http://knitty.com/ISSUEfall08/PATTtatiana.html

Now. NO. NO NO NO. I know what will happen with this one. I will merrily get all the yarn and start off with lots of enthusiasm. Then halfway through mitten 1, I will realize that this is an eternity project cause wtf look at all the pattern work, and since I took on such an ambitious project, I will consider myself back in the knitting realm again and start three other quicker projects, and put this one aside.

Oh.

"Except for eyes of mitten cap, all facial features are embroidered after knitting is complete, using duplicate stitch and French knots."

Cheating!!

Okay so perhaps I will make them. >_> After I've finished some Christmas presents!

"The main reason people have sex is boredom." - Tom
Any comments? ;)

We're emailing about stuff to buy for tonight's dinner, and we wanted to first make some chutney, but found out it would be quite tedious, so we're going to buy some. So he asks me to go look for it if I pass by some immigrant shop, and I say chutney isn't very exotic, they probably have it at a normal grocery store. The answer? "Don't forget that you're in Norway now. Garlic is exotic here."

:D
But hey, by the way, I found FILMJÖLK! They just call it "Kultur" and place it with the milk so you think it is like Biola but it isn't! One year without it and it was there all the time...

I made two sorts of cookies yesterday! And both turned out very nice, pretty and so on. Wheee.

Come on people, do try to update some more >_<

I'm absolutely enamoured with the lang-8 site. If you're into languages, and like to pracise your language, join it! And especially, if you're native French/French-Canadian, you can join and finally get a chance to correct my french :D

I think I mentioned the site before (or did I?), but I will go into some more detail now. The whole idea of the site is that you create a profile (very unceremonial thing, just name-native language-target language, age, sex...) and have a journal. You can write whatever in your journal, use it as a diary or review stuff or whatever, and you write in whatever language you want. If you are learning Japanese, some Japanese people will see that someone has written something they can correct, and they go to your journal. When you correct, you can overline text, mark things in blue and red, and add words, sentence by sentence. And write just normal comments, like on a blog. And you can add photos to posts and regulate who can read them.

The site is mainly for Asian languages (and Asian people learning English), cause it was created by a Japanese person, but there's lots of other people there too. Quite some Russians, very many people who study Portuguese, some French, etc. And it's just Beta, so it's not perfect yet and still growing. But SO useful! I have like 4 Russians who correct every post I write and who gladly comment on whatever silly things I write.

Join, and add me, I'm tricours as always ;) lang-8.com

Jeg tenkte jeg skulle prøve å skrive litt på norsk, bare for å se hvordan det egentlig fungerer. Selvfølgelig får de norske som leser dette more seg med å rette feilene mine!

Okei. Det føles litt rart! Jeg tror aldri jeg vil snakke norsk, det høres bare altfor dumt ut når svensker gjør det, men det hadde vært litt morsomt å kunne skrive korrekt norsk. Problemet mitt er vel da at det ordforrådet jeg har på norsk til stor del bare kommer fra dagligtale (talespråk og DB og VG!). Jeg kan ikke noen fine ord på norsk, jeg kan selvfølgelig ta et svensk ord og slenge på noen "e" og "sj" eller bare prøve så godt jeg kan å stave feil på svensk og håpe at det fungerer på norsk, men det er ingen sikker fremgangsmåte. Og jeg har så lite tid til å lese :( Når jag faktisk leser på norsk og finner et nytt ord og spør Tom om det, så veit han i sin tur oftest ikke hva det er :P

Egentlig hadde jeg tenkt skrive litt på islandsk, men det føltes litt for mye som å utfordre skjebnen!

Best jeg slutter nå så det ikke blir pinlig mange feil :D

I have made delicious dried fruit-hazelnut-orangepeel-chocolate-linseed scones :) Perfect with grape jelly and cactus tea :)

Today will be lots of Russian since I can't go out and do much anyway because of the sudden snowfall. Russian and the How-to-learn-any-langue forum just because it makes me feel bad :D

When we go "baobao" to Castro (that's apparantly what... Vietnamese or something cats say) he actually talks back. Sometimes, I wonder if we're saying something to him, cause he always looks very tortured when we have a dialogue going on.

