Home again :)

My summer holiday is now officially over, and I'm back home in my apartment. The dreaded busride turned out to be quite nice this time. Not really sure what's happened, but I guess the bus routes have been changed or something, because now I only had to change buses once, and not in one of the places it used to be. And all my luggage was still with me! Yay :) Here's a better picture of all my stuff (the previous one was taken with my phone):

Because of the weight, that black bag and the big suitcase are now ready for the scrapyard... Oh, by the way, more than half of that pile is YARN! Some stuffing and finished amis as well, but mostly yarn :) I guess you can imagine Dung Beetle getting tangled up in all that, with the Velcro on her legs! She'd stick to everything and frizzle up my yarn... So I solved the problem by putting her in a plastic bag. Not the most pleasant picture! But I can assure you she survived the trip and is now happily reunited with her dung ball :)

Bollan, Glyptodon and I were all very happy to come home, but I think Piggen and the kids were just as excited! They couldn't wait to show the family pictures and tell all the stories of their summer adventures :) (I will tell you all about it in a later post, I promise!)

Yesterday I got a lot of things done, but I'm still working on my CV and I haven't applied for any jobs yet... So many details to include! I don't even have all my records of school and previous jobs, so I'm not sure what to do about that... Looked all over the apartment today, but can't find them :( But at least I got to buy math and biology books yesterday. The biology book is so cute! It has a honey bee on the cover, because the book is called Bi 1, which is short for 'biology', but it's also a pun on the Norwegian word for 'bee' ("bi", even though "bie" is most common these days), plus the ring around the '1' sort of makes it read 'bio'. Very clever on so many levels. I think if I'd been high school age I would be embarrased for the people making this book, grownups weren't supposed to have humor back then :p Almost finished reading the first chapter already, and I love it! This is definitely what I want to do :)

Tomorrow I'll go out and talk to some councellor about jobs and financial support, because I won't get payed for the last week of work until the middle of September. That's a long time without food! Well... if my blog doesn't get updated in a while (within a week or two, I think - you can survive for a long time as long as you have something to drink!), I'll propably have starved to death or something :p

Back in town

For a little while, anyway.. Just enough time to let you know I'm still alive, upload a bunch of photos and write a few posts :)

The past week or so I've been staying with my grandmother. The plan was to help out with a lot of gardening and stuff, and to paint all the garden furniture white (we're tired of a very boring green), but the weather's been bad most days, so very little of this has actually been done :/ On Tuesday we did manage to dig up some stone tiles across the lawn that just didn't look good anymore. I carried the tiles away and used them to make a path and a small step up to my gran's new tool shed. Bollan and Glyptodon tried to reach the door, but even together they are a bit too short. Fortunately my grandmother is a little taller :)

Carrying all those tiles were hard work, and the next day I was so stiff and sore all over I could barely move! But the work was worth it. We dug up a new flowerbed and used the turf to fill in the gaps from the stone tiles, and voila - the lawn is all pretty again AND my gran has a new place to put even more flowers :)

Then it was rainy again for several days, until Sunday and yesterday, when I could finally start painting a couple of garden benches. There are lots more to paint, so I'll have work to do all weekend when I'm not preparing for the fair. Have I told you about that? Hm.. Well, it's a fair. Don't know what else to call it. There will be food and drink to buy, an art exhibit by local people (paintings, sculpture and photography), crafty people selling their stuff, and there will be some entertainment. Among other things there'll be a play, which I have two different parts in. Very scary. Thankfully we're not supposed to speak, because everything's been recorded beforehand :) Most of this will happen outside at the harbor on Sunday (want to keep some privacy, so I won't tell you excactly where it is - it's where I come from and it's a pretty small place). Since I haven't been outside much I've had plenty of time to finish the stuff I'm going to sell at the fair :) Here it is:

I don't count on selling all these things, but it's good to be prepared :) I have have so many different things that even if I only sell one of each, I'll still be half-way to a new laptop! Yay :D Tomorrow afternoon I'm going back to my grandmother's again and I probably won't return to civilization until the fair is done on Sunday evening...

Freezing!

Got back to our apartment today, and it was just over 3 degrees Celsius inside! No time to unpack, just to turn all the heating on, and then we curled up under a pile of blankets, with hot water bottles (yes, plural!) and tea. We lit lots of candles and had a very quick dinner, and now I plan to stay in my chair until bedtime :) Poor Glyptodon had to rest on a hot water bottle, he was so cold. I still have both my alpaca hat and wristwarmers on, and I have trouble typing... It was actually warmer in the fridge! Now, a few hours later it's almost 8 degrees, practically summer :p

I'm looking forward to tomorrow, hopefully the apartment will have warmed up a bit more, and I'm going to buy lots of new school books. Always the most fun part of the semester :)

By the way, this is what it looks like when I go back from a holiday.

