we just came back from one fabulous week in rome.
we’re going to need a bit time to recuperate. my poor boots are completely tired and i’m a little bit exhausted as well. from all the walking around, you see.
anyways… plenty of stories from rome to tell. shall be back to blogging in a couple of days. i hope 
so they increased interest rate by .25 per cent today. making norway the first in europe who did it after the global financial crisis. niiiiice.
same day, they reported that unemploymen rate’s gone up.
surely i’m the only one who thinks this is weird? as in, it doesn’t make sense? as in, where’s the logic behind it? as in, who are the idiots running this bloody country???
how can you increase interest rate when more and more people are unemployed? i understand that they say norway hasn’t been hit as hard by the global financial crisis as most other countries; no problem when it comes to consumer spending and the rise in unemployment is much lower than expected but still.
they can’t do anything to help the unemployed? they don’t want to create opportunities so these people can go back to work? they just going to dismiss this and say, well, the majority of us have no problem so why should we take you, people who’s lost their job, into consideration?
i’m not sure if i have the numbers right so don’t quote me but from memory:
this is just locally. in a city with around 42 000 population.
yes, yes. increase the rent. we’ll be fine. we’ll look after ourselves. not like you ever do, ignorant people in high places. i mean, really. the idiocy of it all is mind-boggling.
and let’s see how fast the banks increase their rents. they said they’d wait. ha! fat chance. took them forever to lower the rent to start with. and nowhere near the rate they should. bet they’ll be implementing the rise in no time.
i’ve had it with this place. just… had it!
‘hey, husband! i went to the car earlier to see if it was frozen or not, right. i couldn’t open the door so i turned the heater on (we have a portable car heater) to melt the ice a bit. just now, i went out to see if it was thawed. i still couldn’t opened the door. which was weird because it wasn’t completely frozen to start with. then i realised… (pause for dramatic effect) the door is locked. that’s why i couldn’t open the door. because it was locked. not because it was frozen. your wife is an idiot. nyahahaha…’
sigh… i really am such a loser.
so we’ve gone back an hour today.
the weather is getting better and better. lots of sunny, warm days.
WHERE IS MY SNOW???
if x is coming to talk to us, we’re going to need an interpreter. it’s absolutely impossible to understand what he says.
a friend commenting on someone from some other place in norway and his dialect.
if even a native feel this way, what hope do i have? honestly.
ps. it turned out just fine. i understood everything he said but my goodness, he sure does have some strong, funny accent.
i woke up late on sunday. went to the living room and saw this on the living room floor:
here’s a closer look
feathers! my guess is from a bird one of the girls have killed. and most probably eaten. yikes!
i don’t know how they could sneaked in a bird with both of us in the house. MOH reckons they did the killing and eating outside and probably just had the feathers stuck to their fur. but… look at that! that is quite a lot of feathers. all those black dots on the first photo are feathers.
if they have taken a dead bird in (i hope not), that means they ate the poor thing inside. now, they usually eat everything (i once found a beak at our front door. a beak, i tell you! they ate everything but the beak) and i sure hope they did too this one time. i do not want to wake up one day and found a rotting leftover of that poor bird.
my girls are killers. i’m so ashamed 
i laughed a lot.
i laughed until my stomach ached.
i laughed until i got stitch on my side.
i laughed until my cheeks hurt.
i laughed until i cried.
i laughed until i fell down to the floor. then i continued laughing while rolling around on the floor.
i laughed hysterically.
i laughed for minutes.
i laughed and laughed and laughed until people started to laugh with me eventhough they didn’t know what they were laughing at.
i laughed online. every sentence i wrote ended in ‘hahaha’ or ‘hehehe’ or smiley face. i still do it today but not as much as before.
i laughed and screamed, ’stop, stop. please. i’m going to pee in my pants!’
i laughed like that again and again.
yes, i wrote ‘laughed’ not ‘laugh’. past tense. because i don’t laugh anymore. not real laughter. these days, i’m all about fake laughs and fake smiles. i’m getting pretty good at this faking business.
last week, i laughed after seeing baileys sleeping in this very funny way. it lasted about half-a-minute. it wasn’t completely fake, but it wasn’t completely genuine either. she was funny but i think the laughing part was more of a show. to myself. to convince myself that i still know how to do it.
i want to laugh happy laughters. i want to laugh uncontrollably. i want to laugh high-pitched crazy laughters. i want people to tell me to stop laughing like a crazy woman. but there is no reason to laugh. nothing makes me laugh these days.
i wish there was. you have no idea how much energy it takes to fake your emotions. it is so very tiring. and i’m exhausted. just… exhausted.
i have being called stingy my whole life. i always say thrifty but the general consensus by people who know me is that i’m so careful with money, i’m borderline stingy. i don’t have problem using money for presents, for example, but when it comes to myself, i hardly ever buy things that i want; i usually just buy things i need.
MOH: are you going to get the vaccination for h1n1?
me: maybe.
MOH: norway has got their vaccine. lots of them.
me: i know you don’t want to get it.
MOH: no.
me: well, then we’ll see if it works or not. you’re not protected, i will be.
MOH: so you’ll have it?
me: i don’t know. probably. i’ll ask my mummy. but you know, since they bought it with our tax money, we’ve paid for it already. might as well get it.
MOH: you know you have to pay for it?
me: what?
MOH: you have to pay to get it.
me: what a rip off. didn’t they use our tax money to buy them? then they want us to pay to get it? huh! forget it. i don’t want it anymore.
