Home Sweet Home

It has been a crazy weekend which thankfully culminated in us putting an offer on a house! I don't want to say too much more and jinx everything, but it looks like by November, we should be enjoying life on a lake...

Way Up There

For the next week and a half, I'll be in central New York, not so much "on top of the world" as somewhere in the northern hemisphere. I'll leave you with some pictures way up north, above the tree line...still not quite the Arctic Circle, but way, way up there.

Nope, I Am Not An Intellectual Giant

Because I have an adolescent boy's sense of humor, I found the following Aftenposten article extremely funny:

http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1949645.ece

I especially found the whole "Save the environment, shoot a moose!" mentality of the article hilarious (although obviously misguided and ridiculous).

Changes

I couldn't say anything before I knew that Kevin's coworkers had all been informed (just in case any of them reads this blog) but the announcement was made yesterday, so now I can announce it here:
WE'RE MOVING BACK TO THE UNITED STATES!!!!!!!!!!
Norway is a lovely country, but I have been incredibly homesick pretty much the whole time we have lived here. I really tried to grin and bear it for the sake of Kevin's career, but over the last couple of months, it became apparent that he wasn't happy living abroad either. He loves his job, but was willing to give it up in order to move back to the U.S. again. Luckily for him, he won't have to...after a long talk with his boss, it has been decided that he can continue in his role as CFO from the New York office (although he will have to travel to Norway 1 or 2 weeks every month with occasional trips to Asia).
Originally, we were supposed to go to Vancouver together this Friday, but with the new developments, we'll be going to New York instead to look for a house in the Finger Lakes area. Beautiful lakes, wineries, in close proximity to so many wonderful people...I can't wait. It's crazy, everything is happening so fast that my head is kind of spinning, but in a good way! Every so often, I remember some random little thing that I have missed since we moved to Norway and I get excited all over again. (A good example is Diet Coke--Coca Cola Light just doesn't taste the same. And don't even get me started about free soda refills in restaurants! See, I'm all giddy and screechy all over again, just thinking of the beverage possibilities!)
Anyway, assuming we do find a house next week, it will probably take at least 2 months to close, so I'm guessing we won't move until November or December. I'm glad I still have some time to have a few more Norwegian adventures, and once we move, I plan to travel back to Norway occasionally with Kevin too. I still want to travel above the Arctic Circle, I want to check out the islands along the southern coast, I want to see polar bears on Svalbard. More than anything, though, I want to go home, and it looks like that wish is coming true very soon!

My Dogs Enjoy Grazing

15 kilogram bag of Science Diet dog food...510 NOK ($85)

1 Kong rubber chew toy...180 NOK ($30)

The knowledge that my dogs prefer sticks and grass clippings to their very expensive, veterinarian recommended toys and food...PRICELESS.

A Year Has Passed

A year ago today, we arrived in Norway, excited to begin our new life here. I'm a bit of a technophobe, so I had no idea what a blog was back then. Instead, to keep friends and family up to date with our progress, I sent out emails which I dubbed "Norsk Newsletters." In celebration of a year spent here (wow, has it really been that long?) I thought I'd share some excerpts from those first bewildered letters with you--I think I've actually come a long way!

"We live at the very edge of town, surrounded by forest. It is a gorgeous setting, but something screams in the woods every night. I don’t know what it is, a wild cat, a screech owl, a troll? Whatever it is, it is loud, and the dogs barking madly at it are even louder, so the whole living on the edge of civilization hasn’t been quite as peaceful as I had hoped! Oh well, hopefully whatever it is will hibernate this winter!"

"Kevin and I went to a dinner at the inn owned by his company. The main course was reindeer—eek! I discreetly filled my plate with potatoes and vegetables, but the portly man sitting next to me bellowed, “You didn’t take any reindeer!!!! Don’t you eat reindeer?” I almost replied that I would rather eat Santa Claus himself than Comet or Cupid or Rudolph, but I restrained myself. I tried to explain to him why I don’t eat meat, but the poor guy just looked perplexed as he shoveled heaping forkfuls of reindeer meat into his mouth. I turned back to my plate and fervently hoped that dessert wouldn’t be tooth fairy soufflé with Easter bunny sauce!"

"Our furniture arrived in the container. The truck driver had quite a time maneuvering the huge semi backwards up our very long, narrow and twisty driveway. By the time he finally reached our house, several small trees and our lamp post lay in his wake. When he parked, the movers jumped out. There was an American, a Pole and a German. The company is owned by a Norwegian, but it is most cost efficient for him to hire foreign labor. Hmm, an American from San Francisco is considered cheap labor here! I was very amused at how frightened the movers were of spiders. There was a small spider web on our tent, and the German was sure it must belong to a black widow, or some other terribly poisonous American spider! I had to carry the stupid tent to the garage, as none of them would touch it. It was an interesting move—the American drank many beers while he worked, and then had the brilliant idea to burn all the packing material, instead of hauling it away as was contracted. I came out of the kitchen to find a huge bonfire going in our front yard, the plastic bubble wrap producing some toxic fumes. When he noticed that I was more than a little unhappy about the situation, the American suggested that I could use the huge charred spot in the lawn as a barbeque pit. Great idea, and if I ever decide to grill a moose, I now have the perfect spot!"

