Happy Birthday Anita!

I was sorry I couldn't meet your plane
when you arrived to Ukraine
way back in 1999+1.
Our boys met you, and that was fine & fun.


Your cheerful face and friendly ways
Brightened up our “everydays”.

I met new friends with you
Bucky and Satchel to name just two.

Remember Barsik and Julia​? Our two strays
who ate anything we threw their way.
Julia was an unfaithful concubine
Her puppies looked like porcupines.


And you taught me to enjoy Ukrainian candy!
Svitoch and Korivka - I found out taste real dandy!

Train a horse?
But of course!
Poor Landish died of fright...
served him right...

I've been nearly everywhere

I was toting my pack along the long dusty Winnemucca road
When along came a semi with a high canvas covered load
If your goin' to Winnemucca, Mack with me you can ride
And so I climbed into the cab and then I settled down inside
He asked me if I'd seen a road with so much dust and sand
And I said, "Listen! I've traveled every road in this here land!"

I've been everywhere, man
I've been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I've had my share, man
I've been everywhere

I've been to:
Reno
Chicago
Fargo
Minnesota
Buffalo
Toronto
Winslow
Sarasota
Wichita
Tulsa
Ottawa
Oklahoma
Tampa
Panama
Mattawa
LaPaloma
Bangor
Baltimore
Salvador
Amarillo
Tocapillo
Barranquilla
And Padilla

I'm a Killer
I've been everywhere, man
I've been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I've had my share, man
I've been everywhere

I've been to:
Boston
Charleston
Dayton
Louisiana
Washington
Houston
Kingston
Texarkana
Monterey
Fairaday
Santa Fe
Tallapoosa
Glen Rock
Black Rock
Little Rock
Oskaloosa
Tennessee
Tennessee
Chicopee
Spirit Lake
Grand Lake
Devil's Lake
Crater Lake

For Pete's Sake
I've been everywhere, man
I've been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I've had my share, man
I've been everywhere

I've been to:
Louisville
Nashville
Knoxville
Ombabika
Schefferville
Jacksonville
Waterville
Costa Rock
Pittsfield
Springfield
Bakersfield
Shreveport
Hackensack
Cadillac
Fond du Lac
Davenport
Idaho
Jellico
Argentina
Diamantina
Pasadena
Catalina

See What I Mean
I've been everywhere, man
I've been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I've had my share, man
I've been everywhere

I've been to:
Pittsburgh
Parkersburg
Gravelbourg
Colorado
Ellensburg
Rexburg
Vicksburg
Eldorado
Larimore
Adimore
Haverstraw
Chatanika
Shasta
Nebraska
Alaska
Opalacka
Baraboo
Waterloo
Kalamazoo
Kansas City
Sioux City
Cedar City
Dodge City

What A Pity
I've been everywhere, man
I've been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I've had my share, man
I've been everywhere

I've been everywhere

I haven't really been to all these places, but I like the song!

Edith Hansen shopping

There were two ladies who would visit us in Eddyville too. One of the times they came I sang them a song I'd composed, (I exhibited literary talents at an early age before exhausting them). I sang:

"Starry Queen, Starry Queen
Staaaaary Queeeeen, Staa-aa-ry Quee-een
Starry Queen."

Edith's kind comment was "I don't understand what you mean dear."

That's like I was saying about the truly gifted: nobody understands.

One time my mom and I went to Ben Franklin's 5 and 10, and of all things we saw Edith in a STORE...it didn't seem right for her to know that we'd seen her doing that, so we quietly backed right on out of there.
One time my dad and I helped, or watched, don't really know what we were doing, but there were some farmers dipping sheep. That was a fun memory, then we sprawled on the grassy hillside. I felt like I was in a pastoral scene in a famous painting. Or maybe not, but it was far from the madding crowd.
Don't go away, I had a wiener dog, Hjalmar. A man who tried to make friends with my dad had given him a box of chocolate, which was fed to poor Hjalmar. Hjalmar ended his days with a bad case of road rash. Also there was Lauritz the cat. It was fun to turn a cardboard fruit box over him, then he'd stick his paws out the round holes in the card board box, and playfully wave them around. I think of him every time I play with cats.
Now my mother tells me that the way she remembers it it was, "Starchy Queen"

Bats in the Attic

I have mentioned kindergarten here a few times. In the middle of kindergarten I transferred to Wisconsin, where I graduated from kindergarten and completed one semester of first grade.
But let's go back to before kindergarten. It was so much simpler then. One prekindergarten episode was when I was still an only child in Eddyville, Oregon.

