Oooh. The company is offering a home-pc lease-to-buy-thingy. This is some sort of initiative from the government in order to make the population more pc-literate, and basically it means you can lease/buy a pc through your employer and pay through a monthly deduction from your salary and, this is the crux of it, the deduction is made before tax. Now, I already have a pc at home which I am more than satisfied with… So a stationary PC, even if it has all the bells and whistles one could ask for, is somewhat pointless (especially as there is NO room for it). BUT – I can have a laptop. A brand new shiny IBM ThinkPad for less than thirty alterian dollars a day, eh, sorry, less than 400 NOK a month (currently 54 USD, 34 GBP) for three years (14400 NOK) as opposed to 26000 NOK (3550 USD, 2250 GBP). Mmmm. Laptop. Gadget. With dvd-player… I could watch dvds on the train and stuff (if the battery holds…) Mmmm. Gadget freak, me? Noooo. Not at all. I’m sure it will be very useful, too, for, uhm… Posting to this blog while at my grandparents! Yes! Very useful! And – Uhm – something else, I’m sure. I can sit on the couch and “work”! (The fact that my couch is all of one-and-a-half metres from my desk is irrelevant in this connection, I’m sure.)

I might just have to.

Voice in my head: Thorbjørn Egner as Ole Brumm humming Det snør, det snør, tiddelibom (though it doesn’t just now)

This is is getting ridiculous:

you have an ominosity quotient of seven. you are as ominous as the creators of this quiz. which terrifies us. find out your ominosity quotient.

Voice in my head: Richard Marx singing that song you know about going down to the river and stuff

So, the weekend’s almost over. At least, all I’ve got left here in Trondheim is dinner (cod and eggy butter – mmm) and then off to the airport to get the plane back to Oslo.

Oh well.

At least I’ve had a lovely time.

Voice in my head: Someone or other (definitely a black man) singing Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen

So, Nicolette, you want Norwegian lessons, do you? Well, I have started, haven’t I? Not sure tenke koffert and reisefeber are the most useful words in the Norwegian language, though…

Norwegian lesson of the day: mørkredsel s. “dark-fear”, fear of the dark. Also: mørkredd advb. “dark-scared”, being afraid of the dark. As in “Jeg er mørkredd” – “I am afraid of the dark”. One example of how the Norwegian concatenation of words leaves us with one word where in English you need a phrase.

I used to be really scared of the dark as a kid. I had to have a light on in order to go to sleep. I was not afraid of anything tangible or defined – robbers, murderers, ghosts, mummies, giant spiders, you know, that sort of thing – just of the dark and unknown, the sense of not knowing what was out there. Hence I also never liked to swim in places where I couldn’t see the bottom (still don’t, as a matter of fact). I wouldn’t imagine sharks or crocodiles, or even giant squids or other mythical beast, but I’d fear a something, a presence, an unknown.

I remember the boy next door had a book called something like “The Giant Book of Monsters and Ghosts”. Stupidly (and against the wishes of my family, and, I hardly need add, my own better judgement… Oops, hang on, sorry, wrong movie, wrong context – but you get the point, right?), I looked at it. It had lots of pictures of frightful-looking beings – werewolves, hags, trolls, ghosts and ghouls – but they all seemed pretty harmless to me. The one image that still sticks in my mind, and that, at the time, gave me nightmares for weeks, depicted a crack in the ceiling through which Something was, literally, clawing its way – all you could see was the claws peeping through the crack, trying to get a hold in order to widen it… *shudder*

And, obviously, there was a crack in the ceiling above my bed…

This is why I’ve never been a great fan of scary movies. My imagination has always (still does) provided me with quite enough “scare” without help, thank you very much – I still have to tell myself not to be stupid in order to go down to the basement if it’s dark. looming, unidentifiable shapes in the dark can still make me start. I need the room to be dark in order to fall asleep nowadays, though.

Random quote of the day (in Danish…):

Trist
(Minde-gruk)

Hvor trist at N.N.
har sagt livet farvel!
Jeg har glædet mig sådan
til at slå ham ihjel.

Kumbel (Piet Hein)

I have suddenly been hit with a massive wave of tiredness/exhaustion/apathy. All I want to do right now is curl up into a little (well, ok, not so little, I’m not small enough) ball and go to sleep. Or get out of this place and find my way to the airport to get the plane to Trondheim (or better still, disapparate and apparate in Trondheim, thus disposing of the tedious waiting in line and sitting on buses/trains/planes business) to get home and be pampered just a little. Or we could get back to this sleep idea. Mmmm. Sleep. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Voice in my head: John Lennon singing I’m So Tired

Just rediscovered these in one of my draft files:

I am 87.5% British, just like Mr Bean
Shy to the point of ridicule, you’ve probably never been out of the UK.

Take the Brit Quiz at www.darrenlondon.tripod.com/britquiz1.htm

I seem to have spent most of the day woking (sic.: v. Standing in the kitchen wondering what on earth you came in here for. See Adams/Lloyd: The Meaning of Liff – check out the Adams page in the bookshelf if you’re confused), or at least staring into space thinking: “what the f*** was I doing?”. Every time I’ve started some task, someone’s come to ask me a question or the phone has gone off or an e-mail has arrived that I have to deal with… And when it’s been dealt with I have to try to get back to what I was originally doing – more often than not what I was originally doing was also a phone call or an e-mail that needed to be dealt with. Phew. As for getting any actual, tangible work done… Well, I’ve set the sex of the 1000000 patients in the patient table on the test database. Not manually, obviously, so it didn’t actually take me as much as five minutes to do. The rest of the day seems to have been all piffle. Important piffle, but piffle none the less.

Voice in my head: back to Avril and Complicated

Lessons to be learnt from history in general, and the Titanic in particular:

Anything that can’t possibly go wrong will.

Voice in my head: Michael Wiehe singing Titanic (Andraklasspassagerarens sista sång)

NME have put together a list of the best singles ever… Apart from thinking that they seem to have a bit of a grunge/rock/punk preference going (no soft, lyrical ballads here), my initial reaction was: What, no Dylan? (I’ve only seen the top ten, I guess I’ll have to stop by somewhere to sneak a peak at the rest – I’m not going to buy the magazine.) My second thought was: Hm, I don’t think I actually own any of those…

And would I like to? Well, I’ll have the Bowie, please. I could do with Anarchy in the UK, The Charming Man and London Calling, too. As for the rest? Well, if you happen to want to give away the original singles, please send them to me. I’m sure I could swap them for a lot of stuff that I really want at one of the local record collectors’ dens.

Voice in my head: David Bowie singing Heroes, naturally

(“Can’t come to work! Sick! Bye!” “Wait…” — “Do you know when the Lord of the Rings version with the extra scenes will be released?” “Hm?”)

Amazon has sent mine. Still, it will be a few days…

I love this “stopping by other people’s blogs” thing. Anyway, read Lisa’s “about me section” and I think she might have a point about the kindred spirits thing:
I’m content, usually, to be where I am with no interruptions or interactions with other people. If others were me, they might get bored.
However, the “I’m a bit of a neat freak” doesn’t ring a bell. Whatever, I am quite happy for other people to clean just as long as they don’t expect me to follow their example…

Voice in my head: still Avril, but she’s switched to “Anything but Ordinary”