Thursday, July 16, 2009
Could people see those photos?
I had a weird paranoid moment when some woman I've never met, named simply "Kate," added my picasa album as one of her favorites, so I made my albums unpublic--but in the past, people to whom I've given the link could look at my unlisted albums anyway. A friend said she couldn't see my pics--can anyone else? Let me know if not and I'll make them public again, Kate be damned. There are some good ones.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Summ Summ Summertime
Ah, weekends in Frogner.
Norwegians are generally reckoned to be a somewhat shy and retiring sort. They aren't demonstrative and emotional like their southern European counterparts, they aren't anal retentive like the Germans and Austrians (wow, I could get in trouble here--forgive these stereotypes), and they certainly aren't proud like Americans. (Great story: my American friend Rolf, who is both a competitive runner and one of the least assuming, shy guys I know, told me that early on in Norway one of his colleagues asked him if he was a good runner. Rolf replied in his usual self-deprecating way, "Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm pretty good," to which the colleague said "Oh look at me, I'M American, I'M the best...") It was actually kind of difficult to teach Norwegians, in some ways, because none of them ever wanted to excel or stand out. Norwegians like to blend in.
Until they get a few beers in them. On Saturday nights in this city the buses and streetcars are filled with drunk 20 year-olds with multiple open containers, shouting across the train, pushing each other, laughing--the din is unbelievable. And where we live, close to city center, weekends can be brutal drunken fests of shouting and annoyance in the streets. So it was that we got home close to 1:00 last night from a really nice dinner party over in Ullern, with neighbors of Kristin and Thor, I was pleasantly surprised by how quiet my neighborhood was and fell promptly asleep, only to be awoken at 4:45 by twenty guys shouting and playing techno music in one of the apartments nearby. I mean....really? At 4:45 a.m.? I know the midnight sun has made us all a little nutty in the head, but do people really have to be so inconsiderate? Eventually I gave Ben the space he needed to put the pillow over his head and I moved out to the couch with my book, where if I closed the windows and door it wasn't quite so loud, and managed to fall back asleep a while later.
Something like this happens every weekend here in Frogner. If it isn't the guy upstairs, who at least has started to put notes up before he has a party, it's someone in my apartment building or down the street or just IN the street, and I can't help thinking as I suffer silently that there must be twenty other people also exhausted and wishing those guys would just shut up. But you don't call the cops here in Norway, is what I'm told. That would be sort of against the whole blend in, don't make waves thing, and they don't want to come anyway. (Petter told me they have much bigger problems to deal with, but last I checked there wasn't a hell of a lot of crime in Oslo, so I think they should add public disturbances to their list of things to deal with).
Grumble, grumble, grumble.
So, in other news, I'm 38+ weeks pregnant. I had this scare that I might need to be induced early due to some liver condition they thought I might have, but after repeated blood testing they just can't find any evidence of it after all (phew), so it looks like I'll be carrying this baby to term. Whenever that is. My due date is July 26, the hospital bag is packed, the baby clothes are washed and folded, I am officially resting a lot in preparation for the big event, and I'm trying to keep the house clean in case I suddenly have to go in to the hospital--but the weirdest thing is not knowing when that will be. A couple of days ago I was having a lot of Braxton-Hicks contractions and I thought, this is it, it's coming--but the past two days I've been feeling like maybe this baby wants to bake for another month. I guess we will find out.
My friend Brooke took this photo when she was here. She came for a week and was a good sport about the fact that we couldn't go very far from Oslo. It was great to see her, even if for the first half of her visit we were having a heat wave that made Oslo simply unbearable--and then a blast of cold rain for the second half that made us just want to curl up with books.
Anyway, I'll leave you with some photos of Norwegian summer. There are a bunch of them, so I linked from Picasa instead of sticking them here. Enjoy!
Love,
Susie
Norwegians are generally reckoned to be a somewhat shy and retiring sort. They aren't demonstrative and emotional like their southern European counterparts, they aren't anal retentive like the Germans and Austrians (wow, I could get in trouble here--forgive these stereotypes), and they certainly aren't proud like Americans. (Great story: my American friend Rolf, who is both a competitive runner and one of the least assuming, shy guys I know, told me that early on in Norway one of his colleagues asked him if he was a good runner. Rolf replied in his usual self-deprecating way, "Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm pretty good," to which the colleague said "Oh look at me, I'M American, I'M the best...") It was actually kind of difficult to teach Norwegians, in some ways, because none of them ever wanted to excel or stand out. Norwegians like to blend in.
Until they get a few beers in them. On Saturday nights in this city the buses and streetcars are filled with drunk 20 year-olds with multiple open containers, shouting across the train, pushing each other, laughing--the din is unbelievable. And where we live, close to city center, weekends can be brutal drunken fests of shouting and annoyance in the streets. So it was that we got home close to 1:00 last night from a really nice dinner party over in Ullern, with neighbors of Kristin and Thor, I was pleasantly surprised by how quiet my neighborhood was and fell promptly asleep, only to be awoken at 4:45 by twenty guys shouting and playing techno music in one of the apartments nearby. I mean....really? At 4:45 a.m.? I know the midnight sun has made us all a little nutty in the head, but do people really have to be so inconsiderate? Eventually I gave Ben the space he needed to put the pillow over his head and I moved out to the couch with my book, where if I closed the windows and door it wasn't quite so loud, and managed to fall back asleep a while later.
