Is it Safe?

I was feeling a bit tired at this point in the bike ride........but not quite that tired. This is a very small cemetary on a hillside near Breilia, which is on the other side of the fjord from Trondheim. Joel and I did a 50 mile loop around some roads there last weekend. I'm building up for a 90 mile ride in mid-August, so I still have some work to do but I think I'm getting there.

Yesterday I FINALLY got my aching tooth the root canal it so richly deserved. I had a nice Russian dentist named Alexey (I assume he was Russian anyway). Alexey drilled that thing out for and hour and a half, oh what fun. At least he used copious amounts of anesthetic. I tried to eat some cookies a few hours later but my whole face was numb. I wasn't able to actually eat some dinner until my tongue started working again around 9pm. Now I have to go back once more in August so he can finish up the work.

At lunch time today I went and turned in my precious Oregon driver's license. I couldn't get any numbers to come out of the little "take a number" box for a couple of minutes, until I finally hit the right button and out came '666'. Great. I checked the top of my head to see if there were any little horny nubbins growing out. Seemed OK. I took my carefully prepared paperwork to miss Ingrid Helga Crabbypants, who proceeded to sigh and tell me all the things I didn't fill out right. There must be an international code of behaviour for DMV workers, because they all act the same. Maybe I should have spun my head around and threw that 666 down in front of her. How do you like me now Crabbypants! See you in hell!
OK actually she wasn't that bad. But I just like writing crabbypants. Joel had to do the same license thing a month ago and they told him he had to go to some sort of driving school before he could get the Norwegian license. So that's what I was expecting too, except when Cpants was finished going in the back to "make copies" (and drink coffee no doubt) she came back out and said "vi'll send you a text message ven you can come back in". I said "uhh, then I go to traffic school?" She said "nei, yust come back here". So maybe that traffic school business is only for people from backwards driving countries like Australia. Ha!

drive on,

P.S. hi to my lastfm buddies ( that means you Lisa )

Fly the coop already!

This is one of the little seagull babies that lives on the roof across the street from my apartment (look closely). I think they are about a month old now, based on the sqawk-o-meter which went through the roof around the first week of June. There are 3 hatchlings up there, and the mom and dad keep a close watch on them all day. Every time I walk out of the apartment to walk to work I get dive bombed by mom or dad, sqawking like a maniac. I used to see some other chicks in the field by the apartments but I think they all got eaten by house cats, I don't see them anymore :( I can't believe those 3 have managed to stay on that roof for a month. It's quite steep and when the wind starts blowing I'm not sure how the little dudes are holding on up there.
I will be glad when they all take off though, the morning sqawking session is quite something. It usually starts around 2am, God only knows what they are squealing about at that time of night, but it sounds like two tribes of monkeys in a battle to the death. One pair starts it and then there are at least 10 pairs of gulls in the neighborhood and pretty soon they're all going full bore. I would like to have the window open in the bedroom at night, but listening the seagull marching band doesn't do much for getting a full night's sleep.

Go ahead and laugh..........

So I was in the ICA store across the street yesterday, buying my staple food items: bread, yogurt, Coke Zero, Kvikk Lunsj etc. When I went to pick up my usual loaf of crappy Norwegian bread, I noticed that it had green mold on it. So I picked up the one next to it, that one had green mold on it as well. Hmmm, taking a closer look all of the loaves looked a bit like they had been dropped out of the back of a moving truck. It was about this time that I realized that for the last 6 months I have been buying all of my bread from the rack of week old stale loaves they were just trying to get rid of........
The actual fresh bread is in the rack 10 feet away.
It never dawned on me before why they had 2 bread racks.
All this time I just assumed Norwegians made the worst bread in the world.
My apologies to all the Norwegian bakeries.