"I visited the vet last week to establish Kermit and Honey as patients. I think that Norwegian vet care will be the one area where we will actually save money. There are no heartworms in Norway, and for the most part, no fleas either. The vet did explain that there are no dog or cat fleas, but the birds and “the little roly-poly animals” have fleas that can occasionally jump onto dogs. Of course I had to figure out what these little roly-poly animals were, so the vet and I engaged in a game of charades, and finally I correctly guessed hedgehogs!"

"I have been talked into trying a couple traditional Norwegian dishes. (No, not lutefisk, I don’t think that will ever happen!) I had a taste of sour cream porridge, and yes, it is as terrible as it sounds. Even with loads of cinnamon and sugar on it, wow, that is definitely an acquired taste! I accidentally tried fiskekake—it looked like cheese so I took a bite. I’m not a big fan of tofu, and fiskekake has the gelatinous consistency of tofu with a creepy, fishy taste. Really unpleasant stuff! I have tried the infamous brown cheese. It’s okay, I guess, if you like your cheese nutty and sweet, which I don’t!"

Hmm, maybe I haven't actually come that far...I'm still not a fan of the brown cheese or fish cakes, I haven't ever tried lutefisk (although I have had a couple of unpleasant rakfisk enounters) and when I think of reindeer, I still think of Rudolph, not dinner. I have no idea what was making that racket in the middle of the night, but after experiencing all the birds twittering in the middle of the night this summer, I'm guessing it was some sort of an avian screech. The grass has grown back in our yard after the scorching of 2006 and our yard has occasionally provided munchies for a moose family, but I haven't seen a single hedgehog. I'm still looking, though! It's been a year of highs and lows, and in the end, I'm grateful for the experience.

A Fearsome Creature

I was wandering around the open air museum on Oslo's Bygdøy Peninsula when I stumbled upon this ferocious looking tree. Does anyone else see the angry little tree troll? It's not just me, right?

I Was Industrious Today

I drove down to my friend Heather's house today--her farm is about 3 hours away from our house, across several large mountains. I was dubious about our plan to pick raspberries as I drove along, watching the ominous looking sky. The first photo is of the town of Bagn, shrouded in fog. By the time I made it to Heather's house, the sky had cleared and the sun was shining. We walked up a really steep hill with our little buckets--I was winded before I had picked a single berry, and I still had to contend with balancing on the rocky hillside, overly friendly flies, and a nasty, stinging plant called "Burning Bush." Ow. Being industrious is tough! I would make a lousy farmer--Heather filled her whole bucket in the time it took me to pick about 25 berries. She has plans to make jams and pies, and she has been making juice out of the blueberries and currants she has already picked...Kevin and I ate the 25 raspberries I proudly toted home tonight on ice cream, they are all gone now.

The second and third photos were taken at Heather's farm--the sun didn't last very long. Oh well, I do like the effect of the dark, rolling clouds in the pictures. The last picture is of a couple of the many sheep I ran into today (not literally, obviously!) during my drive. Norway is chock full of moose crossing signs, but I have never seen a moose near one of the signs (in fact, the only place I have ever seen moose has been in my own front yard). Norway is also chock full of sheep crossing signs, and I have noticed that without fail, wherever there is a sign cautioning drivers to look out for sheep, there will be sheep...lots and lots of sheep grazing, napping, wandering down the road. Amazingly, everyone manages to weave around them, even on the most difficult, twisting roads, and all the roadside sheep live to "baaa" another day.

If You Like Sheep, You'll Love Muskoxen!

The last time we went to Maihaugen (the open air museum of old Norwegian buildings in Lillehammer), we met an interesting lady knitting in one of the little houses. Her name is Wenche, and she hand spins and knits muskox wool. She said the wool is 8 times warmer than sheeps' wool, and it is softer than angora. Her website is: www.moskusdesign.com (It is in Norwegian, but at least there are lots of pictures for those who don't read Norwegian!)