Something like this happens every weekend here in Frogner. If it isn't the guy upstairs, who at least has started to put notes up before he has a party, it's someone in my apartment building or down the street or just IN the street, and I can't help thinking as I suffer silently that there must be twenty other people also exhausted and wishing those guys would just shut up. But you don't call the cops here in Norway, is what I'm told. That would be sort of against the whole blend in, don't make waves thing, and they don't want to come anyway. (Petter told me they have much bigger problems to deal with, but last I checked there wasn't a hell of a lot of crime in Oslo, so I think they should add public disturbances to their list of things to deal with).
Grumble, grumble, grumble.
So, in other news, I'm 38+ weeks pregnant. I had this scare that I might need to be induced early due to some liver condition they thought I might have, but after repeated blood testing they just can't find any evidence of it after all (phew), so it looks like I'll be carrying this baby to term. Whenever that is. My due date is July 26, the hospital bag is packed, the baby clothes are washed and folded, I am officially resting a lot in preparation for the big event, and I'm trying to keep the house clean in case I suddenly have to go in to the hospital--but the weirdest thing is not knowing when that will be. A couple of days ago I was having a lot of Braxton-Hicks contractions and I thought, this is it, it's coming--but the past two days I've been feeling like maybe this baby wants to bake for another month. I guess we will find out.
My friend Brooke took this photo when she was here. She came for a week and was a good sport about the fact that we couldn't go very far from Oslo. It was great to see her, even if for the first half of her visit we were having a heat wave that made Oslo simply unbearable--and then a blast of cold rain for the second half that made us just want to curl up with books.
Anyway, I'll leave you with some photos of Norwegian summer. There are a bunch of them, so I linked from Picasa instead of sticking them here. Enjoy!
Love,
Susie
Friday, June 12, 2009
The Midnight Oil
Hi friends,
Had a minute and thought I'd write. Days have a new rhythm now, since school is about to end and my commitments for this week included: going in on Monday for three hours. Oh, and I guess I had to do some emailing with students as well. Next week, commitments include Tuesday tidying-up day, Wednesday getting ready for the Somerfest (summer party), then the Somerfest. I think there's an assembly on Friday.
Rough life...
I'm using my vast amounts of free time to socialize, clean our place, panic about motherhood in six-seven weeks, get my computer working again, and write. I am working on a revision of my memoir, which is a story about Ben and me and our year-long travels that we took in 2004-2005. My plan was to finish the book and approach an agent about it before the kid arrived. My friend Simone read it recently and wrote me eight pages of comments that were extremely helpful and of course also a little depressing. I think every writer secretly wants to hear that the work is perfect as is, and of course, like a true friend and critic, Simone did not say that. Writing a memoir is intensely personal, too, and so when someone comments on it and makes suggestions about where it should go it's also hard not to do some serious soul-searching--in a sense, the feedback becomes about more than the work, it's also about YOU. So, anyway, I dealt with that in one afternoon of some crying and thinking, got back to work, wrote for about a week and really felt like I was making headway--then witnessed the crash of my hard drive and lost the whole thing (not the whole thing whole thing--just that week of work). Then I entered into a three-week long saga with Apple about the OS X disks I needed to get my computer up and running again (these could be found in a box in a storage space in Burlingame, California, or from the Apple store for a mere 900 kroner). Finally, after a lot of cajoling on my part, Apple sent me new disks and I am now able to work again. So, this was a set back. A stressful one. So it is really good that life has calmed down a bit, and I am trying to just chip away at the project an hour or two every day, revising, revising...in hopes that just maybe I will be happy with it by the time D Day arrives and life as I know it changes forever. Duh duh DUH!
I keep thinking of my friend Rose, whose baby was due the day she had to take her medical boards. Lola stayed in the womb until the day after. Good kid. I want one like that.
Kidding aside, I am very excited for the baby to arrive (not prematurely). S/he is growing by leaps and bounds. I know this because I have a foot lodged in my rib cage at all times and a head somewhere near my pelvis (I hope). The baby is definitely lying on my right side, so pronounced that my belly sticks out more on that side. Ben and I took a LaMaze class last weekend. It was really cool. The teacher, Judith, showed us all these posters of what happens in your body when you're pregnant. It's incredible--all your internal organs just move out of the way. Your stomach gets sort of tucked up near your chin; your intestine wraps around it. Then we learned how to breathe. The whole deal with LaMaze, and with another method of birthing advocated by this lady named Penny Simkin, who wrote The Birth Partner (Judith likes her, too) is that the dad/partner is essential to the whole thing. He/she counts and times the contractions, helps you remember your breathing, brings you water in between, etc. It's pretty cool. I have already warned Ben that at some point I might say something to the effect of "get your fucking hands off me, I'm in pain" and he has told me that anything I say in the labor room he will never hold against me. He was actually the one who brought this up, which I thought was a good sign. So.
