Homesick

My friend went back to Norway around noon and the house seems a bit empty without her around now.

I guess I’m feeling a bit homesick to day, missing family and friends….

… but I’ve known even since before I came to England that there’s bound to be days like these and I’ll get through it. Just a bit tough going from having the house filled with people last night to being alone again today.

The blues will pass tomorrow though when I’m off to lectures again and get to focus on my writing again, that is after all the main reason that I’m here in the first place.

Every time I think about that I feel very lucky indeed.

Birthday celebration

I celebrated my birthday last night, and it was a very nice party.

I was quite happy about the job my Norwegian friend and I had done with the food and setting up the table, so I took a couple of photos.

Collage…

I have to admit I have had a tiny bit of the blues in the last couple of days, and it’s very likely because it’s been my birthday. Now you probably think that I’ve got the blues because I’m getting older, but that’s not it at all: as I always say, think of the alternative – if you didn’t get older you’d be dead!! No, I’ve had a little bit of the blues because every year for my birthday I gather my family and friends and celebrate my birthday.

When I was 30 and 35 I rented a place and invited lots of family and friends to a party. The other years in between 30 and 35 I have celebrated my birthday twice every year, once in Oslo with my friends who live there: we’ve gone out for dinner together and then to Zinatra karaoke bar – the second celebration has been in Solör with my friends and family who live there. I love my family and friends and I like to take every opportunity to gather them around me.

As I’m in England this year, obviously things are different. I will be celebrating my birthday on Saturday with new friends that I’ve made here (and one “old” friend who’s coming over from Norway) and I’m really looking forward to that, I think it will be great. At the same time I do miss my family and friends in Norway too. Now that I’m in England it seems as if I just don’t get to see them and spend enough time with them.

Today I sat down and made a big collage that I could put up in the kitchen. It’s with lots of photos of my family, friends and pets. It kind of brings them closer, but also made me even a bit sadder seeing all the fun party photos from earlier birthdays and other parties that have been.

Oh, well, there will certainly be other parties in Norway as well. I’m planning a birthday celebration in Solör when I go back there on the 15th of February so that should be good.

And I really appreciate having a visitor from Norway coming over and I’m looking forward to seeing her tonight.

Let it snow…

I wished for snow for Christmas but never got it. I guess I had to wait till my birthday then to have my wish granted!

This morning I was awoken by my mobile phone as early as 0615 when the first birthday greetings were ticking in – and when I looked at the curtains in my bedroom I thought I could recognize a glow behind them. When I pulled them aside I could see the whole world covered in snow and it was still snowing! Is that a birthday present or what???

It’s very different from last week though. Then when I was walking down to the city in 15°C I stopped and photographed some flowers that were blooming and sent to family and friends in Norway. Poor flowers now! But by now most of the snow is gone again anyway, and we’ve got 2 degrees.

The best news today though is that I’ve finally got my broadband connection in the house up and working, no thanks to Virgin!!! I could’ve predicted that installing broadband here would not go according to plan; it never does with these computer related things. And on Monday when my phone line had been upgraded I still could not get my computer online, I just kept getting error messages. I kept trying during Tuesday as well, but no. I walked down to uni, logged on to Virgin’s site and found the service number than I could call to ask for help. When I got back to the house I found that when I tried calling that number, from my home phone or mobile, I just got the message that I was not allowed to call that number. In all the emails I got from Virgin they never mention any phone number, they just say to contact them through their internet site – yeah, cause that’s easy when your internet connection is still not working!!!

I was getting frustrated, and this morning as a reply to an email I sent them yesterday describing everything I had done and asking THEM to call me, I got another completely useless email from them. For some reason I suddenly thought of something I still had not tried out – and when I did this I got online. It turns out that the installation CD hasn’t installed everything it was supposed to on my computer so I had to do that kind of manually. Maybe I’ve become a year smarter today too?????

So that’s my day, outside there’s a little bit of snow left – inside it’s me and my friend, the laptop, exploring the fabulous virtual world of the internet!

12 month contracts……

I thought it might be a problem for me getting broadband installed at my new place. Most broadband companies demand that you sign a 12 month contract before they will install broadband for you, I have found a couple that don’t, they however demand that you have a British Telecom phone line to get broadband. British Telecom on their side demands that you sign a 12 month contract with them before they will install a phone line to your house!! See where this could go very wrong???

Oh, well, fortunately I was able to keep the phone line that’s already installed in the house I’m renting and yesterday I ordered broadband from Virgin who doesn’t demand that you sign a 12 month contract (they do however charge you £50 if you cancel the contract within a year, but I guess I’ll just have to live with that!) and I got an email today saying that my phone line will be upgraded and ready for broadband use on Monday the 22nd.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’m looking forward to that.

