Stone age blogging

Only about a 5 minute drive from here where we stay at Hegratun there is a huge amazing outcropping of smooth stone with ancient hellerinstingar, or petroglyphs. We went today and looked and took pictures. I want to go back soon and do rubbings with paper and crayons. There are carved pictures of symbols and people and horses and boats, and lots of carved footprints. The footprints look like a boot with a heel.
I manipulated these pictures to make the carvings more visible. Some are very faint and best visible in evening light or in the fall when the sunlight is less brilliant.
These carvings aren't listed in wikipedia but this link is informative.
Runes are a different kind of rock writing, haven't seen any like that yet around here.
When you click on the picasa link make sure you choose to view the pictures in google earth, then it a real www experience.

the Atlantic Highway

We traveled north over a week ago to get up here. The trip was beautiful, and we had nice sunny weather.
The roads here are really nice, instead of going around or over mountains there are lots of tunnels. Some of the tunnels have replaced ferries, they go under the ocean floor. There used to be lots of ferries, but now there are bridges that connect the islands. The road we took from Ålesund to Trondheim goes over the Atlantic Highway. In the picture you can see the bridges and the land fill used to connect the islands. It would have been nice to go out and walk around there, but instead I hiked around on the web and found some nice pictures. They were from tourist sites, so I guess it's ok for me to use them here to advertise further.
I took some pictures too; they are here.

Kindergaten and the new Gym

The place where we are staying now organizes outings for the residents, and Inger Johanna was excited about going along last week. I didn't really feel like going, was only just getting over a cold and we had a class to teach in the evening. But I relented and went along. And I'm really glad I did, because it was so neat to see all the kindergartners! They meet us at the door, all friendly and welcoming, so I didn't feel weird or strange because of not knowing anyone. I like the way little children are exposed to senior citizens, and that the seniors get to be with children.
The gym was fantastic, and I loved watching the children running with balls and playing with hula hoops and climbing on the bars! There were goal lines in all bright and magical colors on the floor and the children were dressed in bright colors so it was like watching a prism's beams flitting around the floor.
An elderly man in a wheelchair buzzed around the whole time taking pictures, I hope you'll click here and look at them! You'll see Inger J in two pictures and me in one of them. You can also see the kids climbing up the side of the walls!
After we had a tour of the gym we went in to the kindergartner's room and were served coffee and tea, the kids sang for us, and of course we applauded, then we sang a few childrens songs to them and it was really cute how they clapped for us.

I goofed up today and ended up not being able to boot up my laptop. And I'd like to write down what I did here for future reference:
1 Insert xp installation disk
2 Three options are available:
a/Install windows
b/Repair windows
c/Exit
3 choose option 2
4 enter administrator password
5 choose which OS to repair; hit enter
6 type HELP
7 or type fixboot
8 then type fixmbr
It worked!!!

The Far Side

I didn't understand Anita's comment the other day, but it reminded me of this...

this free service helped me find the comic, he'll help you find any Gary Larson comic!

shout-out to Colter!

congratulations!!! the emails keep bouncing back :(, so I've temporarily given up on that venue of contact with you.
Question: do you still have that canoe I carved and gave you? If so please send me a picture of it, I'd like to post it here.
Thanks!

the morning catch

Here's Anders, the youngest of this litter of cousins. He phoned from school last night and said he wanted to come help pull in the nets, (he had other reasons for wanting to come home too)anyway he arrived home at 0800 this morning and was the designated rower for this trip.

 
We got 10 fish in this net, 4 different kinds: 3 mackerel, 4 bergylte, 1 lyre, 1 småseid, and one that my uncle threw back, he gave him a little speech first, that he was getting thrown back because he was still alive but too small for us!




My aunt, tante Mali, fried the mackerel up for Inger Johanna and me. There is nothing like fresh fish from the fjord!

fishing in Hundeidvik

Here we are on the ferry. As we were in line watching the ferry chug into the landing, we saw one of the crew come storming off the ship with a fishing pole. During the few minutes which cars disembarked and when we drove onto the ferry this opportunistic fisherman managed to haul in 2 mackerel! My uncle Arnstein is a retired ferry captain so I made sure to tell this story when we got here last night. In reply he and my cousin Håvard took us out in their "Fering". It is a very cool wooden rowboat. He says the boat is so steady in the water that he can sit out on it's edge to haul the net in without fear of capsizing it.
This is uncle getting ready to cast the net. We were hoping for crab...

Here is my cousin, Håvard, he's home on leave from the military this week.
After we came in from casting out the nets my uncle told us that it's bad luck to have women along in the boat when you cast out...so we wondered if there would be anything in the nets or not the next morning...

That rat went to heaven. All Right?

Fleet Ave. Milwaukee, WI
I don't remember the house number, but we lived there in early 1965 as I recall; anyway it was before I had started first grade. We were reminiscing today and my parents used the word "slums" to describe it. Here's how I recall it.

