Another Long Weekend…

...Another Trip To The Hytte

Urban Dictionary's 12 funniest travel entries (From Gadling.com)

Travelanche n. When a considerable amount of bags and/or suitcases get packed into the back of a vehicle to the point that they are about to fall out.

Get ready, Set, Go

Other terms includes:
• Hotel n. 1. A place you never want to work; 2. A chill place to work if you can shake off the sh*t cranky bastards throw your way for easily remedied inconveniences.
• Backpackistan n. The country that exists in the minds of twenty-something-year-old travellers throughout the entire world. Its citizens are identifiable by their dreadlocks, faux-tribal tattoos and strict, tiresome adherence to Bob Marley tunes. They eat falafel and juggle fire torches. Their economy is based around mooching, and the sale of Tibetan prayer flags and Che Guevarra marijuana pipes. Backpackistanis are united by a common language: broken English.
• Road Trip n. When a bunch of kids get in a car (most likely a VW Bus, most likely with tons of drugs) and drive to an exotic destination (like Vegas or New Jersey). It happened more in the '70s.
• Travel 'Stache n. A moustache grown and maintained for the sole purpose of a special vacation. This particular mustache is a head-turner in airports, train and bus stations, and cruise ships in particular. May be more noticeable to women, especially women with children ages 5-12.
• Gap Year Tragedy n. A student who is enlightened by the insight afforded by global travel to the extent of cringeworthy personality renovation.
• Travel Wanker n. When someone has travelled overseas and, upon returning, can speak of nothing else. They are at their worst when in the company of fellow travel wankers. The conversation quickly deteriorates into an excruciating game of one-upmanship.
• Hostel n. The place in Europe where your girlfriend stayed while on that college backpacking trip and slept with a bunch of European men who promised to call her and told her they'd come to America to visit her so they could get in her panties.
• Travel Nazi n. A person who transforms into a completely serious and un-fun mood when the time of travel has come. They always appear to be in haste as they are always 10 to 15 feet in front of the family. They must arrive 2 hours early to an airport gate and you may not leave your seat no matter how much you need to urinate or else "you might miss the flight."
• Tourist n. Stupid a**holes from outta town that take pictures of anything and everything and annoy the crap out of all the locals and will stand in the middle of the road, block traffic and almost get hit by a car to take a fu*king picture of a church. [Guilty!]
• Laviator n. A person or people who take photos of themselves in the lavatories (restrooms) of airplanes.
• Passport Constipation n. When you have applied for a passport with the US Government 6 months ago and you are leaving tomorrow and still can't squeeze out a passport for your spring break trip.

Happy Birthday...

...Google

We started our journey together 12 years ago… us for a life as Expat with a first stop in Buenos Aires and a few weeks later you came into my world.

Happy 12th Birthday my dear Friend.

Google Doodle created by Wayne Thiebaud

So here’s what was happening in the world in 1998

• President Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman.
• El Nino is kind of a big deal.
• Winter Olympics are held in Nagano, Japan.
• Viagra is approved by the FDA.
• Charlton Heston becomes president of the National Rifle Association.
• Windows 98 released by Microsoft.
• Apple Computer unveils the iMac.
• Notable TV premieres: Dawson's Creek, Sex and the City, Will & Grace, That '70s Show, the Powerpuff Girls, Charmed, Felicity, and the King of Queens.
• Popular movies: Armageddon, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Godzilla, There's Something About Mary, The Wedding Singer, Shakespeare in Love, and Deep Impact.
• Popular music: Celine Dion, Chumbawumba, Marilyn Manson, Green Day, The Offspring, Spice Girls, Aerosmith, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, Sublime, Natalie Imbruglia.

And

• Jeffrey and Celine finally decided to make it official and tied the knot just before moving to Buenos Aires

FYI, Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007.

We got an invitation less than 6 months later and sign up for our first common email address (cjsuiter) on 12 September 2004. We then decided to create individual ones a few months later.