MOH: my god, you’re stingy.
think about it. do i really need the vaccine? the way it is now, they don’t know, do they. what with the virus mutating itself or whatever other funny medical business.
and really, this is not about being stingy. in a way, it’s a principal thing. i mean, they did use my tax money to buy the vaccine, why the bloody hell do i have to pay for it again? and if it’s absolutely necessary for us to have them, i’m sure we’ll get them for free. eventually.
come to think of it, norway is the one who’s stingy.
as someone who were born in a tropical country, i took the sun for granted. this is how it is in indonesia: sunny today, sunny yesterday, sunny tomorrow, sunny forever. 30 degrees, 31 degrees, 32 degrees. i don’t think anybody in indonesia go out into the sun voluntarily. why do you think there are so many malls in indonesia? so people can spend their time there in places with ac. even if you don’t have it at home.
people always ask me here during the few days of hot summer days, you must be so used to high temperature and sunny days like this. uh… no. i didn’t live in a jungle. i lived in a city. every room, excluding bathrooms and kitchen, in my parents’ house had ac. i grew up in a room with the ac set on 15. when i wanted to go somewheree, to the mall for example, i got out from my air-conned house to my air-conned car. then from my air-conned car to the air-conned mall. get the picture? during breaks at school, we stayed inside the classrooms eating our lunch or catching up with homeworks. we did our physical ed class in an inside gym. when it was an outside activity, we did it waaaay early in the morning. 6.30. we went swimming once every two weeks up until junior high (with the whole class). before 7 o’clock. once, for one or other reason, we didn’t go until midday. i came home completely burnt and shed a layer of skin the following week.
then i moved to australia. not to victoria or nsw or tasmania. you know, places where it get cold. i went to queensland. aaaah, dear old sunny brisbane. as an impoverished students, i lived at places without ac. i accumulated six addresses in brisbane, only two of them had ac. i walked quite a lot there but the heat wasn’t as fierce as in indonesia. and the humidity was lower. still, i avoided being outside whenever i could. i loved the computer labs at uni; they have ac. even lecture theaters and tutorial rooms were welcome because they were cool.
so to sum it up, i have never been a fan of sun. i still am not. because i spent almost 25 years of my live in a sunny, warm place, i never really thought about it. just part of my life that i try to avoid.
isn’t the fact that i take one of these every day ironic?
my mum told me her doctor warned her about osteoporosis. my sister was given a lecture because she is very skinny and have very thin (small?) bones. i, thankfully, am big-boned. no, i’m not saying it in a vain i’m-not-fat-just-big-boned way. i’m fat and big-boned. but big-boned or not, i have decided that i don’t want to risk it. so i began taking vit d supplement. i wish i was one of those people who can drink milk straight (i watch in awe when MOH, norwegian that he is, pours a glass of milk and drink it all without problem) but i hate milk. i went through a period when i drank a glass of warm milk with honey before bed but that was ages ago. and it didn’t last. the only way to get me to consume milk these days is using it in my cooking. my mum used to say i only drank milk when i ate ice cream. and even if i wanted to go out and sunbathe now (after slopping on spf 30, of course), there is no sun!
must be karma. having all that sunshine and letting it go to waste.
i can’t see uuuhhh… ghosts. thank goodness. but as i’ve said before, sometimes i just feel there’s something around. something i can’t see but can most definitely feel. something that gives me the chill.
for the longest time now, i’ve felt weird walking through the first-floor hallway at work. i usually walk through it when i park at thebasement carpark. i do it in the colder months because my car is old and when it’s cold the doors and locks got frozen shut. parking it outside means i can’t get into the car afterward and have to pour hot water on it to unfreeze it. not fun. so during the colder months, i park at the basement parking area. which means i have to walk through the scary hallway to get inside. or i can go outside the parking area and make a detour to the front door. not fun either when it’s minus degree.
last week, for the first time, i took the detour. i refuse to walk through the hallway again.
even though i’ve been making myself walking through it for ages now (because i feel kinda stupid avoiding a hallway based on a feeling), i always walk very fast. very, very fast. before last week though, i couldn’t point a finger on exactly what was scary there. just a general feeling of a … presence? then last week, after work, i walk there with some other people who were also going to the carpark and i made a mistake of turning my head to the left to the… i’m not sure what room, i’ve only toured the whole place once ages ago, but it think it’s where the suntanning machines are, on the way to the gym. anyway. i looked in there and felt cold. something wasn’t right there. i got this negative vibe from it. it was a bad feeling. i haven’t walked there alone again.
after i found out exactly where it came from, the spooky feeling, i realised that it’s kinda situated under the second-floor bathroom. that bathroom has been giving me the creep since i first started working there. not the whole bathroom, just the left cubicle. when i need to go to the bathroom and the right cubicle is occupied, i wait until it’s free. it’s that serious.
i don’t think i have a sixth sense or anything like that. neither do i want it. and i usually just feel some places are creepy but that left cubicle, i used it a couple of times waaaay at the beginning and i kept getting this feeling that someone died there. unvoluntarily. do i sound crazy? i do, don’t i? i feel kinda crazy. talking about getting a bad vibe from a room and refusing to use a bathroom cubicle because i felt someone died there. i might be losing my mind. i probably just have a bad case of paranoia. it is also very possible that this is a direct result of me having too wild of an imagination. either way, i’m taking the detour from now on. minus degrees, rain, snow, hail, whatever. or i’ll come a bit early and wait at the garage until someone else comes and walk with them through that hallway. i can’t take that hallway.