We lived in a gigantic old farm house. An old woman had lived there before we moved in and she was dead now. There was an upstairs with long dark shadowy halls and all the doors were to be kept closed. One of the rooms had been the old lady's bedroom. The room was left as if she could come back at any time. I wasn't so sure that she didn't do that. I don't know how much a four-year-old has heard of ghosts, I don't know if anyone had told me any ghost stories by then. All I know is that one night in the middle of the dark, black night I was out in that upstairs hallway, and the banister post of the staircase turned into a a golden metallic archer and he was aiming an arrow at me. All I remember now is that I was rescued by my mom. I told her about it and she didn't look very unconvinced, if you know what I mean. After that I got to sleep in their room. That was a good thing, because it was scary in my room with all the bats flying around in there. There were bats flying around in my parent's room too, but at least my dad killed them. I remember watching him tearing around the bedroom slapping at bats with his T-shirt, or something. I remember my mom screaming until they discovered I was awake, then they made me turn around and look at the wall.
In the bathroom was a great big bathtub that stood on feet that resembled claws which gripped iron balls. I came downstairs one morning after a bath; I was wrapped in a towel and I was holding a rag doll. I opened the kitchen door and saw my mom chasing a bat that was zooming around the kitchen trying to save its life. I think my mom had either a flyswatter or a rolled up newspaper as her weapon, until she saw me, then she took my doll, and told told me to get outside. But I stood and watched as she beat the bat to death with the doll's head, then she threw the doll with the bat wrapped in its rag body into the wood burning cook stove. I must have gone outside then, because then she came and got me back inside and told me to go and get dressed if I was going to go outside!
I remember two men came to visit us, my dad wasn't very happy with them, so he invited them up into the attic to help him kill bats, and this they did! Using the ladder which was leaning on the outside of the house I followed them upstairs into the attic, but they wouldn't let me stay and watch.

Bestefar tells stories

I have a guest writer today, this will make it clear to everybody why I made my brother run home after he fell into the crick in Olympia:

I was about 10 years old or less. My older brothers did not want to go ice skating on the river with me. I was not "old enough yet" was the "excuse". So I decided to check out the ice for myself. I found that the ice at the shore was frozen onto the rocks and it was a little higher than the ice on the river, so I looked for a place where I could easily get onto the ice without jumping. Eventually I climbed onto a rock and sat down on its frozen icy surface and slid down to where the ice was level, then I stood up. I walked along the shore and felt quite comfortable. I was dressed in trousers, long wool underwear, heavy shoes, a wool sweater and mittens. The sky was clear and the temperature well below freezing, there was no wind but it was biting cold. I walked toward the other shore and knew that I should not try to cross the river, because the ice would be very thin in the area where the water was still flowing, which it was because... suddenly
the
ice
broke
under
my
feet
and
I
went
down!





I reached my arms out to the sides,and finally stopped falling when I had
water up to my armpits. I thought of the scolding I would get coming home all wet, and started kicking without realizing it. Then I hit something solid and got my chest onto thicker ice; I kept kicking until I managed to completely roll on to the surface of the frozen river. I crawled on all fours until I got to the shore I had started from, then I got onto my feet and ran in a straight line for home across the frozen fields. When I got home I quickly undressed and built a fire in the "Jøtul". My mother brought dry underwear and asked why I was so wet. "I just fell through the ice.", I answered nonchalantly, like it was a common thing to do, and there was no scolding. Just “what are you going to wear for school
tomorrow?”.

It took a long time before we got permission to skate on the river that year.

Takk far!

Another day in Hell

From Hell, Norway My mom told me about this place, in fact she told me to go there.  How many mothers have told their kids to go to Hell?

There are interesting rock carvings there too, I hope we get a chance to go back there sometime.  One thing I want you to notice if you click on the web album link is the location of Hell on the google map.  See if you can calculate how far the carvings are from the shore.  The reason I bring this up is that the carvings were originally near the shore line.  There must have been a period of very warm weather thousands of years ago when ice caps melted etc etc...

From Hell, Norway

Thanks Joyce!

From pacific Ave.
An Olympia Lurker has tracked down what's left of the house on Pacific Ave. After doing research she wrote and that the place has been torn down. Looks like the hazelnut trees are still there though!

