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Thing two about Norway

Another, far less poetic post about my visit to Norway. This time:

It’s not just bad PR. It really is fucking expensive.

Forgive the profanity, but I was always taught that if you know how you use the language well, then you know when it is appropriate to use profanity, and let me tell you, it is appropriate.

So, yeah, it’s pricey.

To give some context, at the time that I went to Norway, I had been in the UK for about 8 weeks. I’d been spending pounds, not dollars, and the conversion happens pretty smoothly in my head, when I need it to. Generally, I just assume that stuff costs twice as much as it does at home and I’m almost always pleasantly surprised. Not to mention the time that I have spent living in the Bay Area and San Diego, where the climate is welcoming enough to overcome a cost of living that says, “get out! go away! we don’t want any!”

The Norwegian Kroner, at the time of my visit, was 10 to the pound. Most of the time, I only did one currency conversion in my head and I told myself that this trip was being financed by my savings, every birthday gift I received, and a need to visit my cultural homeland and get it out of my system.

So, a quick overview of some things I paid for (go ahead and use the MasterCard commercial guy’s voice instead of mine):

Private room in a YHA Hostel with breakfast: 880 kroner
Tea in a YHA hostel: 20 kroner
Glass of draught lager: 67 kroner
One bed in an 8 bunk room in YHA Hostel: 220 kroner
Lefse with butter at a farmer’s market: 40 kroner

Seeing the very scenery that gave the fjords their name: priceless. (Unqualified apology goes here.)

So, just to review. Yes, I did spend well over $3 for hot water in a cup with a tea bag and a teaspoon of milk. Also, I really did spend $11 for less than one pint of beer that could be most reasonably compared to MGD. Actually, in the interest of full disclosure, I spent that $11 at least once every night of my trip, and on my very most self-indulgent moment (the night of the 8-bunk dorm that was the result of a pension house that had double booked), I paid that $11 three times.

Now, about this lefse stuff that cost me six and a half bucks. Twice. If you don’t know what lefse is, it is the only purely Norwegian food item that I grew up with. To me, it is a very, very tasty symbol of my cultural heritage. It is essentially mashed potatoes with enough flour and butter in them grill them into large pancake-y, tortilla-y things. When they sell them at the farmer’s market, they are spread with and folded around the most wonderfully tasty homemade butter. So tasty, in fact, that you recognize the price might well be reflective of the calorie content and you no longer care.

I still sort of plan to do a final accounting of my trip, though I’m not sure what purpose that will serve. In the end, I could not imagine doing it for less. I ate nutrition bars for all meals, save dinner each night, and aside from that one cup of tea in the hostel in Voss, I indulged in exactly one cup of coffee to accompany my second lefse. No kidding, I wasn’t this frugal when I was a public school teacher.

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We keep calling this real life

And I suppose, in a lot of ways, it is.

Things that make this real life: Today, I bought a trash can for my bedroom.  I went to the post office.  I bought ingredients for dinner. I worked a full day.

Of course, if it felt like real life, we probably wouldn’t have to keep saying it out loud.

Things that make this not feel like real life: Today, I paid for my new trash can in pounds. It cost me nearly $1.50 to mail one Father’s Day card. Paul cooked dinner. I worked from 3:30pm-11:30pm and enjoyed dinner, a beer, and some cake while I did it.

Real life is awesome.

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How did I get here, literally?

It seems like it would be such a simple thing: You get in a big metal cylinder in one place, then get out of it in another.

That only covers the first 15% of my travel story, actually.

To be fair, if my travel plans had happened the way they were supposed to, they still would have been ridiculous.  I was supposed to fly from SAN to JFK on a redeye, spend 16 hours in JFK, then take another redeye to MAN.  Obviously not the most restful travel arrangement ever, but I’m hardy and I have mobile broadband, so I figured it would be fine.

And it was, for a while.  I did get a ridiculously expensive manicure in JFK, but the massage chair justified the enetire price.  I also enjoyed a more than reasonable amount of Dunkin’Donuts coffee, and put in more than a full workday.  Not bad.

Roughly 24 hours after I left San Diego, I was asleep somewhere over the Atlantic.  I was awakened by an announcement on the plane’s PA calling for a doctor.  I swear, it’s just like they did in Airplane!  Some time later, I was awakened by another announcement, this time informing us that we had made a u-turn and were headed toward St. John’s, Newfoundland in order to get an ill passenger to the nearest medical facilities.

Now, I get that sometimes the way forward is actually the way back, but in this case, we were two hours outside of Manchester and an hour and forty minutes away from Newfoundland.

Once landed, the ill woman had to be removed from the plane (they never told us what was wrong with her, but she was barely conscious as they wheeled her off), then her luggage had to be removed from the plane, and then a broken lavatory needed to be fixed.  All of these things, as you can imagine, caused a pretty heavy strain on the resoucres at St. John’s airport, so we were lucky to be back in the air just two hours later.