Sommerslagere

Kevin and I went to a great outdoor concert last night in Gjøvik. Two of the performers, Trond Nagell Dahl and Trond Lien, are pretty famous in Norway (and if I understood enough Norwegian to watch NRK TV, I might have seen their show, but since I have been on a steady TV diet of American DVD's since we got here, I hadn't heard of them before). The music was fantastic, a fun mix of 70's and 80's covers, Norwegian and Swedish hits and even a surprisingly good rendition of Bob Marley's "Could This Be Love." (This is actually the second time we have heard live reggae music since we moved here...last September, we went to a carnival where Ravi was performing and he did several reggae tunes too. It's kind of funny to hear reggae so far north, performed by such blonde people, but I must say I have been very impressed by the quality of all the live music I have heard here.) Anyway, at the concert last night, the singers bantered with each other between the songs and the audience roared with laughter. I really couldn't follow the jokes, because in order for me to understand Norwegian, the speaker must talk slowly and clearly and not use slang (and also use very small words). I felt very frustrated with myself, but at least I was able to appreciate one really funny moment of the concert. As the evening grew dusky, a bat started circling the stage, hunting for bugs. The female singer noticed the bat, and apparently the bat noticed her too, because it started swooping around her head. The singer was such a pro and she managed to keep singing as she tried to run away from the bat--even her surprised shrieks were right on pitch! One of the guitar players almost fell over from laughing so hard, and the whole audience was cracking up, especially when the bat flew right between her knees. It finally flew off into the night, much to the poor singer's relief. (When Kevin's dad was visiting, he asked us if there were bats in Norway. We said we didn't know, as we had never seen one. Now we can answer with confidence that yes, they do live here, and they seem to appreciate a good '80's medley!)

Speaking of Old Stuff...

E16 is a major highway in Norway, connecting Oslo and Bergen. Even though E16 is a busy thouroughfare, traffic is sometimes brought to a halt by sheep wandering in the road. In addition to the occasional farm animal and all the gorgeous scenery, there are so many things to see along this highway. On our most recent drive back from Bergen, we made a quick detour to see the old road that used to connect the eastern part of the country with the west. There is an old, abandoned farm at Galdane which sits high on a hill, overlooking the river and the ancient road. Kevin said he got chills looking up at those old buildings, imagining all the road weary travellers who must have stopped by along their exhausting hike across Norway. The road is just a grass path now and it looks like parts of it have eroded away into the river below. Still, it seems like a nice place to go for a walk and be tranported back in time a few centuries.

Pictures of Really Old Stuff

I don't have too much to write about these days...Kevin is back to work and school hasn't yet started for me, so I'm just hanging out with the beasts, reading, cooking and spending time outside in the long-overdue nice weather. Since I have nothing much going on now, I thought I'd post some pictures from when Kevin's parents were in town. One day we drove up to Beitostolen to take a hike with the dogs, have a picnic and enjoy the interesting scenery above the tree line. Mother Nature wasn't too cooperative, so we ended up leaving the icy rain of the mountains as soon as Kevin's dad had a chance to make and throw a snowball (he lives in Florida, so it was a treat for him). Even though our day didn't turn out quite as planned, we ended up having a great time on the drive back. There are a lot of ruins and remnants of an ancient society in the Slidre valley area so we stopped to walk around and take some pictures. That big rock in the protective gazebo is called the Einang stein, and it is actually a grave marker from about 300 A.D. etched with runes. The Einang area has been turned into a nice little park with a walking trail that leads tourists from one ancient site to the next. There is an old smelting pit and several burial mounds (third picture) from the 400's. The last photo was taken by Foss where several thousand year old stone carvings of moose have been found (I'm guessing the red paint was added at a later date to help preserve them and make them more visible). Kevin and I have begun to pay more attention to the road signs in Norway, and we have noticed that whenever there is a white sign with a 4 leaf clover shape, it's generally a good idea to pull over and check it out, even if we can't understand the Norwegian writing on the sign. This clover symbol means there is some sort of tourist attraction--sometimes it's a stave church, sometimes it's a waterfall, sometimes it's a museum, and sometimes, like in this case, it's a bunch of really old stuff that's worth taking the time to pull over for!

