Weather update

We've had almost two weeks of nice weather, brilliant shining sun, warm temperatures (around and up to 5 Celcius), melting snow, clear roads, singing birds, pollenating trees etc. And then, this morning I woke up to fog, strong wind, and 5 centimeter of new, wet and heavy snow. Felt kind of bad for my cats I locked out last night... They were more than happy to come in again this morning. My brother left at 7 am to get the school bus, and when I got out to get the newspaper an hour later his footprints were almost covered again. Wellingtons were doubtlessly the right choice of shoewear.

No pictures today, I had no time to take any, and they would be grey, flat and boring anyway.

A Sense of Spring

It's still a lot of snow here, and a slight risk of more of the stuff falling on our heads the next month or two, but toady there was a sense of spring (or just optimism?) in the air. The sun shone brightly, the snow was melting, most of the roads are bare of snow even if the ditches still seem to have inverted themselves lying belly-up and reflecting their white bellies of snow. It was a joy to be outdoors today. Beautiful light when I went home from work today. Took many nice pictures on my way home.

Other stuff: an update since last post seems to be in order...

I'm still job-hunting, but not as intensely as I did earlier now that schoolwork has caught up to me. 1-2 months until my final deadlines and then exams, and I have about 15-20 pages of Japanese writings to do (of various smaller stuff that is, a 15 page japanese sakubun would be a real nightmare!), a 10 page semesterassignment discussing the debate around R. Benedict's the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, and then 1500 pages of history curriculum to read, + general repetition of Japanese grammar, kanji and glossary which should be done continuously regularly...

In addition I've got a job; I'm temporarily working as an assistant (substituting a woman on extended sick leave) on a local shcool's after-class-club (or something, I have no idea how to say it in English really...).  It's not a full time position, but I having somehing to do outside the house, income, and still have time to study, it's almost perfect. I never thought I'd ever work with kids, but now I do..  And it is fun -most of the time. :)

Last week I even tried being a teacher! It's really nice to receive phone calls which go along the line of "Can you come tomorrow? We need you!" It was a different school that called me when one of their teachers was going away on a seminar, and they wanted me to fill in for him for a day. So now I've tried teaching Math, Norwegian, Religion (Buddhism) and elementary school biology to 12 year olds. I was given a prepared program for the day so I did OK even though I had no experience and I'm not majored in any of those subjects.

Now I'm off to bed, I've plenty of curriculum and fresh air waiting for me on the other side of sleep, so I'd rather get my share of it by then.;) 

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I'll add pictures tomorrow if I have time.

Cecily's February Winter Wonderland

 
When you put on wellingtons in order to reach the mail box nice and dry and you still get snow in your boots, then you know it's a lot of snow... 

 

Snow vs. Wellingtons

It started snowing before I went to Bergen for a couple of days, and it started snowing in Bergen before I returned home as well. Along the railway to Bergen there was one beautiful snowscape after another, and although it is quite a challenge to take nice pictures from a moving train with a lot of trees close along the railway, I got quite a collection of nice pictures. 

  

Prepared for travel

 

View: Snowscape 1

View: Snowscape 2

 

In Bergen I was lucky enough to only get snow during my last day, the first days being nice and dry. I enjoy seeing the gradual tranformation of 'Bustling Bubbling City' into 'Busy Snow-Clean City', but I don't like the opposite transformation of 'clean snow city' into 'grey sludge city', and I'm glad I left before the reversed transformation kicked in. (I had a blast in Bergen, loved being back, and for social reasons not that happy to leave so soon...)

I like snow, I really do, but it can be... inconvenient... at times...

Here at home again I find myself partially snowed in; there's a lot of snow making it difficult (though not impossible) to get out of the house, the household's car is out of town with my mother this weekend, and since it is weekend public transport is only accessible enough to make people exercice extreme patience in extremely boring places or cause immense frustration, or both, due to the extreme lack of correspondance between the different bus lines etc (it's so bad it feels like it has to be planned by somebody). Just as well I don't have any reason to leave the house until tomorrow.

"Snowed in"

 

For the record, it's four steps in the stairs to our front door, and the footprints/tracks to the mail box was largely snowed away 10 minutes after I took the picture.

Long time, few words.. first words of 2009

Belated welcome to 2009, Happy New Year, Happy Celebrations, and all that jazz! 

I see I haven't posted a word since late October '08, but I will try to remedy that by giving a brief update on happenings since then, and then try to update on a regular basis throughout 2009... 

2008:

My stay in India ended a week and a half after our group assignment was due. I had 4 days in Pondi before me and Lina travelled to Pune to visit a fried of Lina's. I stayed in Pune with Lina and her friends in Pune for a week before returning home to cold and snowy Norway to write my final assignment and celebrate Christmas and New Year with family and friends. 

Writing the assignment at home turned out to be quite a challenge as I had no proper workplace at home where I could concentrate. I still have to work with that, but now, 3 months later, I have adapted and adjusted potential workspaces to fit my needs a little better than they were back in November. 

In mid-December people started coming home for the holidays, Christmas and New Year came and went in a flurry of social arrangements and festivities, and then everyone left town again.

2009:

I stayed behind after the holidays, starting my jobhunting activities when everyday normalcy returned in the beginning of January. It also turned out that I lacked a course at the university to fill the requisites for my Bachelors' degree, so after some amount of bureaucracy I've acuired student status until the  end of the spring semester. Hopefully I've finished required amount of courses by the end of this semester's exams. 

And this is basically where I am now, in the middle of jobhunting and studies. As I expect the next months to be basically the same I expect to change some things in my blogging topics, rants, the nature of my writing, etc.

No way of knowing what it will turn out to become until it has become what it will be. 

Still wishing everyone a happy and prosperous 2009! 

Week 7 & 8: Cancelled/rescheduled

Last week's blogpost is (largely) cancelled due to sickness and dehydration, and this week's post will disappear in the amassed workload; the groupwork assignment took a new twist while I was sick so now I have to start all over on something I wasn't really prepared to write (that much) about. 

Um, yeah, to briefly explain last week:

I just had the time to be "well" again for about 2 days, and then I ate something that didn't agree with me. After a heavy nausea on Wednesday I've been dehydrated and feverish throughout the weekend, slowly rehydrating and getting gradually better closer to Monday (food helped a lot), and I was back at school today Tuesday...

But on a nicer note, the Monsoon is here and temperatures are getting comfortable! I love the heavy rains and thunderstorms, it gives me a good autumn feeling. I've started reading stories with a friend at the rooftop in the evenings to hold onto this atmosphere.

People are getting restless here. It's the ten-week-crisis looming I think, assignment stress, and travel giddity. A lot of people have started talking (increasingly) about their after-Pondi-travels or about the return home. My plans are still not fixed, I'm still checking out the options as they appear, I've had about 6-7 ideas I've decided and then decided against. This time I've started asking for possible dates and price options etc. Looks like it'll turn out nice in the end...:)