Last night, I had Stine #1 and Kristin for dinner. We were supposed to have a kind of baby/birthing ceremony dinner with my friend Steph last night. Steph lives in Portland, Oregon and was coming for three weeks with her partner Peter. They are some of my oldest and dearest friends--they're more like my family than my friends, really. Anyway, they were supposed to arrive this week. But, and this is so tragic, a good friend of Steph's is dying of a rare and horrible form of uterine cancer, so they are in Seattle instead, saying goodbye and helping out. Lovely Stine suggested that we meet anyway, so in honor of Steph I made her and my kind of food: what I think of as gourmet hippy food. You see, typically in Norway a dinner party involves a lot of meat or fish, delicious, but heavy--and so I like to cook more West-coast style freshness when people come over. If I might say so myself, we had a really simple and delicious meal:
An onion tart
A quinoa salad
Fresh tomatoes with basil and olive oil.
The onion tart was a success, though up until the last minute I was afraid it wouldn't be. I can't claim much credit for the recipe; I found a rough sketch here, but I didn't have buckwheat flour so I used quinoa flour, and I didn't have parmesan so I left that out. I also didn't want to make mini tarts so I smushed all the dough into one big springform pan. For the topping, I caramelized the onions with some fresh rosemary (growing on our deck--thanks Benj), then folded them into the ricotta egg yolk mixture. Added a little cream, a squeeze of lemon. Baked about thirty minutes. Delicious. Like a savory cheesecake.
The quinoa salad was my old standby, also one I suppose I can't claim credit for since it started as a recipe in Vegetarian Planet, which is a great cookbook if anyone is interested. Quinoa, chopped arugula, chopped red onion, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, generous salt and pepper, feta cheese, and some toasted nuts (I used pine; walnuts are tasty too) at the end.
Lovely. It was a nice night. We talked a lot about having kids and being married and all sorts of other topics domestic and not. I really enjoyed myself.
So, not much else to write. Oslo is light until 11:30 p.m. or so these days. Not true midnight sun, but kind of midnight glow. And very hard to get to bed at a decent hour. Unfortunately it's been gray for a while now. Today it is downright raining, but most days it has been overcast at least. It's reminding me of the gloomy June of the Pacific Northwest. I'm ready for some hot and dry!
Hope this finds you all well.
Susie
Had a minute and thought I'd write. Days have a new rhythm now, since school is about to end and my commitments for this week included: going in on Monday for three hours. Oh, and I guess I had to do some emailing with students as well. Next week, commitments include Tuesday tidying-up day, Wednesday getting ready for the Somerfest (summer party), then the Somerfest. I think there's an assembly on Friday.
Rough life...
I'm using my vast amounts of free time to socialize, clean our place, panic about motherhood in six-seven weeks, get my computer working again, and write. I am working on a revision of my memoir, which is a story about Ben and me and our year-long travels that we took in 2004-2005. My plan was to finish the book and approach an agent about it before the kid arrived. My friend Simone read it recently and wrote me eight pages of comments that were extremely helpful and of course also a little depressing. I think every writer secretly wants to hear that the work is perfect as is, and of course, like a true friend and critic, Simone did not say that. Writing a memoir is intensely personal, too, and so when someone comments on it and makes suggestions about where it should go it's also hard not to do some serious soul-searching--in a sense, the feedback becomes about more than the work, it's also about YOU. So, anyway, I dealt with that in one afternoon of some crying and thinking, got back to work, wrote for about a week and really felt like I was making headway--then witnessed the crash of my hard drive and lost the whole thing (not the whole thing whole thing--just that week of work). Then I entered into a three-week long saga with Apple about the OS X disks I needed to get my computer up and running again (these could be found in a box in a storage space in Burlingame, California, or from the Apple store for a mere 900 kroner). Finally, after a lot of cajoling on my part, Apple sent me new disks and I am now able to work again. So, this was a set back. A stressful one. So it is really good that life has calmed down a bit, and I am trying to just chip away at the project an hour or two every day, revising, revising...in hopes that just maybe I will be happy with it by the time D Day arrives and life as I know it changes forever. Duh duh DUH!
I keep thinking of my friend Rose, whose baby was due the day she had to take her medical boards. Lola stayed in the womb until the day after. Good kid. I want one like that.
Kidding aside, I am very excited for the baby to arrive (not prematurely). S/he is growing by leaps and bounds. I know this because I have a foot lodged in my rib cage at all times and a head somewhere near my pelvis (I hope). The baby is definitely lying on my right side, so pronounced that my belly sticks out more on that side. Ben and I took a LaMaze class last weekend. It was really cool. The teacher, Judith, showed us all these posters of what happens in your body when you're pregnant. It's incredible--all your internal organs just move out of the way. Your stomach gets sort of tucked up near your chin; your intestine wraps around it. Then we learned how to breathe. The whole deal with LaMaze, and with another method of birthing advocated by this lady named Penny Simkin, who wrote The Birth Partner (Judith likes her, too) is that the dad/partner is essential to the whole thing. He/she counts and times the contractions, helps you remember your breathing, brings you water in between, etc. It's pretty cool. I have already warned Ben that at some point I might say something to the effect of "get your fucking hands off me, I'm in pain" and he has told me that anything I say in the labor room he will never hold against me. He was actually the one who brought this up, which I thought was a good sign. So.
