't be any mix-ups."

Tangentally--the punch-line of one of Mister's favorite lame jokes goes something like this: "Mayday! Mayday! We are sinking!" Nearby German ship responds, "Yes, vee are sinking of you too!"

He tells this joke almost daily now as Amanda continues to say "sssss" instead of "thhhhhhh".

I sink she knows perfectly well how it's upost to be pronounced. She's only persisting to piss him off.

She's evil that way.

Skull-La-La

2010-10-31T22:51:00.003+01:00

The morning after I hung him up, the kids decided he was French and immediately started calling him Skull-La-La. Boy wondered what he'd like for breakfast. "We'd offer you toast, but it's not French toast, so you probably wouldn't like it."

We offered an exclusive selection of lemon poison, orange poison, or raspberry poison. But everyone, by God, had to drink their poison, or be gone with them! There was only one dimwitted little kid who couldn't quite get with the program, and insisted that he wasn't allowed to drink wine.

He spent the weekend rewatching the movies so he could get Jack's mincing little walk down. I thought he was pretty good at it, but Boy insisted he could do it better if only I'd give him a little rum. It's the rum, apparently, that makes badass pirates walk that way.

If you asked Boy what Emma was for Halloween, he said, "I don't know, something black." If you asked Amanda what Emma was for Halloween, she'd say, "It was kind of like pretty, but the face was all wrong." If you asked Emma what she was for Halloween she'd say, "I don't know what I was, but I was the best one there!

The princess dress that Alpha Grandma made for her last year was a much better fit this year. She insisted that she needed a wig because both Daniel and Emma had wigs to go with their constums. Stupid Disney branded Sleeping Beauty rat's nest cost me more than the other two costumes combined, she only wore it for 10 minutes, and she looked 100 times prettier when she finally took the damn thing off.

Count them if you dare. There should be 16 of 'em, not including the terrified friend of Amanda's who was cowering in my lap while this picture was taken because she was terrified of all the boys' scary masks. Seriously, the precious thing was sobbing in terror. Her mom had to turn right around, and pick her back up. Part of me feels awful about it, the rest of me is all, "Oh for God's sake!"

Appropriate? Or inappropriate? Mister and I held quite a debate over these little guys the night before the party. The marshmallow ghosts were not working, and I was pretty much ready to punch someone in the face for being fed up with party preparations. Toby then started hanging Seigemenn from tiny licorice nooses, and I think I fell in love with him all over again right then and there. I worried, however, that other mothers might not think they were nearly as adorable as I did.

They ended up being a big hit, with the boys especially. In fact, Mister had to make more, because there was some awful whining about there not being enough for everyone.

No Halloween party is complete without a game or two. It was Emma who came up with Pin-The-Arm-On-The-Zombie. Then she offered to draw and color the requisite zombie and severed arm.

I offered to find some pictures of zombies online to give her some ideas. She was immediately offended. "Can't I just use my own ideas? It's much easier that way."
Clearly she didn't need my help.

Didn't need my help at all.

She's rather wonderful, my Emma. Is she not?

As a prize for playing the game, which they all played and loved, we mixed 50 Kr. in coins into a pumpkin still full of its guts, and told them they could keep whatever they managed to grab hold of. The perfect amount of gross-out factor, but most of them still dared to do it.

We Regret To Inform You

2010-10-21T09:41:00.001+02:00

I don't think anyone believed it would really happen.

"Winter? Again? So soon? But, summer was just...Is there nothing to be done about it?"

No. 'Fraid not. No deferments. No appeals. No special pleading. Only forbearance. And it would help if you would all put your winter tires on now, please, thank you. Which no one did.

Last weekend the pepperkake went on sale. And last night? Last night it snowed. Oh, not much. Only 2 or 3 inches at most. But still. Winter -- that bitch -- she's back.

I hear talk, occasionally, when I choose to listen, that there have been predictions of another winter as harsh and cold as the last one. Personally, I think it's a load of bullshit, and mean-spirited fear mongering. But still...what if it's true?

I'm not being the least bit poetic or melodramatic when I say, I don't think I can handle another winter like last winter. Empty wells, frozen pipes, daily shovelling, minus 29.9 degrees. That's the record low on our thermometer. I don't care to ever see that one broken. I'll throw the fucker in the lake before I see it dip another tenth of a degree lower. Well -- first I'll hack through a foot of ice, then I'll throw that little fucker in the lake! So help me God I will!

If I sound a little cheerless and bleak lately, it's because I am. Things are not going well at school. My hair is suddenly choker-block full of grey hair. When did that happen? It's been two months since I last went out running. All work and no play, and I'm still not as smart as I think I should be? Oh, and I'm cold. All the time cold. And now there's snow.

Ah well, at least the pepperkake went on sale last weekend. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, pepperkake is absolutely the best and brightest part of Norwegian Christmas. Still waiting on the juleøl though. I'm sure everything will be better when the juleøl (Christmas beer) hits the shelves.

Week 41

2010-10-10T12:22:00.000+02:00

Ever since my kids hit school age, I've carped and moaned about høst ferie in early October and vinter ferie in late February. They're a week long school break (every year the same week--week 41 for høstferie, week 9 for vinter ferie*) and every year I've grumbled, "A week? A whole week? Didn't they just start school? Do they really need a whole week right now? A long weekend sure, maybe. But a whole week? How absurd! How wasteful! How perfectly inconvenient!"

Then I went back to school last winter. And it all began to make sense to me.

To say I was ready for this week long break is a bit of an understatement. To say my brain was fried, and I was in need of a week long break from studying is still a bit of an understatement. To say my brain was first battered, then fried, then shredded and finely minced for good measure, and that I was in need of flash freezing and a week long rest in cold storage is coming much closer the truth (albeit metaphorical) of the matter.

It's not just the classes. I'm taking physics and chemistry, and I find both subjects challenging to say the least. And, of course, it's all taught in Norwegian, so I have the additional hurdle of having to make my own understanding of all this new and intellectually demanding material make sense in a language that is not my own. My fresh-faced, eager young classmates don't have to do that, and I find I resent it.

Also absent in my fellow students' lives--children. Three children who must be fed, chauffeured, occasionally chastized, often nagged, tutored and read to, not to mention just plain listened to every once in a while, and at the end of the day made to feel nurtured and loved and wanted. Here too, I find I resent that I'm presumably the only one in my classes struggling to balance both studying and parenting. And in resenting my childless classmates, how can I help but start to resent the presence of my own children?

It hurts my heart to say, to even think, such a thing. But there it is. I resent my husband too. I resent his job for taking him away from home so much, and throwing such a disproportionate amount of the parenting responsibilities on my shoulders. I resent his success because it only means that I can't really complain. He's extremely good at what he does, and to ask him to step back, to help me (cuz' he'd do it, see, he loves us, and he'd do pretty much whatever I asked him to do) would be to essentially ask him to quit. He's always on the verge of something fantastic, something truly, career-makingly spectacular. One of these days, one of these glorious projects is going to round third base, and slide on into home. And that would be it for him. He'd be set for life. I cannot, I will not ask him to step back now. Afterall, it's not his fault that I was lazy, and I foundered for so long trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and then summon up the gumption to actually go back to school and do it.

He's been rather wonderful though, ever since I did ultimately decide. Encouraging me. Supporting me. Cheering me on. But even this unequivocal enthusiasm I resent a bit. He expects great things of me. Perhaps even a greatness, eventually, equal to his own. He says simply, that I'm clearly capable of it. But with that expectation comes a huge amount of pressure. I'm not allowed to simply float. I suppose that even without him there egging me on, I'd put the pressure on myself to get far more than merely adequate grades. That's just the kind of girl I am. But feeling him there behind me, expecting it of me...

The resentment, it just grows and multiplies.

It's this, really, that has been fucking so thoroughly with my brain, and from which I needed the week long break. I've got to find some way to put it all in perspective, or it's going to break me in two, and I'm going to have to quit. I don't want to quit because I like it. I like having a direction and purpose to my days. I like the challenge of learning new and difficult things. I love the heady buzz of getting a good grade on a difficult test. But I keep catching myself thinking, "Why can't my kids just go away?" and "Why is my husband so useless?"

It's wrong. It's unfair. And I can't do it anymore. My kids are delightful, my husband is far from useless, and I deserve to enjoy them.

Later.

For now, I'm on my own. Mister has taken the kids to his mother's. He's gone hunting. And I've got a box of rosé and season 6 of Lost to rediscover. I can honestly say, I resent none of these things. I am at peace.

*These are the weeks that apply to Bergen. Other cities have their høst and vinter feries in either the week before or the week prior to ours. They stagger it this way, apparently, so the entire population doesn't migrate en masse to the hyttes (cabins) and various resort destinations, thus causing a catastrophic shift in land mass distribution, and, theoretically at least, causing the earth to move off its axis. This is the shit I get to think about now that I know all about Newton's laws of motion....

Girlie Interlude

2010-09-30T21:37:00.000+02:00

On the way home from ballet class Monday evening: I'm driving, Missy is alone in the backseat, Elton John is on the radio singing one of his whinier, sappy love songs.

Elton sings, "What do I gotta do to make you love me?"

Missy groans, "Ugh, just kiss her, and get it over with!"

I snort.

A refrain or two later, Elton sings, "What do I do when lightening strikes me?"

Missy retorts, "And then you die. Duh. Mom, is this man stupid, or something?"

Interlude

2010-09-22T23:12:00.000+02:00

"Dammit, Boy! There's Lego everywhere I look. My house is covered in Lego!"

"I know, Mom. Isn't it wonderful?"

Neutrons Schmeutrons

2010-09-17T11:06:00.001+02:00

I had a physics test on Wednesday. I chose not to study for it Tuesday night.

It was a bold move, and in no way reflected the level of my confidence in my mastery of the subject matter. It's just that, after careful consideration, I figured it was probably better for my continued abiltiy to move freely across the American boarder that I rather not know too much about how nuclear fission works.

"Welcome to the United States, Ma'am. I just need to ask you a few questions. Do you know how a nuclear reactor works?"

"Um, I can draw a diagram. But actually explain how the thing works? No. Definitely not."

"Mm-hm. And, are you familiar with the various ways enriched uranium can be degraded into plutonium for use in atomic weapons?"

"Gosh sir. Beyond balancing the equation on a final? No. No, I really don't know that much about it."

"Very good then. Enjoy your visit. Next!"

I like to think of it as The Freedom From Information Act.

P.S. The test went fine. I neither disgraced nor distinguished myself. I can live with that.

For Nan--The Mother Of All Outcroppings

2010-09-02T09:35:00.000+02:00

This is Preikestolen. I don't know what they're calling it in the English language tour guides these days. Pulpit Rock? Rock Pulpit? Translated literally it's Preacher's Chair, but I can't seem to stop myself from thinking of it as Preacher's Mount. Which I know is wrong in all sorts of ways. But then...so am I...so....Preacher's Mount it is, and ever shall be.

Whatever it's called, it's rather stunning, no?

It's one of those iconic, quintessentially norsk images--along with trolls, Northern lights, and those thorny looking, wooden Stave Churches--that I've tied to Norway, deep in my psyche ever since I was 14 years old and pouring over library books to learn more about the exotic homeland of my hunky, new heart-throbs A-ha. (Fact: JEDA never would have come to Norway, may still to this day, have been living under the false, but harmless, illusion that Norway was the capital of Sweden, and that Jarlsberg cheese was merely a poorer, larger-holed version of the preferable Swiss, if "Take On Me" hadn't been such a perfectly awesome song.)

It was the one thing Mom said she wanted to do while she was here this go 'round--see Preikestolen. (My mom is here visiting/helping. Did I mention that? Been here since early August. It's been great, but I've been working her hard since school started, and I think she might be ready for a vacation.) She's been training since winter to make sure she was physically fit enough to make it there--long walks, and hiking in the trails around her house. We took her on a practice run to our choice blueberry patch a few weeks ago:

The blueberry patch is those sunny, green swathes in the valley below. We left Mister and the kids there to pick blueberries while we climbed to 'redningshytten'--a sort of way-station for weary travellers another kilometer and a half (maybe) and a hefty (you can't see the vertical drop just behind her in this picture, but trust me, it's there) climb along the way.

We thought we blew out her knees on that little trip. Hiking the dusty trails of Corner Canyon didn't quite prepare her knees and thighs for all the boulders that must be negotiated on Norwegian trails. But she did eventually recover, and last weekend we all headed to Stavanger en route to Preikestolen.

Boulders. Boulders, boulders, and more boulders.
It was a much harder, steeper, and more physically demanding trail than I expected it to be. Mom, however, gamely insisted that it was about what she expected it to be. Step by careful step she made it there and back no problem.

There were a ton of people there, but none of them this happy and this proud.

With our legs hanging over the edge like a couple of bad-asses...
Those thunderstorms you see gathering rather magnificently in the background, waited until we were about half way back down the trail to soak us to the skin.

White specks on water = itty, bitty sailboats.

The preferred loogie hocking position.

It was a great trip. I'm so glad I finally got to see it.

Next on the Norwegian icons bucket list: Lofoten, and the Northen Lights. But probably not this year. There's chemistry to learn this year, and physics....School kind of sucks right now....not that you asked....but it does....and now you know.

Tonight! On Cops.....

2010-08-26T09:49:00.000+02:00

Last night I slept with a (I want to say 'hardened', but that might conjure up the wrong sort of image) criminal.

Of course my mother, who taught hardened criminals in a federal prison for seven years was dismayed. But I found the whole experience rather thrilling.

His nerves were frazzled, and he was sorely distracted because he'd been caught red-handed--on film even--commiting his heinous crime. And now his picture was plastered all over the internet news sites. There was a film segment featuring a grim looking cop calming the good citizens, telling them not to worry, that he, Officer Friendly, was there to stand as stalwart barrier between them and my foul, baleful lover.

It was all weighing rather heavily on his mind, so I can't say he was all that tender or solitious. Ah, but just to be there for him....To sooth those lawless nerves....To reconnect him to his fraying humanity....What a night!

What's that you ask? The nature of his crime? The pernicious scope of his naughtiness?

Are you ready for this? Promise not to judge too, terribly harshly?

Speed biking.

Speed. Biking.

Srsly.

That's him. That's my wicked man with the radar pointed right at him. Busted! At 22 kilometers per hour. This is the picture featured on the article which ran all day yesterday on the front page of BT's (local newspaper) internet site. And although he declined to be interview for the news crew that was there, in the segment they posted you could see him (in all his pixel-ated infamy) getting a stern dressing-down from that behelmeted cop with his hand out.

Awesome.

Alas, he was not hauled off to prison. He was not even ticketed. This little display by the local constabulary is a result, no doubt, of an incident that happened over the weekend were a little girl was playing (not too far from our home actually) on a pedestrian/bike path, and was run down by a biker who then took off without stopping to make sure the girl was okay. She was not. Her collarbone was broken, and her parents are quite rightly furious.

Thus goes the on-going war between bikers and the rest of us, and Mister ends up in the news. Again, I say....Awesome.

He was not indignant or defensive at being stopped. He was actually rather repentant, and quite honestly chagrinned. He chooses to use the paths and sidewalks because he tends to agree with me that bikers in the road are just fucking annoying. But, he probably really is biking too fast to be sharing a space with all those soft, meaty pedestrians. So what's a well-meaning, non-fossil-fuel burning commuter to do?

Revert to a life of crime. Obviously.

So Much For Summer

2010-08-18T22:59:00.000+02:00

Let's skip the small talk. Shall we?

Yes, it's been a while.

No, I haven't posted much.

Yes, my consistency leaves a great deal to be desired.

Actually, yeah, I do feel a little guilty about that.

Moving on. Missy started school today!

She was more nervous that she'd have you believe. But also more ready than she knew.

There was a heady shuffling of goods, mutual ahhhhs of admiration, and one stomped foot of jealousy as the girls showed off all their new school supplies to one another.

One of her new teachers helps her with the big clips on her backpack. Course...she'll fall over backwards if they ever decide to put any actual books in the silly thing. Nevermind how securely fastened it is around her waist.

"Soooo, how you doin'?"
Boys are already putting the moves on her.
She's already looking decidedly unimpressed.
Good girl.

All kitted out, and ready to get serious. Tomorrow she has to navigate the bus system....

Growing Up....But....Hold On There.....Not Too Fast.....

2010-06-13T01:23:00.004+02:00

I'm fed up.

Every night at bedtime I go into the room Boy and Missy share. I fold clothes, toss toys into baskets, shove baskets under beds, and pick up two dozen or so stuffed animals off the floor and throw them back in their place at the end of Boy's bed.

Daniel's menagerie. A once treasured collection. Currently at least twice the size it was when I first wrote about it, lo' these many years ago.

Every night I pick 'em up. Every night he kicks them back on the floor.

Tonight I'd had enough.

"ENOUGH!" I say, "Is it time we got rid of the animals, Daniel? I'm sick of picking them up!"

"Yeah," he mutters.

"Yeah, what? You want me to get rid of them?"

"Yeah."

"Fine. Good." I give one last tug on the sleeve I've been wrestling, before I toss the half-folded shirt unceremoniously into the closet. I can't fault my children for their clutter too harshly because I am no Neat Nelly myself. But, there are limits.

"Get rid of them......where?" he wonders.

"Throw them away where I never have to pick them up ever again. Ever." I pull a shin guard out from under a pile of books. This too is thrown carelessly into the closet. Somewhere on the second shelf if my aim is true. Which it is...at least half the time...

"Okay," he commits sullenly.

"Seriously. You're seriously okay with me throwing them away? Are you sure?"

"Yeah. Do it. Take Bobby too."

Say wa'?

There's too much bravado in his voice. I pause in my search for a mate to the filthy Ben10 sock I've just fished out of an empty Playdough can, to give him a level don't-fuck-with-me kind of look.

"You want me to get rid of Bobby too?"

"I'm almost eight! Don't you think I'm too old for a Bobby?"

"No. I really don't. I'm just sick of picking up these stuffed animals off the floor. I never said anything about Bobby."

"I'm too old for cuddly animals. And Bobby too. Take 'em."

Stubborn ass.

"Fine," I say through gritted teeth.

I sweep grandly out of the room, and return half a minute later with a large, plastic garbage bag into which I immediately start chucking the rejected toys. I feel sharp pangs of regret as I do it. Snowball, the gorgeously soft racoon that Grandma Gae had to special order. Snakey, from Disneyland last summer. Tucker, his Build-a-Bear dog for Christ's sake! I don't really want to throw all this stuff away! Stop me you idiot child! Stop me now!

But he doesn't. He helps. He drags a small, plush Wall-E, and an ugly purple and blue scorpion out from the far side of his bed, and throws them at me. It takes a second to feed the last animal--a long, green IKEA dragon--into the now full bag, but when I'm done, I look at him, and hold it out to him with a 'well? what's it gonna be?' arch of my eyebrow.

Bobby, tucked safely under his pillow, is the only soft, cuddly remnant of his babyhood left. He quickly grabs it, shoves it in the bag, then backs himself into the far corner of his bed. He pulls first his pillow, then his comforter over his chest. His eyes are wide. Wild. He licks his lips. They look pale and dry. I know he deeply, intensely, insanely regrets what he's done. But he won't look at me. And I won't help him out of this hole he's dug for himself. I'm just that mean.

I linger with the bag in my hands a few moments more. When he doesn't make a move for it, I drag it out into the hallway, and busy myself with cleaning up Missy's side of the room.

I don't know how long it takes. Not long. A minute? Maybe two? Amanda is babbling about something or other. I'm not really listening because my mind is full to bursting with the little farce Daniel and I have just acted out. I know he'll cave. He has to cave. Bobby is his fucking soul mate. His missing twin.

He'll cave. I just hope he gets on with it before it's time to turn out the lights.

It starts with a mumble.

"IwantBobbyIwantBobbyIwantBobbyIwantBobby...."

All soft and breathy like, but I can hear it. Abruptly, the mumble stops. He's quiet for a few, steely seconds, then he looks me right in the eye and says, "Mom. I want Bobby."

Well all right then.

I found his Bobby. I tucked him in. Kissed him hard on the forehead, and told him he wasn't even close to too old for Bobby. And that he never, ever had to pretend to be again. Then I came into the kitchen and poured myself a very large glass of wine.

A little while ago, about 20 minutes after I'd said my last good-night, I heard the door to their bedroom open, followed by a very distinctive rustling in a certain plastic garbage bag still sitting in the hallway right outside their door. I haven't checked to see which of the animals he called back from exile, but I hope Snowball and Tucker made the cut.

Not even close to too old.

2010-06-11T08:36:00.002+02:00

Strike is over.

Huzzah!

Children have buggered off to school where they bloody well belong.

HipHipHuzzah!

There's all of a week and a half's worth of school left before the summer vacation, so ya' know, the teachers are really going to earn their hard fought raise this month!

Meh.

I know. I know. I know. I really should be more supportive. And, I am. No really. I am. Teachers have a thankless and difficult job. In order to get (and keep) the good ones, we need to pay them the wage that they're worth to us. Plus, how can I fault them for taking advantage of a negotiation tactic that I've believed for years now that American teachers* need to be more aggressive about using.

I finally found a place that listed average salaries for Norwegian teachers (a surprisingly hard fact to track down). This was not from an official site, mind you, so I won't swear by it or even link to it, as I can't seem to find it a second time. But my shadey sources tell me that the starting wage of a teacher in Norway is 319,000 NOK**. Right now the exchange rate is about 6.5 kroner to the dollar, so that's $49,000 per year. Just 'fer starters. teacherportal.com lists the starting wage of a teacher in Utah as $26,521. Even making amends for the inflated cost of living over here, that's a huge difference. Huge. Clearly one side has been much better about making themselves heard. And I'm all for that. But a two week strike for higher wages still feels ever so slightly off to me at a moment when the rest of Europe is in financial meltdown mode.

Whatever. I'm over it. We're all totally over it. Except my trash can, which hasn't been emptied for three weeks now. And wasn't it just my luck that the strike ended on our regular pick-up day, so we have wait another damn week before they get around to our bloated, stinking midden.

*By 'American' I guess I should admit that I'm talking mostly 'Utah' since that's where both my parents live and taught, and it's their gripes I'm most familiar with.

**The average after 16 years on the job goes up to (I think--I don't remember exactly, and like I said, I can't find it again) 380,000 NOK ($58,000). Not much of a raise at all, really. It was much easier to see why they're on strike after finally finding these numbers.

Schools Still On Strike

2010-06-07T20:10:00.000+02:00

In the meantime--eye candy!

From Missy's birthday party. This is her very bestest friend. They were together when they got their ears pierced.