And this is GREAT:

- Vous avez une jolie femme, dit le professeur à Colin, dans l'antichambre.
- Oui, dit Colin.
Il se mit à pleurer tout à coup, car il savait que Chloé avait mal.
- Allons... dit le professeur. Vous me mettez dans une situation embarassante. Il va falloir que je vous console. Tenez...
Il fouillait dans une poche intérieure de sa veste et en retira un petit carnet relié de cuir rouge.
- Regardez. C'est la mienne.
- La vôtre? demanda Colin, qui s'efforçait de redevenir calme.
- Ma femme! repliqua le professeur.
Et Colin ouvrit le carnet machinalement et éclata de rire.
- Ça y est, dit le professeur. Ça ne rate jamais, ils rigolent tous. Mais enfin, qu'est-ce qu'elle a de si marrant?

(L'Ecume des jours, Boris Vian)

I finished the tale and Aleksey corrected the essential errors in it, but I decided not to post it here, only on the blog.

Soon food (hamburger :D) and then... ugh I'm tired all of a sudden. Perhaps some Hungarian ^^

Just in case I didn't mention it, my Russian blog is highly active again. Anyone who feels like doing a little bit of correction work is very welcome, just be... pedagogic and nice ;) http://snezhnost.wordpress.com/

I want to traaaaaavel. Like really bad. I need to get out of here for a bit. So I'm nagging Tom about asking his friend when we can go to Budapest so that we can order tickets. It would be ideal if we could go there after my birthday (20th of April) as JF (whose birthday is also on the 20th of April :P) will also be going there then, to see Andris! That way, I could hang some with them (ever so slightly more cultural company if I may say so) and Tom could catch up with his friend without me hanging around.

And when will I get my ass over to Russia? That one feels much harder...

Can't wait until my books get here! But tomorrow French starts again. Yay! Or not. But I do want those points...

Mushroomcandy kind of weird, cause the Belgian chocolate won't go completely hard and dry! Hmmmpf. Anyone knows why? Soooo delicios though, icredible.

( And more. )

I've done some baking! These things are filled with dried fruit, chopped up apple, brown sugar and cinnamon. We haven't tasted yet, but we're about to. My first try at something of this kind, and I'm quite proud of the result :)

( Photoooos )

Don't they just fit together so well?

( meow )

Sometimes, or well, rather often, Swedish is such a practical, space saving lagnuage, while French is... well... as it is.

Why not simply say "kausal bisats" when you can say "proposition subordonnée adverbiale de cause"?

I get a small kick out of dividing sentences into main and secondary clauses.

And I am amazed at how my smile can work people, me being such a horrible person!

The gym this afternoon. I've got pink sneakers!
Without Tom I would be scared about yet again going into a room (several rooms) filled with pumped up people lifting silly heavy weights (while I take on feather weights), but Tom kind of looks like he belongs in a gym, so I feel safe. :D

I found another great blogger. Her face has kind of annoyed me on the front page of www.aftonbladet.se from time to time (probably because she wrote a post about smokers being more fun than non-smokers) but she's really funny, à point and she just doesn't give a damn about all the crap people give her.

Also, it's hilarious to read the comments she get from angry people who can't handle irony and satire, and who can never ever spell correctly.

Please people, since when is Swedish a language that's hard to spell for its natives?

This is just brilliant:

http://blogg.aftonbladet.se/19586/perma/689354

The kitty is the personification of cuddliness :)

Soo... there's been one customer here since I opened two hours ago O_O I kind of suspected this would be a suuuuper quiet week, seen as it's the last week of January and people are generally broke, but still...

And there's so much LIGHT now! Yesteday when I was closing, I had to look what time it was twice to make sure I was really supposed to close.