Last night, I had Stine #1 and Kristin for dinner. We were supposed to have a kind of baby/birthing ceremony dinner with my friend Steph last night. Steph lives in Portland, Oregon and was coming for three weeks with her partner Peter. They are some of my oldest and dearest friends--they're more like my family than my friends, really. Anyway, they were supposed to arrive this week. But, and this is so tragic, a good friend of Steph's is dying of a rare and horrible form of uterine cancer, so they are in Seattle instead, saying goodbye and helping out. Lovely Stine suggested that we meet anyway, so in honor of Steph I made her and my kind of food: what I think of as gourmet hippy food. You see, typically in Norway a dinner party involves a lot of meat or fish, delicious, but heavy--and so I like to cook more West-coast style freshness when people come over. If I might say so myself, we had a really simple and delicious meal:
An onion tart
A quinoa salad
Fresh tomatoes with basil and olive oil.
The onion tart was a success, though up until the last minute I was afraid it wouldn't be. I can't claim much credit for the recipe; I found a rough sketch here, but I didn't have buckwheat flour so I used quinoa flour, and I didn't have parmesan so I left that out. I also didn't want to make mini tarts so I smushed all the dough into one big springform pan. For the topping, I caramelized the onions with some fresh rosemary (growing on our deck--thanks Benj), then folded them into the ricotta egg yolk mixture. Added a little cream, a squeeze of lemon. Baked about thirty minutes. Delicious. Like a savory cheesecake.
The quinoa salad was my old standby, also one I suppose I can't claim credit for since it started as a recipe in Vegetarian Planet, which is a great cookbook if anyone is interested. Quinoa, chopped arugula, chopped red onion, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, generous salt and pepper, feta cheese, and some toasted nuts (I used pine; walnuts are tasty too) at the end.
Lovely. It was a nice night. We talked a lot about having kids and being married and all sorts of other topics domestic and not. I really enjoyed myself.
So, not much else to write. Oslo is light until 11:30 p.m. or so these days. Not true midnight sun, but kind of midnight glow. And very hard to get to bed at a decent hour. Unfortunately it's been gray for a while now. Today it is downright raining, but most days it has been overcast at least. It's reminding me of the gloomy June of the Pacific Northwest. I'm ready for some hot and dry!
Hope this finds you all well.
Susie
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Tabouli for Forty
Heisan.
I am so sorry it has been such a long time since I've written. When my mom was here week before last she said, "you haven't written since April 18!" and I realized I was about to lose my most loyal fan and then, undoubtedly, my entire fan base. Come back, readers. I have all kinds of plausible excuses for my absence...
The best one is that my computer died a couple of weeks ago and I have been in a funk about it and using this old Dell of Ben's while mine has been in the shop. So blogging has not been my first priority.
But. A nice spring afternoon in Oslo, threatening to rain. We are at about eighteen hours of daylight these days. The sky starts to get pink at 3:00 a.m. or so (I'm told), and by 4:00 or 4:30 it's pretty light. Last night at midnight the sky was still glowing on the horizon, though it had been dark by most standards since around 10:30. This is the so-called Nordic light. It's like the sky never fully darkens in the summer and it is gorgeous, luminous, glowy. It's been a rainy spring but it's always a sort of gentle rain, good for making things green.
We have been up to all kinds of things. My parents came, and we took a three day extravaganza tour of Westlandet, Bergen and some of the fjords around it as well as one day in Hardanger, which was exquisite. If you're interested in seeing the trip, you can go to Picasa and look at Ben's photos. It was a really nice visit, lots of laughs, some fun times, and a whole lot of baby-inspired excitement. After my parents left it was Syttende Mai, Norway's national day, when the whole country goes Nordic and parties. Bundader (national costumes), traditional herring breakfasts, a big parade, barbecues in the park. Ben and I marched in the parade with my school. Some pics ahead. First, me looking very pregnant and water-retaining with two of my fabulous students, Astrid on the left and Helene on the right, both in national costumes. Then, looking down Karl Johan's Gate towards the castle (the king and his family are there waving to us, you just can't see them yet). Stine Pernille, my colleague and friend, in the background. Finally, random marching band.
So that was fun. And this weekend, another set of festivities. We christened little Inga! Yesterday there was a big party for her at Petter and Eldri's. She of course had no idea why everyone was smiling at her and showering her with gifts, but the grownups enjoyed themselves (maybe too much? I have never seen so many empty wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays). But first there was the meal, a sort of Mediterranean/Greek themed do. We were enlisted to make green salad and tabouli...for forty people. I optimistically thought this would be a fairly easy job. Oh man, what a production. Tabouli for forty requires roughly...
2 large bags of bulgar, soaked
7 large bunches of parsley, chopped
5 large bunches of mint, chopped
1 large bag of shallots, chopped
1 bunch of green onions, chopped
half an onion, chopped
about 2-3 cups of olive oil
the juice from TWENTY FOUR lemons
about 3T of cinnamon
lots of salt and pepper
...and a kilo of tomatoes, chopped.
My recommendation to you: next time you make tabouli for forty people, make sure you have a decent kitchen knife and no predisposition for carpal tunnel syndrome. We couldn't fit the tabouli into bowls, so old Benj went and scrubbed out the recycling bin for us. Witness, tabouli for 40, salad for 40, ready to go. We should be caterers, I think.