It was a smallish party. Just the kids from her age group at barnehage. All the boys ended up with Boy and his Lego. All the girls ended up in the kitchen with the Playdough. None of them much liked my cake. One boy asked for two pieces, but only because he wanted to lick the frosting off of both of them.

From Elder Miss's birthday breakfast. In 10 years it's never rained on her birthday. Born under a lucky star, this one...

Later that afternoon, she had a bowling party for all of her friends. They're all 10 now, but they all still squeal like mad harpies when they get together in a large pack like this. When do they outgrow the squealling?

The birthdays were two weekends ago. Last weekend Em had a dance recital at one of the malls in the center of town.

She was awesome.

May I Bitch About The Strike For Just A Moment Here?

2010-06-04T11:48:00.000+02:00

You won't have heard, because you don't live here, and you probably don't care, but there's a huge strike afoot in Bergen. It was sort of cramping my style last Friday when it started. Now, a week later, I'm just plain pissed off, and ready to start smacking sense into people.

The teachers have been called out on strike. Our school (and a handful of others around the city) shut down last Friday. All the other schools closed as of Wednesday. A whole week this thing has lasted, and there doesn't seem to be any rush to get it sorted out before a whole 'nuther week passes.

As a child of educators (or, former educators, I should say), I know I should have more sympathy. But here's the thing. The strike isn't about education, or any specific complaints modern educators tend to have: crowded classrooms, insufficient materials, the slow attrition of fine arts and humanities electives. These are problems I could easily get behind. But none of that is what this strike is about. It's about money, of course. But not specifically teacher's salaries. It's to do with the entire pool of money allocated by the federal government to the kommune, and how much of that pool is set aside to pay the salaries of municipal employees. I think. The municipal government (the kommune) says they've given enough of the pool to salaries. The unions representing the municipal employees say, 'No, actually, we want more.' The kommune says, 'But no. Seriously. You have enough.' The uppity unions say, 'Enough is never enough. We want more.' And so on and so forth. The teachers were just chosen to fight this fight because closing schools and kommune-run barnehages is inconvenient and, presumably, a very effective pressure point.

I think.

Meh--this whole rant is hopelessly half-baked right from the get-go, because to be honest, I don't really understand the way unions work here. All I know for sure is, they're very large, and they're very powerful. Powerful enough that the prospect of a two to three week strike sounds like a grand way to make a point. To hell with the children and the two or more weeks of education they'll be missing out on! But forcing thousands of families to scramble to find alternative day-care? That's our ticket public sympathy and support. Hell yeah!

However, I have yet to talk to anyone who has any sympathy whatsoever for the union in this particular strike. Big babies. Knock it off, and open the damn schools again!

It's not just the teachers that have been pulled out on strike though. There's a handful of city offices that have shut down, as well as the people who run the big smelter thingy at the city dump. The upshot of that one being--no garbage pick up.

Quite honestly, if this thing breaks earlier than expected, I think it's going to be the garbage issue (rather than thousands of languishing, instruction-less children) that does it. It's turned warm and sunny here in the past few weeks. Garbage bins everywhere are filled to overflowing. The one right outside Missy's barnehage* is more than a week overdue now, and it smells so bad they're limiting the kids' outside playtime. Hurricanes, and minus 30 degree weather don't deter Norwegians from their outside playtime. But a week without garbage removal does. Experts are warning of a rat explosion. Articles in the paper are featuring tourists registering disgust and rueful disappointment in the state of the city's streets. It won't be borne. Something must be done. Eventually. Just as soon as they get their damn money......

*Missy's barnehage is privately owned and operated, and is therefore not part of the strike. It's still opened.

May 27th

2010-05-29T13:06:00.001+02:00

A big day in big pictures.

We started early at the school. Little Miss's 'forskoledag'--a sort of open house for all of next year's new students to come in, meet their teachers, and see their classrooms. I don't necessarily like that I'm the sort of person who cries at these prosaic little milestones. But I can't help it. I am. And I did.

The woman on the right, with the dark hair, has been Emma's teacher for the past four years. She's rather wonderful, and I'm thrilled that it looks like Amanda will be spending the next four years in her keeping.

When we were finished at the school, I surprised Amanda with her first birthday present.

The only thing she asked for specifically this year was to get her ears pierced. Well, 'asked' isn't exactly the right word for it. 'Nagged' is a bit weak as well. She never came so far as to 'insist', but after the second month of negotiations, she did start to talk about it as if it were a foregone conclusion. A rather brilliant strategy, if you ask me. By early May, she had her father asking me, "So? When are you taking her to get it done?"

Happy Birthday, dearest.

She was predictably stalwart throughout. There was a breathy 'ow ow ow' followed by an accusing glare, and an indignant 'that hurt' directed at the wench with the white gun. I detected a slight tremor right before the second shot, but no tears, no fuss. And now:

Pink, sparkly loveliness.

That same afternoon was Emma's art show opening.

As you may or may not recall, last year's show ended up being a bit of an ordeal for me. (If you're interested, you can read about it here .) In short, I was grumpy and unimpressed.

Now, I don't mean to brag or anything, but it's almost as if someone in charge heard my grumblings of discontent, and decided to do something about it. Lest I should be displeased again....

They held the show in the same museum, but they spread the student work throughout the upper galleries so it was mixed in with the stuff on permanent display. There was much more room to move around, and breathe every now and again. Still crowded, but tolerably so.

Once again they ignored her paintings and drawings, which I (perhaps mistakenly) tend to see as EM's strong points, and opted for a small, model chair that she had designed. But it was displayed in a gallery that featured Norwegian chair designs over the past two centuries. Clearly an attempt at some sort of thematic continuity. Very cool. Emma was also impressed, and a little surprised. "You mean....furniture? can be art?" Oh--and they chose her chair to feature in the pamphlets and advertisements for the show. (Just here, I definitely do mean to brag.)

So, without further ado:

EM did not design this particular chair, but I wish she had because I feel strongly that it should be in my house.

2010-05-25T21:47:00.000+02:00

Ho-hum. Ho-hum. I'm bored.

I feel like I should be studying. I probably should be given the phantom possibility of these oral exams in June.

So here's how it works. Five students out of every class will be picked out by a computer (total random chance) and called in to take the final. Some classes have both a written and an oral final. Some classes have just a written final. Some classes have just an oral. My calculus class has both. I already know I wasn't called up for the written final. But there's still a chance I'll have to show up for the oral. My biology class has just the oral.

This is by far the weirdest thing about Norwegian high school. Not everyone has to take the final.

Odd.

And because it's done by computer--and computers are notoriously heartless, indifferent bastards--you could be called up for none, or all. The computer really doesn't give a shit one way or the other.

The day they posted the list of written finals along with the students who'd been selected to sit for them, there was a girl crouched in the corner, wailing (wailing, I tell you) and cursing (rather loudly at that) because she had been called up for three written exams. TRE! TRE! FAENFAENFAENFAEN! TRE EXAMER! Ahhhhh FAAAAAAEEEEEEN Ahhhhhh...

(For those of you not familiar with the dimsally limited range of Norwegian curse words, here's a link to an instructional video: NOT SAFE FOR WORK )

I must say, I tend to agree with the wailer. How is it fair that this one poor girl has to struggle through three exams while some other smug bastard, taking exactly the same classes, may luck out of having to take any?

It just seems right to me that a written final should be part of the requirement for a final grade for every student, not just an unlucky few.

I have no idea why they do it this way, or how they justify it. I've asked. No one knows. Well--to be clear--I haven't ask an actual educator, or administrator, for that matter. But I asked Mister. And, like, a whole two of my classmates. They didn't know. So I assumed it was unknowable. "It's just the way it is," said Mister, "Everyone's used to it. So no one bothers with it much. It's just....the way it is."

Sigh. So very unhelpful.

In the meantime, I'm left to find some way to motivate myself to study for these 'maybe' oral exams because, if I do get called up for one or both of them, I'll only have 48 hours notice. Everyone has to be prepared; everyone (or at least all the responsible ones who care about their grade at all) has to study like as if they're definitely going to be selected. So, alright, fine. I see the fairness in that. But still.....what is the point in subjecting only five of us to the pressure of an actual examination?

Whatever. It's just the way it is, and I'll deal with it if and when that soulless bastard of a computer puts the short straw in my hands and says I have to.

It's in Norwegian though. Am I getting across to you people the point that we're talking about an oral exam...in Norwegian? There's something so comforting about sitting around bitching about how flawed the system is in the face of my imminent doom. Because, obviously, it's the system's fault that I still can't wrap my tongue around Norwegian well enough to comfortably compare and contrast the circulatory systems of an insect and a human, or the reproductive cycle of forest moss, or even my thoughts on the exceptionally cold winter we've had, and what effects I might expect it's had on local ecosystems.

Oh God, and the calculus? What's up with an oral exam in math anyway! It's the prospect of that one that's really got me wetting my pants.

Doomed. I'm doomed, I tell you.

Situation Normal

2010-05-19T13:04:00.001+02:00

Okay. So. The blog.

Look, I know. I'm sorry. But, you know, things got really hairy back there in, what was it? April? March month? Something had to give. I'm only one person.

I only had school to talk about anyway. The derivation of logarithmic functions, and how I can't do it very well. That's it. You wouldn't have enjoyed it. I got sick some more too. Really sick, as it turned out. But that was very recent, and, now that I think about it, that episode actually was blog worthy material, fraught as it was with pathos and dispair. Nothing like a fever to unleash the poetic muse lurking in us all, eh?

Ah well, it's over now. I'm finished with classes for the time being. I may yet have oral exams in June to fret about, but for the most part I'm free. Free to blog at will. Blog about the kids. About the pseudo-wet-Norwegian summer, and long runs around the lake. About the dirty floors, and the laundry pile which grows legs and arms, and breathes hoarsely from somewhere deep within its fetid bowels. And eventually maybe, we'll even get to how I've been reading Stephen King lately, and how ever since, my whole house appears to me to breathe hoarsely from somewhere deep within her fetid bowels.

I avoided Stephen King for a long time, because I thought I would find his whole demonic anthropomorphism thing disturbing. But actually, I kind of like it. I could straighten the cupboards and scrub the floors, but frankly, she wouldn't like it. She draws her strength from filth and chaos. She breeds order from our disorder. She is our sentry and our warden. She is the ghost of a dead white whale.

No. I can't take credit for that last one. That was Boy's phrase--not about the house, but about his beloved Bobby. But I can't get it out of my head. There must be a story in there somewhere.....

But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, freedom. Speaking of which--Hooray for Norway Day was just this last Monday. Yey Norway! wOOt! wOOt!

Or...whatever...

As most of you already know, I'm no big fan of ye ol' syttende mai. Nothing's changed there. It was cloudy and coolish this year. Had to buy the girls capes to go with their bunads. And hey, we even got Boy into a bunad this year. He was not well pleased with it. He kept saying, "But why do I have to look German?"

"You don't look German. A bunad is Norwegian."

"But it looks German. I don't want to look German."

"It's not German! It's nothing but norsk, Boy. Quit it."

"But it's kind of French then, right? I don't want to look French."

"Boy, a bunad is a quintessentially Norwegian thing. People will look at you and say, 'Hey, why does that kid look so Norwegian? I want to look just like that Norwegian kid. Geez what a cool Norwegian outfit. Can I have one?' Get it? Norwegian. Now I mean it. Shut up, and button up those knickers."

"Scottish then. I look Scottish. I don't like it."

Gah! I had my way in the end; he wore the damn thing. It must have been some sort of twisted cultural solidarity thing that prevented him from admitting that what he in fact didn't want to look like was another stuffy Norwegian in yet another stuffy bunad.

A few pictures of the day:

Random, pretty Norwegian girls leading the parade. You're not meant to recognize anyone here, so don't study it too closely. It's merely a mood piece.

I said 'boobies' to make them laugh and to wipe the standard picture grimace off their faces. Then I couldn't get them to stop giggling.

So serious.....

Missy's last year marching with the barnehage.

Looks Canadian to me......

Final Proof That The Universe Really Does NOT Want Me Back In School

2010-03-11T10:17:00.001+01:00

I've already chronicled how I missed my first two calculus tests--the first one because of a car accident, the second one due to a crippling fever.

Did I tell you about the day I went in to make up for that second test? How the only day she could arrange for me to take it was the last day before the week and a half long winter break? So I had to do it, right? Because who wants the specter of vectors (heh!) hanging over their much deserved school vacation?

But the make-up test was the same day, at the same time, that I was supposed to be tested on the circulatory system for my biology class. Not such a big deal, actually. I arranged it with Mr. Biology to just come in an hour late, and got permission to stay over into the lunch period if I needed the time (I knew I wouldn't). Easy peasy. Except for the fact that I woke up the morning of the Double Test Whammy to a record breaking snow storm that was relentlessly laying down inch after inch of giant-flaked, wet snow on the very roads I needed passable to get me into town.

Long story short: I made it. Barely. And even though--two weeks later--I can tell you that I passed both tests with flying colors, the snow did--and still does--seem a rather heavy-handed omen.

In addition to endless snow storms, January and February were frought with illness--both the kids' and my own. I know this is par for the course for this time of year, and a household with three young children. But, my god, it was one after the other after the other, then round two, and round three, then the absurd episode with the horney cat.

And the well. Without the water. Don't forget the drought that has left me greasy with funk for the better part of three months.

Oh, and Mister's little work crisis. I know I haven't mentioned this before. To be fair, I should point out that there was nothing 'little' about it. He had no choice; he had to deal with it. I get that. But he's been absent--in every sense of the word--for pretty much the entire month of February. Even when he was physically here in the house--which wasn't often--he was mentally, just, gone.

It's been a challenging winter.

Last Saturday afternoon I got a message from the U.S. Embassy saying that on March 10 (yesterday) there would be a consul in Bergen for one day only, who would be available to witness signatures for passport renewals. Never mind that I've already missed seven--SEVEN!--biology classes to obligations related to the previously mentioned dramas. Never mind that I've been gently chastised by Mr. Biology that, while seven isn't exactly a problem, seven isn't exactly impressive either. Never mind that there is yet another test looming in the very near future. This business with the passport signatures must be dealt with. Otherwise, the only way to get it done is to travel to Oslo, and show up at the Embassy in person.

So I skipped my class. I gathered my documents, filled out the applications, checked the girls out of school for the day, went to town, waited in line, got the signatures, got the signatures notarized. Drove home, picked up the cat, drove the cat to the vet, held her tight while they removed the four stitches from her sterilization. Managed not to pass out. Then I drove home again, shoved some bread into the kids, got the girls into their dance clothes, drove them to dance class, sat for 90 minutes on a hard plastic chair while they danced. Then, once again, I drove home, picking up dinner on the way. After saying good-bye to Mister, who was heading out the door on yet another business trip, we ate dinner, then I read stories. After stories, I walked up to our neighbor's house to ask if they could pretty please drive Amanda home from barnehage the next day, as Mister is out of town and I simply CANNOT miss another biology class. That done and agreed to, I returned home and tucked the kids in bed. Finally--as a reward for a day's worth of tedious, motherly to-doing--I sat down with half a tub of ice cream and the looooong awaited Norwegian premiere of Lost. Which was better than Christmas. Lightyears better than my birthday. But, in all honesty, not quite as satisfying as the big, red A (6 if you're keeping score in Norwegian) on that last calculus test.

By 11:30 I thought, "Surely my day is done. I can go to bed now. It's early for me even. I'll get plenty of sleep, and be ready for another long day tomorrow. This time of classes...learning...not mothering...which is better...."

Alas.

At 11:35 p.m., while I was brushing my teeth, I heard a message come through on my phone. I assumed it was Mister telling me he had arrived safely where ever (think it was Tromsø) he was flying last night.

But no.

It's from the director of the barnehage. She's very sorry and all, for the late notice, but the snow--the god damn, mother (even though I've been trying hard to clean up my language, especially in my writing, it has to be said, 'cuz no other word quite covers the depth of my disdain) FUCKING snow--as collapsed part of the roof of the building where the barnehage is held. The kommune cannot guarantee the safety of either the children or the employees. Therefore, they have no choice but to shut down indefinitely. INDEFINITELY.

At 11:35 p.m. I get this message.

Mom, seriously. I need you here YESTERDAY!

So here I am Thursday morning. Not at school. Not learning anything. Blogging instead.

Even though I rather doubt that 'indefinitely' means, like, 'INDEFINITELY', (I'm pretty sure they'll find some sort of solution soon, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, as people's actual jobs--not just my schooling--depend on this building being open for business) it is, once again, a rather heavy-handed omen. Wouldn't you say?

A Word About The Weather

2010-03-03T16:06:00.000+01:00

I've been complaining for months, and people have been asking, so here's a few pictures of the snow piling up around the house.

I suppose, all things considered, it's not the most snow ever accumulated in one spot--that distinction being reserved for glaciers, and nordic tundras, and such. It is, nevertheless, and a whole bunch more snow than I'm used to dealing with. Much, much more than Bergen is used to seeing.

I'm sick to death of the stuff. I want it gone. Dead. Undone. Yesterday.

My apologies for the bad lighting. I meant to get out first thing this morning to take these pictures when the sun is at its wintery brightest on this spot on our front porch, but...you'll note the fresh layer of snow on the stairs. It was SNOWING again first thing this morning, so there was no wintery brightness to be had from the sun first thing this morning. Go figure.

Note the bottom most layer. That layer dates back to December 19th, that first big storm just before Christmas that dumped two feet of snow on us over night. I thought that was a lot of snow. I thought it was more than enough. I thought, surely that's our quota for the year. How foolish and naive was I?

That's right. The snow piled up outside my front door is now taller than my husband. He's absurdly cheerful about this fact. He thinks this has been the greatest winter EVER in the history of winters. He thinks every winter should be just like this one. Dry, cold, and thick with more snow than your roof can comfortably handle.

There's now been snow on the ground in Bergen for 75 consecutive days. That's beat the last record of 62 days set clear back in 1918 by a very comfortable margin. This sad, lumpish snowman, wallowing knee deep in layer upon layer of snow, was made by Mister and the kids three days before Christmas. Three days before Christmas. It shouldn't be possible. But there it is.

One of the lead stories on Bergens Tidende's website as I write this is: The Rain Is Coming! The Rain Is Coming! Okay, so it's not quite that jubilant, and it's become increasingly difficult to believe anything any meterologist has to say about anything so impossilby unfathomable as the weather, but apparently, there's talk of rain all next week. All next week! That might not be quiet enough to melt away the 6 feet of snow outside the front door, but it should spell doom for Norman, the lumpish snowman, and (fingers crossed) it just might fill my well enough that I can take a proper shower for the first time since Christmas!

And now, if I may, a brief word about my birthday, which was yesterday:

A most unexpected, thoughtful, wonderful surprise.

The sun broke through the clouds just moments after the delivery man handed the box over to me, so in a way, Jilly, for a minute anyway, they did stop the snow. Thank you so much. I'm slightly overwhelmed, but you have no idea how much I needed them.

For Your Listening Pleasure

2010-02-26T10:44:00.000+01:00

So I'm standing at the bus stop waiting, as you do, for the bus. I'm fiddling idly with my bus card, looking right, looking left, basically anywhere but directly at the people standing around me. One doesn't want to draw too much attention to oneself in these situations. I'm plugged into my iPod. Crisp white wires on prominent display, running from my ears to my coat pocket. A clear warning signal to would be conversationalists--STEP OFF BITCH!--it says, or so I imagine.

I've been there, waiting, everyday at about the same time for about two months now. Some of the faces are familiar to me. I might smile and nod to some of the friendlier looking ones. One doesn't want to appear rude, afterall. But I'm careful not to let my gaze linger too long on any one person during these occasional exchanges. Eye contact only ever leads to conversation, and conversation...well, see above...it's not what I'm there for.

We all see the bus at about the same time. It drives around a curve about half a kilometer away. It'll be pulling up at the curb in less than a minute. We make ourselves ready.

A sort of loose, jostling scrum forms around the approximate spot where we guesstimate the bus door will eventually open. Some are only now getting around to pulling out bus cards or loose change for the fare. Some idiots will wait until they're standing right in front of the driver. I hate those idiots. Me, I'm all ready, bus card in hand. I have only to pull out an ear bud in order to greet the driver properly--again, one doesn't want to appear rude.

The scrum tightens reflexively as the bus pulls up to the curb. I find myself standing next to an older woman. One of the friendly, familiar faces to whom I've nodded from time to time. My backpack knocks her purse off her shoulder as I'm pushed slightly from the right. I pull the ear bud out my ear, give the woman a tight, chagrinned smile, and say, "Sorry."

She smiles back, and before I have a chance to look away again, she puts her hand on my arm and says, "I just have to say, it's always such a pleasure to see you here in the mornings. You've got such a cheerful face. You're always smiling." She gives my arm a little pat, winks at me like we've just shared a conspiratorial little secret, then pushes ahead of me into the bus.

Who? Me? Eh?

If she'd given me a chance, I would have been able to explain: It's not me. I'm actually a pretty god-awful bitch in the mornings. Ask my kids. There's not enough steaming, milky tea in all of Europe to sooth my rougher edges at 7 o'clock on a cold wintery morning. It's the iPod. It's David Sedaris. I've got three of his books downloaded on to it, and the dude is funny. Laugh-out-loud-even-at-7-o'clock-on-a-cold-wintery-morning funny. At the precise moment when this kind woman chose to tell me what a cheerful face I had, I was listening to David Sedaris read a Christmas letter from a woman who put her daughter's crack baby in the washing machine. I couldn't tell you exactly how, but trust me.....F.U.N.N.Y. And apparently, I'm calling attention to myself at the bus stop listening to this stuff.

Whatever. As long as the audible guffaws and wide, gapping grins are being interpretted as cheerfulness, and not madness, I'm going to keepright on listening to it. Makes the time pass much quicker. In fact, I often find myself wishing the commute was a bit longer.

David Sedaris. Check him out. He speaks to the darkness in your soul and makes it giggle.

This I Did Not Need

2010-02-18T23:11:00.000+01:00

The blog. She is suffering. I know.

I blame the calculus. It's eating up the artsy, language side of my brain, and making me reluctant to write pithy prose.

Here's a story for you, though. I think you'll like this one. It's sure kept us up nights with the sheer hilarity of it all.

So, it all started Monday night. Late Monday night. Pretty much, technically Tuesday morning, I guess. All night long, Cindy, the cat, was restless and unsettled. Up and down, in and out, all over the place. It wasn't enough to just shut the bedroom door. I could hear her pacing up and down the stairs, jumping up and down from the window sills. She was everywhere. She would not settle. I finally had to lock her in the living room just so I could sleep.