Hier on a passé encore une de ces soirées ensemble. Très calme, rien de spéciale, mais tout à fait extraordinaire. Tom cuisinait une soupe à poisson - déjà ca c'est impréssionant, il mangeait pas le poisson avant de me rencontrer - asiatique, et on avait des lichis, du jackfruit - beurk - et du pomelo et du Marabou Frukt & Mandel pour dessert. Ensuite, moi j'ai fait du russe en traduisant des recettes pendant qu'il lisait des documents pour son travail. J'ai traduit une recette pour уха донская et une autre pour un genre de dessert (je pense...?)... un genre de piroge avec une crème de fromage dedans. Quelque chose comme ca. C'était la première recette que j'avais trouvée qui ne contenait pas 500g de sucre :P

Et mais j'ai peur du cours de francais qui commence maintenant. On est sensé utiliser un logiciel qui s'appelle Marratech et qui utilise des webcams et des headsets. Déjà, parler francais fait un peu peur, mais le parler à travers Internet ou au téléphone, c'est mille fois pire. Et je vois trop le scenario où je passe toutes mes soirées à faire du francais et où le russe est encore une fois complètement oublié :S

En même temps, il me faut ce cours de francais. Il me le faut vraiment. Je rêve même de gens qui me disent que mon francais de ces jours est nul.

Cette nuit par contre, j'ai rêvé que Tom faisait du cheval et qu'il a tué le cheval. Le cheval était très stressé et il a essayé de "sauter" par un clôture de 0,7 m, et en échouant il s'est fait arraché la jambe... ensuite, il est mort parmis les fleurs de ma mère.

Aujourd'hui je pensais que je pratiquerai mon francais un peu, car il est terriblement négligé, et j'en ai honte. Mais finalement... non :P

Today passed wonderfully fast. Tom's making an improvised asian soup and I'm gonna make coffee bean candy later. The only slightly annoying thing is that we got an elecitricy bill for 4000... Sokita suggested it was due to Tom's presence (we cook so much), and I kind of pointed out that it was rather the heating Morten and Hanna use in their rooms. If Hanna has her room at like 30 degrees and it's 15m^2 and you take that *3,5 (super high ceiling) and Morten has an even bigger room and likes to keep it warm... well... (Sokita and I both prefer our rooms at <20).

This weekend we took a tour to Grønland (I love that we will live close to Grønland when we move) and bought fruit and vegetables in the biggest of the immigrant shops there. It was really fun. They have like 20 fruits and vegetables I have never seen before, and of course we have no idea what to do with them. But this time we noticed that they actually have big posters on the walls showing almost all of them, and in which family they are. We found a new favourite, Pomelo. Soooo delicious. And I bought these kiwi looking things that must be the cousin of the dates, cause it tastes exactly the same, and looks like what a fresh date ought to look like, but they don't. We also bought a delicious little brown thing that tastes like a creamy version of potatoes, and Okra, which looks very funny and makes any soup pretty (they form small stars when you cut them up). I so loooooove coriander (our next door immigrant shop doesn't have it) and went straight for it.. to discover that all the bundles of coriander looked like they had had their prime like 4 days ago.

"The coriander is bad today" a muslim woman said next to us, and we agreed with her. Then I discovered they had wonderfully fresh mint, and she was very enthusiastic about how delicious it was in tea :) Then we went to look at weird fruits, and all of a sudden she's next to us offering us the fresh coriander she's found in another box :) We also had some interaction with a fellow confused Norwegian, who was looking at an alien like fruit going "Do you have any idea...?" We did not.

The tapenade I made this week end is absolutely wonderful. Love that stuff!

And OOOH, I bought a gigantic polar bear today!! It's almost as tall as I am :D His name will be Butch-Ingvar.

Off to some... to something.

It's all about Madrugada again. It's the one with the curly hair who died this summer.

I'm tired, and I haven't eaten properly in days. There is no more lunch-dinner thing going on, it's breakfast, perhaps lunch, snack and snack. Or just breakfast, snack snack and snack. But tomorrow I only work 3,5 hours! What a difference! Perhaps I'll go get a mattress with Tom. Or get new shoes.

Kind of feel like reading something. I may fall asleep, but wtf...

One great Norwegian expression is "få kjeft". And that's what we get from so so so many customers. Kjeft. No respect whatsoever, just whining and complaints and condescending comments.
Be nice to the people in the cash register. Please.

Spent today's lunch break talking to Hamad. He's from Afghanistan, and he's really nice! He's the first one I've met here who doesn't really like Norwegians (they're too hard to get to know), but who loves Swedes because they're so open and who loves Sweden cause there are not so many mountains. :P He's 24 and he's got the life experience of someone at least 10 years older. He suggested we go to a café some time. It's nice to meet interesting people :)

Book. Hmm. Sarraute?