Proud papa, grilling chicken.
And the guest of honor today at the church, being held by her favorite Godfather.
It was a lot of fun, from chopping madly to being given a contract for how I'm supposed to behave as a Godparent: "pray with the child. Send her gifts on her christening day. Take her to church with you and light a candle. Give her bible stories..." Ben and I were the admittedly more secular Godparents, so we'll probably send money when she graduates from high school and send her lots of good vibes and letters over the years.
I think that's all to report...school continues to go well, and baby preparations are at least partially underway. I am quite pregnant, as you can see. The little one is moving around a lot and it's fun to imagine what he/she will be like. I cannot believe it is a mere two months until this baby arrives. Some days the thought panics me terribly. Other days I can't wait. Well, that's a lie: other days I think I will be ready when it's time, which is the best I think I can do!
Store klem fra
Susie
I am so sorry it has been such a long time since I've written. When my mom was here week before last she said, "you haven't written since April 18!" and I realized I was about to lose my most loyal fan and then, undoubtedly, my entire fan base. Come back, readers. I have all kinds of plausible excuses for my absence...
The best one is that my computer died a couple of weeks ago and I have been in a funk about it and using this old Dell of Ben's while mine has been in the shop. So blogging has not been my first priority.
But. A nice spring afternoon in Oslo, threatening to rain. We are at about eighteen hours of daylight these days. The sky starts to get pink at 3:00 a.m. or so (I'm told), and by 4:00 or 4:30 it's pretty light. Last night at midnight the sky was still glowing on the horizon, though it had been dark by most standards since around 10:30. This is the so-called Nordic light. It's like the sky never fully darkens in the summer and it is gorgeous, luminous, glowy. It's been a rainy spring but it's always a sort of gentle rain, good for making things green.
We have been up to all kinds of things. My parents came, and we took a three day extravaganza tour of Westlandet, Bergen and some of the fjords around it as well as one day in Hardanger, which was exquisite. If you're interested in seeing the trip, you can go to Picasa and look at Ben's photos. It was a really nice visit, lots of laughs, some fun times, and a whole lot of baby-inspired excitement. After my parents left it was Syttende Mai, Norway's national day, when the whole country goes Nordic and parties. Bundader (national costumes), traditional herring breakfasts, a big parade, barbecues in the park. Ben and I marched in the parade with my school. Some pics ahead. First, me looking very pregnant and water-retaining with two of my fabulous students, Astrid on the left and Helene on the right, both in national costumes. Then, looking down Karl Johan's Gate towards the castle (the king and his family are there waving to us, you just can't see them yet). Stine Pernille, my colleague and friend, in the background. Finally, random marching band.
So that was fun. And this weekend, another set of festivities. We christened little Inga! Yesterday there was a big party for her at Petter and Eldri's. She of course had no idea why everyone was smiling at her and showering her with gifts, but the grownups enjoyed themselves (maybe too much? I have never seen so many empty wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays). But first there was the meal, a sort of Mediterranean/Greek themed do. We were enlisted to make green salad and tabouli...for forty people. I optimistically thought this would be a fairly easy job. Oh man, what a production. Tabouli for forty requires roughly...
2 large bags of bulgar, soaked
7 large bunches of parsley, chopped
5 large bunches of mint, chopped
1 large bag of shallots, chopped
1 bunch of green onions, chopped
half an onion, chopped
about 2-3 cups of olive oil
the juice from TWENTY FOUR lemons
about 3T of cinnamon
lots of salt and pepper
...and a kilo of tomatoes, chopped.
My recommendation to you: next time you make tabouli for forty people, make sure you have a decent kitchen knife and no predisposition for carpal tunnel syndrome. We couldn't fit the tabouli into bowls, so old Benj went and scrubbed out the recycling bin for us. Witness, tabouli for 40, salad for 40, ready to go. We should be caterers, I think.
Proud papa, grilling chicken.
And the guest of honor today at the church, being held by her favorite Godfather.
It was a lot of fun, from chopping madly to being given a contract for how I'm supposed to behave as a Godparent: "pray with the child. Send her gifts on her christening day. Take her to church with you and light a candle. Give her bible stories..." Ben and I were the admittedly more secular Godparents, so we'll probably send money when she graduates from high school and send her lots of good vibes and letters over the years.
I think that's all to report...school continues to go well, and baby preparations are at least partially underway. I am quite pregnant, as you can see. The little one is moving around a lot and it's fun to imagine what he/she will be like. I cannot believe it is a mere two months until this baby arrives. Some days the thought panics me terribly. Other days I can't wait. Well, that's a lie: other days I think I will be ready when it's time, which is the best I think I can do!
Store klem fra
Susie
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Spring at last
I have a cold. I seem to be especially prone to colds when the seasons change. Perhaps this is because of the winds of invasion (look it up!). In any event, this cold has been insidious because it took about four days to materialize after the telltale scratchy throat, etc. and the beginning signs were so minor I thought it just wasn't going to come at all. Next thing I know: snot central. Iyiyiy. Normally when I think I'm getting a cold I take all manner of schtuff like micostat mushroom wonder tincture and loads of vitamin C and some other herbal goodness that knocks it down. But when you're pregnant you have to be pretty strict about not taking things like that, lest the lille pille gets defective, so I have to just watch my colds come and go. I wish this one would go. I feel like a mucus factory.