It was on a busy street with a candy shop nearby. You could get these red edible fake lips there. Seems they were made of a waxy substance. I've never seen them anywhere since that I can remember. In my gallery of memories that street is a Norman Rockwell painting.
Our apartment had thin walls with neighbors on the other side. I remember hearing great domestic wars in the night, sounds of banging and hitting and screaming. I was sure it was murder. But always when I'd check in the morning I'd see those two; they couldn't get enough of kissing each other to finish up saying goodbye so that he could go to work. I worried that he would be late for work. When I told my mom about it, and she said not to talk to them and not to watch them saying goodbye in the mornings. I was always glad to see that they were both still alive though and that they'd survived their big fight.
Since I wasn't supposed to talk to them my contact with the neighbors became limited to a kid who hung around there. In my memory's list of characters he's a graduate of Fagin's school of pickpocketing from _Oliver Twist_. I don't remember if I ever knew his name, but he would tell me stories about a rat. One day he told me the last story about that rat. I don't remember the circumstances, but the rat had died, and "went to heaven". Well, I was a conscientious enough preschooler and had a little background in theology, so I seriously explained to him that:

1. only a soul can go to heaven.
   
2. A rat is an animal and animals don't have souls, so
3. Rats don't have souls, and
   
4. The rat did not go to heaven.

This little lesson in eternal life ended with the kid giving me his most menacing look. In threatening tones he told me, "That rat went to heaven. All right??"
I didn't laugh in front of him, but I when I told my mom I guess I made her laugh; anyway we moved to a different neighborhood after that.

At one with the elements

Fishing to the rhythm of the pouring rain
I'll never fall for that again...

And nary a nibble we had.

The Gimp strikes again!

I'm having fun with this. Does anyone know any other gimp tricks I could do when I get tired of this one? Any are there any clues from the audience how to fix the color disparities? I sort of wish I had a regular SLR with a 50 mm lens for these pictures; the mountains are not as far away as it looks in the pictures.

This is the Grandpa of the week

I've asked for permission to post these, but the mails to the new father keep bouncing back. Let me know if I should take the post down. She was born on the 30th I think.

Housekeeping for the homeless by the homeless shall never perish from the hearth

Instead of going out for a run at 0600 this morning I decided to use my
time and energy to sleep in, I really needed it because we nearly got
booed out of town last night, and we had to stay up late to get it out
of our system that we are unpalatable and unappealing to certain
audiences. There was an unhappy drunk woman who came in last who vented her spleen all over us after we finished. A jog would have been nice after that, but we went to a
friend and ate ice cream instead!
There is also a certain catharsis in cleaning house. We've been
breathing and living here for a week, combing our hair and generally
raising the dust. Each time the dust settles there's more of me in it
every time, so I'm decreasing, but it's unfortunately only the dust
around me that's increasing.
My mom has some very nice housekeeping equipment, I should have
photographed it while we were still there, but our tools here are pretty
good too. My mom told me that since men became equal with women in
Norway and started helping out in the house, that house keeping has
gotten lots easier. Now there are disposable mop heads and disposable damp treated
paper cleaning cloths available in the stores. It's a lot easier to start cleaning when you don't
have to start out with a grungy rag or a mop full of last week's crud
and old gray hares...if you know what I mean and pun intended, so as not
to gross you out my gentle readers.
Ya, so I did our 2 rooms and hallway and bath in less than an hour
likely, then I combed my hair; OUTSIDE.
Oh another housekeeping tip my mom shared was if you don't have time to
clean before Christmas, just put an open container of a bit of bleach
under the furniture in each room. That clean aroma hypnotizes people
into believing that dust bunnies are really cute and appealing.

This is the entrance to the annex where we stay; it's under the garage.

I like these windows that open inside out so you can get lots of fresh air.

And this atavistic urge I fulfill from time to time...one of my earliest memories is from before we left for the states; watching my grandmother roll up the rugs to take them out, and I think of her every time I do this.

skriket

Yes, The Scream, I was getting to that.
Halvor Nylund, born in the 1870's was a Norwegian politician and apparently somewhat of a character. He once showed up for dinner at the king's table wearing his suit and one black shoe and a brown shoe. Another guest, an actor from the National Theater, told him, "you are a very colorful character". Anyway, this man, Halvor was a good friend of Edvard Munch. His nephew where we are staying was telling us stories about them. Apparently Edvard Munch was so intense that no one could stand to spend much time with him. Other artists like Henrik Sørensen, who were his contemporaries couldn't take more that 10 minutes with Munch. So Halvor became one of his closest friends. He tried to convince Munch to try and sell his paintings, but Edvard didn't think they were worth much. He would give his paintings away as barter payment for expenses he'd incurred, and people would hang them up in their outhouses is what we've been told.
I don't know how much "The Scream" is worth now, but it's been stolen at least once from the Munch Museum
But that's the way it goes when an artist dies the demand for their work increases, but then there is no supply. I suppose that's a very logical reason for artists being posthumously recognized.

Pikene på broen

Our hosts have a reproduction of this painting up in their living room. It is the work of Edvard Munch, a Norwegian expressionist who died in 1944. We were told last night that the uncle of our host here was a close friend of Munch. I'll have to find out what his name was to keep from starting another urban legend.

The view from here

We are in Ulsteinvik. To get here we had to drive through the deepest tunnel in Europe. And this is what we see from the window...The picture does not do justice to the weird shapes and contours of these mountains.



I made this with Gimp, an open source photo editor. This operation went better than my fish-people picture, I need to read the manual maybe :P
I republished this with a jpeg instead of the original gif file.

did I mention fishing here before?

Here are the pictures of our last fishing trip...

gatecrashers

these 2 showed up unexpectedly to our Thursday night episode! They listened very nicely :)

the 100 pushup challenge

Any guesses how many push ups? Stay tuned for progress!