Qu'est-ce que c'est?

This is picture is somewhat relevant to the story....
I received a rude wakeup at 5 am a few days ago, when it sounded like a team of construction workers had descended onto the house from a helicopter. Well that might be exaggerating a little, but at 5am it was LOUD (and dark). I may have mentioned before that I live approximately 500 meters from a psychiatric hospital, where Norway likes to send their finest insane criminals. This tends to cause me some jumpiness at 5am. I live on the 2nd floor of the house, but generally in the winter I am too lazy to go down and lock the outside door to the stairwell, because well I'm lazy, I don't want to get my feet cold and my fleecy slippers fall off going down stairs. So I normally just lock the upper door into the apartment and go to bed. This was one of those nights. So my first thought after jumping out of bed was that an escaped prisoner was trying to hack his way into the house. So I ran into the hallway and sure enough, I could see that the motion sensing light in the stairwell was on. Now being it is 5am, I just woke up and I'm not really that smart anyway, I OPENED THE DOOR, to see who was in there. Fortunately for me, I did not receive an ax into the forehead. I didn't see anyone, but I heard something... which sounded suspiciously like a crazy person talking to themselves. I ran over to the small north window that looks towards the driveway into the garage. I see a shadow! Someone is walking alongside the house and mumbling. I've got you now serial killer, I thought. I ran over to the kitchen window facing the street to try to get a glimpse of the psycho as he came around the corner.
-and-
OK, it was the guy delivering the newspapers, singing along with his ipod. whew.
That didn't really explain all the noise until I went back over to the south windows, where I could see that the section of roof from this picture was now bare. The entire load of ice and snow had slid off at once. Since the roof is tiled, every time the ice bumped over a tile it shook the crap out of the house, waking me up and setting off the motion sensor. Mystery solved, although somehow that did not really help me go back to sleep. Next I will start working on that remote locking mechanism for the outside door....

Sigrid and Maria

I can't be the only that sees some physical resemblance between Sigrid Undset and Maria Amelie. Maria Amelie ( real name Madina Salamova ) is an undocumented Russian immigrant to Norway who has lived here since 2002. She has been in the news constantly in Norway in recent months, as the Norwegian authorities are preparing to deport her back to Russia. I have been reading her book "Ulovlig norsk" for the past few days. It is written in Norwegian so it takes me a while to get through it but I have managed about 50 pages now. She has quite an interesting story to tell. She actually managed to graduate from NTNU here in Trondheim with a master's degree, in spite of never having proper legal status. I happened to have a 500kr note laying next to the book cover the other day, and I thought "wow, she looks a lot like the woman on that 500kr note." I didn't know anything about Sigrid Undset either, so I had to look her up. Interestingly, there are 2 other coincidences between them. They both wrote their first books in their early twenties, and Sigrid, although celebrated as a Norwegian author, was not actually born in Norway either. She was born in Denmark to a Danish mother and a Norwegian father. Sigrid went on to win a Nobel Prize for literature, but who knows what will happen to Maria. It seems almost certain she will be deported in the near future, but I believe she would be able to re-apply for residency here after some period. Maria's case has generated quite a lot of controversy here in Norway, I am wondering if Sigrid were still alive what she would say about it?

On a completely un-related note, I watched a nicely dressed woman in the neighborhood this morning trying to push the family car out of the driveway while her husband backed it up. They were stuck in the snow and melting ice but they were half blocking the road so I couldn't get through until they moved the car. Anyway after 3 or 4 tries of rocking it back and forth, they got it loose and it went back into the street. Of course the instant it shot backwards, she lost her footing, slipped and fell ass first into a huge puddle of melted snow and slush. Which goes to show you that when there is a car stuck somewhere, always volunteer to be the DRIVER!

FBAR

This topic will probably only be of interest to U.S. expats or soon to be expats. Being that it is getting close to tax time I wanted to mention the FBAR, which concerns foreign bank and financial accounts. Basically if you are a U.S. citizen who has signature authority over a foreign account or accounts that totals more than $10,000 at any time during the year, you must file this form the following year before June 30th. The form is not that difficult to fill out, but if you meet the criteria, DON'T FORGET! The government has some very severe penalaties for ignoring this requirement.

Here is one typically cheerful note from the instructions:

Can cumulative FBAR penalties exceed the amount in a taxpayer's foreign accounts?
A. Yes, under the penalty provisions found in 31 U.S.C. 5314(a)(5), it is possible to assert civil penalties for FBAR violations in amounts that exceed the balance in the foreign financial account.

Awesome!

Note also that you do not mail this to the same address as your tax forms, it goes here:
U.S. Department of the Treasury
P.O. Box 32621
Detroit, MI 48232-0621

Here is a link to the FAQ about it: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=210244,00.html#FR1
and here is the current form: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f90221.pdf

So remember my fellow Americans, your ass may be 3780 miles from Washington D.C., but your wallet isn't!