Sorry for sharing.
Gorgeous day here. The sun is now up at 5:00 a.m. or so and the mørketid, the so-called "dark time," is a distant and painful memory. We live in an incredibly sunny apartment, it turns out, which is lovely because the sunlight pours in all day (and not so lovely when it wakes us up at 5:00...). There is still some snow on the ground, that kind of snow I remember from childhoods in Boston: piles and piles of it that won't really melt until May even though the sun is out most days. Where I live, close to Oslo center, it's pretty bare by now, but up at Berg the schoolyard still has big ugly drifts.
Last week was sort of the passage between winter and spring: Påske. Påske means Easter, and the Norwegians take Easter seriously. It isn't actually a religious holiday here; it's the last ski vacation of the season, and everyone takes a full 10 days off: the whole week before Easter, plus the Monday after Easter Sunday. This means you can get a full day of skiing in on Easter Sunday before you go home and get settled on Monday. The world is sort of functional until about the Wednesday before, but most things shut down for good Thursday through Monday. More evidence of the advanced state of civilization in this country. The Norwegians know how to take a vacation.
We had a lovely Påskeferie, and I have a slideshow to prove it. First of all, Ben and I splurged on a little getaway. I have been making decent money for a few months now, and I wanted to spend a little before we have a baby and no time to get away together. What I really wanted to do was spend a week on the beach in Mexico, but since that was totally unrealistic we went to Stockholm for four days instead, stayed in a medium-swanky hotel with a sea theme, an ice bar (my idea of hell: socializing in -5 Celsius), and a gorgeous breakfast spread every day (if only I had someone in my apartment, making me eggs three-ways, bacon, fruit, müsli, yogurt, coffee, tea, toast...), and just hung out. Loved Stockholm. No offense to quaint Oslo, but Stockholm is a real city. Great museums, great parks, stunning architecture, cool people, fashion, neat stores, good food. We took it at a fairly leisurely pace, ate a lot of street food, enjoyed the wateriness of the city. Stockholm is built on 14 islands, so it has a really interesting footprint and you're constantly crossing bridges. Some are so short you barely notice; others take 20 minutes and you're looking down on the Baltic from a great height. You'll see from the pics that there's a preponderance of boats, and the city definitely feels like it revolves around the sea. Nice.
We came back Wednesday, did our taxes, saw the midwife (baby's heartbeat sounds good; he/she is moving like mad these days. I'm a little on the small side, but they think that's normal). Then Thursday bright and early Ben and I went to the train station and met Petter and Eldri, who took us to a little place called Kongsvoll, to the Kongsvold Fjellstue, near Dovre, about four hours northwest of Oslo. I can't find a great map, but here's an interactive one that lets you get pretty close: we were nearest to Oppdal.
This is a place that Petter has been going to since he was a kid, with his mom, and he has since taken his own family every year. This year, we were the family! It was a really special and cool place, an historic hotel made up of about ten red wooden buildings. We skied and rested and ate wayyy too much rich food and watched murder mysteries every night--another Norwegian Påske tradition. The snow was called rotten snø, which translates pretty cleanly to "rotten snow," meaning it's thin and mushy and you fall through very easily. Petter and Eldri took me on two easier days of skiing, and they took Ben on two more difficult ones. I was disappointed not to get to the top of the ridge behind the hotel, but I'm glad I didn't go because apparently it was pretty treacherous and I'm not a great skier and you know, baby and all. Ben actually crashed on his face and got a little banged up.
Lovely week. Hard to come back to real life, especially real life with a head cold, but the teaching schedule is seeming a little more manageable and since it's become spring Oslo feels like an entirely different place to me. In the middle of winter I sometimes felt as though I was living at the edge of the world, light years away from everyone. I felt so isolated and dark. Now I feel like Norway isn't half as far as it was; it's just up here, little ways North...
I will stop prattling on. Here is the slideshow. Bonus belly shots at the beginning. Enjoy!
Sorry for sharing.
Gorgeous day here. The sun is now up at 5:00 a.m. or so and the mørketid, the so-called "dark time," is a distant and painful memory. We live in an incredibly sunny apartment, it turns out, which is lovely because the sunlight pours in all day (and not so lovely when it wakes us up at 5:00...). There is still some snow on the ground, that kind of snow I remember from childhoods in Boston: piles and piles of it that won't really melt until May even though the sun is out most days. Where I live, close to Oslo center, it's pretty bare by now, but up at Berg the schoolyard still has big ugly drifts.
Last week was sort of the passage between winter and spring: Påske. Påske means Easter, and the Norwegians take Easter seriously. It isn't actually a religious holiday here; it's the last ski vacation of the season, and everyone takes a full 10 days off: the whole week before Easter, plus the Monday after Easter Sunday. This means you can get a full day of skiing in on Easter Sunday before you go home and get settled on Monday. The world is sort of functional until about the Wednesday before, but most things shut down for good Thursday through Monday. More evidence of the advanced state of civilization in this country. The Norwegians know how to take a vacation.