Prisoners of War

The title of this book caught my eye in the library today, so I looked up under the "D" to find "Dahl", and sure enough.

Martin Dahl from Volda was our morfar,

this drawing must have been done about a year after he came home. I've heard mor tell the story about when soldiers came to the home to take him away, and maybe she'll tell it for us here...

The Blue Swan

A few more details about the rowboat; my mom was just telling me more about what it was really made of...
We have to go back to kindergarten, I started school in Samoa, California at Pacific Union School. We lived in one of the little cracker box houses that had been built for employees of the Samoa pulp mill, I think it was called Georgia-Pacific. My mom had some curtains that we used in that little house and they were made of fiberglass! Those curtains were the first layer of the rowboat which was later to be christened the "Blue Swan". I don't remember this but she said that on the inside of the boat you could see the pattern and pleats and seams from the old curtains.
And you thought recycling was a new, modern idea to save the planet?

Homemade rowboat

I mentioned that our dad built a boat. There was an old rowboat behind the house on Pacific Ave, left behind by the previous resident. It may not have been seaworthy anymore, but our dad took it into the garage and cloned it with fiberglass. I was baffled watching him with all this fabric, mom was the one who spent time in fabric shops. (She sewed all my clothes) He draped it over the old boat, then I think he painted glass onto the the fabric to make fiberglass... Ok it wasn't glass he used, but when this compound dried it hardened the fabric. I don't know how many layers of material he used, but one day we were ready to move the new boat out of the basement. A tight fit, but he was able to squeeze it out the door. Could it be he had to remove the door frame? Don't remember, I do remember feeling relieved that “we” got it out of the basement.
We made good use of that boat at the Weyerhauser place. That really was idyllic. I don't know if it was there that I learned to row, seems like I've always known how to do that. There is stuff that we learn as kids in the western world, like riding a bike, rowing a boat, or paddling a canoe, riding a horse, driving a car, and it's not a big deal. But I know people who've never had a chance to learn any of those things. Of course there's a lot I can't do – can't walk a tightrope, can't play the piano, can't even touch type! But some people can even row a boat and eat an apple at the same time! (He bought an electric outboard motor the day after I took this picture.)

From How to fish with an otter

Lemmings

I'm looking for the original Gary Larson for this. I got this from here.
More about lemmings here

Festus, Missouri

I even didn't start 7th grade until about 6 weeks into the semester, because we were camped out at Howard Johnson's in St. Louis looking for a suitable rental. But I got a real education the short time we lived in Festus, Missouri, until partway through 8th grade. The name of the school I went to there was Jefferson R-7. We had a very strict principal; boys were not allowed to wear T-shirts, and all shirttails were to be tucked in! The PE teacher was strict too. We were the Blue Jays, undefeated in girls volleyball, probably boys basketball too. Yes, all we did was play volleyball during gym class, but first he made us do push-ups on our fingertips. No, I was not on the volleyball team. For a while I was the “new kid”. I made up for that by getting good grades and making up rude songs about certain nasty classmates. The fact that I wasn't embarrassed to loudly sing uncomplimentary solos to my classmates helped them to let me in to their circle maybe...I don't know.
Anyway, my parents found us a really neat house to live in. I can't remember this address either, It was something like RR #1 etc, I can't remember, but yes, rural. The landlord, a doctor, was a retired army colonel. He was like an feudal land baron. His house was a log cabin type structure on the top of a hill and he told us he owned all land we could see from there.
“Our” house was an old two story farm house, whose cellar housed a Missouri Terrapin. The nearest and only neighbors, (besides the landlord, Dr. Allbee, who lived up a terribly steep hill to the left of our driveway) were – we'll call them the McCornicks. A family with 5 adolescent kids including Ma and Pa. The oldest was a daughter, Candy; she got married to Hell's Angel candidate while we lived there. Then there was Roy, named after his dad. I remember that Roy Jr. and his best friend, “Melonhead” signed up for the Army. Later, after Roy and Melonhead had been home for an inordinately long Christmas leave, I learned from his little bother Paulie what AWOL means. There were two other girls, Renee and Theresa.
This family all lived in a single wide mobile home with no skirting around it. Their big old black and white dog, King, and an adopted stray pup would huddle under there in bad weather. Next to the the mobile home was an old rectangular concrete foundation of an old shed or something. That was their garbage dump. I'm pretty sure we didn't put our garbage up there because our house and yard had a low white board fence around it. Periodically this garbage was theoretically burned, but finally the day came when my dad helped Mr. Roy McCornick shovel it all into a trailer to be hauled off. That upset the food chain a bit because the mice that had been recycling the garbage and using it for food, heat and shelter had to find another place to live and something else to eat. I've witnessed lemmings on the run, and this was about the same idea – dozens of mice fleeing. The cats were so surprised at first they just sort of stood around and watched.
Our house had three entrances, a front door with a wide cozy porch for warm summer evenings and on each side of the kitchen were doors into back yard. We almost always came and went through the kitchen door, because it was a straight shot to the garage and the rabbit hutches. The white board fence had a gate there; beside the gate was a pipe that stuck about how many inches up out of the ground...four inches? I never paid much attention to that pipe, but one day I noticed something white in a bit of gunk that seemed to have collected at the mouth of this pipe-whatever-it-was-thing. If you looked hard enough it almost looked like a toothy grin.
I was too busy being Heidi of the Alps, and Huckleberry Finn and Caddie Woodlawn to pay much attention to details like that, until Renee or Theresa told me and my brother about a tragedy that had happened at their house. Ma, or one of those girls, I can't remember, had been so sick and vomiting and stuff all day, and had lost her partial in the toilet and the dentists charge so much that they didn't know what they were gonna do. And just like that it clicked, and one of us, my brother or I, had a “plumbing-needs-ventilation-revelation” and realized that that grin in the gunk could really be someone's pearly whites. We got a stick and poked around...yep, all we need is to rinse these off and soak 'em bleach and they'll be as good as new!
Don't forget the location of the rabbit hutches, they may come up in this blog again...

