blognak

I made the cornbread tonight using this recipe. We ate at the Whispering Canyon Cafe when we were in Disney World last year, and this makes a reasonable copy of their cornbread. If you like sweet cornbread, this stuff is good. (By the way, our opinion on the whole restaurant can be summed up in six words: Good food but too dang LOUD.) This makes a 9x13 pan, so you might just have leftovers. Best of all, it's simple to whip up and mostly uses the kind of basic ingredients sold in every supermarket in the Western world.

The exception, of course, is the cornmeal itself, which we get from the local Asian grocery. If you can find both the fine and coarse stuff, get the coarse, which is much closer to American cornmeal. The fine stuff works OK in cornbread but the texture just doesn't turn out quite right.

This is the sort of comfort food it's nice to have when you're contemplating your place in the universe, where you're coming from and where you're going. This might be an expat/love-immigrant kind of thinking, or it might be that I'm in the middle of student teaching and short on sleep besides. Take your pick. And have some cornbread.

I know this article is in Norsk and most of you can't read it, but it's got me so furious that I'm going to say something about it anyway.

The article is from our local paper and concerns events in the neighboring township of Asker - which likes to portray itself as a quieter, more peaceful place than either Oslo or my own home township of Bærum. In this quiet, peaceful place, earlier this year, a group of about ten teenaged girls and young women, led by a 20-year-old woman, beat up a 15-year-old girl so badly she needed medical attention afterwards. About a week later, the same group approached the same girl and told her to cut her hair. If she didn't, they told her they would shave her head, strip her naked, and dump her in the middle of downtown Oslo. She cut her hair and they let her go, and she went to the police to ask for help. These were only two incidents in a long campaign against this young girl.

The 20-year-old leader of this group has been told she's not allowed to visit or talk to the 15-year-old victim again. The other members of the group have been sternly talked to by the police. Meanwhile the 15-year-old victim and her family have decided to move out of Asker to get away from her tormentors.

But Asker police want everyone to rest assured, this isn't a gang thing, and your daughter is of course perfectly safe. And they're really, really concerned about bullying, and they won't tolerate it.

Where "we won't tolerate it" means "when it gets bad enough that we can't ignore it any more, we'll make some useless gestures and hope that it all just goes away".

Just saw it.

Loved it, though it was absolutely not what I was expecting.

Damned screen kept getting blurry. Must have been the 3D glasses. *sniffle*

"Are we... awake?"

"That depends. Are we.... a Nobel Peace Prize winner?"

"Yes, we are."

"Then we're awake. But we're very puzzled."

"Your travel documents are being mailed tomorrow and you are now in countdown mode until you leave for Disney!"

You'll have to imagine the size of my grin, here.

Good: Our local Ikea's new parking system. They have a metric buttload of different kinds of parking spaces; in addition to the boring old standard spaces, the mandatory disabled spaces, and the increasingly common "family" spaces, they have special spaces for cars towing trailers and for electric cars (which can plug in! for free! demonstrating their commitment! to the enviroment!). And they have the increasingly common system that shows how many spaces are available in the parking garage. Ah! but they took it one step further: the indicators show how many spaces are available in each row, and what kind of spaces they are. No more driving to the end of the row that claims to have five spaces available only to find that they are all family spaces, requiring a visible car seat to park there. Astoundingly, it's even easy to understand.

Bad: Okay, how hard is it to design a public restroom so that you can reach a soap dispenser from every sink? Very, very hard indeed, it seems. Yup, Ikea again, but not just them; even the brand-spanking-new swimming hall where Robert has his swim class. It's been irritating me for a while, but in these swine-flu-paranoid times, it's a lot more obvious, as fellow restroom users who before would just give their hands an extra good swish now walk around, dripping on the floor, looking for the blankity-blank soap dispenser. (And, of course, the sinks themselves are busier than before, as people who before would just try to slip out unnoticed now actually stop to wash. Heya! As someone who is beginning to suspect she's a direct descendant of Dr Semmelweis, I've been watching you.)

When I went to the gym this morning I realized I'd forgotten my lock, so I went out to the front desk to buy a new one from their small Dumb Stuff You Forgot Shop (I'm not sure that's it's official name, of course). While there, I saw they had two kinds of shower gel on the shelves. One claimed to be something like Ocean Fresh Scent, whatever that means, and the other was labeled Sport Scent.

I've seen lots of body cleaning products marketed to men that claim to be "sport" scented, and I just don't get it. The scent I associate with sports is the scent I'm trying to get off my body.

(For the record, some ocean smells are also less than enticing, particularly certain beaches at low tide. But clean salt air is nice.)