We had a lovely Påskeferie, and I have a slideshow to prove it. First of all, Ben and I splurged on a little getaway. I have been making decent money for a few months now, and I wanted to spend a little before we have a baby and no time to get away together. What I really wanted to do was spend a week on the beach in Mexico, but since that was totally unrealistic we went to Stockholm for four days instead, stayed in a medium-swanky hotel with a sea theme, an ice bar (my idea of hell: socializing in -5 Celsius), and a gorgeous breakfast spread every day (if only I had someone in my apartment, making me eggs three-ways, bacon, fruit, müsli, yogurt, coffee, tea, toast...), and just hung out. Loved Stockholm. No offense to quaint Oslo, but Stockholm is a real city. Great museums, great parks, stunning architecture, cool people, fashion, neat stores, good food. We took it at a fairly leisurely pace, ate a lot of street food, enjoyed the wateriness of the city. Stockholm is built on 14 islands, so it has a really interesting footprint and you're constantly crossing bridges. Some are so short you barely notice; others take 20 minutes and you're looking down on the Baltic from a great height. You'll see from the pics that there's a preponderance of boats, and the city definitely feels like it revolves around the sea. Nice.
We came back Wednesday, did our taxes, saw the midwife (baby's heartbeat sounds good; he/she is moving like mad these days. I'm a little on the small side, but they think that's normal). Then Thursday bright and early Ben and I went to the train station and met Petter and Eldri, who took us to a little place called Kongsvoll, to the Kongsvold Fjellstue, near Dovre, about four hours northwest of Oslo. I can't find a great map, but here's an interactive one that lets you get pretty close: we were nearest to Oppdal.
This is a place that Petter has been going to since he was a kid, with his mom, and he has since taken his own family every year. This year, we were the family! It was a really special and cool place, an historic hotel made up of about ten red wooden buildings. We skied and rested and ate wayyy too much rich food and watched murder mysteries every night--another Norwegian Påske tradition. The snow was called rotten snø, which translates pretty cleanly to "rotten snow," meaning it's thin and mushy and you fall through very easily. Petter and Eldri took me on two easier days of skiing, and they took Ben on two more difficult ones. I was disappointed not to get to the top of the ridge behind the hotel, but I'm glad I didn't go because apparently it was pretty treacherous and I'm not a great skier and you know, baby and all. Ben actually crashed on his face and got a little banged up.
Lovely week. Hard to come back to real life, especially real life with a head cold, but the teaching schedule is seeming a little more manageable and since it's become spring Oslo feels like an entirely different place to me. In the middle of winter I sometimes felt as though I was living at the edge of the world, light years away from everyone. I felt so isolated and dark. Now I feel like Norway isn't half as far as it was; it's just up here, little ways North...
I will stop prattling on. Here is the slideshow. Bonus belly shots at the beginning. Enjoy!
Monday, March 30, 2009
Still alive in Oslo!
Hi blog fans,
I'm so sorry for this long lapse. The simple answer is I've been working like a dog and have had very little time for writing of any kind--let alone any of the other commitments I made (like to finish War and Peace sometime this century, do my taxes, you know). So let me catch everyone up...
Well, spring is sort of kind of here; two days before Daylight Savings (later here than there, just happened on Sunday), we got another foot of snow. But then it stopped snowing and settled in big drifts in the mountains, where Ben and I went for the weekend, and with twelve-hour days it really was quite magical. The snow in Oslo is still piled up in ugly brown blobs but the birds seem to be back (some beautiful gull or other was all over in the Vigelands Park today....migrating through, or back for the summer?). The sky is temperamental but clear a lot of mornings. Early morning light has been a real uplift.
So, right, life has been busy. I am still teaching two English classes at BVS, and I also started my gig as an after-school English teacher for a group of minority Norwegian high schoolers out in Lørenskog, a town about 30 minutes from Oslo by train. That's two afternoons a week. Finally, I'm teaching an adult ed course called "Administrative English" on Thursday mornings at the University. My last official commitment is my online writing class. I think if I were teaching 5 courses at one place, it might not feel so overwhelming, but the planning, grading, and keeping tracking of sooo many students, with such different needs, leaves me exhausted most evenings. Luckily, I think the worst of it is over--I had a moment last week when I felt like my brain was a sieve and I couldn't even fathom the concept of groceries, let alone taxes or verb tenses. But next week is Easter Break, and then due to various factors life should get steadily less chaotic over the next six weeks or so, then taper down further until I have just my two classes at Berg for most of May and all of June, and then I go on maternity leave around the beginning of July...
All of which to say, this past weekend in the mountains was totally necessary and completely renewing. Ben and I drove up after school on Friday, finally getting out of town around 6:00 with all our stuff in backpacks in the trunk of Petter and Eldri's car. We arrived up at the parking lot to Thor and Kristin's hytte around 9:00 after a minor detour down the wrong road, strapped on the packs and the skis, and found ourselves ensconced in a dark moonless Norwegian night. Luckily Ben guessed approximately where to turn right off the un-groomed trail and we stumbled upon the cabin in the dark, me feeling pretty hard core to have trussed up the hill in a pack, on skis, at 5 and a half months pregnant. (Very Norwegian, too.) It was so nice and quiet and student-less up there...we basically ate and slept and skied and read until Sunday morning when we very sadly had to return to Oslo.