What is up with that god damn cat! I muttered to myself as I climbed back into bed hoping against hope I would fall asleep fast now that the nuisance was contained.

She was just as restless the next morning. In addition to the pacing, I noticed she was running to her litter box every ten minutes, licking herself like mad between visits, and far more vocal than usual. Meow, meow meow right up in my face like she really needed me to listen to her this time.

Shit! I don't know. Bladder infection, maybe? I have been rather lazy and just giving her dry food lately. That's supposed to be bad for cats. Right? Mental note: pick up smelly, soft cat food on way home.

Elder Miss was home sick Tuesday, and she kept sending me SMS updates on the cat. All day long I got these messages: "Cindy still pasing." "Cindy seems sad." "Cindy making werd noyses." "Cindy is giving me a headake!" You'd think T9 would be doing something for her spelling, but alas.....

I was starting to worry. I assumed I'd have to call for an appointment. I started wondering, how does one test a cat for a bladder infection? Surely I would not be expected to procure a urine sample...?

But when I got home, she seemed fine. She was purring and friendly and cuddly. She happily lapped up the smelly, soft cat food I'd bought. She drank. She chased a dust bunny out from under the couch. Mental note: enough with the fucking vectors, clean the house! I persuaded myself that I had been imagining all the odd behavior. She was fine. By this time it was nearly 7 o'clock anyway. The vet's office had long since closed.

Then--around 9 o'clock--the yowling started.

Wait. Allow me to rephrase that in order to more accurately describe the sound my sweet little kitty was making.

YEEEEOOOOWWWWLLLLLING

Deep and low, way in the back of her throat.

YEEEEOOOOWWWWLLLLING

Ho.Lee.Shit. I mean, clearly this was an animal in a great deal of pain. All night long. She'd pace and yowl. Yowl and pace. Collapse on the couch and rest a few minutes, then pace and yowl, yowl and pace.

I was beside myself with worry. This must be more than a mere bladder infection. A bowel blockage maybe. She's all the time playing with those tiny, rubber Polly Pocket clothes. Maybe she swallowed one that got stuck? Around 3 o'clock in the morning I had managed to convince myself that what she had actually swallowed was one of my ear plugs, and those things swell up when they get wet. I was pretty sure she'd be dead before the vet's office opened at 8 the following morning.

And yet--and I must emphasize this point--and yet, in between all the yowling and the frantic pacing, she was still very affectionate and sweet. Still purring. Still eating. Still following us from room to room. Still very much Cindy.

I called the vet's office from the bus the next morning. I was bleary-eyed. Exhausted. I doubt I had slept more than an hour all night. But I had an 8:30 biology class that I couldn't afford to miss because I'd already skipped two classes last week taking kids to doctor and dentist appointments.

Upon hearing Cindy's symptoms, the lady on the phone kind of wanted me to bring her in right away, but when I explained that I had something to do that morning, was in fact already in town, but could bring her in later that afternoon, the receptionist sighed, clearly disappointed in my priorities (believe me, I was too), but agreed that as long as the cat was still eating, she'd probably hold out until 2:30 that afternoon.

I was having a hard time concentrating on much of what was going on in class. As I said, I was dead tired, and pretty worried about Cindy. What could it possibly be? Cleary so uncomfortable, in so much pain, but still purring and tolerant of all the kids' cuddles and attention. What is that? And then, it hit me. Biology. Restlessness. Yowling. Purring, even.

That little bitch is in heat!

BAM!

As soon as I thought it, I knew it was true. And I felt stupid. So incredibly stupid for not seeing it sooner. It was not all that long ago that Puss (my old Puss) was seriously sick, and in serious pain. I know what a sick cat looks like, and not once during the drama of the past two days did Cindy strike me as a sick looking cat. I mean, she sounded right enough like she was being eaten alive from the inside out by fire ants. But then to take the time to chase a dust bunny? Come on.

I mean, duh.

I kept the appointment, of course. Just to be sure. The vet checked her over thoroughly. Bent her every which way. Cranked open her jaws. Folded back her ears. You should have seen Amanda's face as she watched the thermometer being shoved up poor Cindy's butt. The horror! After all that was done, the vet said kindly, "Ahem, well, it is queening season, you know. Usually starts up about this time of year...."

Blah blah blah. I know. I know. When can we get her fixed? I made the appointment for a week from Monday. It's funny. Even the kids, who were so eager to have kittens, after two days of listening to her yowling for a mate all night long, can't wait to have her bits unhinged. Will she stop, Mom? Will she stop making that God awful noise once she's fixed? Man, I hope so!

As an interesting side note--just because I haven't blogged for two weeks--and it may be another two weeks before I get around to it again, so I might as well get in a nice long juicy one while I'm at it--while I was at the vet's office, during the examination, I damn near passed out. Literally. There I was, holding Cindy down while the vet was manhandling her nethers and giving me a mini lecture about feline estrus cycles, when I suddenly felt incredibly nauseous. Seconds away from vomiting. Then, just as suddenly, a clammy sweat washed over me and I knew I was about to pass out. I barely got myself sat down and my head between my legs in time to stop it.

I had been feeling pretty shitty all day. Two sleepless nights and another math test coming up that I've been struggling to prepare for had pretty much gotten the better of me. I was crashing fast, and I knew it. But I don't think that's why I nearly fainted for Cindy's vet. I think it had to do with Puss. The last time I was in that office was the day they took Puss away from me....or...okay....I gave him to them. But it was awful, and they didn't even ask if I wanted to be there with him when he went.....

There's just something about the smell. That wet-doggy, animal uriney, clinical disinfectant smell. I felt it the minute I walked in the door, but not so much so's I'd expect my body to react so viscerally to it later on. It couldn't have helped that while I was waiting, there was a guy who had just made the decision to put his dog down. Answering all the same cold, awful questions about remains that I had to answer. God damn it! Pets should just live forever. That is all.

But, not really, because I also have to report that by the time I had gotten home from the vet's office I was running a fever. I had a math test at 8:30 the next morning. I hadn't been able to really study properly for three days due to lack of sleep and loud feline interjections, and now I was running a temperature of 101.2. Great. Just great. Mister came home late and found me crying on the kitchen floor because I was too sick to study, and didn't think I could manage to rub two cents together let alone figure out the size of an angle given its vectors. And he was all, "Jamie! Dude! This is high school calculus! Not your damn Master's thesis you're scheduled to defend! Call in sick. Then, for God's sake go to bed!"

So I did. And I feel much better today, even if I did miss my second Norwegian high school math test, after showing up an hour and a half late for the first. Not a very good showing, if you ask me. But at least the cat is sleeping peacefully at my feet as I write this. Fingers crossed that her mad kitty hormones have settled, and we can all get another good night's sleep.

2010-01-29T17:29:00.000+01:00

So I've just taken my first Norwegian high school math test. Trippy.

I was so over prepared for this test, it's a little absurd.

I'm not the type to freak out about tests or finals. I don't panic about time or blanking out.

I do the class work, I read the material, I figure out what the teacher wants to hear parroted back to him or her; if I know it I know it, if I don't I don't. Having said that, I do tend to work my ass off to make sure I know 'it'...whatever 'it' may turn out to be.

I think I've said here before, I'm a good little student.

So yeah, I feel a fair amount of pressure leading up to an exam, because I want to do well. Truth be told, I want to ace the damn thing. This is always what I'm aiming for. But it's largely internalized pressure, there are never any visible signs of wigging out. At least, there never were before.....

Blame it on my distracting children, blame it on my age, blame it on the funky foreign language, or maybe just the funky foreignness of the school system in which I find myself. But whatever the reason, the prospect of this math test has been causing me to go ever so slighty batshit this past week.

I've solved, resolved, and unsolved every single problem in both the text- and workbooks. Nothing is assigned, per se. There is no homework that is due, or required to be handed in ever. You're expected to be responsible for keeping up with the pace of the class at your own discretion. I'm finding I quite enjoy doing the math, so like I said--solved, resolved, and unsolved three times over. I made Mister help me with the impossibly hard story problems (finding annual interest rates, calculating the growth of a bacteria population, oh, and my favorite, determining the rate at which human teeth are shrinking per every 1,000 years....riveting, vital information!)

You could easily say I've been a little obsessed with these story problems. I find them incredibly difficult. I always have. Factoring, reducing, dividing, and variable finding--the systematic shifting around of numbers and letters on a page according to some carefully memorized formula--this stuff, I'm pretty good at. But take those formulas out of that purely theoretical context, and ask me to apply it to some real life number crunching? My brain congeals into lime Jell-o. Useless.

Having never taken a Norwegian high school math test before, and not really having any--you know--friend thingies in the class that I could talk to, I had no idea what to expect. Would it be easy? Hard? Lots of drill type exercises? Mostly long equations? Would I have to prove anything? Because--gah!--ask me to prove 'a' plus 'b' equals 'c' never 'd', and I'm totally fucked! Or would I be faced mostly with my old nemesis, the story problem? And if so, like seriously? How hard?

So I worked, and I solved, and I memorized. I ignored dishes, laundry, floors, and wet moldering rain pants under the stairs. In short, I freaked a little bit out. Then late Thrusday afternoon, I hit a wall. Exhausted, I summoned up a little bit of my old sang froid, and breathed deep. I either knew it, or I didn't. I'll either be able so solve it, or I won't. Either way--another deep breath--at least I have my health, and my children will always love me. Ommmmmmmmm.

There was an accident in one of the tunnels through town early this morning. At 8:30, as the tests were being handed out in my classroom, I was crammed into a crowded bus, idling on a bridge, a mere three minutes (in good traffic conditions) from my stop. The driver was repeatedly asked, and repeatedly refused, to let any of us off the bus to just walk the rest of the way. So there we sat for 50 minutes while they cleared the accident away (Turns out a father with two small boys in the car, collided with a truck, no one was seriously injured. There's probably a logarithm somewhere that would explain how such a miracle is possible).

Mister soothed and reassured me continually via SMS. If traffic is this back up, there will be others who are late for the test too. She'll have to give you all extra time. Don't worry. Breathe. Ommmmmmm.

I ended up being 40 minutes late for the test, but sure enough two other students ran in about the same time I did. One girl was a good 15 minutes after us. The teacher had heard about the accident. No worries. You'll have all the time you need, she said. I was handed a single piece of paper with the test, and a stack of graph paper for my answers.

Del (part) 1--45 minuter--uten hjelpemidler (no aides). Shit!!! That means no calculator! I felt myself begin to panic, but then I looked at the problems. Three of them. Basic. Pretty easy stuff. There was one bit where she wanted me to explain the reason for my answer, but I didn't have to prove it. So I think I'm okay there.

Once we had all turned in our first set of answers, we were allowed to turn the page over. Del (part) 2--90 minuter--med hjelpemidler. With aides. Yey! Hello, fancy scientific calculator, whom I've come to love. Come, and let us do our thing.

Then, to my amazement, every single kid in the class reached into their backpacks and pulled out, not only their calculators, but also their textbooks and all their notes. WHA-HUH? We can use our freaking books? Oh for hell's sake! Is this normal? I don't remember this from the math tests I took back forever ago when I was in high school? Our books? Seriously?

I didn't need mine. Never even took it out of my bag. Do I sound smug? Because I feel a little smug. Of course, there's always a chance that I managed to mess it up. Misplaced a parenthesis, flipped the wrong negative, used the wrong function. But, I kind of doubt it. Even the two story problems didn't stump me. Set it equal to this, plug in that, divide by this, log here, log there, raise it to this, punch it all into the calculator, and voila! 70 degrees Celsius after 6 hours.

Doesn't exactly make me a math genius, but I'd have to say my wine is well deserved tonight.

P.S. Except for a minor minunderstanding regarding the power of a cell wall to protect a plant cell from the ravages of sea water, my Biology test Wednesday? Aced it. Norwegain high school loves me.

2010-01-19T22:26:00.000+01:00

Biology teacher: Any questions on protein synthesis before we move on to the mitochondria?

Skrawny-necked boy in the back: Will the next test be mulitple choice?

Biology teacher: Just to change the subject....completely......

High school is freakin' awesome, man. I had almost forgotten just exactly how awesome it really is.

Sea Change

2010-01-09T01:14:00.000+01:00

Our new life looks like this:

I get up at 6, not 7.
I drag Amanda out of bed at 6:10, not 7:30.
Amanda moans, and cries, and shivers in the cold, dark morning.
Amanda and I leave the house at no later than 7:15. Emma and Daniel are still eating their breakfast.
I drop Amanda off at barnehage no later than 7:20. This morning she was the first one to be dropped off. Yesterday evening (due to god-awful traffic and a late bus, she was the last one to be picked up. I swore I would never do that to my kid....NEVER....yet.....here we are).
I catch a bus into town no later than 7:30.
At 7:40, I call Emma from the bus to tell her it's time to start getting coats and shoes on, and then to head to school. "Try to remember to turn out the lights," I say. "Okay Mom. I love you," she says. "You're a big girl, Em. I love you too." I hang up, then turn up the volume on my iPod, and try not to think about how Boy is surely walking out into -23 degree weather without his coat zipped up because I'm not there to do it for him.
With any luck, the bus rolls into town around 8:20.
I run/trot/shuffle clumsily over icy cobble stones to my new school in order to make my 8:30 class. Biology on Mondays and Wednesdays; Math on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.
It's high school, folks. I'm back in high school.
Somedays I'm back home before Emma and Daniel get home. Somedays I'm not. Keys to the house have been made and given to both. Daniel was so proud of his; he showed it off to all his friends.
Thursdays will be the hardest. Emma will have to take a bus--on her own--into to town to her art class. Daniel will come home alone. Mister will leave work an hour early to pick up Amanda from barnehage. I'll be done with my class in time to pick up Emma after her class. We'll take the bus home together. We were all set to practice this new routine--Mister had arrange to take the day off, so he could be there to take the bus that first time with Emma, just so she'd know where it was going to go (it takes a slightly different route than we usually drive)--but the damn art class was cancelled at the last minute, so we didn't get a chance to practice. Next week...
It's only been three days since our new life started. Only three days.
It's still not quite sunk in that this is it. Every day, every week, through to the end of the school year.
I feel guilty all the time. The kids weren't expecting this. They could do without the shake up.
Mister says I'm dead wrong about this. If ever there were any three kids in need of a good shake up, it's our three kids.
Be that as it may, it doesn't feel good.
I don't love the classes. I don't fit in.
It's freakin' high school. I can't dress it up any better than that. I was hoping there would be more people like me--foreigners in need of extra classes to get into a specific univeristy program. But, no. They're all kids.
They look at me like I'm all dusty and decrepid.
I'm older than my math teacher.
It's weird.
On the other hand, I can tell the classes are already working wonders on my Norwegian. My infant math teacher spent 3 hours this morning teaching me how to divide 3rd and 4th degree polynomials, and I'll be god damned if I didn't understand it. Mostly.
It's a soft entry into the world of Norwegian higher learning.
I needed that.
But still. Dude. It's high school.
It's weird.

Dregs

2010-01-05T14:21:00.001+01:00

The time stamp on this picture says: 01.01.10 02:14:52. Quarter after two in the morning. I think that might qualify as some sort of abuse. Oh well, at least they fell asleep with their hats and gloves on.

In case I haven't said it to you already, I should probably start off with a hearty Happy New Year Everyone!

We're usually in Rosendal with my mother-in-law for New Year's, but seeing as she abandoned us for other, more favored family members this year, we were left to make other arrangements. We opted to keep it local (sort of) and drove the billion miles north of town, across the bloody bridge and everything, to spend the evening with my friend Marilyn, her husband, and her son. A very quiet, but highly enjoyable evening that, as you can see, ended at least two hours later than the kids might have wished it.

Now for the part where I review last year's resolutions and make half-hearted, non-commital commitments towards new ones.

Old resolution #1--As you may or may not recall, last year I decided it was high time to read a book in Norwegian. My one book commitment somehow turned into three. Then my three book commitment ballooned into a class, leading to an exam, landing us here on the foothills of a still murky, but definitively bilingual future involving, almost certainly, ever more books. So I'm going to call old resolution #1 a success, even though, in the interest of full disclosure, I never actually finish that third Norwegian book. A mystery/crime thing. It would have bored me even in English.

Old resolution #2--I was going to learn all about digital photography and the inner workings of the fancy Canon I got for Christmas last year. Ahem. Well. I've definitely learned things. For example, I've learned that the settings you would use to take this picture:

are not necessarily the same settings you would use to take, say, this picture:

All wrong. I know. But I've learned, see, that kids move, like, all the freaking time, and they're way too impatient to wait while you fumble with your settings on a cold, dark night when there are fireworks to be seen. I've learned not to care so much. Because, I've also learned, that using the wrong settings can sometimes capture oddly amusing phenomena such as this:

"But Mommy. You told me there were no such things as arctic ninja ghosts!"

So, old resolution #2 still needs some work. But I'm always picking up odd bits and pieces of knowledge here and there. And I got a tripod for Christmas this year. I'm told tripods are an important tool of the trade, so it should help, right?

That was about it for old resolutions. I kept the blog posts up above 52 for the year, so I'm happy about that. Despite the dark moment mid-September where I got all moody about it, and nearly quit blogging altogether. Let's say I try to avoid that kind of nonsense this year, call that new resolution #1.

New resolution #2: obviously, this one's about school. I've lost some of the steam I had going into December. I clearly didn't make if off the waiting list into those classes I waited too long to sign up for. There are some other, far more expensive options, but I find myself dragging my feet. Finding reasons why the kids can't spare me, why it would be too hard to get into town, why it would just plain be too hard. Anyway, I'm still going to apply to the university in February. There's still a chance they'll take me even without those extra classes. So, depending on what happens with that, I'll either be starting university in August, or starting the high school level science classes I'm missing that kept me from being accepted into the university classes. Either way, I'll be going to school full time next fall. Or at least, that's my current plan/hope/wish/fervent-if-only-I-believed-in-prayer prayer.

And just for kicks, new resolution #3: run the Fana mil, a local 10K race held here every September. This is an easy one because I already know I can run 10 kilometers. But I've only ever run in one organized 5K. I don't much like races, but I'm feeling this urge to go ahead and give another one a try. I could make it more challenging by training for a specific goal time, but no way am I going to commit to that this early.

For now, let's just say I plan to sign up for the race. Now, if only the damn snow would die so I could get out on the road and go for a run!

Edited to add---Man did I ever speak too soon. Hours after I posted this, I got a call from the school I was on the wait-list for. Seems I got into both of the classes. Shit. Starting tomorrow. Double shit. The logistics are fierce. I can't be here in the mornings 3 days a week to send the kids off to school. Amanda is going to have to be dumped at barnehage at 7:15. Thursdays are the worst. I have no idea how to get Emma into town for her art class other than to have her take a bus in on her own. Shit! What have I done? I didn't look very closely at the time table because the counselor made it sound like the waiting-list was miles long. No way was I supposed to get in. This was largely a symbolic move to bump me in the right direction and shut Mister up for another few months or so. SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! Now everyone watch while I step out of my comfort zone, and turn my life upside down......

One Score, And Very Nearly Two Years Ago...

2009-12-30T00:33:00.000+01:00

I've been going back and forth on whether or not I should post this one. It feels mean, in a way, and I don't want to be mean, because I really like this guy. I flirted wildly with him when I was 15 and in Norway for the first time. I never kissed him, but I probably should have, even though it turned out for the best that I didn't, because he just happens to be the cousin of my current, and most favored Mister.

Anyway. I went to his wedding in Brussels last month. Not Mister's. Obviously. The cousin's. The guy's. I'm on my second glass of port. Whatever. It was a nice little wedding--rich in champagne, and retro 80's pop for the dance portion of the evening.

Imagine my surprise, though, when I get his tasteful and, I might add, very prompt Thank You in the mail today, only to discover that I attended the wedding of none other than Abraham fucking Lincoln:

Minus the fetching goatie, of course. Prettier wife too. But, seriously. Have you ever?

Clever, Clever Farfar

2009-12-26T21:21:00.000+01:00

I'm sure I've already mentioned what an incredibly handy family I married into. Indeed, my house would be a far, far humbler affair if it hadn't been for the generous time and talent of my father-in-law. So I knew he'd be able to handle a Christmas order for some sort of storage device for the 12,892 LEGO pieces that have accumulated upstairs.

This was the first present of Christmas, delivered early Christmas Eve.

How perfect is that? I love it. No boxes to open. No lids to be shoved under the sofa. Everything just right there in orderly, color coded compartments where they need it.

Already near full, though. And this was before Boy opened the five--count 'em--FIVE giant LEGO sets he got for Christmas.

Undaunted, Farfar* is already planning a way to rig a second story to the thing. The bottom level will have wheels and roll out for convenience and easy storage.

Again I say--clever, clever Farfar.

**************************************

So Christmas has come and gone already. We've had a mostly quiet and stress-free couple of days. I made the kids get out of their pajamas before they came to dinner last night. Today I was slightly more strict with them; around 4 p.m. I started nagging them about getting dressed. That's the level of quiet we're talking. Pretty much what Christmas should be. Right?

For those who are keeping score: I was right about the shiney new computer. Yey me!

I hope everyone had a very Merry, equally Chilled, and soggily Unsober Christmas.

Much love,
The JEDA's

*Farfar--for those of you who didn't already know--means father's father. Paternal grandfather, to get all technical about it.

Careful What You Wish For

2009-12-21T08:38:00.000+01:00

I always find myself bitching this time of year about the decided lack of white in the Bergen Christmas. Nor do I bitch alone. The entire city takes note, and grumbles accordingly.

Gray, rain, drizzle, gloam, gloam, gloam.

Two white Christmases in fifteen years. Two. And one of those was more a hoary dusting than a legitimate blanket. The other one, I was in the States. Hardly counts.

Apparently, though, the Gods have been listening. "Snow?" they said, "You want snow for Christmas? Fine. We'll give you your precious snow! Take THAT whiney mortals! And THAT! And THAT! And some gale force winds to go with it! You'll take it, and you'll take it all in one day. You'll like it too, because it is our benevolent gift to you. Merry fucking Christmas."

We went from the mildest November and early December in decades, to the coldest day in December like ever, to half a meter of snow. And all this delightful change occurred in less than a week.

It took me four hours to clear the stairs, a narrow path on the drive up to the road, and a small patch just large enough to park the car. Four hours.

Did I have a snow shovel? No.

We rarely get more than six, seven, eight centimeters of snow fall at the most. So, for the most part, I make do with a broom to clear the stairs. A snow shovel has just never been very high on my list of priority purchases.

Consider it priority number one this cold, white, winter's morn.