First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage*. Messages displayed in context as conversations.
So what else is new?
Gmail has many other special features that will become apparent as you use your account. To help you get started, we encourage you to visit our Help Center, there you can browse frequently asked questions, read our Getting Started guide, or contact the Gmail User Support Team. You'll also find information in the Help Center on such topics as:
• Importing your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, and others to Gmail
• Using address auto-complete
• Setting up filters for incoming mail
• Using advanced search options
You may also have noticed some text ads or related links to the right of this message. They're placed there in the same way that ads are placed alongside Google search results and, through our AdSense program, on content pages across the web. The matching of ads to content in your Gmail messages is performed entirely by computers; never by people. Because the ads and links are matched to information that is of interest to you, we hope you'll find them relevant and useful.
We're working hard during our limited test to improve Gmail and make it the best webmail service around. Thanks for taking the plunge with us. We hope you'll enjoy Google's approach to email.


Thanks,
The Gmail Team
P.S. You can sign in to your account any time by visiting
http://gmail.google.com

* compare to 2 and later 4MB from its competitors.  6 years later, I’m still only using 30% of my 7520MB… and I’m the kind of people who doesn’t delete any mail!!

The Best Thing Since…

…Sliced Bread

I love mangos but mangos don’t love me. They make you work hard so you can taste their sweet flesh. A couple of weeks ago some mangos were tempting me at the local supermarket. So I took one, thought about all the hard work, put it back on the shelf; pick it up again on my next round, put it back on the shelf again convincing myself that really it wasn’t worth the effort especially since I’m the only one at home really eating it.

The kids have inherited their dad's genes about eating fruits –ok except bananas and apples- and Jeff blame it on where he was raised (mid-west apparently didn’t have fruits in the 70’s, go figure!). Well as I was toying with the idea at the fruit section aisle of my local Coop; should I, shouldn’t I? the solution appeared right in from of my eyes (ok cleverly placed by some marketing guru)… a mango slicer.

Here’s what I think happen one day in the kitchen of the genius inventor. She was struggling, just like me, to ‘open’ her mango and then her husband (because in my book such an amazing invention must be the work of a woman) had just finished eating his apple (maybe the husband grew up in the mid west too and doesn’t like mango either… well lucky her on that day). So the husband just had finished eating his apple and of course he had left everything behind on the kitchen counter… and there it was, right in front of her eyes, the solution to her problem. She needed an apple slicer only bigger.

Problem solved… happy Celine!

Mangoes without the hard work... my life is complete!

My House In France Made It …

..... to Boston Big Picture

Well not quite… but only because we weren’t there so the lights were not on!!

Picture #6 from Boston Big Picture

So what's what.... and where is La Riviere?!  Roll your mouse over the picture

Photo credit: NASA/JSC

Norwegians To…

...Take Over France

Well at least one!

It’s always interesting to read your home country news from your host country point of view!!!

Norwegian hits top of French politics (Newsinenglish.no)

Eva Joly, the au pair from Norway who gained fame as a judge and corruption fighter in France, has recently risen to the highest levels of French politics. She has her eyes on the French presidency, and may at least wind up as a government minister.

Joly has announced that she will run for the French presidency as the Green Party candidate in 2012. Born Gro Eva Farseth in Oslo in 1943, she holds both Norwegian and French citizenship because of her marriage to a French citizen.
Public opinion polls have ranked her as one of the most popular politicians in France, not least for her crusades against corruption. Now a French member of the European Parliament, Joly is turning her attention to domestic politics within France and has a good chance of becoming Justice Minister, if not president, if her party wins government power.
French right-wing politician Jean Marie Le Pen, however, claims Joly is “not French enough.” He contends she “has no direct connection with France and she wasn’t even born here.”
Le Pen is the first to directly attack Joly’s bid for the presidency. Other French voters have made little issue of Joly’s Norwegian origins, and instead hailed her background from a social welfare state.
Her name has been associated with 30 years of high-profile and fearless campaigning against corruption. An Elf petroleum scandal in the 1990s secured her a position in the inner circles of French political life, notes newspaper Aftenposten. According to a professor in government at the University of Oslo, Raino Malnes, it also made her a household name in France.
A poll recently published in la Libération left Joly with high marks. Some 38 per cent of the respondents said they liked Joly and 16 per cent would prefer her as president. Given that she has only just announced her candidacy, political experts say these figures are extremely good. The poll also places Joly among the 10 most popular French politicians.
Even if she looks like she may do well in the coming election, Malnes does not think she has much chance of winning the Presidency. The Greens likely will form a coalition with the Socialist Party and possibly the French Communist Party, he notes. If they win a majority together, it’s likely to give Joly a ministerial post in the French government. Malnes tips her for the role of minister of justice or minister of home affairs. “Both are very important positions,” Malnes told Aftenposten.
The French Left is doing well so far, getting 55 per cent support in a poll last week. President Sarkozy’s popularity is down to 24 per cent, reports Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK).
Malnes does not believe Joly’s Norwegian background will be a problem. “Joly is well integrated in French culture and there was no indication that she was taken less seriously because of her Norwegian background when she worked to root out corruption,” says Malnes to Aftenposten. He points to Sarkozy’s Hungarian background to support his argument.