Man, I do have to say this country is stunning sometimes. Nice too to capture the hytte here for you all.
Speaking of photos, people have requested a belly shot of me. Later, when I can finagle my way onto Ben's laptop, I will attempt to post one (as well as a beautiful shot of the sliver moon that came up our second night i fjellen). The truth is, though, that I am not showing very drastically at all yet. That doesn't mean I'm not feeling lots of pregnancy symptoms. I have a small rodent crawling around in my belly, for one thing...he/she wiggles, kicks, punches, rolls, and does lord knows what. In order to make space for this movement, my uterus is pushing up my lungs and rib cage and internal organs...and I am feeling it. I have on multiple occasions been in absolute agony with pain in the right ribs, front and back. It feels like a little man with a hammer and a long nail is slowly pounding it into my ribs. Then, weirdly, it passes. Today I saw the physical therapist for the first time and I have a massage on Thursday. Also doing my yoga video when I can find the time. And sleeping with an arsenal of pillows. Adjusting, adjusting.
Making dinner so I will stop...much love to everyone. Glad people liked the recipes and photos. On tonight's table, my old standby: red lentil dal with coconut milk and garam masala over rice. Might sound difficult, but actually it's a 20-minute meal. Shoot ya the recipe if you're interested.
Klem,
Susie
I'm so sorry for this long lapse. The simple answer is I've been working like a dog and have had very little time for writing of any kind--let alone any of the other commitments I made (like to finish War and Peace sometime this century, do my taxes, you know). So let me catch everyone up...
Well, spring is sort of kind of here; two days before Daylight Savings (later here than there, just happened on Sunday), we got another foot of snow. But then it stopped snowing and settled in big drifts in the mountains, where Ben and I went for the weekend, and with twelve-hour days it really was quite magical. The snow in Oslo is still piled up in ugly brown blobs but the birds seem to be back (some beautiful gull or other was all over in the Vigelands Park today....migrating through, or back for the summer?). The sky is temperamental but clear a lot of mornings. Early morning light has been a real uplift.
So, right, life has been busy. I am still teaching two English classes at BVS, and I also started my gig as an after-school English teacher for a group of minority Norwegian high schoolers out in Lørenskog, a town about 30 minutes from Oslo by train. That's two afternoons a week. Finally, I'm teaching an adult ed course called "Administrative English" on Thursday mornings at the University. My last official commitment is my online writing class. I think if I were teaching 5 courses at one place, it might not feel so overwhelming, but the planning, grading, and keeping tracking of sooo many students, with such different needs, leaves me exhausted most evenings. Luckily, I think the worst of it is over--I had a moment last week when I felt like my brain was a sieve and I couldn't even fathom the concept of groceries, let alone taxes or verb tenses. But next week is Easter Break, and then due to various factors life should get steadily less chaotic over the next six weeks or so, then taper down further until I have just my two classes at Berg for most of May and all of June, and then I go on maternity leave around the beginning of July...
All of which to say, this past weekend in the mountains was totally necessary and completely renewing. Ben and I drove up after school on Friday, finally getting out of town around 6:00 with all our stuff in backpacks in the trunk of Petter and Eldri's car. We arrived up at the parking lot to Thor and Kristin's hytte around 9:00 after a minor detour down the wrong road, strapped on the packs and the skis, and found ourselves ensconced in a dark moonless Norwegian night. Luckily Ben guessed approximately where to turn right off the un-groomed trail and we stumbled upon the cabin in the dark, me feeling pretty hard core to have trussed up the hill in a pack, on skis, at 5 and a half months pregnant. (Very Norwegian, too.) It was so nice and quiet and student-less up there...we basically ate and slept and skied and read until Sunday morning when we very sadly had to return to Oslo.
Man, I do have to say this country is stunning sometimes. Nice too to capture the hytte here for you all.
Speaking of photos, people have requested a belly shot of me. Later, when I can finagle my way onto Ben's laptop, I will attempt to post one (as well as a beautiful shot of the sliver moon that came up our second night i fjellen). The truth is, though, that I am not showing very drastically at all yet. That doesn't mean I'm not feeling lots of pregnancy symptoms. I have a small rodent crawling around in my belly, for one thing...he/she wiggles, kicks, punches, rolls, and does lord knows what. In order to make space for this movement, my uterus is pushing up my lungs and rib cage and internal organs...and I am feeling it. I have on multiple occasions been in absolute agony with pain in the right ribs, front and back. It feels like a little man with a hammer and a long nail is slowly pounding it into my ribs. Then, weirdly, it passes. Today I saw the physical therapist for the first time and I have a massage on Thursday. Also doing my yoga video when I can find the time. And sleeping with an arsenal of pillows. Adjusting, adjusting.
Making dinner so I will stop...much love to everyone. Glad people liked the recipes and photos. On tonight's table, my old standby: red lentil dal with coconut milk and garam masala over rice. Might sound difficult, but actually it's a 20-minute meal. Shoot ya the recipe if you're interested.
Klem,
Susie
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