We Interrupt Our Sob Story To Bring You This Bit Of Christmas Cheer

2009-12-13T12:26:00.002+01:00

I didn't get Christmas cards made this year, so you're going to have to consider this your substitute.

I had a brilliant plan for a card: it involved Santa hats, and a globe, and a caption about axial tilt being the reason for the season. But my sullen, ornery children would. not. cooperate. I became angry. Boy became miserable. There were tears. And in the end, a glass ornament was shattered. I felt it best to cut my losses and run from the project.

A couple weeks later we visited the hastily resurrected Pepperkakeby (Gingerbread City). Spirits were considerably higher that day. The resulting pictures, more flattering. Even Boy--still feeling somewhat guilty, no doubt, from the drama he had created the last time I tried to take a picture of him--sat still, and sort of smiled.

I have no idea why, but it is incredibly difficult to get these kids to smile for a picture. Especially when they're together like this. I mean, look at that! Emma gets all mock, solemn introspection. Amanda gives off this silent-plea-for-help vibe. And Boy just smirks. Smug little snot. He's not really all that better than me...

So you'll recall the sad fate of the first Pepperkakeby. They did catch the guy who did it. Some drunk, possilby high (they never said which) 20 year old went in alone, and sort of lost his mind a little bit. He ended up pretty much turning himself in after a couple of his friends ratted him out for the 100,000 kroner reward money. But get this--apparently, this kid showed so much remorse, was so literally sick with guilt, and beside himself with the pressure of being hated and vilified by the entire country, that the authorities decided not to punish him any further. Nothing. As far as I understood it, they just let the kid go. (If anyone out there knows otherwise, please let me know. It is possible that I missed the news of any futher fines levied against him. But the news of the day right after they caught him was that he had more or less punished himself enough.)

As I also mentioned, Bergen businesses and residents pulled together and had a new gingerbread city ready to open the following week. We had to be in town the first Sunday it was open for a play which Emma's art class had made the stage scenery for, so we decided to go in early enough to stop by the Pepperkakeby first.

Good thing we got there in plenty of time. Check out this line. There were articles in the paper about how long that line was. Big news here, apparently....

The line moved relatively fast, we were at the entrance in 35 minutes. Just enough time to take all the above pictures you've just been enjoying.

Here are a few shots to give you an idea of the scale of the thing. It really is rather impressive.

All the local landmarks are represented. This is the harbor restaurant where Mister proposed to me. Awwwwww.

Mister was rather proud to find this one. That's one of his boats. Not his, obviously. He doesn't own it. But he did design it. It's a coast guard vessle that the navy docks here in Bergen.

I had other pictures uploaded. I must have exceeded my limit. Blogger won't let me post the rest. No matter. They were just more pictures of gingerbread landmarks. Probably it would have been tedious and boring to include anymore anyway.

Stay tuned for the conclusion of JEDA's heartwarming, coming-of-age story. Yes. There's more. Though something tells me it might be tedious and boring to include anymore of it, it's a saga that has been brewing in me all year. I'm telling it as much for my own sake, as anyone else's. Skip it if you're weary. But I have a feeling that this blog is going to be a whole lot of Edumacatin' Norwegian-wise from here on out. Consider yourselves alerted to the programming change.

Sine, Cosine, But Mostly Tangent

2009-12-11T19:07:00.000+01:00

Part Two:

During the process of investigating how to study geology in Norway, I figured out early on that I was probably going to need more science classes in order to qualify for admission into the program. As I said yesterday, I avoided them in high school; pretended they didn't even exist in college.

Somewhere along the line I had managed to convince myself that, while I was a good student, I wasn't necessarily a smart student, so math and science weren't for the likes of me. Somewhere considerably further along the line, I finally came to the conclusion that this isn't exactly true.

Geology has always interested me. Ask my mother. How annoying was I in the 9th grade when I was first learning about U-shaped valleys vs. V-shaped valleys? Igneous vs. sedimentary? Oh, and the names of all the different kinds of clouds? Remember how I used to quiz you on the damn clouds? I loved that shit. But everytime it started to get a little technical: formulas for carbon dating, chemical reactions that desolve certain rocks, the physics of storm formation....my mind sort of shut down. Refused to even consider the notion that I might be able to sort those kinds of details out.

It's what kept me from changing my major in college. The first thing I would have to have done to major in Geology in college was take Inorganic Chemistry. I had heard tell that Chemistry is hard, yo'. At the time, I didn't believe I could do it.

(See? I was stupid. Just stupid in a different way than I thought.)

I could go on and on: Biology, Calculus, and ever more Chemistry. All would have been necessary, and all of it intimidated me enough that I ultimately decided to stick with what I knew I could bullshit my way through. Color, light, line, shape, texture, and the intentions of a bunch of dead, neurotic artists. That shit's subjective man. As long as it sounded good, no one could tell me I was wrong about it.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when I grew up. But I'm no longer quite so intimidated by science. Obviously. In fact, I crave the knowledge. I crave the challenge of acquiring that knowledge. I know that, while I'm no genius--these subjects will be difficult for me--they're not impossible. And I get now, that I don't have to have mastered all of them in order to apply their principles to whatever field of Geology I ultimately settle into. For the most part, I'll just need the basics.

Once I had safely passed the Norwegian test I needed to pass, I turned my attention to math. Math is the foundation of pretty much all the sciences, right? So I figured it was a logical first step. I took Trigonometry my junior year of high school.  I struggled with math, and I had done everything I needed to graduate, so I stopped there. I should have done more. I wish I had done more. But I didn't, so there's no sense in belaboring the point. And besides, even if I had taken AP Calculus my senior year, it doesn't necessarily follow that now, 18 years later, I'd remember any part of it. I wouldn't. I don't.

I knew that if had a prayer of passing myself off as competent in a college level math class, I needed a full-scale review of everything I'd already studied--including the very basics of algebra. To this end, I had my mom send me the material she gives her inmates (Mom teaches high school at the federal prison in Utah--me and the felons, doin' our homework....)

It starts with easy-peasy order of operations stuff, and ends with the Quadradic Formula. I'm very nearly finished with it. In fact, I spent yesterday evening using the Quadradic Formula and the Pythagorean Theorem to find the lengths of the sides of right triangles. And felt right brilliant doing it.

It's taken me the better part of two months to get through the 10 units she sent me. The kids have been watching over my shoulder the whole time. They're clearly intrigued. All those x's and y's and parenthesis--you have to admit, algebra does make for a rather elegant page of work.  Poor Emma is still struggling to get her 7 times tables down, so the fact that I can make sense of anything more advanced is like witchcraft to her.

Not long ago she was babbling along in her Emma-like way. I don't remember what led her to the subject, but for whatever reason she started listing the primary talents and assets of everyone in the family:

"Cindy is the cuddly one.  I'm cuddly too, but mostly I'm the one who's good at drawing. Daniel's not really good at anything yet (according to her), but he's getting better at Lego everyday, and he really likes it, so he's probably going to be a builder. Amanda's good at making people laugh. Daddy knows all about birds and nature. And you, mom, you're the one who's good at math. So you can help us with our homework."

Ha! Hear that Mister? I'm the one who's good at math! Me!

I sort of love that. I love that she thinks I'm some sort of savant because I don't even have to think about what 7x7 is, and I can make sense of "the math with the letters instead of numbers". Mister was right there when she said it. Mister, who really is a bit of a math wiz, let it slide. He went ahead and let my daughter believe that her mom is the one who's good at math. I sort of love that too.

My mother went back to school when I was around Missy's age. I've been thinking a lot about that lately. The precedent she set. The role her example must have played in making me, not even for a single second, ever question the fact that I would go to college some day too. I want to do that for my girls. I want them to be proud of me, as I am of my mom. I don't ever want them to look at my life and think, as I've been doing for the past 16 years now, what a fucking waste!

So, thank you, mom. Thank you for the example. Thank you for being brave enough to take the leap. I still remember you got an A in that Algebra class. I told Emma you were pretty damn good at math too.

And, thank you, Mister. For letting our daughter believe a lie. This was one of the good lies, though....like Santa Claus.......

Rådgiver

2009-12-10T19:57:00.000+01:00

It means advisor. Or counselor.

A hint for the English speakers--it's not pronounced rad giver. That's a silent 'd', followed by a soft 'g'. Something more like 'raw-yeever'. You can say it that way. You'll sound like a total hick American when you do, but that's okay. Norwegians are kind. They'll indulge your awkward, unschooled tongue.

Rådgiver.

Long story short: I met with a high school guidance counselor today. She said, and I'm translating loosely here, "Too bad you were such a pussy about making that phone call, 'cuz now all the classes you need are full, and there's a waiting list to get in."

***************************************

And now for the long story: Part One.

(Fair warning--This is epic. I'll forgive you if you don't make it all the way through.)

Clear back last January, I had a rather devastating emotional break-down. A ruinous crisis of the soul which left me shattered, raw, and finally (at great, long last) ready to grow the fuck up already.

You'll remember that the world economy had just tanked a few months prior. Everyone was still talking about how bad it might yet get. Mister was worried about the fate of his relatively small engineering firm. Worried enough that he told me there was no way he was draining our savings account in order to buy plane tickets home for the summer. His arguments were reasonable, logical. His attitude was impeccably kind throughout our discussion. I know he felt really bad about what happened to me over the course of the next few days. What with the slow, agonizing unzipping of my sanity, and all. But I couldn't seem to stop it from happening. I couldn't get a grip.

After a couple of days*, I finally managed to stop crying, and we sat down to talk again. The summer trip was back on. Resources had been pooled, certain coffers plundered, five seats to Salt Lake City, Utah safely booked and ready to go. So that part of my mind had been greatly eased.** But I was still reeling from the suddenly violent rush of guilt I felt over not being able to help ease Torbjørn's burden--the worry of keeping our family afloat, even in the face of complete financial meltdown.

"I need to get a job," I said.

"That would help," he admitted.

"What can I do? Should I ask around at grocery stores? I know the barnehages are always short of assistants. What else is there?"

"Look," he said, "It's not as bad as all that. We're not destitute, and you're not cut out for just any old job. You need to go back to school."

"But to study what? I have no idea what I want to do."

"You said you wanted to be a mid-wife."

"But I have to be a nurse for two years first. I don't want to be a nurse. I'd make a truly shitty nurse." He must have agreed with me, because he didn't try to argue the point any further.

We sat in sullen silence for a good 10 minutes. Then I said, "Goddammit! I wish I had just changed my major when I had the chance, and studied geology like I wanted to! Art history! The fuck was I thinking!" This is something I've said before...too many times to count really. But this was the first time Mister chose to respond to it.

"Why don't you study it now?" was his terse, but brilliant rejoinder.

Honest to God, it had never occurred to me until that very moment that such a thing was possible. But Mister must have been mulling this over for some time, just waiting for the right moment to plant the seed, "You could get a job with one of the oil companies, and be making more than I am now within 6 or 7 years."

I had myself enrolled in a Norwegian class, the last one I needed before I could be admitted into the university, the very next day.

Direction. At long last, direction.

I spent the next several months not only rounding off the rougher edges of my Norwegian, but also combing the internet for information and admission requirements into the geology program at the University of Bergen. I'd return to the same sites over and over again hoping, I guess, that they'd eventually recognize my IP address and let me in out of sheer exasperation. Christ, if you're that interested then.....go ahead and sign up.....

I was full of questions. I have a Bachelor of Arts from a college in the States--a good college in the States. How far would that get me? Art history doesn't afford a lot of opportunities to delve deep into the natural sciences. I avoided them in high school. Surely I'd need to fill in some gaps there? Which ones? What the hell does matematikk R1+R2 cover exactly? I took trig. Is calculus really all that important? And will 16 years of loafing and making babies count against me in the long run? Did I mention Smith College?

Sometimes in the evenings I'd ponder these questions, and many more, over beers with Mister. I'd work myself up into a frenzy uncertainty. Can it be done? I don't think it can even be done. But I'm a good student. Can't we just tell them what a good little student I am?

Mister would cross his arms and sigh for the umpteenth time, "I don't know Jamie. You really need to call the University, and ask them."

Ah. The call. The dreaded call. How to explain the why's and the wherefore's of the dread with which I met the prospect of that one phone call? I put it off for a full 10 months. That ought to tell you a little bit about what a genuine phobia I had managed to turn it into. We're talking palm sweating, stomach churning...we'll get to all that later...

I hate phone calls. I always have. I'm not much for phone chit-chatting even with my friends and family. And official business type calls? Forget about it. I get tongue-tied and confused. I forget what I'm calling for. If the other person starts asking questions, requiring dates or numbers or whatever of me, I get even more jittery. And that's calls I might get to make in English. Add Norwegian to the mix? You never know which dialect you're going to get on the other end of the line. Even if it's a dialect you understand resonably well, sometimes they'll speak it so fast it's impossible to catch every word over the phone. Then you sound like an idiot anyway because you're constantly saying, "Huh? Wuh? That last bit? Eh?"

So yes, I hate phones. But I had 10 months to practice the dialogue in my head. I had my opening line nailed. And I had exhaustively practiced over four dozen possible versions of the ensuing conversation during every shower and long run around the lake since summer. Plus I really have been speaking a lot more Norwegian this past year. It's been a long time in coming, but I'm far more comfortable with the foreignness of it on my tongue than I ever have been before. So the phone itself and the fear of sounding stupid in Norwegian was only a part of the hang-up.

The rest of it, I guess, had to do with what I was actually attempting to do. Not the school part of it. School doesn't scare me. As I said before, I'm a good little student, and at this point, even school in Norwegian, even school with a bunch of teeny-bopper children, even school in the natural sciences doesn't scare me. In fact, the challenge of it all thrills me a little bit.

But what happens after school? In four or five years, when the schooling's all done, I will be expected to go out into the real world and get a job. I've never done that. Ever. The thought of starting a career post 40 years old? Ever so slightly paralyzing.

*************************

End of Part One. Sorry folks. Remember, this story took over a year to unfold. It's going to take some time to get it all out. Plus Missy just came to me complaining of chills and a sore throat. She needs tending to. The consideration of moments like this, and all of Mister's god damn business trips, were part of the paralysis too.....

*You think I'm exaggerating. But I'm not. It seriously took two days to pull myself back together enough to talk about it.

**As I try to describe that whole episode, I realize how much of my reaction must seem simply like drama queen antics in order to get my way. But, honestly, it was all much more visceral than that. I didn't just want to go home in that moment. I genuinely NEEDED it. I have never felt so strongly the need to simply run away forever as I did that first night.

In Which He Implies He's Come To Know And Understand Me

2009-12-03T09:06:00.001+01:00

Me: What do you want for Christmas?

Him: Me? I don't know. Don't you know?

Me: How should I know? You're impossible to shop for.

Him: No I'm not.

Me: Yes you are.

Him: Am not.

Me: You're picky about your clothes. You don't have time for toys. You're inhumanly greedless. Are. too.

Him: (pout)

Me: Unlike meeee. I'm easy to shop for. Admit it, you already know half a dozen things I'd be thrilled to find under the tree with my name on it.

Him: Humph. That's true. You're easy. It'll cost me a bloody fortune, is all....

_____________________________________

For the record, this is not entirely true. Yes, some of the items on my wish list (a new computer with more that 40 lame GBs of storage space, for example) are pricey. But I don't think he fully understands how absurdly satisfied I'd be with just season five of Grey's Anatomy, and say, a new bread knife.

Of course, all this is very easy to say, because I already know that I'm getting season five of Lost (which is all I ever really wanted for Christmas) from another considerate party. So I'm totally set.

....and also....of course.....I can go ahead and say all of that because I'm 99% certain that, come Christmas morning, there's going to be a new computer with more than 40 lame GBs of storage space somewhere under that tree....

Greed works. Mister has yet to learn this valuable lesson.

2009-11-23T18:38:00.000+01:00

Locals have long been wont to brag that Bergen hosts the largest gingerbread city in the world. The whole world people! I have no idea if this claim is true or not, but they do throw together a pretty big ass gingerbread city every year. And it is a cherished tradition of just about every family in the area (mine included) to open the holiday season with a visit to this spicey, winter wonderland.

Schools, barnehages, businesses, and individual households are welcome to donate a gingerbread creation to the city. Over a thousand are collected every year, and set up in an elaborate layout complete with snow capped mountains and trains that run throughout. It smells wonderful inside, and it really is pretty neat to walk through.

Over the weekend, a couple of as yet unknown jackasses broke into the place where it was being built (finishing touches were just being put on everything, as it was supposed to open this coming Friday) and wantonly destroyed the entire city.

The citizenry is up in arms. Completely beside themselves with rage. Indeed, I find myself rather furious about it too. Such a shame! Especially for the kids. As you can see, these are not professionally made, delicately constructed works of art. Though there are always a handful of larger perfessional looking pieces, by and large you'll find a motley collection of rough, crooked, wildly over-embellished houses pasted together with pure whimsy. They're the obvious masterpieces of some very eager, very imaginative children. How heartbreaking that someone felt the need to stomp all over them.

Not to worry though. Time, resources, and raw determination are being donated from all corners, and they're hoping to have a new gingerbread city (complete with night guards this time around!) constructed by the middle of next week. Indeed, by Thursday, which is when they've asked to have all the new donations delivered, I'm guessing they'll have twice as many gingerbread houses as they've ever had before.

Hear the Grinch! Christmas is still coming to Bergen, so there!

Oh For God's Sake

2009-11-15T14:49:00.000+01:00

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no master speller; I make my own fair share of stupid mistakes. But this is a bit much. From Emma's class schedule for the week, practice words in English will be:

Unless, of course, they meant the verb 'to wolve' meaning: to behave like a wolf. Or (and this one was new to me) "of a pipe organ : to produce a sound like the howl of a wolf (as from failure of air supply)", as in:

He had returned to his schoolboy's script, to distant Evensongs, to the wolving of the ancient chapel organ as the last light is extinguished and the door latched for the long night.

2006, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Vintage 2007, p. 784
Retrieved from "http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wolve"

All in all, a rather brilliant sentence, but unlikely to be what her teachers had in mind. I fear I shall have to make a nuisance of myself come Monday.

A-ha Just Released A New Album Too

2009-11-11T11:10:00.002+01:00

So, you know how at a certain moment--usually a little too early on in November--by seemingly subliminal accord, an army of janitors are sent to their respective basements to retrieve their dusty garlands and fairy lights, junior sales clerks in malls everywhere are tasked with arranging gaudy displays of tinsel and beglittered glass ornaments, and suddenly pepperkake and juleøl are back in your life? Well, maybe that last example only happens here in Norway, but that's just too bad for the rest of ya'll, isn't it?

My point is, the arrival of Christmas is cyclical. Predictable. If you live anywhere in the western world, it's inescapable.

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that the fashion world runs on pretty much the same uninspired principle.

I swear, last summer a light in a basement somewhere started flashing neon, and a message went out to retailers the world over: FASHION REBOOT, 1985, STIRRUPS OPTIONAL. With great haste all those eager junior sales clerks were sent into the darkest corners of their storage rooms to retrieve boxes and boxes of unsold chunky belts, plastic shoes, and leg warmers that had been languishing...muldering...waiting for this very moment. Maybe--just maybe--they'll get lucky enough to unload all this garbage this time around!

Perhaps I over-simplify. I guess the advent of this season has been coming for a year or more. It started with the return of jeans to the waist where they belong. And continued with sightings of high-top Reeboks, and sassy black ankle boots. But this, ladies and gentlemen, this then--right now--must surely be the high season.

I'm seeing mohair, for crying out loud! Chunky, loose knit sweaters in pastel colored mohair.

Last week I was in Oasis looking for something to wear to a wedding, and I saw a glossy sign on the wall that read Does this jacket make my shoulders look big? And sure enough, there below the sign, was a rack of dress blazers, all with thickly padded, oddly pointy shoulders. All hail the great Joan Collins!

But the blast from the past that has most caught my attention, the iconic relic that makes me most certain that H & M wants me to believe that I'm back in 1985, is the blue. The deeply saturated, highly synthetic, so royal it all but commands your attention blue that is everywhere at the moment. It was the color of my very first pair of stirrups. I had a wool coat with huge plastic buttons in that color. When I was home for the summer, I cleared out a drawer of old clothes and threw away a faded pair of socks that were once that color.

I'm not sure--I haven't quite decided--but I think I rather like it. Not just the color, but the whole current fashion reboot. All those loose fitting, blousy, off-the-shoulder shirts and sweaters are certainly a lot easier on a frumpy frame than the low-riser, skin tight cuts of two seasons ago. I'll tell you that much.

And it's got me missing my Swatch watches too. The ones with the pastel straps. Mine were pink and blue. Some of the girls preferred the white and yellow. But we all agreed that there was no point in wearing them if you didn't wear them two at a time. Man, you were nothin' at my jr. high school if you didn't have at least two Swatch watches!

So--what do you miss about 1985?

2009-11-09T21:39:00.003+01:00

I'm thinking of starting a new blog, or at least a new sub-section of this blog, entitled:

Stupid Shit My Cat Does That Makes Me Wonder If Dogs Aren't The Way To Go Afterall

#1--Deftly impales tail with own expertly honed claw.

Seriously.

She may look all growed up an' all, but she's still got plenty of kitten in her, right? So every morning while I'm getting dressed, she bounces all over my bed chasing lint, shadows, and, mostly notably, her own tail. It's cute. A light-hearted little romp to start off both our mornings.

This morning, however, when I sat down at the foot of the bed to pull on my socks, I hear a plaintive, squeaky little mrrrrrroooouuuuuuu coming from behind me. I jump up quick thinking for sure I must have sat on a paw or her tail maybe, but instead I see her lying on her side curled into a fetal position with her tail over one shoulder and both paws buried somewhere between her back legs.

"The hell, cat?" I ask, thinking maybe she's got something reasonable to say for herself and her ridiculous position.

"Mrrrrrrrroooooouuuuuuuuuu," she pleads, sounding a little indignant that I would take the time to discuss the matter when she's obviously experiencing some considerable amount of discomfort here.

I reach over to unwind her, and discover that she's got not one, but two claws so deeply imbedded in her tail that she can't retract them to free herself.

Idiot.

Obviously, I didn't say it out loud, or anything like that, but you can be sure I was thinking it.

The Funk Of Forty Thousand Years

2009-11-01T21:21:00.000+01:00

I'm going to go right ahead and give myself a big ol' pat on the back for my efforts in throwing this Halloween party together. I did it up right this year.

Jack o' lanterns 'n all!.......though we didn't ever put them outside, because, without any trick or treaters to impress, what would have been the point?

And how cute are my tombstone cupcakes? Those are meant to be undead gummy zombies clawing their way out of their curséd graves. The kids were dead impressed, but wondered why none of them had legs...