To start with, I pack very little yarn, a few balls only, because I know what I'll end up with... The strange thing is that I rarely need to buy colors that I know I already have, so I don't end up with several balls of colors that I use very little of. Quite practical :)

I'm dreaming...

Last night it started to snow, and today it was two inches of snow most places :) Could it be? Will we have a white Christmas this year? That hasn't happened for twenty years, if I remember correctly. If it snows at all before Christmas it always melts away after a day or two. Usually it rains a little :/ Here is my grandmother's garden covered in snow for once:

Of course the snow had to be tested! Glyptodon put on his new scarf that I crocheted for him, Bollan put on her knitted vest (made last year by my mother), and they went out to play in the snow :) They wanted to make a snowman, but it was so cold they ran back inside right after we took this picture:

Home, sweet home :)

Home, at last :D Up way too early today, at 06.00! Had to catch a flight at nine, landed at 10.50 (about 30 minutes late), waited at the airport (the tiniest airport I've ever seen!) for almost an hour, then took the bus home (changed buses several times, too). The whole trip took about seven and a half hours. That's too long... It was insanely cold waiting outside for the bus, and it wasn't even below freezing. But now we're finally home, and relaxing in front of the TV with a glass of red wine :)

Of course the whole Boll family came with us on holiday, here they are anxious to go:

It was Glyptodon's first time on a plane, and he enjoyed the view a lot:

(The red light is because of the sunrise on the other side of the plane)

All together in my mother's livingroom:

We're going to stay here with my mother until the weekend, I think, then we'll go to stay with my grandmother. We will be there the rest of the holiday, until we go to my boyfriend's parents, where we will celebrate New Year's Eve. At my grandmother's I have a very poor internet access (33k modem, I think), so my blog probably won't be updated very often, at least not with pictures (which take several minutes to upload).

Owlet keychains and a scarf in the making

I have finally gotten around to buying some new key rings after the last ones disappeared, and four owlet keychains/bag charms are now finished. Tada!

I have about four more waiting to get done, but they will have to wait a little longer. Last night I started this crocheted scarf, because I wanted to make something so easy I didn't have to think or count :p Right now it's about 25cm wide, but I plan on felting it, and hopefully it will stay human-sized and not shrink too much :) It's crocheted with one strand of  pure wool yarn (different shades of brown to make stripes) and one strand of white mohair.

I planned on giving the scarf away for Christmas, but now it looks like our new friend has claimed it as his own. I can't blame him, though, he barely survived the last ice age, so he wants to be prepared for the next one! You just have to love him :)

Dinosaurs & cupcakes :)

Yesterday my boyfriend and I went to see the Walking with Dinosaurs "live" show based on the book and the TV series with the same name. I have seen the TV series and own the book, so I just couldn't miss this. We arrived way too early in the morning (around 7 am), so we had almost 12 hours of waiting before the show started. We spent a few hours at the Museum of Natural History (just to get to see even more dinosaurs!), where I bought myself a very cute souvenir.

It's a plush Glyptodon, a very well-armored, prehistoric relative of the modern armadillo. Of course, Bollan has now adopted him as her newest friend and uncle for her kids :) I just need to come up with a good name for him.. Suggestions, anyone? :)

After the museum we sat a cafe for hours, while I tried to do some homework. That didn't work out too well, I had hardly slept on the train, so I was too tired to do anything productive.. I did, however, manage to crochet a little, and the result is this: a bunch of half-finished new cupcakes. When I'm done at school tomorrow I will try to finish a couple of the cakes and take some decent pictures, and the pattern will of course be posted on my blog :)

Anyway, when the time finally came and the show started, I couldn't stop smiling. I just sat there through the whole thing (including the break) with a great big grin on my face. Me and all the other kids and their parents. I count my relatively uninterested boyfriend as a "parent" here, but everybody seemed to be fascinated when it all started. The beasts were great, the animatronics were great, the sounds (which were obviously inspired by Jurassic Park) were great and the music was great :) The animals in the show are all life-size, which means they range from 50 centimeters in length (one of the baby Plateosaurs) to more than 10 meters in height (the adult Brachiosaurus). In one word: awesome!

Plateosaur babies

Brachiosaurus

I would go to see the show several more times if it hadn't been so expensive (which it was, for a student, anyway). Luckily we were allowed to take pictures, but not with flash, so most of the pictures are very blurry. Still, the important thing is to know that I've been there, and at least I know what's in those pictures :p I'm really happy that I took the opportunity to see the dinosaurs, I doubt they will ever be in Norway again.

Sadly I didn't get to buy any souvenirs from the show, because they were quite expensive. Mostly it was kids-stuff anyway, but I really wanted a T-shirt... Instead I got a plastic bag. You know, the kind you get your shopping in. It's not much, but it has the show's name and logo on it, and it was free :D

More photos from the show and the museum will be uploaded tonight, after dinner and homework :)