Cranberry bread

These are some Wisconsin cranberries I found in the store over the holidays. Suprisingly, they weren't even that expensive for Norway anyway ($5 for 12oz). I wanted to make some cranberry bread from my mom's recipe to give away to some friends. The first effort was a horrible failure. I put too much batter in one pan, because basically I only had one pan. Then I cooked it about 3 times longer than the recipe said, and it still wasn't done.......argh.
Finally I gave up and and threw it out. I got another bag of berries and borrowed some pans from Joel for the 2nd attempt. That one worked. Cold cranberry bread from the fridge with some butter or margerine on it, that is some good stuff.
I managed to get sick twice over the holidays, right before Christmas and right after I got sick for the whole week between Christmas and New Years. That sort of took the fun out of it but we had some nice parties on Christmas weekend anyway. Now it's back to normal work weeks and slightly longer days ( the sun manages to stay up until 3pm now ). In a few weeks I will be back in the U.S. for about 10 days. I will be first at a conference in Las Vegas and then I will stop and visit my family in Wisconsin for a few days on the way back to Trondheim. I am starting my shopping list now for a visit to Fry's electronics in Vegas and probably at least 1 trip to Target as well.

2 weeks til Christmas

Trondheim has had a serious winter so far, and it's not even officially winter yet. We had the coldest month of November ever measured (since 1788!) and now we are back to warmer weather and lots of snow. I decided to walk to the sentrum today to go to the julemarket, but I think I would have been better off taking the bus. You have to walk down some steep hills to get to the sentrum from Tyholt, and there is basically no way to avoid walking down slippery sidewalks and streets. I was walking down the first steep street today when a girl fell down about 20 meters in front of me. I didn't laugh because I figured I was next. I made it about another 20 meters past where she fell and I went down too. It hurt a little bit but I got back up and continued down the hill. I stopped at the Kristiansten fort to take these pictures, and then I had one more hill to go down to get to the sentrum. And sure enough, I fell down AGAIN flat on my back on that hill too. That one really hurt. Now I'm home taking ibuprofen illegally imported from the U.S. Probably shouldn't say that. I found it, yea that's it.
When we had our company Christmas party a few weeks ago I was awarded my very own first-aid kit as a prize for being the most consistently injured player on the soccer team. I guess I should have had the kit with me today, it might have helped to break the fall(s).

Visit to Oslo

I made a brief visit to Oslo a week ago to have a doctor look at my injured knee. I hurt it playing soccer in July, but so far I had not been able to get in to see an actual surgeon about what needed to be done. The Norwegian health system is quite good overall but it is very slow for non-prioritized injuries or health problems. Since the knee wasn't stopping me from working, they put you at the back of the list basically which for ACL tears is approximately 3-6 months. I paid for my own visit to see a doctor at the Ringvoll clinic in Oslo just so I could have someone tell me for sure if it needs surgery or not. (It does). He told me they could operate on it in a week in Oslo, but since my company doesn't provide any insurance for injuries like that I would have had to pay the full cost myself, which would be around $5,000 USD. Or I can stay in the queue at the clinic in Trondheim where eventually ( January maybe? ) I will get the operation without cost or at very small cost. I decided to wait until January, since I've already waited 4 months, what will another 3 hurt?
I hadn't been to downtown Oslo for some 15 years, so I was interested to see how much I remembered. It looks mostly the same except for the giant Opera house they built in the harbor. That is a really nice building. It is covered with a white marble roof that you can just wander around on, a photographers/skateboarders dream. A really amazing place. I ended up walking way to much of course, and between wandering all over town and having the doctor yank around on my knee in the middle of the day it really did hurt by the time I got back to the airport in the evening. I lucked out on the weather that day as you can see in the photo, it was not very warm but the sun was out all day and it didn't feel cold after the early morning. It was also nice I must say to listen to people speaking a dialect of norwegian that I actually could understand (most of it). People in Trondheim might as well be speaking martian for how much I understand but the Oslo dialect is close enough to Bokmål that I could get most of the words.
Today I decided to try and XC ski a little bit with my friend Joel to see how the knee would feel. The answer was very quickly "not too good.....". I can't put enough pressure on that leg to turn the skis or snowplow on the downhill parts so it is a bit difficult unless the course was completely flat or had only left turns. Not likely!
Anyway I might try it a few more times this winter before I get the operation, because I think there will be no skiing after that for the rest of the winter.

Halloween in Trondheim

I made a couple of pumpkins this year for Halloween and put them in front of the house. It seemed to work, the little munchkins stripped the house of candy like a swarm of locusts. A lot of Norwegian adults seemed quite mystified by Halloween in general, I think because it didn't really catch on here until about 10-15 years ago. But I must say that the kids have latched on to it now, the words "free candy" have pretty much the same appeal no matter what country you are in. There are tons of kids in my neighborhood here, there must have been something in the water here about 10 years ago. I was worried at first that maybe there wouldn't be any trick or treaters here but after an hour or so I was more worried about running out of candy. I eventually had to look through all the cabinets for old bags of Swedish candies that I never finished. I gave away everything I had and I finally had to bring the pumpkins in around 9pm. Witches seemed to be the most popular costume for the girls, one time I had 6 identical little blond witches at the door at the same time. Or maybe it was more, it was hard to count when they all have the same costumes. Most of the boys I couldn't tell what the hell they were wearing but they all got candy anyway. Another American holiday successfully exported! I did notice also that most of the candy displays at the grocery store were filled with American candy brands. We want to make the rest of the world diabetic as well so we can sell more insulin monitors......