Martha Steward…

...Part II

After making some red currants jam last month, I’ve decided that I should give this Martha Steward thing another go.

I bought some fabrics almost a year ago because I wanted to hide some of my knick-knack from view. Actually it’s only on the general view when we go to the basement where the laundry room and the kids play room are located. So no heavy public traffic but it was starting to really bother me. I finally decided to haul the sewing machine upstairs, look for the fabric and try to remember how I used to do those kind of things in my previous Martha Steward style life (i.e. Aberdeen).

Not sure Jean-Paul Gaultier or Chanel will come banging on my door and beg me to come work for them any time soon but it does do the trick

Fashionably...

...Fashionable

When you live in Norway, how does one treat oneself for being very good all week?  One buys Rain boots, but not any rain boots, THE rain boots!

Jeffrey is in Paris this week so I was on the morning duty and I really don’t like it because I really like my peace and quiet time on my own at night (read really late night/really early morning!)

Brad Pitt Not included! (You should have clicked on the link when you saw it!)

Chloe’s Turning Into…

... (Horror) An American

Chloe asked me last night if I could give her a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich for her school snack. Quick, where is the nearest store so I can restock on Nutella?

Good old American stable food

Thankfully she came to her senses.  When she got back from school and I inquired about the American delicacy -word used loosely ;-) , She told me that in fact she didn't like it that much (must have been peer pressure!). French Honor is safe: back on the Nutella diet.

Good old French (European?) stable food

I Told You So…

...Multiple Times

My friends like to rub it in and send me links like this: The World’s Most Expensive Cities 2010

I had expected Oslo to be on the list but Stavanger, pop. 120,000 making it a number 6!

Tokyo, Japan top it the list, followed by Oslo, Norway; Luanda,Angola; Nagoya, Japan; Yokohama, Japan; 6. Stavanger, Norway; Kobe, Japan; Copenhagen, Denmark; Geneva, Switzerland; Zurich, Switzerland

As a reference: Lunch at a restaurant cost around $33 in Stavanger ($43 in Oslo), Beer at the grocery is $4.76, Eggs are $6.35 for a dozen and movie ticket around $16… Ouch.

Word of Wisdom…

… From a 6 Years Old

Jeremy and Jeffrey were in an intense conversation this week-end while playing on the trampoline and Jeremy told his father that nerd kids don't get girlfriends (?!), which prompt Jeffrey to tell him he was a nerd. Jeremy replied: don't worry Mommy made you cool...

Father-Son time

No School…

…Already?!

What do you mean they don’t have school tomorrow? 

Ok so I was back to my mommy routine; kids in school all day, husband at work all day, and Me time for me all day, well until I put my Ayi hat and my Chauffeur hat and my tutor hat and my cook hat and my…but you get the point. So merely 2 weeks after they started school and after-school activities and I’m finally back in the groove here comes ‘Teacher Day’ which mean NO school for the kids. I got them for 2 full months, I don’t have anymore activities to do, stories to tell, cookies to bake in me, none. It’d better be nice weather tomorrow, well wait even if it’s raining we now live in Norway they’ll HAVE to play outside no matter what, that’s why those rain suits are for!