Another really good thing that I recently learned about is this:
At my house when I moved in there was only 4 TV channels. When I searched the internet to see what options I had in ordering more TV channels through different companies as for example Sky TV it seemed like everyone demanded that you sign a 12 month contract!!! (heard that before??) Then a friend told me that I could buy this little box at the cost of about £30, a one-off payment, and I would have 30 new channels. At first I could not believe it was that simple – but you know what, it was! I stopped by Woolworth on Sunday, bought this Freeview box for £27, hooked it up to my kitchen TV and it works great!! So now I’m so happy because I can keep up my habit of being a TV-slave here in England as well! The only thing I miss now is the Eurosport channel which would have given me the chance to watch winter sports, that’s not on any of the Freeview channels. But I guess you can’t have everything, can you? I guess I’ll have to settle for having 98% of what I want!

Not bad, is it?

And I’m expecting my first visitor from Norway next weekend when I’m having a small birthday celebration here in England, really looking forward to that!

Got a house

On Wednesday I finally got to sign the contract to the house that I was originally planning to rent from October last year. I’ve signed a 6 months contract, got the keys and have inspected the property. I’m still not quite moved in though, that will probably happen tomorrow, for now I’m staying with friends in Worthing.

Any friends or family who might at some point feel like spending some time at the South coast of England are more than welcome to visit.

I survived

watching the entire ”Passion of the Christ” movie. They really should be giving out t-shirts with that written on it.

A couple of years later than most others but still last night I sat down and watched “The Passion of the Christ” on DVD. This is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. I really don’t see what all the fuss was about when it was first released in the movies. It’s another splatter movie, and not a very good one either. As my friend was commenting “This movie should’ve been called how to turn a man into a piece of raw meat in 2 hours”. There’s really nothing else going on in this movie than lots of people beating the crap out of a man. And after they’ve beaten him in all sorts of ways, with blood all over the abusers and the ground and oh well everything for an hour you’re just fed up with it you know. I considered giving up on the whole movie because I was so bored, but at the same time I had decided to see it so I forced myself to sit through another hour of it.

It sure makes me wonder about what goes on inside that head of Mel Gibson though, to think that a 2 hour beating of a man makes for good entertainment. Maybe he gets off at violence? I know there’s got to be something. Because no one really knows how Jesus was treated the last days of his life, if we assume that the stuff written in the Bible is true it’s not by far detailed enough to justify a movie like this. The topic of Jesus’ last days could have been presented in so many ways and Mr Gibson decides to make a splatter movie out of it, weird choice if you ask me.

So if you have nothing to do, absolutely nothing at all to do – DON’T see this movie. It will only be a complete waist of another 2 hours of your life that you’ll never get back. Staring at the wall for 2 hours would probably be a much better use of your time.

Back to ”work”

Tomorrow I’m going back to England. The lectures don’t start for another week but I thought it would be good to be back in Chichester to prepare for that and doing the last touch-ups on my assessments. And on Wednesday I’m finally signing the contract for the house that I originally planned to rent from October.

I’ll have to admit I do have some butterflies in my stomach before travelling tomorrow, but that is pretty much normal. I’m always a bit nervous before going on longer trips, I don’t know why, I just am. I’ve really enjoyed my stay in Norway; seeing family and friends again – and now it’s also good to go back to England to see my friends there, and get back to “work” again!

Things you didn’t know….

Oh, goody, I’ve been challenged again…. this time my friend Roy has challenged me to write the following: “Five things you probably didn’t know about me if you only know me from my blog”.

To do this I’ll probably have to write down things from my past, as I think for the last couple of years I’ve actually been sharing most of the things going on in my life on this blog (except for details from my love life and I’m NOT going to start writing about that!) so there shouldn’t really be anything new to write about there.

Let’s see, five things you wouldn’t know…..

• From I was 10 till I was 12 I took at least 3 different Norwegian folkdance courses (10 classes each) together with my two year younger cousin.
• When I was 18 I went for naked midnight swim in the swimming pool at Våler high school together with four male friends.
• After a booze cruise between Moss and Frederikshavn I had to sleep in a train till the next day because the last train to Oslo had left when the ferry reached Moss. We actually kind of “broke into” the train; we found an open window and climbed in and slept on the seats till the first train for Oslo left in the morning. I must’ve been about 19 or something at the time.
• The day after I got my driver’s license I borrowed my uncle’s car (an Opel Ascona 77 or 78 model which were the absolute most popular cars in our district) to go cruising at Flisa. After having been parked outside the bank (which is something everyone did at the time) for a while I backed without checking my mirrors and crashed into another car, which turned out to belong to my uncle’s nephew!
• Once at a party I got ridiculously drunk on Tequila and I got the mother of all hangovers, I think it lasted for about 3 days. To this day I still don’t drink tequila, and I think this must’ve happened when I was in my early twenties.

These have got to be things that those of you who know me only through this blog didn’t know about, I hope……