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!