Summer party

This picture has nothing to do with the post. I just liked it :)

Yesterday we had a big summer party at work. We had a nice buffet dinner complete with "vegetar" options, and then we watched a very funny short film last year that some of the engineers put together for the company 25th anniversary last year. After that we had a band made up of some current and former Nordic employees play for a while. The band was actually quite good, the singer was the wife of one of the engineers and she could belt it out.
Joel, Bjorn Inge, and the rest of the organizing crew made sure that we had PLENTY of beer and other drinks to last for the evening. We did our best to consume all the beer but I think there might have been a few left at the end. Most of us switched from beer to something else after the band stopped. Irene made a couple of nice Irish coffees for me, which probably would explain why I was still standing at 3:30 when the stragglers finally decided to call it a night. I had to walk home in the rain, but since it was already light outside and I was fully intoxicated it didn't seem to matter that much. I got into a large tussle with the zipper on my jacket after I got home. I had it zipped up to the collar and the zipper would not come down when I got in the door, I briefly considered going to bed with a wet jacket on, but after one final heroic effort I got the damn zipper down far enough to yank the jacket over my head. Victory was mine!
It was quite a fun evening overall, I got to hear several inebriated and abbreviated versions of Norwegian history, which you will only get after a Norwegian engineer has had at least 4 beers. Hopefully everyone made it home safe and sound.

I did finally have my first crash on the new mountain bike last week. I started down a very steep short hill full of rocks and roots, only realizing when I was half-way down that there was a very large nasty rock right in the middle of the trail at the bottom which I couldn't avoid. It threw me up in the air hard enough that both feet came off the pedals, and when I came back down on the seat my feet missed the pedals, so shortly after that the bike and I parted company. I did a nice somersault in the dirt and the bike went off the side of the trail. No harm to either me or the bike, so I just came home a bit dirtier than normal....ride on!

Flower day

I decided to join the herd and fill up a flower box yesterday. Most of the neighbors had one already so I didn't want to be the oddball flower hater guy. Cletus has my drill so I can't mount it yet but I'm sure it will be the envy of Kyavegan street. Who invented salty licorace? Man that stuff sucks but I bought a half pound of it so now I feel like I should eat at least some of it before I chuck the rest into the dumpster.
It often looks like summer outside now, except when you actually go outside and realize that it's only 45 degrees. The daylight lasts a really really really long time though now. It does feel odd to be walking around at midnight or even later and it's still light outside. The sun does go down eventually but it's so close to the horizon that it never quite gets dark out. The whole country seems to have turned bright green in the last month, it's quite beautiful to see the fields growing, all the trees filled out and flowers growing everywhere. Definitely more fun to walk to work now.
When I came home from work at lunch to do an errand today, an older lady who lives on this floor was coming out of the elevator when I came out of my door - "Sporty?" she said. I thought frantically for a second, trying to figure out what the hell she could be talking about. "Sporty?" she said it again this time pointing at her head. Then I got it. I was wearing my bike helmet. I think she thought I was just screwing off from work going out for a bike ride. "oh ja ja" I said laughing. Didn't have the heart to tell her I was just going back to work :)

Let's sum up the last 2 weeks:

flights: 8
airports: 6
miles flown: 14800
rental cars: 3
miles driven: 550
states: 4
parties: 1
funerals: 1 (mom)
weddings: 0
track meets: 2
hugs: 100+
ibuprofen tablets smuggled into Norway: 200
jet lag: massive

May Day

I promised a picture with no snow, so here ya go...finally!

Today was May Day, so we had the day off of work and luckily it was a beautiful day here. The sun was out all day and there was no wind so it was a great day for bike riding and walking outside. I set a new record for my longest continuous downhill today on the bike - 3.6 kilometers without pedaling. I think I can squeeze another 1k out of the same route but I need a road bike probably. The knobby tires on the mt. bike didn't give me enough speed on the first part of the hill.
After that I took the car on a nice drive down to past Klæbo, to Selbusjøen lake. That is one big-ass lake.
In the evening I rode my bike through the Kristiansten fort and then down through Solsiden and along the harbor. I saw a group of Norwegian teenagers throwing an American football in the park by the fort. They threw it end over end which I got a kick out of. I resisted the urge to stop and show them how to throw it properly. I think this was the most people I've seen outdoors since I got here. Solsiden was nearly standing room only in the outdoor restaurants and cafes. I think the lesson is when the sun comes out in Trondheim, get your butt outside....