Olympia, Washington

I think this is the spot, but I'm not sure, and I don't remember the address, but I think that you can still see the big white house from the freeway as you drive by.
I went to all of 5th and 6th grades in Olympia, at McKinley school. The school has been razed because of asbestos in its construction.
I have lots of happy memories from here. We had a nice little dog called "Cricket". My mom had the house fixed up so nice and neat everybody liked coming to see it. It was a two story house with 4 bedrooms. There was camel hair carpeting in the living and dining rooms and going up the stairs. My mom bought our furniture at second-hand shops and used Jasco to scrape off all the old gunk. Then she decorated it by painting Norwegian rose maling designs. I liked living there and reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I read nearly all the books in the library of McKinley school.
It snowed for Christmas and we had a Christmas tree, and our cat , Lakris, (Licorice) went insane and climbed to the top of the tree. I sewed little Christmas socks out of red felt and I liked thinking I was Laura Ingalls when I was making them.
There was a crick across the field to the left of the house and we would go there and catch crawdads. There was a swamp on the other side of the house and on my 10th birthday we went there with sack lunches to catch frogs and polliwogs. I've always wished I could have stayed 10 forever.
The house had a full basement where my dad had built a boat in the evenings. The house had been built on a hill where there were fruit trees: a crabapple tree, hazelnut trees, and a cherry tree where the tree fort was. There was a pulley line from the kitchen to our tree fort so we could get sandwiches and stuff from our mom. There was a front porch the length of the house.
Then one morning we woke up and there was a huge bulldozer in front of "our" house. The Bulldozer started BANGING into the porch to knock it off, another digging machine went after the crabapple tree, I left the breakfast table to run out there and pick the poor daffodils. CRASH into the wall, our paintings, originals done by a special family friend, came crashing off the wall inside. My brother and I had to go to school, and when we came back the house was naked, the mound it had been built on was shaved away by earthmoving machines, we had to wade through mud to get inside. Of course we had to look for another place to live, the landlord had neglected to tell us he was tearing the place down to put in a car dealership just like the one across the street.
It was a trick moving out of there, especially dropping the piano out the front door 8 feet down into the moving van.
We found a really nice place to live next, it was the uninhabited executive mansion of the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Company. That was nice too, but lots of work for my parents to fix it up.
The last thing I did at the Pacific Ave. house was to walk through the whole place with muddy feet and unscrew every light bulb.
And it amazed me to see the house still standing last time I was up there, some 6 years ago...is it still there anybody???