Not to mention my perfectly awesome mummy dogs. I think, by the way, that these would double at a Christmas party as infant babes wrapped in swaddling clothes.....must resist the sacrament jokes......

Bobbing for apples is sort of a classic Halloween game, right? We opted for the cleanier, fuss free version where you hang one off the end of a broomstick. Giggles galore. The older girls loved it.

I hinted in my last post about the costumes that Alpha Grandma made for Boy and Missy this year. She went all out with some tapestry remnants she's had laying around for awhile now. They turned out fantastic, even though my kids were totally lame in the eleventh hour, and wouldn't let me add some finishing touches to their get-ups with make-up, and up-dos, and such. That baby pirate face is screaming for a rum-red nose and a handle-bar mustache!

The camera seemed to hate Princess Amanda all night, so I never did get a decent picture of her dress. She insisted on the red shirt under it. Not me. When I suggested that the party was going to be inside, and, this being a special occasion and all, maybe she might consider going without the under clothes...she pouted and whined until I said, "What.ever." She's all Norwegian, that one. And no way, no how was she going to let me fix her hair all pretty like. "Step off and let me at those skeletons," she said, "This here's what it's all about!"

I found a couple of cheapy, plastic skeletons that I could pull apart. Then we had races to see who could put them back together the fastest. Some were better at this than others, but they all seemed to enjoy it.

There were 10 of them altogether. A manageable number. The older girls thought it was hysterical to run around screaming in terror at the top of their ever-loving, squealy-ass lungs. The boys were not even a little bit amused.

They did end up getting to do a bit of trick-or-treating. Earlier that afternoon, Mister went around to all of our nearest neighbors with a bag of candy, saying, "Look. In a couple of hours a bunch of becostumed kids are going to come knocking at your door. Just give them this, and they'll leave you alone." One lady--the older one in the blue house--was way into it. She ended up getting out candles, and was wearing a witch hat when she came to the door. She refused our candy saying she had plenty and wanted to put together her own goodies. She served it up to them out of a plastic cauldron. That's the spirit! I liked that lady immediately.

All in all, it was a pretty painless and (dare I say) fun four hours. I won't even terribly much mind having to do it all over again next year. In fact, I'm already cooking up ideas in my head to find a way to cover the ceiling with spiders and bats. And we definitely need a ghost hanging from the loft upstairs.....

Mister needs to work on his costum a bit though:

The stubble's alright, but the hair will never do.

Ten Things I've Managed Poorly

2009-10-28T11:16:00.002+01:00

1--My blog. Obviously. An effective blogger wouldn't let two weeks go by without a new post now, would she? And this directly on the heels of a three week hiatus? Pathetic!

2--My career. I'm pretty sure I was supposed to have one by now.

3--My health. On account of how I hate making phone calls, and appointments, and such.

4--My waste? No. My waist? Meh, it could be 3 or 4 inches smaller I guess, but given the five--count 'em FIVE--hill repeats I ran Monday night, I'm going to go ahead and eat my pasta carbonara and say, no, not really to the waist bit. Frankly, I just couldn't to go any further with this theme until I'd dealt with the fact that the phrase "waste management systems" keeps running through my head.

5--My household, with the laundry being a specific sticking point. I've got a pretty good system down for the washing and drying, but the folding and putting away bit? Mired in inefficiency.

6--My humility. My mother tells me this blog doesn't necessarily have to be all about me, all of the time. I see her point, but have thus far failed to proceed accordingly.

7--My SAD. I'm working on a scheme by which I convince Mister to pack it all in and move to Libya for the pool parties and the wonderous Roman ruins, but so far? no dice.

8--The invitations to Saturday's Halloween party. Here's the thing, see. There weren't any.

I told the kids that I'd do the party. I told them we had to keep it small--manageable, if you will. I told them there wouldn't be any trick-or-treating because this particular neighborhood in this particular corner of Norway hasn't caught on to that particular tradition yet. Some have, but ours has not. So no trick-or-treating. But there will be games. And candy. And, most importantly, an opportunity to wear the costumes that Alpha Grandma stayed up all night one night making for you. Not you Emma, but you other two...you can wear the hand-sewn get-ups in luxurious brocades and heavy tapestries*. Emma's got that flimsy devil/fairy thing she seems to be so enchanted with. Everyone's happy.

I told them all this, then told them that they could choose three friends each. They all knew immediately who they wanted to invite. There was no fuss, no whining for more. Three seemed to be an acceptible number to them. Except Amanda--who only deigns to associate with two of the other babies at barnehage. But that was fine. Two friends for Amanda then. Whatever.

Then before I knew it, they were on the phone calling and arranging. The one friend couldn't come, so Emma quickly chose and dialed another. Then another. Of course, I realize now, that this was a mistake to allow the word to get out this way. I simply wasn't thinking at the time. I should have made invitations. I should have explicitly told them to keep this affair on the down low.

This all happened over the weekend.

Yesterday--Tuesday--one of Emma's friends who wasn't on her top three list, called and asked if she could pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseprettyplease come. It doesn't surprise me that this particular girl called, and asked so directly. She's that kind of girl. Of course I said yes. And I'll continue to say yes to anyone else who calls.

My concern is all those other girls and boys out there, and the mothers of said girls and boys who aren't quite so direct, quite so brazen as to call and say, "Hey, that sounds like fun. Can I/my kid come?" All those bitches? They hate me right now. And they're right. I really did fuck this one up royally.

9--My brevity, in the case of the last item.

10--My caffeine intake. Three cups of tea later, I'm finally done with this post. My first post in two weeks. Huzzah!

*There will be pictures. You seriously won't believe how lovely these costumes are. Well done mom!

Happy--From The Latin Meaning, Free iPod

2009-10-13T16:42:00.003+02:00

Yeah, yeah. I'm late. I don't even have anything terribly amusing to report from my weekend away with which to make up for my lateness. Oops.

I mean, I do. I could. Our visit was exactly as chaotic and 'undone' as I expected it to be. But it's becoming increasingly clear to me that I'm the only one much bothered by the chaos, so chewing over it here only makes me sound like an irritable bitch. I figured I'd skip it and try focusing on The Happy for a change.

Turns out The Happy was mostly to be had in trees last weekend.

I tried my damndest get them all in the same tree at the same time for a picture, but they were having none of it. In fact, they were all oddly hostile towards one another all weekend. If I were thinking less happy thoughts I might be inclined to chalk it up to The Chaos seeping into their bones while they slept. Something in the Cherrios perhaps......

Ooo ooo ooo! And now for a piece sarcasm free Happy!

Emma just got home from school. She's aglow, I tell you. Bedazzled. Apparently, just before høstferie, her class was involved in some sort of drawing contest sponsored by one of the local newspapers (BergensAvis) in connection with the upcoming United Nations Day. Dudes! She won an iPod! A freaking iPod! Just a Shuffle, mind you. But still! An iPod! For something she drew! Wait, how many exclamation points was that? I don't think it was enough. !!! ! !!!

I haven't seen the picture. I'm not even all that sure what it depicted--one assumes something to do with world peace and harmony--President Obama and a chorus of angels perhaps? Em says no, but that's what peace is, right?

She was irritatingly vague on all the details. No, she doesn't remember what she drew. No, she wasn't the only one to win something. Yes, it was just her class who participated.....she thinks. No, she doesn't have any idea if the newspaper is going to print the winners. But LOOK at my iPod mom! An iPod!

There now. That oughta make up for the 3 week hiatus.

2009-10-08T23:21:00.000+02:00

Every once in a little while I get it into my head that I'm going to give up on this whole blogging business. It's trite. It's silly. No one really gives much of a damn anyway, so why not just spare myself the bother of it all?

Some might call this 'feeling sorry for one's self'. Me, I prefer to call it 'insightful introspection', even if it is technically true that I only ever do it when I'm feeling sorry for myself.

Whatever.

I received a stern talking to from my mother via e-mail this morning regarding this issue. She told me to knock it the fuck off already, and write something funny. Like, NOW!

Sigh.

If she had been living my life in all this rain for the past month, she'd know what a Herculean task funny is for me at the moment.

Truth is, I got nothin'. But, tell ya'll what, Mister bribed me into going with him up to my sister-in-law's farm for the weekend. I'd share with you the terms of the bribe, but you wouldn't approve, so we'll skip it. Suffice it to say, the Lord of Chaos himself runs his sloppy syndicate out of my sister-in-law's kitchen cupboards. Simply (and lovingly--because I heart her and all, and I certainly wouldn't want anyone getting the wrong idea here) put, people tend to loose their collective shit when they go up there. Hilarity is sure to follow.

So, come Monday, I might, just might, have two or five funnyish acedotes to share. Or--at the very least--a picture or two.

I'm here.

I'm back.

I just needed a break is all.

The 9/11 Retrospective

2009-09-12T12:56:00.000+02:00

I imagine the American TV market is flooded with far more of these every year than the Norwegian one. We get our fair share though, mostly on the cable stations--Discovery, History Channel, BBC Knowledge, and the like.

My kids use these channels as bargaining tools. When I start grousing about how much TV they're watching--"ENOUGH SPONGEBOB ALREADY! TURN! IT! OFF!"--they'll come back with, "Okay, but if we turn it to Discovery, can we still watch TV? Huh? Can we? Can we?"

Grumble, grumble, grumble. "Fine! But no bullshit ghost or U.F.O. documentaries! Find something about something REAL!"

Can you see where I'm going with this?

They watched 5 minutes of "102 Minutes That Changed America" before I wondered upstairs and realized what they were looking at.

I just watched some of it on Google videos through that link, and I must say, it's pretty good. It's all primary source video and voice recordings. No editorializing. No overly dramatic music. No kooky conspiratorial angling. Just recordings of phone calls, tourist video cameras, cell phone cameras, and news feeds in real time as the events unfold. Very powerful stuff.

I made them turn it off. Of course, Emma, who always has to know whywhywhy everything why, asked, "But Mom, what is this? Why can't we watch this?"

They hadn't seen the airplanes. They saw a lot of very scared people milling about the streets and lots of smoke billowing out of the buildings, but they didn't see the airplanes. I really didn't want to explain about the airplanes. So I told them very basically that this show was about a terrible thing that happened in New York, and a lot of people died that day, and it was awful, and I just didn't think it was a good idea to get into the details of it right now because it's so scary and hard for kids to understand.

They seemed to be alright with this except Daniel, who has this thing for labels, and names, and everything in its place. He wanted to know what the buildings were called and if they were still on fire. So I had to add to my condensed history that the Twin Towers, in fact, fell down that day.

And that was it. They cleaned up their Legos, and went to bed.

But Daniel must have spent the night chewing over these details, because the first thing he asked me when he crawled into bed with me this morning was, "But Mom, how did those Twin Towers fall down?"

So I'm wondering. How much should they know? How much of the details of 9/11 are kids in America taught? Are they told about the airplanes? The hijackings? At 7 years old? At 9 years old? How much terror is too much at so young an age?

More By Which To Be Disturbed

2009-09-11T11:12:00.012+02:00

Once again this little piece of disturbia comes to us courtesy of EM. Nothing to do with art this time. Though, honestly people. I don't think you all are appreciating the piercing insight of my interpretation! You call me Freudian? Me? When clearly it is her who is struggling under the weight of Freud's leering, subliminal misogyny! Pfft. It's not like I'm the one who drew the giant squiggly sperm, and the sad brown uterus now, is it? This is not Rorschach! I assure you my psychology has nothing to do with it!

Anywho

Norway--in case you weren't aware--is gearing up for its national elections in just a few day's time. I will not bore you with the particulars. Most of you don't live here, don't care, and thus, don't particularly pertain. And those of you who do...well, I'm sure you've already formed your own learned opinions. Far more learned than mine, in fact, since, as a non-citizen, I'm ineligiable to vote, and therefore, incapable of processing enough of the political narrative to interpret and describe it here. Also--I'm lazy, and the whole multi-party coalition/parlimentary thing baffles me a little.

There. I've said it. For the most part, I just don't get it. Plus, it turns out that the one party with whom I am most ideologically opposed (as all decent, rationally minded liberals should be) is the one party that speaks any sense at all when it comes to a plan for correcting the sorry state of education in this country. It seems that FrP (the fuckers) know what it takes to actually educate a child, as opposed to merely socializing one. Once I figured that out, frankly, I didn't have the stomach to investigate further.

Wait. Why did I even start down this road?

Oh yeah, EM.

This afternoon we were at the kitchen table talking about this and that--dinner wishes, homework left to be done, plans for the weekend, that sort of thing.

"So," said I, "We'll have time to finish up this spelling chapter next Monday since you'll be off school, and we'll have extra time for English that day."

"What?" says she, "What do you mean off school?"

"The schools are closed for the election. You know that."

"Whaaaaa, what?"

"The election, EM. Norway's nation elections."

"Does that mean Kong Harald won't be king anymore?"

Surely she jests. And yet, she seems serious enough. "No! I mean...obviously...just....No!"

"Mmm. What does it mean then?"

"You know what an election is. Don't you?" I'm not asking, so much as pleading.

"It's when you get new presidents and stuff."

"Right. Or in Norway's case prime ministers. Do you know who Norway's prime minister is?"

"Ummmm. Kong.....no. Ummmmm......no."

Wondering if she's been paying any attention to anybody for the past year especially, I ask tentatively, "Do you know who America's president is?"

"Barack Obama!"

"And what does congress do?"

"Make laws!" Phew, that's my job done.

"So have you ever heard of a parliment? Or the Storting?"

"No."

Anyone else disturbed by this? I mean, here she is in the 4th grade. The whole country is in the throes of a nationwide, political debate leading up to national elections next Monday, and she knows NOTHING about how her government works. NOTHING. It would seem her teachers have used ZERO class time to use this opportunity to discuss civic awareness. ZERO.

Do I expect too much? I swear I knew the basic structure of my government by the time I was in the 4th grade. Executive, legislative, judiciary. President, senator, congresscritter. Surely I knew that much by then. Didn't I? At the very least I could tell you the name of the president. I mentioned "Jens Stoltenberg" to her, and she looked at me like I was spinning sticky webs of misdirection and subterfuge....again.....

Democracy. Republic. Periodic popular elections. Sounds like a pretty decent afternoon lesson to me, but apparently not. Much too much like real learning. Although, I can't help but think, that if Americans find the President speaking directly to their children so damn scary, they'd really be better off following the Norwegian model. Presiwhat?

Art Appreciation: Reproduction Edition

2009-09-07T23:39:00.001+02:00

Having decided which of EM's masterpieces we wanted to frame and hang (the faceless head), I was lovingly packing up and storing away the rejects when I was suddenly struck by something I just have to get off my chest.

Brace yourselves. It's a bit disturbing.

But, seriously, isn't her shape and color assignment positively teeming with blatant sexual imagery?

No obvious phalluses (giant squiggly sperm notwithstanding), but go ahead, count the clams.

Count 'em I tell ya'!

I get three obvious ones, a uterus--complete with ovaries, a possible fourth candidate in the upper left-hand corner, and a shapely tit in the lower left. Oh, and let us not forget the large X and Y chromosomes smugly dominating the composition (in leu of the phallus, one supposes).

I mean, I know she didn't mean for any of that to appear the way it does, but isn't it just exactly like she meant for all that to appear just exactly the way it does?

I'm a little concerned that so many of the obvious lady bits are in the shadey corner, surrounded by the ugly colors she was "challenging herself" to use. That and the menacing sperm make me wonder. Perhaps it's time for a rather serious Come-to-Venus/Our Bodies, Ourselves kind of chat with her sometime in the very near future.

I know, I know. I'm going to hell. But now that I've shown you all (and I just know you all see it too), you're coming with me....

2009-09-02T07:59:00.000+02:00

Assimilation into The Collective complete.

Subjugation of native inhabitants can begin.

Aftermath

2009-08-31T22:54:00.001+02:00

I know you all want me to say that the very gates of Hell opened up to swallow back its demon horde. Just 'cuz that would be the better story.

But it was...I don't know....they were kind of......sort of....civilized.....

They sat politely at the table--asked for help with the ketchup, apologized for needing more soda, and I even saw two or three of them using their napkins:

After eating, they ceremoniously--following the laws of some archaic, unspoken, tribal heirarchy--organized themselves into a tight circle, and played an only slightly jostling round of spin-the-bottle for the opening of the presents:

They listened reverently as Boy counted the money he was given...over and over again. They asked to hold it, but they never attempted to pocket the prize. This would have thrown the brotherhood into disarray.

Don't get me wrong. It was louder than bombs over bedlam.

There were moments of sheer, unglued crazy. And, I might add, not all of them have yet learned to flush a toilet.

But they didn't eat my husband alive when they had the chance.

And, at the end of a very intense three hours, my house remained mostly intact; my girls and their precious girly toys mostly unmolested. The apparently not-so-fearsome little darlings gathered up their things, said "Takk for meg", and tripped up the stairs holding their dad's hand rambling on about buried treasure and lucky Boy's delightfully adorable balloon chasing kitten. So much for the demon horde.

Easy Peasy. But next year they're SO doing this at the bowling alley!

P.S. The treasure hunt was a huge success. Three rum and cokes produce poetic genius from fumbling engineers! And you've never seen a prouder Mister than after watching kid after kid run out the door telling their dad's how freakin' COOL it was to get to dig that silly Lego box full of candy out of the ground.

It's What Pain Is

2009-08-29T23:03:00.002+02:00

As most of you know, my beautiful Boy turned 7 a few weeks ago.

For many reasons--the least of which being I'M A TERRIBLE MOTHER--he's NEVER had a proper birthday party with school pals and presents, intemperance and chaos, anarchy and fiery distruction.

Tomorrow I set that record straight.

My guilt led me to approve a guest list of 16 sticky, feral boys.

SIX.TEEN.

Prey for us now, and in the hour of our death.

In an effort to focus the energies of the these sixteen wee lordlings of havoc, I have decreed that there shall be a treasure hunt.

Yes. After the hot dogs, but before the presents, the little darlings will be sent on an adventure.

Maps shall be furnished. Clues must needs be deciphered. Much fun will be had by all.

The only catch being----my demon guests are Norwegians, and I'm completely norsk challenged. I can't write any of the damn clues! Gah!

At this very moment, Mister is sitting at the kitchen table, nursing his third rum and coke, trying to churn out a series of 16 cutesy rhymes leading to a cache of candy bags buried out in the backyard.

You have no idea how much it pains me--THE WRITER--to have to hand this delicate task over to he--THE FUMBLING ENGINEER!

The Trouble With Oddny

2009-08-27T23:00:00.000+02:00

Earlier today, I glibbly asserted in the comment section of a fellow Norwegian ex-pat blogger's blog that half of Norway's problem was the absurdly short, barely 5 hour school day. I didn't say it exactly thus, but whatever. I meant it at the time. And sure, why not? I might as well stand by that statement. It makes about as much sense as anything else I might pull out of my ass at any given moment to account for and condone my ongoing discontent.

Sooooo, if short school days are one half of the problem, this woman, then, must be the other half:

Okay--maybe not her personally, but certainly what she represents.

The picture comes to us today from our local paper, BergensTidene. The article, which is featured on the front page, is actually a pretty interesting one discussing the upward trend of health fanatics in the mid- to upper classes. It's basically arguing that, these days, the status symbol of choice among the elite, rather than a flashy car or a big ass sailboat, is a toned and healthy body.

Fine. I think this trend was well established donkey's ages ago, but whatever. Oddny (uber-norsk name of above woman) is used as a prime example of this trend because she once tipped the scales at over 200 pounds. Then, one fine day, she decided to go for a walk. And hey presto! However many years later (I don't think it ever said how long it took) she's thin, fit, and climbing every mountain in sight.

Grand. I'm happy for Oddny. I really am. As a runner who started out barely being able to run 200 yards without inducing 'episode' worthy heart spasms, I applaud absolutely anyone who commits to their fitness hard enough and long enough to gain that level of endurance and drop significant poundage along the way. Good on her!

No. What really chaps my hide about Oddny here, is the very first thing the article says about her--in large, bold print no less--is that Oddny is 'uføretrygdede'. Forget the pronounciation on that one, it doesn't matter. What's important here is the meaning. Let me explain. We Americans don't really have a word for 'uføretrygdede', because we don't have a social system which would allow for such a creature to evolve. But what it means is this: Oddny has been declared medically incapable of work, indeed, she's so incapacitated that the welfare system has had to envelope her into the bountiful cushion of its loving embrace, and is fully....read me again...FULLY...covering all of her health and living expenses.....in perpetuity. The rest of her life people.....if she so wishes......and I'm pretty sure she so wishes.....

The ariticle explains that early in her life Oddny was excused from ever working again because of "a back illness" (it doesn't explain which one), and yet....and yet!.....there's Oddny climbing mountains, lugging a heavy backpack across wet, slippery terrain, and bragging about all the summits she's seen. With a 'back illness'? Srsly? How fucking busted would Oddny be if this article appeared in the States, and there she was living high on the hog off some bogus insurance settlement?

Oddny. Dude. You're fooling no one with that sore back shit anymore. GET. A. JOB.

..........said the jobless blogger from the quiet comfort of her blogosphere.....

Oh. And Norway. Dude. You're digging your own grave with this uføretrygd shit. Dial it back a bit, 'kay?

P.S. Please do not take this rant as a denunciation of socialized medicine or welfare in general. It's not. But such glaring and obvious abuse of a decent and needful system of support hurts my eyes, galls my liver, and vexes my very soul. I just had to share. That's all.

Unfinished Elder Miss Business

2009-08-22T08:00:00.003+02:00

This is another post I would have liked to have put up in June before we left, but was unable to get to.

Not my fault, this one.

EM's art teacher cancelled the last art class, so we couldn't pick up her portfolio before we left. I just got ahold of it yesterday at the first class of the new year. And well worth the wait it was. EM had epics to tell about how she did this, and why she chose that. She wondered where on earth we were going to find the room to hang it all up on the walls. If I were a better mother, I might have shared her concern. As it was, I told her we'd pick one piece--the best piece--to frame and display in some later to be determined place of honor on the walls.

Which piece is still a matter of some debate.

Which would ya'll choose?

This was the first time she'd ever worked with coal. She said she didn't much like it. Much too hard to control. For this assignment the teacher had brought in three stuffed animals. They were told to pick one, and draw it into some sort scene--sort of like a book illustration.

The story goes: this husky comes to school one day to take her on an adventure to the arctic. It's funny 'cuz I spent half of last winter writing half a book about a kid who leaves school one day, and heads out on an arctic adventure.

She didn't have much to say about these two. I don't think she liked them much. They're both paintings that she did after being read a story from which she was supposed to pick two scenes to illustrate. She couldn't remember much of the story, something about a woman who wanted three babies....and there was a bird.....or something.....

