Occupation: background noise-maker

Tonight I have been in the audience for the recording of the TV-show Rikets Røst. I haven't seen the show before, but since Berit had free tickets, I thought why not? Turns out that was a good desicion!

They told us that we were only there for background noise. Our job for the evening was apparently to make this sound so funny that people in front of their tellys would look up from their newspapers or pizza slices thinking that this was something they shouldn't miss. This job suited me just fine. A couple of hours of laughing - not bad if you ask me! And they also gave us a free beer! I had made a promise to myself, as I woke up slightly hung-over this morning, that I would never drink again. But as I am also president of the short-memory-association (or at least a strong candidate for the position) those kind of promises never seem to work. And anyway, what student can turn down a free beer?

The show was a positive surprise. I think I might have to start watching this program. I would at least recommend turning on TV2 at 21.45 tomorrow. I have already decided to repeat the success of working as backround noise. The tickets for the recording of Nytt på Nytt sometime in April are already booked - and I think it'll be a lot of fun!

Frustration Attack

Ohwww!!!

Another day at the library.
Pages produced: none.
Sentences produced: next to none.
Ideas about what to include in thesis: quite a few.
Ability to get them down on paper: absent.
Motivation: apparently gone with the chapters I sent my supervisor last week.

Hoping it will reappear tomorrow.

Untill then, no use sitting here.
I'm leaving.

Fun (but Exhausting) Times in the Life of a Sports Fan

Finally the World Championship in Nordic Skiing. But what were they thinking when they decided to host it on the other side of the world?? In another time zone? That means a lot of early mornings for us sports fans in ski-crazy Europe! In one way it is good though... It gets me up in the morning (at 6 am!!), and it's done so early that I can still make a pretty early start on the thesis writing business. Good thing about being a student I guess. Very flexible starting times.. Bad thing is that it also means an early start in the week ends.. You really know you're a sports nerd when you get up at 6 am on a Saturday to watch some cross country. Today I've just been exhausted all day...

It is also a time of priorities.. A time when the qualification for the ski jumping competition the next day seems a lot more important than getting the second chapter of my thesis done and shipped off to my supervisor. After all, the World Championships is only once every second year! I guess the thesis is only once in a lifetime, but it is for sooo many weeks, and I'm already so tired of all the writing, reading, analyzing, frustration attacks, writing blocks, and dictionaries - that it feels like I've been working on this forever. Therefore, my priorities are simple. The fun wins. I'd choose something fun and exciting over frustrating and annoying any day. Ooops.. Maybe that's why I'm struggling to get this thesis done on time... Which means another semester of writing, reading, analyzing, frustration attacks, writing blocks, and dictionaries...

Support Membership, Bye Bye!

I wonder if this is a coincidence. But on Saturday I decided that it is time to quit being a support member at SATS, and revive my membership. The first unpleasent surprise was when I talked to the (cute) guy at SATS who told me that transferring my membership meant that I also had to start paying Oslo prices. Whatever that means. That means expensive, he told me. Oh. OK. I had no choice. I signed up for a year, and now I'm paying the price (bad pun intended). But this sudden jump in membership fee also kind of pushed me back on the treadmill because I felt too guilty wasting the money, which is good I guess.

Because I don't wanna be part of the ugly statistics I read when I logged on the internet this morning. It said that SATS earns 70 MILLION KRONER a year on people who are just what they call "support members"!! As if that was not enough; the article even called us sofagriser ("couch pigs"??). I refuse to be one.

Therefore I am going there again tonight, even though I really can't move after Saturday's work out, and I have already had an unintended work out this morning (note to self: the one extra minute of sleep in the morning is not worth the sprint to catch the subway in high heels).

Problem Solved!

Since I have been complaining so much about my poor TV lately, I feel that it's finally time to give it some credit. Because it works!!! I now have 4 channels, and a DVD that speaks English! The trick was just to carry it into one of the other rooms, get the channels there, save them, and then carry it back to my room. Obvious, right!?

Oh, and Happy Friends Day everyone!

Technical Problems

I have always known that I am not best friends with all sorts of technical equipment. It is like the technical stuff somehow knows that I have no idea how to make it work and so it decides to have some fun with me and simply not work properly.

But my new TV really gets the award for strangeness. I have complained for a week now that it refuses to show me anything but NRK1 (which is OK for winter sports during the week-ends, but can get a little boring during the rest of the week..). So I'm watching a lot of DVD's instead (the thing has a built-in DVD player!). And guess what? For some mysterious reason, it has now started to show all the DVDs - dubbed in German!

PS: Carrie Bradshaw should keep speaking English. German doesn't suit her.

En Superdistré Persons største Skrekk:

Smekklås på ytterdøra!

Productive Sunday

Today has been what I would call a very productive Sunday. After four days of working at the education fair trying to convince young, future students that Tromsø is the place to be (no, it's NOT that cold. No, mørketid is NOT that bad. No, it's NOT that far away!), all the stuff I had to do to decorate my room has just gathered up until I had to tiptoe between all the piles to get from the sofa, to the desk, to the bed, to the door. So I decided that today I just had to do something about it. It was time to find the sewing machine and start making my room somewhere I could actually be. So I have spent today sewing, watching sports on TV, and covering my sofa that was screaming late 80's - early 90's with some linen colored fabric. That was more comlicated than it sounds. For a while there, I thought that there is some bad technical aura in my room, since my TV refuses to take in anything but NRK1 and now my sewing mashine is also acting weird. But it got better. I'm counting on my TV doing the same.

PS: My upstairs neighbor has spent his whole Sunday practicing playing the guitar. I'm really counting on him being a fast learner.

Ikea,Ikea,Ikea

Moving is kind of exhausting. Fun, but still exhausting. All this packing, repacking and organizing.. I love decorating my room, but I don't like this mess of stuff I can't find the right place for while decorating. But now I think I'm on the right track. As usual, IKEA did the trick!

The IKEA transport people brought my bed yesterday. So for the second time in under a year, I had a "flatpakket" bed and a manual full of smily faces from IKEA.. I could only hope that it would go better than last time! But I faced a problem already on the first smily picture on page one - apparently I needed tools to put this piece of furniture together, tools that IKEA did not provide.. After a few minutes of frustration I got to borrow some tools from a friend, and voila! Definitely a better result than my former attempt! And finally a place to sleep, even though the bed was not as comfortable as it was at IKEA. Maybe I was just so tired when I was there that I could have fallen asleep anywhere.. :)

So my room is slowly but surely starting to look OK. As I said, I love decorating it, but one thing is to get a great idea of how you want it to look - quite another is to try to make that happen on a student budget ;) That requires quite a lot of creative thinking, and sometimes the thinking gets a bit too creative for its own good, because solutions that seem great in my head don't always work too well in real life... But hopefully, my Africa style room is up and running quite soon!

Love is in the Air?

Lately, I have recieved a few e-mails with the subject heading "Love is in the air". Every company seems to think that that will sell their stuff, everyone from SAS Bråthens to the shampoo-and-stuff-place I get newsletters from. It makes me kind of mad. Because it doesn't seem to be much love in my air (again; not bitter - noooo).. And then I got it. I realized why they all come up with this "fantastic" slogan right now. My absolutely least favorite holiday is coming up; Valentines Day. Oh joy.