Balloon payment

I've been wondering now about an offer I had back in 1983 to invest in real estate. The plan was to pay a reasonable sum every month, then after a period of some years there was to be this big, seemingly insurmountable and huge payment to make. It seemed scary to me at the time. I had other prospects in view as well, so I passed up the opportunity to make payments on real estate in the San Fransisco Bay Area. Now I'm wondering if I had gone for it would I have been one of the ones guilty of the present economic crisis?

Notebook help from the Middle ages

If you understand Norwegian you MUST watch this video.

Cute fish videos

This fish is just walking around on the bottom of the ocean...

fishing off the oil platforms

Our host, Karl Astor, has an off-shore job, he services the oil platforms in the north sea or even fixes broken stuff way down underwater on the ocean floor. He operates an ROV which is a remotely operated underwater vehicle
He has cameras which film underwater, he watches this on several screens, then he can make repairs way deep under water.
This job used to be done by deep sea divers, but because of the enormous stress of working on the bottom of the north sea, and the high mortality rate in this occupation, ROVs are used now instead.
There are often lots of fish where they work because the fish congregate near the oil pipe which is warm.
The ROV he uses has 2 arms and sometimes they can even catch a couple fish! Watch the video!!!
This is a very interesting video if you're interested in what happens in the north sea. You can watch how the boat's deck opens up and a wire line gets dropped onto the ocean floor.

New Awareness

This won't last long, this jag I'm on, but as long as it's on my mind I'd like to tell you about this kid I met in Greece last summer (2007). This is Micheal from Australia. (do any of you lurkers from New Zealand recognize him? He and his younger brother and sister had been visiting cousins in England) Any way he told us about where he had been working for a farmer in Canada who was pumping tractor exhaust into his soil as he plowed. The claim is that they used no other fertilizer and it was a record harvest. The neighbors are still paying their fertilizer bills from 2 years ago.
Well it makes sense, the elements which came out of the soil to make fuel, (all those decayed dinosaurs and dung) are floating in the debris of emissions. This genius of a man has a cooler on the exhaust pipe, then he pumps it back into the dust from whence it came. I admire the idea and I admire the deed.

Carbon footprint of the Norwegian Moose

We pulled out of Steinkjer on the way to Kolvereid and stopped to photograph these creatures. I saw them in a clearing of the woods on the right side of the road. They came to edge of the field to look curiously at us, but when I raised the camera to shoot they streaked off. They know it's hunting season.
I learned today that one of the things moose and cows have in common is that they produce lots of methane gas. They are green back to nature type creatures and they are the ones guilty of destroying the environment. In one summer a moose belches out as much methane as a car would produce carbon dioxide on a 13,000 km trip. Is that 8,078 miles? The distance from Los Angeles, California to somewhere in India?
My cousin's wife is into saving the planet, her job is alternate energy sources/waste management and she's the one who first told me about these gas collecting balloons for cows. I can just picture these cows propelled across the sky...
hey diddle diddle
the cat and the fiddle
the cow jumped over the moon...
I could ride a cow all the way to California, hug a redwood tree and sign up for Greenpeace as soon as I arrive.
As we were driving back to our digs last night in the dark I was wondering what it would be like to hit a moose. CRASH...our nice expensive car we've been loaned...possibly a dent in in my coworker also, would we be able to keep the moose meat? The moose hide would look nice on the floor in our ascetic domicile.

I'm glad we didn't hit one, hope we don't get any closer than we got to these today.
This post is an attempt to write something which shows my awareness of the age I'm living in and that I'm in touch with the problems of our times. It's a bit boring though and I like my own world enough, but I'm just trying to be trendy or whatever.
Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.

The Salvation Army in Hell

We've been through Hell today, you have to drive through Hell's Tunnel to get there. We avoided actual Hell on our past trips, but today we've been to Hell and back again...The only street sign I could find to document our trip is this one advertising workouts in Hell. The Salvation Army has a shop in town and I was able to find a big enough purse to make it out of Hell with all my baggage intact.
The leather coat I'm wearing is one I got last week in Trondheim at the Salvation Army there.

The hat is an astrakhan or Persian lambs skin, also from a second hand shop. Esoteric novels usually have a character in an astrakhan hat sometimes. So I volunteered this time.

I had so much fun today!

From det magiske berget (The Enchanted Rock)

I went back to the enchanted rock today, I'm so excited about that place. I was awake for hours last night thinking about how to do rubbings of the rock carvings, and today I had the chance to take the car out there myself and spend about an hour. Too bad I only had 5 sheets of paper, I'm getting more and going back first chance next week.