This one is her favorite, and I have to agree that I think it's rather wonderful. It's a simple still life--a vase of peonies, a water pitcher, and a pineapple. The thing I find most impressive about it is, when I looked at it and said, "Hey EM, I didn't know you guys had talked about prespective or anything like that. That pineapple has some depth!"

She was all like, "Eh? Per-wah-huh? I just thought the flowers turned out nice."

Which they did! But look at that pineapple! It has some depth!

This is the blind portrait of her friend that she was holding when her picture was taken for the newspaper last winter. I liked the little bit I could see from that grainy photo. I flat out love the finished product. If I have my way, I think this is the one I'll be framing. When I asked her why she chose those particular colors, she said, "Because the blue is like, electric! That's what I wanted."

This is one of the drawings she did in preparation for that free-form bird house thing that was selected for the art show. She was told to let her imagination run wild in composing a house. The only condition was that this house had to hang from a tree.

Messy and chaotic as it is, I still think this is far more interesting to look at than the finished product that ended up in the show.

This was from an assignment all about shape and color. She couldn't remember any more concrete instructions than that. Just shape and color. And she told me that she wanted to challenge herself to use some colors that she didn't think she liked. I don't know if that was her idea, or perhaps something the teacher suggested to her at some point during the process. Either way, the finished product works for me.

And finally--to round out the year's curriculum--some scuplture.

......get it?...with the rounding out?....and the scupture?....in the round?........anyway.....

Her teacher broke her leg--apparently, quite badly--'long about mid-January. So, for the entire second half of the year, she had a substitute filling in. The particular speciality of this substitute happened to be ceramics and sculpture. So the kids got to spend a lot of time working with clay that they wouldn't ordinarily have gotten to do otherwise.

EM loved it. The polar bear candleholder with the blue bow tie is kind of cute. But I can't help it, I like her drawings better. I was glad to hear her regular teacher say yesterday that while she might consider to do a bit with clay again this year, she can't do much because she doesn't know much about it, and she doesn't have access to the kiln for firing.

Yey! Sharpen those pencils baby! Make me proud!

Unfinished Boy Business

2009-08-21T00:01:00.000+02:00

This is a post I meant to get up in June, but just never got around to posting....or even writing, come to think on it....

June was a busy month for me. Remember the waterless well? What a lark that was. Incidently, sometime in July--about a month after we left, as happy chance would have it--the fish we kept in the well, and tasked with eating all the worms and moldy bug-a-boos that might muck up the water, died, rotted, and essentially poisoned the whole system. It was apparently no small task to get it all cleaned up and rebooted, so to speak. Shame I missed that. On a happy note, there was plenty of water on hand to flush through the system once it was clean again....

Anyhoo--back to the unpleasantness of June. In between hauling all those buckets of water up from the lake, I found myself frantically driving Boy to and from soccer practices and (finally) a handful of real games.

How psyched was Boy to show up at that first game and be handed a real uniform? Blue! With sponsors and everything! The awesome was palpable.

To be honest, Boy's athletic performance is haphazard and, shall we say, uneven at best. I believe he has the raw material of a potentially superb athlete. But at the moment, like many of his kind, he suffers from the short attention span and volatile grace of a Golden Retriever puppy. The strongest, most solid kick I saw him make during the entire season clocked his own team's best player squarely in the face. Boy was about to feel really bad about this until he got distracted by the goalie's sister turning cart-wheels on the sidelines. He's never scored a goal. He rarely manages more than to merely get in the way of the other team's attempt to hussle the ball. He'd never dream of attempting to steal the thing from them. He'd be uncertain what to do if they just handed it to him. None of this bothers Boy in the least. He has the time of his life everytime he goes out to play. I hope some of that comes across in the pictures.

I love the orange shoes. What flare! No one else on the pitch has them. No one else could carry them off.

I believe he believes his team scored a goal. This may or may not have been true. He often got confused and cheered for the other team's goals as well.

Huddle up!

The kid on his right, the one whose face we can see, that's Ole-- Boy's bestest friend in the whole wide world.

The last weekend before we left, his team participated in a cup/tournament thingy (different, apparently, and separate from the other series of matches he'd been playing....fucking soccer....baffles me) at the end of which, all the players got a medal and a goofy headband. He lost the medal, but that headband he wore to bed for three nights running.

Enter Cindy

2009-08-20T13:09:00.001+02:00

We might as well begin with her, since I know ya'll are just dyin' to know.

She's exactly as lovely as you might have expected.

Her paws are HUGE. And her eyes are the softest shade of cinnamon brown--a peculiarity which as gone a long ways towards bringing me to peace with the name Cindy.

She's perhaps a bit more skittish than I might have hoped. The day we brought her home, we opened up the cage, and she made a beeline for the inner reaches of the sofa (literally made her way up inside the framework of the damn thing). We didn't see more than the tip of her tail for the better part of two days. I was more than a little disappointed.

On the second day we pulled her out, and stuffed the holes under the couch with old sleeping bags so she couldn't climb back in.

She warmed up considerably over the next few days, and now she's proving to be a very sociable little honey, following us from room to room, and settling where ever we do. But she still ducks and runs anytime she even suspects someone might be reaching to pick her up. She'll suffer a good pat and rub from time to time, but she's clearly not much of a cuddler. In this way she's not unlike her new mother....

She's going to fit in just fine.

2009-08-19T20:54:00.000+02:00

The longest two weeks of my life, people!

Srsly.

I hope ya'll are still out there, because I'm finally plugged in again, and I've got shit to say.

It's gonna take me some time to thread it altogether blog-wise, but new material on its way prontissimo.

Promise.

2009-07-26T16:55:00.000+02:00

So, I took a few pictures in California. Honestly. Just a few.

No, but seriously. Once I finally got them all off the camera and had a look at them, I realized just how very few pictures I really did take.
Here's a small sampling of my meager offering.

When we came to Salt Lake in June, we left Mister behind in Norway. The plan was for him to fly directly to LA and meet us at the airport there to start our grand Disneyland extravaganza together. A plan which worked out perfectly except that the morning we were scheduled to fly out, Emma woke up with a fever of 102. Headache, chills, the works. Tylenol only took the edge off. So this is the state she was in when she finally got to see her dad again. His first words to me after our three week separation, "Just what in the hell have you done to my daughter?"

Em stayed sick for three days. Happily by the next day she was well enough that a combination of Tylenol and Motrin were able to reduce the fever completely, so she was good to go as long as we kept her pumped full of pharmeceuticals, and didn't ask her to stay up passed 7 p.m.

I believe it was on Day 3 that we went to SeaWorld. The kids, from left to right, are: Boy, Ethan--of the fabled Chicago Ethans, Em, a presumably very hot costumed Penguin character, Missy, Emily--sister to Chicago Ethan, and Zoe--the only grandchild decent enough to have settled in the same city as the grandparents.

SeaWorld was a huge hit with the kids. As I knew it would be.

Boy had some things to say to this dolphin. I'm not sure, but I think he was giving her instructions to the nearest exit.

There was a Beluga whale in the tank behind Missy. A lovely, graceful creature which she stared at for all of two seconds before she announced, "That's ugly. You can take a picture of meeeee though...."

The light was awful purdy behind her, so I did.

Meanwhile, back at Disneyland--

This one was taken on on the Jungle Cruise. The last time we were at Disneyland, Boy was all of 4 years old. He threw up 3/4 of the way through the line for this ride. What a fun memory to revisit!

No such mishaps this time around. He loved everything about Adventure Land. If I had been thinking, I would have found a way to record his orgasmic reaction to the Indiana Jones ride. Seriously, to hear the kid talk you would have thought he'd just mastered the armpit fart version of "It's A Small World".

I tried my hardest to get Em to go on California Screamin'--the roller coaster at California Adventure--but it goes upside down, see, and she's a total wuss that way. But that tall thing in the background--not the ferris wheel, but the other tall one--the one that pops you and your colon straight up in the air in a reverse bungee sort of action--that one she wanted to go on.

I couldn't.

I didn't.

She shouldn't have. Her hands were still jittery and she didn't have much of an appetite a full hour after doing it.

Boy was a pure delight to have on this trip. He and Chicago Ethan got on famously, and he absolutely adored EVERYTHING he saw, did, and/or heard while we were there--in all caps--ALL. THE. TIME.

I like this picture because it looks so still and peaceful--a moment of quiet bonding between grandmother and grandson--but I can pretty much guarantee that he's talking a mile a minute, probably about the toy snake at the Indian Jones store that he's decided that Grandpa is going to buy for him, the awesome power of the loopdy-loop roller coaster, and the Yeti on the Matterhorn--in all caps--ALL. AT. THE. SAME. TIME.

Precious.

And what would a trip to Disneyland be without a picture of the princesses with a princess. For the most part we avoided the whole picture-with-the-characters ordeal because who wants to stand in that line when we could be standing in this other line with a ride at the end of it? We just happened to stumble into a photo shoot with Cinderella here where ~~there were only a handful of Japanese preschoolers to butt in front of~~ the wait looked relatively short, so we stopped for it.

And aren't we glad we did?

Pardon My Absensence

2009-07-21T20:34:00.000+02:00

The problem, see, is one of alone time.

That is to say, it's summer, and I have none.

I had this great idea to disclose the particulars of our Disneyland extravaganza by parodying the absurdly long and involved online survey I was asked to complete after our visit. I'm sure as certain it would have been great--brilliant--an honest to God comedic homerun--if only I'd had 10 minutes to myself to compose the damn thing.

Alas. It's summer, and there are swimming pools to visit.

We spent a whole week in southern California, visited 5 theme parks, and met with family we haven't seen for over two years. There's plenty to say about all that. I took pictures even.

Alas. It's summer, and Mister has taken time off for some hard-core family bonding...plus fishing...okay, maybe slightly more fishing than family bonding...which means (for me) more swimming pools...because what the hell else is there to do in a desert in the summer? Lately, there's been some internal debate as to whether the Salt Lake valley constitutes a genuine desert. Me, I'm dubious, but it's 100 degress out there and if that ain't desert, the kids just don't know what is....So next year maybe we ship 'em off to Phoenix...and I finally get some alone time...

We'll be home the second week of August. I'd like to say I'll be able to resume normal posting then, but school doesn't start until the 17th, so no promises until then, 'kay?

Poor Farrah

2009-06-26T19:04:00.001+02:00

Last night on the local news there was an interview with one of the lesser Osmonds (Adam? Alan? I can't remember all their names) in which he shared his reaction to the 'shocking' news of Michael Jackson's 'tragic' and 'untimely' passing. He also waxed nostaligic about the good old days when The Jackson 5 and The Osmonds were first getting started and sharing a tour circuit. There was talk of how well Donny and Michael got on together; the phrase "best of friends" was bandied about loosely.

At the thought of Donny Osmond and Michael Jackson alone in a room together, I couldn't help myself, my mind just bogled. If I were a slash fiction writer I'd be all over that action. It would be very King Phillip/Richard III in The Lion in Winter, only I'd be hard pressed to decide which should be the love sick school boy and which should be the contemptuous seducer. Either way, Michael's enduring devotion to military fashion motifs would be the obsessive homage to the fantasy games he used to play during his tawdry brush with Mormon sexual repression.

It was an awesome interview. Brother Osmond's hair was badly dyed and he called Orem the bestest place in all of YOU-tah. How I've missed the local news.

Being home has been pretty great so far. I had the bloodiest, juiciest, saltiest, fleshiest steak EVER just days after landing, and knew instantly that it was worth the $6,000 dollars and 26 hour trek it took to get here for it.

Mostly we're just swimming, shopping, and eating. Not much time for blogging in between. I'll check in every now and then, but honestly, I wouldn't be for expecting much from me over the next five weeks or so. If I have anymore steak, I'll be sure to take the time to tell you about it though. Honest to God--it's just. that. good.

Ha Det På Badet--Literally

2009-06-16T17:33:00.001+02:00

If you've ever wondered how best to complicate the process of packing your family of five for a summer abroad, you can go ahead and stop wondering. I've got your answer: allow your shallow ass well to run dry three days before you leave. It's a perfect hassle see, because it will muddle your life to the nth degree without actually threatening your departure, thus avoiding the pre-flight heart attack that would really throw a spanner in the works.

This happens to us every damn summer. There are three houses using our one itty bitty well, and whenever we have a run of good weather (only ever possible in Spring) it dries up. I try not to be critical of Mr. Gotta Wash The Car Twice A Week Neighbor-Man, but GRRRRRRRR!

Last night the men folk jerry-rigged one of those suction/vacuum deals to draw water from our neighbor's deeper well into ours. We are now over flowing with sweet, potable water, but naturally the pump burned out when we ran dry Sunday afternoon. Soooooo, nix.

I've lost count of the number of buckets of lake water I've lugged up the hill to flush toilets, and boil for dish washing, and such. I spent yesterday at Mister's cousin's house doing the laundry, so that's alright. My primary issue right now is showers and baths before we leave. I fear, Grandparentals, that we might be a bit over-ripe for that first welcome home hug....

Whoa--erase, erase, erase. Just moments ago, Mister waltzed in claiming victory. I can now confirm that we do, indeed, have water. Yey! Showers all around!

Doesn't erase the inconvenience of the last two days though. Jackass Neighbor Man best oughta step off the car washing from here on out....

And now to you la Dragon--

I'll see your rocketship vibrator and raise you a hi-fi stereo:

In the middle there, she asks the guy to turn the music up. And the slogan is "Nothing comes entirely on its own." Ba-dum-bum

Silly blond. Hasn't she ever heard of a spin cycle?

For the record, I think the IKEA ad is probably funnier, but this is pretty damn good too.

HA HA HAAAA

2009-06-14T14:25:00.000+02:00

Every once in a while Norway comes up with a commercial so awesome it naturally wouldn't be allowed anywhere near American prime time.

You really don't need to understand Norwegian to enjoy this. The old guys wanna help, that's all...

Three Gastronomical Wonders Idiot Mister Can't Appreciate Because He's Not The Privileged, Enlightened American That I Am

2009-06-13T00:50:00.000+02:00

1. Caramel Corn

2. Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

3. Captain Crunch Berries

I don't see that any more really needs to be said about this. I mean, he actually said to me tonight, "I don't see what the big deal is, Jamie. Everyone knows that pop corn is so much better without that sticky goo all over it, ice cream was only ever meant to be vanilla, and Captain Crunch Berries isn't even food."

Isn't? Even? Food?

Have you ever heard such heresy in your life?

At least we can both agree that port is the sixth and most essential food group.

Clever Boy

2009-06-10T08:58:00.000+02:00

In order to share Boy's latest penetrating, multi-layered poem, I'm going to have to use real names. This bothers me not even a little bit at this point.

But before I cast away that final veil of anonymity, I want to explain that what started as genuine skittishness and cyber-paranoia, grew into an admittedly lame literary pretension, which eventually seeped into my real life such that, these days, I tend to call the kids by their bloggy handles at least as often as I do their real names. This is especially true for Boy. Boy is Boy--quintessential and enduring. So it made sense to me to keep going with the fake names, even after I gave in and started publishing pictures of them. EM (Elder Miss), Boy, and Missy (Little Miss): that's who they are; it's how I think of them.

Without further ado--Boy's latest little ditty. Which managed to catch me so off guard, that actual tea spurted out of my actual nose. Consider yourself forewarned:

Amanda rhymes with panda,
that means she's a panda.
Daniel rhymes with cocker spaniel,
that means I'm a cocker spaniel.
Emma rhymes with dilemma,
that means she has a problem.

And if you add Jamie (that's me) to all that, you get JEDA. Welcome to my world.

The Test Results Are In

2009-06-09T11:28:00.001+02:00

It's all good.

I'm officially an advanced språker of the advanced språk.

Check me out. I'm even certified to use the fancy vowels: språk, høyre, lææææære.

I think the 'æ' is my favorite of the fancy vowels. It's kind of a hyper-flat, short 'a' sound, and I can't seem to stop myself from over pronouncing it every time I use it: lææææære, bææææære, ææææære. Annoys the shit out of Elder Miss, which makes it even more fun.

I needed 450 points to pass. I got 600 out of a total of 700 points. I'm told this is respectable, and that I should be proud of myself.

But I don't know. I tend to think it means bupkis. I mean, I flew to Rygge (in the East of Norway) yesterday to pick up my new puddy tat and her sister. The dialect over there.....sheesh! Everytime someone opened their mouth to speak to me I was all like, "Wa-huh?"

The breeder who delivered the puddy tats to the airport spoke an extra special form of the dialect called 'breathless rapid-fire'. That was fun. I think she was telling me stuff she thought I needed to know. Something about vaccines which they need more of, and ID chips which need to be...hell, I don't know...but there was definitely something about ID chips. I just nodded my head, fondled the kittens, and signed whatever she handed me to sign. Seems to me that someone who scored a 600 out of 700 possible points on a language test should be capable of more advanced conversation than that.

The kittens, by the way--cute with a capital Q, if you know what I mean. They made me take them out of the travel cage and carry them through the security check point. Everyone around me agreed we made quite the adorable tableau. Then, naturally, the machine singled me out for a random search. Just imagine: me, two kittens, and a rough pat-down by a uniformed security guard (a rather large, dark one, at that). The stuff of fetishes, I tell ya'!

Alas, the puddy tat is not home with us. As I think I've already mentioned, we're leaving for Salt Lake next Wednesday and the woman who bought Cindy's* sister offered to take both kittens for the summer. We delivered them there late last night. Both of them exhausted and terrified from their journey.

And such is the news from JEDA this week. Time to start gathering my wits about me, and preparing myself for the trip home. Funny, yesterday's quick hop to Rygge didn't phase me at all, but the prospect of next week's trek acorss the Atlantic just freaks me out. Is it the distance? The water? The fact that the kids will be with me, and that they too could fall out of the sky from 35,000 feet? I don't honestly know. But I'm not looking forward to it. Not one bit.

Home, on the other hand, home will be bliss. Can't wait!

*You read right. It appears that Mister and his 'Cindy' campaign won out. Fucker.

Finally! The One About The Art Show

2009-06-04T11:18:00.001+02:00

I had some pretty high hopes going into this art show. I've been looking forward to it all year.

Just imagine: my child--who loves art--her art on display--in a real museum--at the tender age of 9. How cool will that be?

As it turns out--not so much.

The visual arts department of Bergen Kulturskole enrolls close to 1,000 students, and this one show was meant to showcase the budding talent of all those kids. I get how difficult it must be for the organizers to pull off such a feat year after year. And I get what a priviledge it is for these kids to have this opportunity to display their work in such a grand manor. I really do. I don't mean to imply that the event as a whole was laughably inadequate or rinky-dink. But I can't help it--I did expect much, much more.

Every year the show opens with a student procession from Bergen's central square (Torgalmeningen) to the museum (hardly more than a full city block, maybe a block and a half away). They have the kids make something flashy to carry during the parade. Last year they painted white umbrellas, this year they made flags. Here's EM holding the flag she designed and painted herself.

They were a little late getting started, the kids were restless and bored, and I was already well on my way to being too bloody hungry for comfort. But whatever. The flags were fun. And they got a drummer from the music department to lead the procession with a brisk ratta-tat-tat on a snare drum.

So far, so good.

The kids entered the museum first, through the upper doors. How nice. Very festive and exciting to watch.

The parents were obliged to wait until all the students were in. Then family was welcomed in through the lower doors. I didn't mind the wait. It's a big building, right? There should be plenty of room for us all. Right? Even though there were, say 8oo students, plus parents, plus siblings, maybe a grandparent or two...that's, let's see...I was always so bad at math....it's, well....it's gotta be over 2,000....But no matter. Like I said, big building, plenty of room. Right?

We were ushered into a lobby--a sort of central rotunda, with a marble staircase sweeping through it. Perhaps 'rotunda' is the wrong word to use here. Congering up, as it does, images of grand, airy spaces topped with painted murals of heavenly clouds and chubby angels. That's not what this was. No, it was pretty much a glorified entryway in plain eggshell blue. But it was covered by a dome. Hence....rotunda?

Anyway, it wasn't big. Not nearly big enough for 2,000+ people. The organizers and parent helpers kept pushing us forward, urging us to fill in all the gaps between us. "We have to get everyone up the stairs," they'd shout, "Please move forward!" Being the good socialists we all are, we did as we were told.

And there we stood--cramped, hot, impatient--for the duration of two speeches, a couple of important annoucements about nothing very important, flowers were handed out to the teachers, a brass band from the music school performed something durge-like and vaguely Christmasy by Bach. And all the while we looked longly through the glass doors that led into the large, roooomy display halls of the main museum.

The glass doors were pad-locked.

Finally, a flutter of polite applause signaled the end of the opening ceremony pleasantries, and a side door swung open. The whole sweaty, bovine mass of us moved toward it as one.

I was expecting--I don't know--a wing? an auxillary gallary? maybe an elementary school gymnasium type space partitioned off with white board on which to display the art? What I saw once I finally got to the door was...well, it was none of these things.

It was a longish kind of room. For those of you who have been in Grandma Gae's downstairs living room--not that big. For those of you who have been in Grandpa Stan's basement TV room--about that big, only with very high, museum worthy ceilings and high-tech lighting. At the far end of this longish room was a door leading to another, much smaller room--think 'guest-room' here--and off of this, was a small nook which I never made it into. But over the heads of many I saw a widescreen TV mounted on the wall, so I'm guessing that's where the digital animation kids were displaying their wherewithal.

Into this cramped space--made even more awkward and small by the sculpture class's garden of green and orange ceramic cactii sprawled gaudily across the center of the room--poured 2,000+ tired and hungry philistines. "Which one is yours, Junior? Show me quick so we can get the fuck outta here."

I found it difficult to breathe. My family had been split apart by the general press into the display room. I had a hold of Boy's hand. I hoped to God someone had a hold of Little Miss. Elder Miss had darted ahead of everyone as soon as the doors had opened. She was hot, and desperate to find out if there were refreshments on the other side; there were not.

As I mentioned, I was starting to feel too hungry before the parade even started. So try to imagine the state of my blood-sugar level a loooong, boring hour later. Suffice it to say, I was not exactly my most serene and rational self. The only thought my mind had room for was, "Why here? Why here? Why on Earth hold this thing HERE?" They host a student art show every year. Every year the students and all their parents show up for the opening. That's 2,000+ people. WHY HERE?