The flight to Manchester was thankfully uneventful, but passport control took ages, thanks to a preference for UK passports (pffft), and a very full flight from India that arrived just before mine.

When I finally got through, I had a good cry and a shower and then a lovely wander around Manchester, followed by some local ales and a tasty dinner with three of my favorite people on the planet.  Already, the travel was worth it.

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Advice for people who want to see the most beautiful bride ever

Go look at John Riedy’s pictures of my little sister.

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Advice for people who don’t have an iPhone

Get one.  (That’s right, I did.)

The conditions under which you should not buy an iPhone:

  1. You live under water.
  2. You live in space.
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Nothing, really

I swear, I have nothing to say.  It’s Thursday afternoon, and I’m certain that there are people who will get this in their feed reader and think to themselves, “oh, I forgot that she even had a blog.”  So, I’m basically writing this just to jog your memory.  Like a meaty paw landing on top of an albino’s head

Here’s a moral dilemma for you: Let’s say you pay a good amount of rent to your landlord for a really nice place that you loved.  Let’s say that she installed a coin-op washing machine, “to help recoup some of the costs for water and power.”  Next, imagine you have washed the kitchen rug (red) with your boyfriend’s jeans (now pink), and you are one quarter short of a recovery wash.

Do you:

a) confess, cry, and apologize

b) tear apart the house looking under every cushion and in every bag and pocket for the last quarter

c) immediately get dressed and go two blocks to buy quarters at the nearby market

d) use the maintenance key to the washing machine to initiate a free cycle

That’s right.  I did it.  I found the button, didn’t even have to look that hard.  Just popped open the door to the mechanism, saw the thing that the thing that holds the quarters hits when it gets pushed, pushed it, and went on with my life.  And Matt would never have known, if I didn’t decide this was the best way to entertain you now.  See the sacrifices I’m willing to make?

The real problem, I think, is what I will do the next time that I have to do laundry.

Ted and Erin arrive today for their second tour of Seattle, since the great northern relocation last August.  I always love their visits, as it basically results in more drinking and knitting and less sleep than my normal life.  Friends like them are the best thing in the world, after grandparents: they love you, they’re interested, and indulgence abounds.

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A reality check from real life

or:

What I have learned from moderating WisePrice

User generated content is pure gold in my industry. People write stuff.  Mostly, I think, because everyone just wants someone to listen to them. People write stuff, then those of us who have websites publish that stuff online, put ads next to it, and make pretty good money. This is the idea with WisePrice, and now that we’re well into the beginning stages of growing, it’s time to share some things with you that I am learning. That post about user generated content as a business model will be published some day, in the future, eventually.

For now, here’s what you need to know. Every day this week I have read on the order of 100 user reviews of services that they paid for. The reviews are from all over the country, and (based on grammar and writing ability) from a diverse economic spread. Here’s what I have learned:

  1. Never ever EVER pay a “lawyer” that you found online, on tv, or in a newspaper ad. So far, all of our reviews on lawyers (with a single exception) describe stories of giving money to someone who claimed to be a lawyer and then skipped town. Get a referral or call your local Bar Association.
  2. Daycare providers all over the country get paid vacations. How? By making the parents who regularly use their services PAY THEM. That’s right. It’s 4th of July. You’re off work and you are hanging out with your kids, and you are paying your daycare provider to take the day off without your kids. Simply stunning.
  3. A laptop that has been urinated on by a 2 year old can be repaired for about $76.
  4. Some people will take every opportunity they get to throw their spouse/ex/mother-in-law/sister’s two ugly pugs under the bus.
  5. Mechanics, as a breed, seem to deserve the reputation they have for lying and manipulating. I continue to feel very lucky to have had such wonderful people work on my car, and if you need a referral for someone in SD or in Oakland, I’m happy to provide.
  6. Babysitters don’t make much more now than they did 15 years ago. I got $5/ hour. Now, $6 seems to be the going rate.
  7. The price paid for a haircut has absolutely zero relationship to the satisfaction that it brings.  I have more rants about $180 spent and raves about $15 than the other way around.
  8. Big shock, this: Unless you know what you’re doing, it’s always cheaper to pay someone else to do work on your home.
  9. People pay to have their cats groomed.  Huh?  I thought that the coolest thing about cats is that they groom themselves.

Melon Head Cat
That is all.

For now, anyway.  There’s many more posts in the queue, so I expect this is only part one in a series.