I went swimming at a new public swimming hall in our area last night, while Robert had his swim class in the other half of the pool. Just practicing what I learned in my class last Friday. Now, I like the pool. They've thought through a number of issues, like changing rooms. There's a women-only changing room, a men-only changing room, and in between, two family changing rooms where dads can take their small daughters and moms can take their small sons without worrying that someone may be freaked out. Also the designers thought about the problem of echos and answered by adding accoustic tile in strategic places, so although it's noisy it doesn't suffer from the constant din that indoor pools so often do.

But that's not what I wanted to write about.

As I was taking my prescribed-Scandihoovian-pre-swim shower (i.e. get nekkid and use soap, just like any other shower), I overheard a girl of six or seven ask her mother why there was a chair in the shower. In fact there's a fold-down seat mounted to the wall under the showerhead closest to the door. The mother seemed very embarrassed about the question, and finally stammered that maybe some people are tired after swimming and would like to sit down.

I wanted to ask, "And what do you tell her when she sees a handicapped toilet? That some people like to do gymnastics while they're on the can?" But I didn't. Maybe I should have.

Is there something terribly embarrassing about saying, "Because some people can't stand up or don't stand up very well, and they have to take a shower before they go swimming, too" that I'm missing here?

I signed up for an adult swimming course again.

Let's see if I get the hang of it this time.

When you have:

• one kid who thinks up a bit of mischief ("Wouldn't it be fun if we did X?")
• one kid who decides the mischief must be done ("Yeah! Let's do it!")
• one kid who facilitates the performance of said mischief ("I'll go get a big stick!") and
• one kid dumb enough to actually DO it,

and they're all standing there pointing fingers and saying that it's all somebody else's fault and at least half of them are crying, making it obvious that the kids have to be separated before the matter can be dealt with, which kid do you deal with first?

And how many times to you put up with this in one day before you duct-tape them to the wall in separate rooms until their parents can come to get them?

'Cause I've got a fridge full of cake.

Oh, yeah, there will be real food, too. But I get the distinct impression that one comes to a Norskie confirmation for the cake.

Kenneth has a shiny new tooth. Well, okay, a tooth substitute. And it's not terribly shiny. But he can open his mouth without random strangers asking What did you do to that tooth?!? So it's a Good Thing.

Just got my exam results back.

I got an A.

Okay, we've got Kenneth's confirmation coming up. Party at home. A house to be cleaned, enough cakes to feed the Army of the Potomac to be organized (Norwegian confirmations aren't actually valid unless the cake table outweighs the candidate), and the three thousand picky little details like, you know, chairs and table decorations and that sort of crap to be organized. But once that's over....

I get to go to the cabin for three days or so to chill out, hopefully with some sisters-in-law and a half a dozen bottles of wine. And good weather would be nice too.
Then I get to go spend three weeks in Pennsylvania with my parents.
Then I get to spend ten days in Disney World with my immediate family and a truckload of crazy Norwegians.

Am I not the luckiest woman on the planet? Am I not?

The graph you are about to see shows the birch pollen levels in the Oslo area over the last thirty days. Anything below the yellow line is considered a "moderate" pollen level. Between the yellow and read lines is a "high" pollen count. Above the red line and into the brown area we have levels simply called "extreme".

( Ready? )

We got our airline tickets for the Florida trip on Sunday night. Managed to get everybody on the same flight, and the right tickets charged to the right credit cards.

Then I got us all registered for the "free" bus to the hotel, got the subgroup I'm with better seats, and while I was at it checked that everything was okay with the trip to Pennsylvania the boys and I will be taking this summer - all without speaking to an actual human being!

I love technology. Introverts will soon rule the world!!!1!

...and mind you, that's a big assumption when you're dealing with a family of this size and level of quirkiness, but assuming no further complications arise, we order the plane tickets for our Florida trip tonight.

Somehow upcoming vacations seem an order of magnitude more real when you have the plane tickets ordered. Perhaps it's because, for cheap tickets these days, you need to pay for them now to make sure the price isn't "adjusted" (a.k.a. raised) at a later date, and the sudden reduction in bank account balance, yeah, that's pretty damn real.

So let's see if we can manage to find one flight for 12 people that satisfies everyone in terms of price and travel time and whatever other requirements pop up along the way. Oh, and Robert wants to fly on a "cool" airplane, where "cool" apparently means "big" and "has those little screens so you can watch cartoons and play games."

Let's play "Where is Nicolas Sarkozy's Other Hand?"

Ten nights at Disney's Pop Century Resort (we like cheap), with 8-day "Premium" park tickets, and two meals a day pre-paid, for $650 per person. All we need now is a cheap flight and I'll be in Skinflint Heaven.





....is it the Pennsy Dutch background showing again, you think?

Yes. Yes, it's time for a road trip.