And on top of that, I couldn't find anything that looked anything like something EM might have done. The walls in both rooms were covered with drawings and paintings, all in a pretty rainbow of various subjects and techniques. Even in the heat of my famished frustration, I had to admit that if only the room were empty of all these god damn people, it would look really quite colorful and lovely. But as far as I could tell, none of it belonged to my child. And I was getting pretty sick of Boy standing next to me pointing at everything and asking, "Did EM do that? Did EM do that? Did she do that? How about that, did EM do it?" NOOOOOO!

After pressing, squeezing, shoving my way through both rooms twice, I still hadn't found anything that had EM's name on it. I caught sight EM standing in a corner looking as bored and insouciant as ever a 9 year old could. I shouted across the room to get her attention, "EMMMM!"

Seeing me, she shouted back, "MOM! I'M THIRSTY!"

"WHERE'S YOUR WORK?"

"I ONLY FOUND ONE THING! THERE'S NOTHING TO DRINK HERE!"

At this point people around us started to understand that these two loud Americans were trying to have a conversation here, and that perhaps they could do it more quietly if they were standing next to each other. A path began to clear.

"Has Daddy seen it? Where's Farmor? Show me where it is."

"Daddy saw. Farmor gave me 50 kroner. I'm really thirsty."

"EM, show me your work, then go find something to drink."

Reluctantly she walked me over to her little patch of museum glory.

Before I show you what her teacher put on display, let me show you what she's capable of:

She sketched Mulan here, and her hapless victim Puff the Magic Dragon, last week while she was waiting for a friend to arrive for a sleep over. Sure, sure this is no finished compostion, and probably, therefore, not museum worthy, but still pretty impressive. Right? Surely she finished something of the sort during all those hours in class that would stand out well amongst the riff-raff.

Yet, this is what they chose to display:

Eh, you say? What in the ever loving Hell is that supposed to be?

Ya' got me.

It's not much improved from the rear-view. But at least now we know that whatever it is, the Norwegians are responsible for it:

It was part of a project they did early last fall. Free-form architecture.

They're meant to be bird houses, or some shit. They spent weeks collecting boxes and empty food containers, assembling them, gluing them all together, and then painting them.

In preparation for the project, they spent a few weeks sketching buildings around the city, and then drawing wonky fantastical buildings from their imagination. I saw those drawings and paintings. They were great. In my ever humble opinion, they were display worthy. I can't quite wrap my aesthetics around the finished product. Yet there it is, basking in the spotlight for all of Bergen to see.
And that's the story of EM's first art show. We went out for pizza afterwards. I took a couple of pictures on the way back to the car. Is it wrong of me to say that, in some ways, this is the prettiest thing I saw in town that day?

And Then It Was This One's Turn

2009-05-31T11:01:00.000+02:00

She's 9 now. And she really doesn't give a shit what her hair looks like, alright. So don't even ask her to comb it or something. She'll only sneer at you, and tell you to take the god damn picture already!

But look! She's smiling!

For those of you who were so concerned about how serious she looked on 17. mai: rest assured, she does smile. All it takes is a pile of presents, and certain knowledge that the one she's holding is the Pokeman game she's been hinting at ever since the missing Nintendo DS resurfaced.

Her party was loud and largely uneventful. She got 350 more kroner towards replacing the ipod she lost earlier this spring. That makes just over 600 kroner she's saved up now--over half of the total price she needs. I'm inclined to help her out with the rest of it, so she'll have it to listen to on the plane trip home to Salt Lake in a few weeks. Mister is being a hard ass, though.

Sorry, Baby Girl. Not my fault.....this time.....

Somebody Had A Birthday Today

2009-05-28T22:31:00.001+02:00

When I asked her who she'd like to invite to her birthday party she said, "Andreas. And my friends. But NOT the babies. I hate the babies."

"Okay. So what about Victoria?"

"Ummmm, no."

"Okay. What about Mariel?"

"She's a baby."

"Oh. I thought you liked to play with her."

"Sometimes. But she's a baby."

"Oh. Okay. Well, what about Charlotte?"

"Diaper baby."

"Who do you play with at barnehage Missy?"

"Andreas. And sometimes Victoria and Mariel."

"But you don't want them to come to your birthday party?"

"Just Andreas."

"But....."

"I don't like babies, Mom."

"But...."

In the end, we (or rather, I) decided not to bother with a party. We had this conversation at least a dozen different times over the past month. Sometimes she wanted Victoria but not Mariel. Sometimes she wanted Mariel but only grudgingly allowed for Victoria. Andreas was the only constant; I wasn't about to throw a party just for Missy and Andreas.

I know weird when my own flesh and blood trips gaily upon it. And this is it. I mean, I know for a fact that Missy likes, or at least plays happily with these girls everyday. Yet, somehow they're not her 'friends'. Her 'friends' are the older girls who toted her around like a designer handbag last year. The ones who moved on to 1st grade. I'm not sure how they would have felt about being invited to a 'baby' birthday party. I'm not sure how they felt about it last year. They came, but they hardly seemed to enjoy themselves. Missy's party last year was a bit of a flop, and I wasn't exacly keen to try again this year, especially with her being so cagey about the guest list. So we (or rather, I) simply didn't.

She didn't seem to mind over much. It was a busy day. She got to open her presents first thing this morning. Then she went to barnehage where they ate the chocolate cake and cookies that I slaved over all day yesterday. This afternoon was the opening of Elder Miss's art show (more on that tomorrow) so we were in town all afternoon and evening. Farmor came, both for the art show and Missy's birthday. We went out for pizza. She got ice cream after dinner. Then she came home and had a temper tantrum because it was way past bedtime and I wouldn't let her stay up to play with her new toys.

We may yet have to deal with her wrath over being denied a party. Sunday is Elder Miss's birthday, and she's got a big bbq bash planned. When Missy is confronted with all of EM's friends showing up at the house in their pretty party frocks, she may yet go, "Hey, wait just a God Damn minute here!...."

Seriously, Little Miss, it doesn't mean I love you any less. I just can't fucking figure you out!

Happy Birthday, Lovie!

2009-05-19T09:57:00.000+02:00

So Sunday was the very day of all Norwegian days.

I went back and had a look at what I had to say about 17. Mai last year, just to sort of review how much you all (as my devoted and faithful ~~readers~~ family) should already know about it, and/or what I'd need to add to explain the following few pictures.

Turns out, I had quite a bit to say about ye ol' 17. Mai last year.

None of it good.

Was last year a particularly bad year for me? I mean, sheesh!

I think the deal with me and 17. Mai is this: I liked it a whole lot better when we were spending it in town every year. Sure enough, I bitched and moaned back then about the hassle of getting all dressed up, and the challenge of getting into the city with all the normal roads closed, and then the headache of finding a parking place, and on and on and on. But at least once we were in town there was enough pomp and circumstance to mark the day as an event! proper.

But see, 17. Mai is meant to be celebrated as locally as possible. Now that we have kids, this means that we're obliged to celebrate the day at their school. Well--to be clear--we're not 'obliged' as in there's a law saying we absolutely have to be there. But that's where the local community gathers. The parent committee (the one from which I ran so cowardly) goes to great pains to organize games and speeches and refreshments. And it's built up so that the kids want to go there. They want to march in the parade with their class. They'd be disappointed if we tried to take them anywhere else.

And so we go. This is one of the ways in which I'm actually a reasonably good mother--self-sacrificing and all that. But it doesn't mean that I can't bitch about it on my blog a bit. Right?

My beef with the school celebration is nothing more than it all feels a little anti-climatic. Here I am all dressed up in hose and everything, and......well......meh. That's it. Just, meh.

There are cannons first thing in the morning, and a few more just after the national song. I mentioned to Mister that there should be more cannons. Cannons are cool. Nothing says CELEBRATE YOUR RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATION! like three or four good volleys of cannon fire. But after having just finished watching the John Adams mini-series, Mister was doubtful. "Nah," he said, "Norway didn't have to fight hard enough to deserve more cannons."

Meh. He's right.

But the weather was good; we must always be grateful for nice weather on 17. Mai. And I do enjoy gawking at the bunads every year. My sainted mother-in-law is going to make one for me, so we were looking with an extra critical eye this year as I have to pick out which one I want.

I give you a random sampling of pictures. I was playing with the white balance on my camera. I don't think I had it quite right, so a lot of what I took feels a little washed out to me. And the focus was all messed up for the first half of the day. I still like my new camera, but my God is there ever too much to have to think about! Sometimes--don't tell Mister--but sometimes, I long for my simple point and shoot.....

In-house Memo

2009-05-14T21:19:00.005+02:00

The kids have learned that there are certain times when Mommy is absolutely, positively NOT to be disturbed by anything so aggrevatingly irksome as their dulcet little voices raised in dubious need of my urgent attention.

When Mommy's on the phone, for example. Or, when Mommy has a migraine. And, most especially, when Mommy is listening to the 'Wait, Wait...' podcast while she's making dinner.

Seriously. Don't even ask. It's only going to piss her off, and cause her to reject any request or query on general principle.

EM has learned to get around this mountain by shoving little notes in my face, and flapping them under my nose until I'm forced to acknowledge them or sneeze undaintily. Tiny little missives scribbled on tiny little squares of torn paper:

"Can I have a apel?"

"Can I go to Selinas hous?"

"Wher did you put my Nintendo this time?"

Her spelling is consistently dreadful, but she gets her point across.

So how proud was I tonight when, for the very first time, Boy followed her example?

Hear that, doubting Teacher lady? Not only can Boy read, but he WRITES too! Ha! I've got the proof of it right here....

......Only....Dude.....Wait.....

What?

So here's your riddle for the weekend:

What does Boy want?

2009-05-09T15:38:00.000+02:00

Ladies and gentlemen

....the Nintendo ....

has resurfaced.

Holy Shit!

In a closet. In EM's room. Hiding with Mister's fishing poles.

From its position, way the hell up top there, it is all too conceivably possible that I'm the one who put it there.

Damn.

On the other hand, EM has this habit of hiding her stuff from Missy when she sees Missy playing with it. EM could have put it there too.

Neither one of us can remember.

Life is funny that way.

2009-05-08T11:01:00.000+02:00

Sigh.

I'm bored with my blog. I want a new blog. A better blog.

This isn't it either, but it's going to have to do for now. I spent two god-awful hours last night trying to get that picture saved in a way that I could load it onto Blogger. Now that it's finally here, I ain't dumpin' it yet! Is anyone else suddenly having trouble uploading pictures into Blogger? I keep getting an error message. I have to go through Picasa first. Anyone else?

So we're in a bit of a low as far as spring weather goes. Cold, windy, grey, wet. I'm not happy about it. Now that I'm finally done studying for that infernal norsk test and have time to take long, slow runs through the woods, it's far too cold and windy to enjoy it. Typical.

I think it may have affected my general mood. Can you tell?

That, and the conference I had with Boy's teacher yesterday. Anyone remember the last conference I had with her? The one where she told me he was emotionally immature, and that there was no point pushing any sort of academic agenda on him because, I don't know, he might break down in a puddle of tears in the face of 2+2=? or some such horror.

She was happy to report that he was way over that. He's come a long way, she said, done a lot of growing up in the past few months. I think she may have believed herself personally responsible for this miracle of maturation.

That's unkind of me. She does spend a large chunck of time with him everyday. Clearly her influence is important. Her contribution should be respected. It's just that....GAH!....she was so fucking smug!

I want to like her. I keep trying to like her. She's going to be his teacher for the next three years. It would be advantageous to my peace of mind if could bring myself to believe that this was a good thing. Right?

She went on to tell me that she had recently run through a set of standardized tests with him. These are brand new, she said, they never used to test first graders to track their progress. I got the sense she thought this was a bad thing. Anyway, she said, he did really well. Really, really well. She made no secret of the fact that she was surprised at how very well he actually did. So very, very surprising, she said, given where he started. Both his reading readiness and number recognition are way above average.

Rather than being comforted by these results, I allowed myself a moment of prickly pique (or, maybe something slightly more than a 'moment'). I've already elaborated on the glacial slowness of the early Norwegian curriculum, so I'll spare you my thoughts on the matter of continuing to speak in terms of 'reading readiness' and 'number recognition' for FIRST GRADERS. They've be ready for two flippin' years! Teach them something already!

Enough.

What really pissed me off about the whole thing was, again, how surprised she was. The way she kept saying how impressive it was, and how surprising, and how simply grand that he had managed to read all her damn three letter words and count all her stupid circles and stars (all of which, by the by, he could have easily managed in September, except for the fact that he's cautious and shy and takes a good long time to warm up to a new teacher and school, so yes, in the beginning maybe he did choose to cry a bit rather than answer a simple question) only confirmed to me that I was right last fall when I predicted she had totally written him off as a lost cause. If she had been paying more attention to him over the past five months, would she really have been so fucking surprised to find out last week that he can read?

And then, and THEN, after the bull shit test results, she went into this whole thing about his compromised language skills. About how important it is that we (his parents, "Or, in this case," she amended, "Perhaps his father, because you can't help him much here, can you now") stress correct speech and pronounciation at home blah blah blah, because he's still very weak in this area.

She was specifically adament about needing to work on his grasp of certain prepositional phrases, and as proof of this she produced a large drawing that he had done in class. This too had been a sort of test about how well he could understand and follow directions. They all had to draw exactly what the teacher told them to draw, starting with a circle or a ball in the very center of the page. Which Boy had done. Then lines going from the ball to the top and the bottom of the paper, then out to each side. Done. Then lines going out to each corner. Which he hadn't managed exactly, but there were diagonal lines radiating out from the ball. She looked at me pointedly and said, "He clearly does not know what a corner is."

Orrrrr, perhaps, I don't know, but just maybe he still lacks the fine-motor and hand-eye coordination to get a straight line to go diagonally ANYWHERE! Bitch.

From there they had to draw a house, with a door and a window and a chimey with smoke, and then a tree with five apples, then a cat, and on and on and on. Boy had done most of all of this. Even as she was showing me the picture and explaining the cues he had been given, I could tell she began to realize that oh yeah, wait, no, yeah. Most of this is right. Okay but still, see, he didn't put the chimney "on the roof". And he missed the apples "under the tree". Oh but look at that, he got the cat "to the left of the house".

Whatever. The picture proves nothing to me but a short attention span. Boy's got that in spades. If she wants to parse spoken language skills, fine I'll grant her that he struggles with vocabulary and diction. But he's bilingual. That's going to be an ongoing problem. I fucking DARE you to suggest that I should stop speaking English to him at home. Go ahead, bitch. Make. My. Day.

Alas. She did not.

She did suggest that maybe it would be benficial for him to spend some time with the school's 'spesialpedagog', which is basically, you know...special ed. I'd be all miffed and offended at this too, except, as long as it falls under the guise of helping him catch up with his language skills, it kind of makes sense to me. And oddly, I've been hinting around this possibility (I tried hard to call in speech pathology, rather than special ed though) to EM's teachers for the past year now because her spoken language skills are just as bad, if not worse, than Boy's. EM's teachers have never been that much bothered by it. They say give her time, she'll catch up.

Heh, I feel so much better after having written all that. Mister has been in Austria all week, so he wasn't home to get an ear full of my supreme indignation just after this all happened. I hadn't realized how badly I needed to unload.

If you made it this far, thanks for listening. Next time I'll say something funny. Promise.

Puddy Tat

2009-05-04T21:55:00.000+02:00

See? She's got a little heart shaped patch of grey right on her chest. That's because she's a widdle biddy bundle of cuddles and wuvs. Oh yes she is!

Every breeder is required to assign a name to their kittens to put on the official birth certificate. The future owner is in no way obliged to use this name. It's purely a records thing. Puss, for example, was offically dubbed Lucius Maximus Aurelian. His breeder, it seems, favored such absurdly inflated Latin names for all of his kittens. Puss, of course, was just Puss to us, but we did sometimes refer to him affectionately as Pussifus Lucifus when we wanted to pump up his ego after catching a mouse or the occasional butterfly.

This new breeder we're dealing with has a similar sort of pretention. Apparently, she likes her gossip rags, because she names all of her kittens after celebrities of varying degrees of prestige and notoriety. The two surviving sisters from her latest litter were summarily named Cindy Crowford and Cheena Easton (a very large [sic] in both instances). I have no idea whether the misspelling is a deliberate part of the pretention. Whether it's considered indelicate, or perhaps illegal to name a cat directly after a living, breathing b-lister. Or whether she simply fucked it up (twice). But those are the names they were given.

Cindy Crowford is the name of Little Miss Grey-Heart-On-Her-Chest.

I think Cindy is a perfectly daft name for a cat. And I had every intension of coming up with a better, hipper, altogether more suitable sort of name once she came home to us. Roxy, for example. As in Roxy Hart. As in perfect for a cat with a grey heart on her chest. No?

No.

The breeder has been forwarding pictures to us every week, and every damn picture has the name Cindy attacted to it. At some point Elder Miss read this name, said it out loud, then asked Boy if he didn't think that Cindy was just the sweetest name ever for a cat with a grey heart on her chest. Boy swooned, and instantly agreed that yes, actually he did in fact think Cindy was definitely the sweetest name ever for our new cat with the grey heart on her chest.

Fait accompli.

I still think Roxy would be much better but the children keep asking to see pictures of Cindy Lou Who. And when is Cindy coming home? And can Cindy sleep in my bed? No, my bed! No mine! And so on and so forth, to the point where I think it's gone rather too far to try to unwind it all now.

Cindy it is, and ever shall be.

Cheena's new owners were smart and requested a name change right away. Cheena was rechristened Stella, which is a pretty great name, if you ask me, and would have gone splendidly with Roxy. But I didn't know about the grey heart on the chest until just last week. How was I supposed to think Roxy Hart before I knew about the grey heart on her chest?

Alas.

I'm going to Rygge in June to pick up both kittens. By happy coincidence, Stella's new owners live in Bergen too, and have graciously offered to baby-sit Cindy Lou Who Who'd Make a Much Better Roxy while we're in Salt Lake for the summer.

I can't wait to get my hands on her. It's going to be hard not to be able to bring her home right away, but it really was very nice of these perfect strangers to offer to take care of her all summer. It just seemed kind of cruel to uproot her from her mother and sister once, only to hand her back to her sister two weeks later, then drag her away once more two months after that. So we worked it out this way so that she's moved as few times as possible.

That way too, I've got a whole summer to keep trying to slip Roxy in under the kid's radar.

Roxy Roxy Roxy Roxy Roxy

This One's For Uncle Mark

2009-05-02T10:25:00.001+02:00

Last year on his blog, Uncle Mark admitted (somewhat abashedly) that he's in the habit of crawling across his lawn on his hands and knees hunting dandylions to pull out at the root. In his comments section I explained that dandylions have a revered status here in Norway as glorious harbingers of inpending summer. It's considered curmudgeonly and unkind to even consider mowing your lawn in early spring before the dandylions have gone to seed.

'Tis the season, folks.

This is a view towards our neighbor's house. Our own lawn doesn't have many wildflowers in it yet, because it's only been in for a year or two. The kids spend hours over in Mailynn's yard picking countless handfuls of løvetann (dandylion på norsk) and engkarse (the purple ones, no idea what they are på engelsk, but they go hand in hand with the løvetann, it's not uncommon to see entire fields turned all purple and spotty yellow this time of year). It can be hard to find a drinking glass in my house in early May because they're all sitting on my kitchen counter stuffed full of ragged bouquets of....well....weeds, basically.

This is the view towards our own house and yard. Mailynn (our neighbor) has always been very kind about waiting as long as possible about mowing her lawn so my kids can keep having their fun. She usually leaves the patch surrounding this fallen log to basically go to seed until mid-June or so. After my 267th bouquet of the year, I usually find myself wishing she would stop being quite so thoughtful.

This is a view of happy, rumpled children in their natural habitat. I pulled two ticks off Missy after this one sunny day of play (that last bit was for Grandma Gae, she's got a thing for ticks).

Engkarse

2009-05-02T09:53:00.001+02:00

If there's anyone out there who knows what engkarse is in English, I'd be mighty grateful if you'd let me know. Every year the kids ask, and every year I have to say, "Hell, I don't know." It's making me look bad here, people! Help me out.

2009-04-17T16:33:00.000+02:00

Sorry if it seems like I've pretty much given up on blogging lately.

I guess I have. Sort of. In a way. For now at least.

I've been studying for this stupid Bergenstest (high-level Nowegian language test that foreigners have to pass before they can be accepted into most university/college level study programs). I'm not loving it, but it's got to be done.

Anyway, that's what's been eating up most of my free time lately.

That, and Spring. Which is too wonderful to be ignored after all that crap we call Winter.

I just had to take a minute to share this little tidbit courtesy of the children:

I recently sat down with Boy and Elder Miss to have a little history/geography lesson all about why Indians are not Indians unless they come from India, and how those whom many call Indians are actually Native Americans who were mislabled due to a rather monumental fuck up on the part of a certain seafaring Spaniard. Or, no wait...was he Italian? Shit, I might have led the little darlings slightly astray there, but at least I can be sure I made my point about the 'Indian' bit because right now, at this very moment, the kids are outside in the beautiful Spring sunshine playing "when cowboys attack India". Boy is the sheriff, EM leads the elephant brigade. It sounds as if the elephants are winning, but only because Sheriff Boy collapses into a fit of giggles every time EM mounts one of her stuffed elephants, and gallops across the lawn on it.

Attention American Passport Holders!

2009-04-07T12:08:00.000+02:00

YOU NEED A VISA TO GET INTO BRAZIL.

I made it to Paris before anyone bothered to tell me this.

Go ahead laugh.

It's funny.

I guess.

Maybe someday I'll even be able to laugh with you.

But not right now.

Right now I'm still just trying to breathe deeply through the embarrassment and disappointment of it all.

Back in Bergen. Where it's cloudy and cold. Naturally.

2009-03-23T22:43:00.000+01:00

I think--but I can't be certain--but pretty darn tuttin' anyway--that this is our new puddy tat: the one lying face up....

There was some sort of trouble with the delivery, and sadly, they lost three of the five kittens the kitty mama was carrying. These two were delivered via kitty cesarean just over a week ago. I thought for sure that the fact that there were only two live kittens meant that we wouldn't be getting one. But apparently some potential buyers are only interested in solid blues, and we were high enough up there on the list that we get one of them! Yey us!

The reason I'm not 100% certain that this one is ours is Mister couldn't quite remember if the breeder said "the one with the least amount of white" or "the one with the most amount of white". He was pretty sure it was least, but...well....we'll see....

Honestly I'm not overly fussed which one it is. I think they're both cute.

I miss Puss. Miss him hard. I still instinctively look for him on Boy's bed, or his favorite spot on the sofa. And I still reflexively close the guestroom door when I've laid sweaters out on the bed to dry because he was a daft bugger, and used to insist on sleeping on my wet laundry. I miss him most when I come home and he's not waiting for me in the entryway. How did he always know I was on my way?