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Roundup

  1. I had like ten plantar warts removed this morning. I know it’s gross but it hurts a lot so I feel like I have a right to complain.
  2. If you would like to know why you should vote for Barak instead of Hillary, watch this: 
  3. If you would like to feel inspired about actually voting for Barak, watch this:
  4. If you would like to feel terrified about the possibility of President McCain, watch this:
  5. If Larry Lessig is successful in his run for congress, and once there, if he is successful in his efforts to end political corruption, I predict that he will go down in history as one of the most influential and important citizens our country has ever benefited from. Here is Larry’s blog. His anti-corruption efforts are not yet online, but you can give him your email address.
  6. Oh my God, there is no place better to live. At the risk of sending the groundhog back into his hole, we’ve had a week of spring-y-ness here in the PNW and is it beautiful. If it’s really spring, then the winter was exactly one week too long. I can totally live with that.
  7. Tomorrow, Matt and I embark on a short vacation in Lake Tahoe (well, very near it, anyway) before going to Sparks for some boot-camp-style entrepreneurialism for the remainder of the week. Can’t wait to see the peeps and play with yarn–what with this bum foot, I don’t expect I’ll be going downhill (or anywhere else) fast. Before then, it’s just cleaning, packing, and, oh yeah, finishing my work day before knitting night.
  8. A friend of mine created this fantastic site. If you’ve ever known anyone with even the tiniest hope of an internet startup, these are fantastic.
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paralyzed with good directions

In the style of a friend of a friend, I have decided to loose the mono-topical posting coil and instead write about some of the many things that were interesting to me today.

Thing 1: I am suffering from knitting paralysis, and boy is it unpleasant. Because I arrived at the end of my Christmas gift to-do list Friday night, I am now free from constraints, other than that I really need something simple and portable so that I can take it to SD with me tomorrow.

Saturday I started my new felted laptop sleeve. As far as that goes, I am very pleased with the design so far (details and photos eventually), but my unwillingness to compromise my design has led to a very high-maintenance sort of knitting. Lots of color changes means that this is not an ideal project for travel and visiting. Sunday I started another project (gift for friend–no details until completion), and it turns out that the pattern is just not as cool as I thought it was, so it has been abandoned.

I could start the brown socks, but I’m terrified that cables and lace will get all screwed up in the face of a cocktail or an engaging conversation. I’ll have to check my queue again for something more straightforward. Or, maybe I’ll just hit the yarn store. :)

Thing 2: Today in my travels around the internets I encountered a fantastic little clip from a fantastic little show you might have heard of, probably from me:

JFK said something similar (and stunningly timeless) in his Don’t-be-concerned-that-I’m-Catholic Speech:

I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding office.

I guess my point is that there are lots of reasons to be afraid of candidates like Huckabee and Romney, and them downplaying the way their faith will inform their actions, should they be elected, is really just the tip of the melting iceberg.

Thing 3: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I found this pretty fantastic feature on MSN Live Search today that needs to be shared: one-click directions.   Essentially, rather than waste your time typing in your starting address, it accounts for the general direction or approach you would take from any of the four cardinal directions, and tells you the end of your route only.  Brilliant!  Don’t waste my time telling me how to get TO the freeway, I’ve done that a few billion times, just tell me what I need to know.

An example for getting to Cafe Ladro from four likely starting points:

One Click Directions to Ladro

MSN LiveSearch…who knew?

Thing 4: I will definitely post more about this when it starts to be a real thing, but for now, I’m just really excited and wanted to share.  Matt and I have signed up for Seattle Startup Weekend in January.  Basically, by signing up you are agreeing to become a founding member of a brand-new startup.  The entire group works from 6pm Friday to 11:55pm Sunday to create, plan, and implement a new web-based business.  All participants are given an equity stake.   First of all, this idea excites me because I hear that lots of smart, energetic, motivated individuals hang out at events like this and I could always use more of them in my life.  Second, I’m excited for the opportunity to take my learning in my new job and field-test it somewhere else.

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Purple vegetables

Wow.  I swear, I thought I had seen all the purple vegetables the good earth had to offer.  In fact, I’d swear I’ve seen them all in my kitchen: eggplant, beets, cabbage, grapes, plums…  what else is purple?

Anyway, we got two new ones in our hippie grocery delivery today: Purple potatoes and purple carrots, which are actually a mottled kind of mix of purple and regular carrot color.  The purple potatoes are actually very dark.  Don’t yet know if they taste like anything other than potatoes–not that that’s such a horrible thing.  The carrots, on the other hand, taste just exactly like… carrots.  Anti-climactic, to be sure.  Especially with all that splashy color.  Seriously inspiring if I were going to be dyeing yarn, but sort of a waste for a root vegetable in my opinion.

My love for my Mac has continued to deepen.  Today it is because I have successfully hooked up my second monitor and productivity is roaring.

My personal unit test results today were 61%.  That’s 15/23 passed, two skipped, and the rest failed.  Most of the ones I failed, though, were because I didn’t set the bar until last night when it would have been too late to drink all 32 oz of water or go back to work to complete my 8 hour day.  Of course, lots of room for improvement.

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