A Short Rant

Last summer, about 4 days before we moved with the dogs to Norway, I got Honey's dog license renewal in the mail. Partly due to the insane stress I was under, and partly due to the fact that Honey was leaving the country later that week, I kind of forgot/ignored the letter. About a month in to our stay in Norway, I received a summons to go to court with a fine of $200 for failure to renew Honey's dog license (and a nasty letter about how failing to vaccinate my dog against rabies is a threat to public health). At this point, I saw red...you would not believe the veterinary hoops I jumped through to get the dogs to Norway. Not only had Honey (and Kermit) had their 3 year rabies shots less than 10 months before, but they had also had another 1 year rabies vaccine the previous month, in addition to having their rabies blood titer levels drawn (at $200 a test). I called the town clerk in my little village, slightly hysterical. Our town was tiny, only about 720 residents, and she immediately knew who I was and that I had moved to Norway. She was very reassuring on the phone, explaining that the local dog control officer was a tad overzealous, and that she would just explain to the judge and get the case dismissed. I thanked her profusely, breathed a sigh of relief and, assuming the dogs records would be expunged from the village computer system, forgot about the whole ordeal. A couple of months later, in December, I received a letter regarding Kermit's license renewal, along with a second, more threatening letter. (Our mail is forwarded to Kevin's company's U.S. office in Auburn, and then at the end of the week, forwarded on to us in Norway. Apparently the dog control officer fired off the second, more menacing letter after she heard no response from the first, but the 2 letters arrived together at our house.) Since we were planning to go back to New York for Christmas, I decided to drive down to our former town and straighten the whole dog mess out in person. Again, the town clerk remembered exactly who I was and laughed about how ridiculous it was that I would keep getting these license renewal letters. She also apologized for the nasty tone of the second letter, saying that the power-crazed dog control officer would sit in the office, firing off these letters and laughing to herself, saying "Gotcha!" The clerk promised me all would be taken care of, and wished me a merry Christmas. Again, I blithely assumed this whole fiasco was over, that everyone in my teeny village now knew that my troublesome dogs and I lived on a different continent, and that we would never hear from them again. I was wrong...I just got another letter in the mail regarding Honey's dog license renewal. I suppose I should call the village hall immediately and hopefully avoid another court summons. That should take care of the situation until, oh, about December when Kermit's license will again be due. (I know that being a dog control officer is a tough and very necessary job, but my little village is full of unlicensed dogs who run freely through town. I think this particular dog control officer's priorities should be a little more about educating all the irresponsible dog owners about proper canine care, and a little less about trying to collect $2.50 in licensing fees from dogs who live in Norway...I'm just saying.)

Pictures from an Abandoned Farm

We took the dogs for a long walk this afternoon over to an old, abandoned farm on a hilltop. The farm is owned by the owner of Kevin's company, but due to strict laws in Norway restricting the use and sale of farm land, it has been deteriorating for years. It's kind of sad to see such old buildings falling apart, but it is a nice place to go for a walk and get a pretty bird's eye view of Gjøvik and the lake.

Brrrr

We have now lived in Norway for almost a year, and in the past 50 weeks, there is a sentence I haven't uttered once. I have never ever in our time here complained, "I'm too hot!" I used to complain about being too hot on a regular basis in the U.S. I can be a touch overdramatic at times, and I might, once upon a time, have even shrieked that I was melting, or something to that effect. When I was in grad school in Iowa City, my crappy apartment didn't have air conditioning, and on one particularly balmy evening (106 Fahrenheit at 10 PM) I may have even had a Scarlett O'Hara-esque tantrum, shaking my sweaty fist at the sky and yelling, "As God as my witness, I'll never live without central air again!" Well, we have no air conditioning here and I have never needed it (although there have been a few times this summer that I would have loved to have fired up the furnace). We're on our way out the door to see a movie and I'm wearing jeans and a sweater. Not a lightweight, short-sleeved summer sweater, but a heavy cable-knit garment. It's August and I'm wearing wool! (In case anyone was concerned that Kevin no longer gets to hear my constant bitching and moaning about being too hot, never fear, I still bitch and moan to him, now I just complain, "I'm too cold!")

Surrounded

Lately, we have been under surveillance...the cute little kitty above has been spying on us. She sits on a stump outside of our house, peering in our windows, or she hides in the bushes, taking notes as we walk the dogs. I don't know what her story is, but I don't think she is a stray. She's not thin and when I offer her treats, even the canned food that's like cat crack to our felines, she isn't interested. I am a little concerned that she might be in heat as she is extremely friendly and affectionate, but hopefully she is just a really nice cat. (If she is in heat, there is no shortage of tom cat company in the neighborhood, so I really hope that her owners are prepared to care for ensuing kittens. But hopefully, they are responsible people who have spayed her and she is just ridiculously friendly and enjoys rolling around and trilling.) Kevin calls her "Watcher Cat"--terribly creative, I know...that is the reason that he has never been allowed to name any of our pets. (That and the fact that he insists that "Satchel" is a fine name for man or beast!)

Anway, Watcher Cat is not the only creature to have taken an interest in our yard lately. Around 3 in the morning, Kermit and Honey went nuts, barking madly, standing on their hind legs at the open bedroom window. I shooed them out of the room and returned to the window to try to see what was upsetting them. It wasn't light enough for me to see anything (damn that approaching autumn and the retreat of the sun!) but I distinctly heard something large and lumbering tromping through the yard, sticks cracking under foot (or paw or hoof as the case may be). I'm guessing it was probably a moose, but Kevin said that it might have been a bear, as they are occasionally spotted close to our town. I must say, if given a choice of critter encounters, I would gladly opt for a purry, roly-poly, overly nosy little cat over a bear (or a moose) any day!