Sigh wistfully, and move on.

New kitty! Yey!

Speaking of moving on, people keep asking me, ever so cautiously, "So...you and EM....Is she? Are you? Are we friends again?"

Yes, people. We're friends again. Of course, one never fully forgives the careless loss of an ipod, but one does eventually take a deep breath and let it go. I let it go pretty much as soon as I realized that she had. It's a little silly to continue stomping about huffing, and puffing, and snipping at toes when all I get in return is a blank stare and a tired, "Geez Mom, whad I do this time?"

No futher punitive action was taken, but I have rather been enjoying refusing to let her listen to anything on my ipod. I'm wicked petty that way.

2009-03-18T23:23:00.001+01:00

My friend Marilyn thinks I'm an insolent bitch, and she found the perfect gift to tell me so...

Heh!

Smells quite nice actually....

See you ladies Friday night!

Avast!

2009-03-16T15:07:00.002+01:00

I let Boy watch The Pirates of the Caribbean over the weekend. All three movies.

He's been drawing giant, homicidal krakens ever since.

One wonders where Boy imagines all those poor, dead seamen will be buried...

In Which EM Loses Her Shit, And I Lose My Cool

2009-03-13T14:58:00.001+01:00

EM lost her ipod last night. That’s her Nintendo DS and her ipod gone within just a few weeks of each other.

I’m furious. I’m shocked and disappointed that she should be so careless. But mostly—right now—I’m just plain pissed off.

The rules were she was never to take either gadget out of the house unless we were going to Farmor’s, or Tante Hildegunn’s, or the cabin—somewhere where I could control where they were and what she was doing with them. Never to school. Never to a friend’s house. And certainly, never to a restaurant, or to art class.

They were clear rules. She understood them. She agreed to them. After she lost three Nintendo games at Mathias’s house during a sleep over, I stopped allowing exceptions to the rules—ever—and eventually she stopped asking.

I believed her at first when she told me that—no, she hadn’t taken the Nintendo anywhere, she’d just misplaced it in the house somewhere. I methodically searched for it for two weeks. I literally gutted her room. I tore apart the toy room. I emptied every drawer in the house, twice. I frisked every pocket and handbag I could find. Still no Nintendo.

Up until this morning’s tearful admission about the missing ipod I was willing to say to myself, “How strange! How very vexing!” And assume I’d stumble across the Nintendo under a pile of towels or something sometime in the very near future. I no longer believe this. After this morning, I’d be a fool to believe in such innocence anymore.

I asked several times during my search if it were possible that the Nintendo wasn’t in the house anymore, if she had perhaps taken it somewhere, and forgotten? Maybe? “Oh no, it’s here” she insisted, “It’s here. It must be here.”

Outrageous, bald-faced lies! And I have no idea how to deal with it, address it, punish it constructively, yet thoroughly enough that she finally gets it. You have to take care of your shit!

She took the ipod to her art class yesterday. When I saw it in the car—when she saw that I had seen it—she hastened to explain, “I know. I know. But I’m only going to listen to it in the car. I’m not going to take it to class with me.”

“It stays in the car!” I stressed, wagging my best mommy finger at her.

“It stays in the car,” she dutifully repeated, and I left it at that. I gave her the bloody benefit of the doubt.

I never saw it again after that, but this morning she swore up and down with splotchy red face, and fat guilty tears streaming down her cheeks that it did, indeed, stay in the car during art class. That it was in the pizza place after the art class that the damn thing went missing.

“WHY was it even IN the pizza place?”

“I thought I’d listen to it while we waited for the pizza.”

“I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE IT IN THE CAR!”

“I know.”

I sent her out of the house then. Pushed her out in the rain five minutes early so I didn’t start fuckidy fuck fuck fucking stupid idiotic careless thoughtless thankless little wretch-ing her right to her face.

Or maybe I should have let her hear it. Maybe then she’d finally get it. Because she needs to get it, ya’ll. I need her to understand that I’m well beyond piqued at this point. I’m a vengeful, malevolent fury. And honey, I’m out for payback.

I must have lost things as a kid. Kids lose things. I get that. But I don’t remember ever being this careless with what you might call the pricier items among my various possessions. Then again—did I even have any high ticket toys? I had a Walkman. Everyone had a Walkman. You tell me mom—did I ever lose it? Did I ever lose anything so valuable that you wanted to thrash me senseless with a wire hanger just to teach me a much deserved lesson in the value of a hard earned dollar?

Not that I’m going to do that, of course. Aside from the legal ramifications, I’m not sure I even have a wire hanger anywhere in the house. And, let’s face it, a cheap plastic IKEA hanger just wouldn’t produce a chilling enough THWICK to get my point across.

So I’m wrestling here with ~~legal~~ appropriate punishments to inflict upon her. Certainly I will not be replacing the lost items. EVER. And I already made her go with her class to the China exhibit in town instead of meeting for her scheduled appointment with the orthodontist to have her retainer removed.

HA!

We discovered that little scheduling conflict early yesterday afternoon. She had said she would rather skip the field trip to get the dread retainer taken out, and I was willing to go along with that plan because I know how much she’s been looking forward to getting rid of the thing. But during this morning’s drama I had the great pleasure of sneering, “And you’re going to town today. The retainer stays!” Much wailing and carrying-on followed this pronouncement. It was great. Very satisfying. But I’m still not convinced that she’s absorbed the full extent of my wrath.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that money and things, specifically, things that cost money, mean nothing to any of my children. And I’ve got to do something to fix this sorry state of affairs.

Do you think maybe it's because I don't work? That because I get money from a machine in the wall for doing ostensibly (in their eyes) nothing, they think it's basically a limitless font from which all things endlessly flow? Of course we've explained to them that the money comes from all the hard work daddy does, that his job is to earn the money, and my job is to take care of the house and the family. But maybe they're just not getting it.

Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with money at all. Maybe I'm expecting too much of them to understand and appreciate in anyway the price of the things we buy them. Maybe I should just stop buying them things altogether. Make them buy it all themselves with money they earn and save on their own initiative. But is that really fair when all of their spoiled rotten friends are drowning in endless piles of things. And how is it these spoiled rotten friends manage to keep track of all their endless piles of things but my kids manage to lose EVERYTHING? From whence do these caring for skills come? How are they taught?

The kids just got home from school a few minutes ago. EM asked if I had called the pizza place to ask if they had found the ipod. I had. They hadn't. We got into it again. She started crying again, "So it's gone for ever?"

"Yeah. Pretty much."

Boy chimed in: "Mom, I have two things to say to you."

"What's that Boy."

"One--I once lost something I loved. Two--and that was my baby scorpie. Don't be mad."

Princess Bedhead

2009-03-13T02:08:00.000+01:00

Here's your eye candy for the day.

Do you see? Do you see now what I mean about the wear-able sweetness?

That Great Litter Box In The Sky

2009-03-11T23:20:00.002+01:00

So we're on the way to Jazz class tonight. All the kids are with me because Mister is "working" in Rio this week so he can't look after the little ones while I escort EM to her dance class, as per our usual arrangement.

We pass a graveyard. The same graveyard we pass every week, every day practically, sometimes twice a day. Often--is what I'm getting at. For some reason, seeing this graveyard on this particular day prompts EM to ask, "Mom, where is Puss actually buried?"

"Yeah Mom," Boy adds, instantly forgetting the loose thread he's been wrapping around his index finger, and seamlessly picking up EM's train of thought like as if they shared a brain, "Puss is dead. Dead people live in graves. Where is Puss buried?"

Damn. Damn, shit, hell, and damn. What does one say? Best to stick to the truth. Right?

"Well," I hedge, "Puss isn't actually buried anywhere. The ground was too frozen when he died to dig a hole. Wow! Lots of traffic today, hm? Hope we're not late. Did you remember to bring your water bottle?"

My clever ruse does not work.

"So where is he then?" Trust EM to refuse to let a sleeping cat lie.

"Well. I left him with the doctor. The doctor took care of him for us."

"How?"

"Ah. Well. The doctor cremated his body. He burned it up. It's how they take care of animals after they die."

"They BURNED him? In a FIRE?" Missy is horrified.

Damn. Damn, shit, hell, and damn.

"But he was already dead. Right Mom?" EM seems to be absorbing this news with sober aplomb. I can't see her face in the rearview mirror. I hope that pause before she asked that last question wasn't the choking back of mortal terror.

"Right. Of course. Cremation is just a very practical way of taking care of a dead body."

"So first they cut a hole to take Puss out. Then there was just a body, and they had to burn it, and what if his eyes went WHAAAAAH! and his skin was all GRXXXXXX! and there was smoke everywhere, and, and then....."

Trust Boy to get everyone off topic with an orgasmic explosion of cartoon-tastic nonsense that will not stop until we've arrived at our destination, and EM has literally slammed the car door in his ridiculously animated face.

That was pretty much the end of it. Or so I thought.

Later this evening, as I was tucking everyone in and kissing them all goodnight, Boy grabbed my face and held it close to his in that way he does when he really needs me to listen to him, "When I die Mom. Can I be buried? Can I live in a grave like the ghosts in Shaggy? Or do I have to be burned like Puss?"

Damn. I mean seriously. Just. Dah-um.

"Of course you can be buried, honey. It's your choice. Of course you don't have to be burned."

"Even if it's winter? Even if the ground is frozen?"

"Even so."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

"Okay then."

"Boy?"

"Yes mom?"

"Don't ever die, okay?"

"Okay mom. I promise."

Sugar And Spice

2009-03-10T11:45:00.000+01:00

Last week was vinterferie (winter break). None of you noticed, of course, because all of your kids were off to school, merrily not bugging you.

I survived it. It came and went without a peep of complaint out of me. Would I be tarnishing that accomplishment by pointing out that they all went back to school yesterday, and it's been ever so----peaceful----since?

I had some comments on Boy's rhymes. Wanna hear the best one to come out of vinterferie? There were several, but this one got the most play: "How much longer must we eat everything we defeat?" Followed by a chant: "We must, we must, we must defeat our meat! We must, we must, we must defeat our meat!"

He should totally be a cheerleader when he grows up.

Sometimes I find Boy so sickenly sweet that I have this overwhelming urge to decant him into a tiny crystal vile so that I can use him, like peppermint Schnapps, to spike my hot cocoa on a cold, wintery day.

Of course all my kids are chock-full of yummy, sweet goodness. But I find their sweetness varies by degrees of usage.

Missy's sweetness, for example, is flashy and stylish, something to be worn. It's a vintage stole in plum velvet, wrapped around your shoulders, and shown off to all your hoity toity friends over tea and cakes.

While EM's sweetness is far more subdued, more comfortable. A flannel quilt, maybe, with which you curl up and fall asleep every night with a feeling of utter peace and safety.

But Boy now--Boy, like I said, is all pungent and spicy. Boy's sweetness must be eaten, devoured entirely.

I laugh at first-time mothers who dither and worry about having a second child, because how could they possibly love another like they love their first? Pfft. Of course you won't! You can't! It's not possible to love a liqueur the same way you love a quilt. It is not possible to enjoy a cherished quilt the same way you enjoy an expensive wrap. But you can and will love and enjoy them all--equally, if differently--and sometimes on different days--depending on the phase of the moon--and possibly the weather--vinterferie will have something to do with it too, but anything can be endured given enough Schnapps.

So go forth and multiply people! Because zse babies, zsey are so sveet!

Namesta

2009-02-26T22:35:00.003+01:00

Man am I ever in a rut.

Can't seem to pull myself out of it.

Can't even blame Bergen perma-gloam as the days grow ever longer, and the sun remembers rumors of whispers of warmth it once shared during its brighter hours.

Mister cut down seven trees around our property last weekend. It's helped with the brightness, but it still depresses me to see all those felled trunks and limbs strewn about the yard. I do not approve of the indiscriminate cutting down of trees. I don't care how much bloody evening sun they're stealing. They were here first!

Things keep dying around me. The trees. The cat. The i-pod.

My i-pod, people. My i-pod. The big one. The investment piece. The mother-fucking-ship. Dead. 80 gigs DOA.

I have no way to process this loss other than the sort of short, incoherent stuttering working its way through this post.

Alas.

Boy has taken up the fine art of the random rhyme--like the Great Vizzini only smaller, and with slightly less sense. Recent favorites: Hurry, hurry. Your pants are furry. And: If you have a vagina, you're going to China.

A bright spot in an otherwise bleak, existential storm of self-loathing.

I'm kidding. Mostly. It's not really as bad as all that. I'm still just not much in a writing mood. And this business of the i-pod crashing is truly disturbing. I'm indulging in a wee moment of melodrama. This too shall pass....

As a further excuse for not posting much lately--I've recently taken up knitting. More the fool, I. It's completly absorbed 80% of my free time these past three or four weeks. When I was in Scotland I got all cocky, thinking I knew something about knitting, seeing as I'd been doing it for more then ten days at that point. Plus, I had way mastered the art of the knit and the purl (that's all you really need, right?) So I found myself some pretty, moderately pricey, multi-colored wool, and a lacey shawl pattern. And there I thought I was good to go.

Any guesses on how it's gone with the shawl so far? First off Jilly--you totally LIED to me! I need twice as much yarn as you told me....Twice as much! First blow--the shawl has become yet another scarf. Probably a blessing in disguise, actually. Still, I really liked the look of that shawl......I like the look of the scarf in the picture, as well. Good thing I have the picture to admire, because mine isn't going to look anything at all like it. Whatever! My son is fat full 'a rhymes, yo. If she's sitting. She must be knitting. So I'm still a good person.

Maybe being 36 will make me happy, and once again full of fun, insightful anecdotes to share!

Check in next week to find out. But, don't hold your breath, 'kay?

P.S. I'm thinking my next few posts should be nothing but LOST LOST LOST all the time LOST, because GOD DAMN but how much do I love that show! The next time you see me it will be 1954 and I won't know who you are. We'll all speak Latin, and take turns braiding each other's hair into fetching frulein do's. Your nose will start bleeding, but I'll tell you not to worry because I secretly love you, and my i-pod is still working.....

I've Got Nothing To Say--Allow Me To Throw Some Pictures At You Instead

2009-02-20T14:23:00.000+01:00

From a recent skiing trip:
Pictures are all self-explanatory, but you are required to spend two or three extra seconds admiring the one of EM and her dad. I made her, you know--even if she does sometimes act like she likes him best.

From Aberdeen:
In general I liked the architecture in and around Aberdeen--kind of monochrome and blah granite, but all ornate and Victorian, so pretty enough to look at. I loved these brightly colored, mosaic tiled designs that could be seen in many of the entry ways. I don't know if they're unique to Aberdeen (didn't think to ask) but they were rather wonderful, and I found myself wanting one--immediately.

You see, sometimes I do allow myself to be photographed. Now you know why it's not very often. I do not feel I'm aging gracefully. Soon the folds of skin over my eyes will sag and droop so low I'll have to pierce my eyebrows and roll my eyelids up like little roller blinds just to be able to see.

Alternative Lifestyles

2009-02-12T08:59:00.033+01:00

Katy Perry's annoying girl kissing song is on the radio....again....

The kids are in the back seat. EM is singing, "I kissed a girl, and I liked iiiiiit...."

She turns to Boy and says, "You have to sing this song, Boy."

"Why?"

"Because you're a boy, and it's about kissing girls, " and she sings again, tauntingly, "I kissed a girl and I liked iiiiit..."

Boy responds--tauntingly, "But it's a girl singing it."

EM stops short, "Oh. Wait.....?"

Missy perks up, "I like girls!" and startes singing--ecstatically, "I kissed a girl and I liked iiiiit!"

I'm off to Aberdeen for the weekend. I wish it were warmer in Aberdeen than it is in Bergen. It's not. Jilly tells me to suck it, and come anyway. The song is in my head now, so I might have to kiss her when I get there....

Husbands Can Be Good

2009-02-04T11:20:00.130+01:00

Thank you all so much for your very kind condolences yesterday.

He most certainly was NOT 'just a cat', which is why I had to keep telling myself that just to get through what had to be done.

I sent Mister a text from the parking lot at the clinic. "Puss is gone" it said simply. He called me within seconds of receiving it, and was so sweet and so understanding it busted me up all over again. He was so sorry I had to be the one to do it. He had said he would, but he's too busy, too pre-occupied to have gotten to it before the weekend. I didn't want the kids to see what shape Puss might have been in by Friday even if he had been strong enough to make it that long. Plus--he was sick, yo. He was my cat. He needed me to take care of him this one last time. So I did.

And awful it was.

Mister asked me if I wanted him to come home. If you knew this man, and the way he works, you'd appreciate what a hugely magnanimous and (in his way) gentle gesture that was. I said no. There was nothing he could do for me. I would be fine. Then he made me promise not to stay home. "Go for a run. Go for a walk. Go get coffee. Just don't go home. PROMISE ME." So I promised.

I called my neighbor--a fellow American who lives half a kilometer away--told her what I'd just done, and asked if I could bum a cup or two of tea off her. "Oh God. Give me 15 minutes, " she said, "Then come." I spent just over an hour listening to her tell me about all the various cats she's had over the years, and the horrid ways most of them have died. Somehow, I still can't work out exactly how, this was therapeutic for me.

A few hours later I was picking up Little Miss to take her to ballet. Boy was in the car too, as he has football right after Missy's ballet. I was standing next to the car, semi-patiently waiting for her to get settled so I could fasten her seatbelt, when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but Mister stepping off a bus and running towards me.

"So how are you? Are you okay? Do you want me to do the running around with the kids this afternoon? Do you want me to come with you? What do you need?"

He'd left work two hours early to play chauffeur to the kids because he knew I'd be sad about my cat dying. Again, if you knew this man...

He ended up coming with me just to keep me company. Just as we were pulling into the ballet studio Mister says to me, "So there's this litter of kittens due in March..." and he hands me three pages of pictures he's taken off the breeder's website. In fact, he's already called the breeder, told her about the situation (she sends her deepest condolences, by the way), and not officially yet reserved one of the kittens for me, but pre-reserved one of them....If I'd like that....Would I like that?

To continue to say..."Geez, if you only knew this guy....This is so unlike him," would be to risk giving you the wrong impression of who he really is. Because it's not that he's heartless, and gruff, and generally uncaring about my feelings. That's not why he surprised me so much yesterday. It's just that he's so busy. And, usually, when he's at work, he's AT WORK, and nothing else much penetrates that concentration bubble he retreats into. But these pictures, and that phone call, and showing up early to hand it all to me...he basically took the day off to put this band-aid on my broken heart. And that...well...it just took my breath away. That's all.

So this is the mother: her name is White Pearl, and this will be her second litter.

And this is the father: his ridiculous name is Johnny Depp, and he looks so much like my Puss in his prime that I have a bit of a hard time looking at that photo.

I asked for a female. I think I might be interested in a litter myself--for the kids, for me, for the money....I also asked, please not solid blue this time. Something mottled, something spotty, something different.

If all goes well, the kittens should be ready for delivery the first week of June. Right before we're supposed to leave for Utah for the summer--which is not ideal--but I think we're going to do it anyway. The kids are already debating names. I'm wondering how I'm ever going to get used to calling a cat anything other than Pussy Lucy....

2009-02-03T10:20:00.084+01:00

It's just a cat. It's just a cat. It's just a cat. It's just a cat.

Just a smelly, grass-puking, mangy god damn cat.

This has been my mantra all morning. Just a cat. Just a cat. Not a kid. Just a cat.

And it was working for me. It kept my voice steady when I called the vet clinic to ask, you know...do I need to make an appointment to kill my dying cat, or can I just drop by? And it kept right on working for me as I picked up said sad, emaciated cat off the bathroom floor to gently slip him into his travel cage--the same travel cage we used to carry him home for the first time 13 years ago. Just a cat. Just a cat. Not a kid. Just a cat.

It sort of stopped working for me a bit on the drive over. The 'not a kid' part led to some pretty gruesome (and, in retrospect, extirely predictable) tangental mindfuckery which my fragile nerves had some trouble processing.

But I choked it back and was in control again as I walked into the clinic. Just a cat. Just a cat. Asshole husband didn't do the dishes last night. And just a cat.

The receptionist was a huge help. Cold. Businesslike. You're here for termination? Would you like him examined first? Will he be going to the common crematorium, or would you like an private urn to take home with you?

Yes. Sniff. No. Ew. What was that first one? And are you always such a bitch?

I was kind of getting pissed at her. I mean, wasn't anyone going to try and stop me from doing this terrible thing? Shouldn't an exam be...I don't know...obligatory? And God! She didn't even ask me why I was doing this! How I had arrived at this horrible decision! Didn't she want to know that he hadn't eaten since Sunday night? Wasn't anyone going to ask me about how he'd fallen down the stairs Monday morning, and never quite got up?

I wasn't crying when she walked back towards the exam rooms, shouting, "I have a termination here. Where should I put it?"

I couldn't look at the cage. Couldn't sit next to it. I kept my mind on the bitch receptionist, and started pacing.

It's just a cat. Just a cat. What a bitch. Just a cat.

When the receptionist came back out. She walked over to me, stopped me mid-pace, put an arm around my shoulder, gave me the saddest, most understanding look, and said softly, "I'm going to take him now. You've given him a long life. This is absolutely the right thing to do." Then that nice receptionist lady had the great pleasure of watching me come completely unglued.

It's been a shitty day. A shitty week really. It should have been done last Friday, but it's taken me this long to be willing to face up to it.

God what will I tell the kids?

Mixed Messages In A Troubled Economy

2009-01-27T19:52:00.007+01:00

Over dinner last night Mister says to me, "So I got a raise today. If we can keep the company afloat I'll be getting 2,000 extra a month. Soooooooo, that should help. Right?"

No word yet on how big an "IF" we're talking about here.

Proud Parent Alert

2009-01-20T08:46:00.000+01:00

EM was in the newspaper the other day. Can you spot her?

One of the local papers featured the kulturskole where she takes her art class on the occassion of its 30th anniversary, and she just happened to get in the way of their photographers the day they visited. Clever girl.

That's EM on the right with her artsy friend Mona, holding blind portraits they did of each other during class that day. I know you can't see it very well in the picture of the picture of the picture, but there's something very Modigliani in the pointy chin and strong patches of flat, vivid colors. I totally dig it--parental obligations notwithstanding.

They don't get to take any of their work home with them until the end of the school year. There's going to be a big student exhibit in June, and the teachers keep everything on hand until they decide which pieces they want to display. The only other thing she's done for the class that I have to share with you is this Christmas card:

Her teacher tells me that she has a very well developed sense of color and balance.

Sure. Sure, I say. But when are you going to teach her to do hands?