I’ve been at my parents’ for a week now, yet it feels like only a couple of days. I’ve done nothing productive, as I managed to leave behind everything that I was supposed to work on (such as administration law, OH NO). I’ve watched some TV, and read a whole lot of books. Also, I’ve wrestled with the whirlwind of a puppy. It took her a couple of days to learn how to coordinate all her feet, but now she runs like the wind. To begin with she could only run a few steps before she would fall over.

My skin has, as always, taken a strong dislike to this change of environment. It’s almost like being 16 again (might need to, yet again, consider blemish acne cream), only now I have bigger boobs.

In response to some of the comments on the previous post: The puppy isn’t mine (thank goodness), it’s my mom’s. Tor and I picked her up from the breeder’s house, had her at our house for one night and one night only, then packed her up in the car and drove 14 long, LONG hours north to safely deliver her to my mom. The drive was…special. It went well though. No car sickness, and she only peed in her cage once. She wouldn’t drink much though, so I had to pour water ON her to be sure her temperature would stay down (the car’s outside thermometer showed 30 degrees Celsius for most of the drive), which of course made our car smell of wet dog. It still does, kind of. Eugh.

From my experience with her so far, I have learned that I don’t want a dog after all. All she does, all day long, is run around and chew everything she sees, including people. Then she pees. Inside. On the rugs. On the floor. In the tub, in the car, up against the minibar.

Anyway. We’re driving back down to Trondheim in less than a week now, bringing with us my brother who starts uni soon. I wish we could stay here for at least two more weeks, but that would probably drive Tor insane - he’s a city boy, not used to our country ways of sitting around doing nothing because there is nothing to do and nowhere to go that isn’t too far away.

Also, should anyone wonder, we have not brought the cats with us up north - they’re staying home, and Tor’s mom is taking care of them and our house. With all this doing nothing, I haven’t really had time to miss them, but hopefully they’ll take some of the sting of having to leave my parents again, away.

It’s no secret that I love to travel. It’s also no secret that I have hardly traveled at all in my life - there are very few places I can brag about having seen that are outside of my own country. Heck, I haven’t even seen all of my own country!

I especially love traveling with Tor and seeing new places with him, and one place we’ve talked about visiting is the UK and Ireland. The UK is easily accessible to us, either by plane to wherever, or we’d drive to Bergen and take the ferry from there over to Newcastle. From Newcastle, the road isn’t too long to Edinburgh and all its wonderful castles! I love castles, but sadly Norway is rather lacking in that department. Staying a night at a castle-made-hotel would be incredibly exciting, not to mention romantic! Throw in a (friendly) haunting, and you’ve got me hooked. I’ll have to take a look around sites offering Edinburgh accommodation to see if those hotels even exist there, though.

(more…)

One thing I have heard a lot, and I mean A LOT, about since I got into the whole «blog for money» business, is Google PageRank, or Google PR, or maybe GPR if you want to get really funky and down with the abbreviations. GPR (yeah, I’m down) basically ranks your website – the higher the rank, the more your site is worth, so to speak. The rank is based on how many other websites link to your site, among other things.

But what Google giveth, Google can – and will – also taketh away. Google frowns upon bloggers earning money by writing on the internet, and many bloggers who get paid by advertisers to write a little something about their company or product have recently lost their Google PR, and are now ranked a 0 (no ranking or banned by Google). This is popularly known as the Rank Spank.

Is all lost? Are sponsored blogs doomed to a life in the Google bog of eternal stench? No! IZEA to the rescue! Just when it looks dark and hopeless and countless bloggers are crying themselves to sleep, IZEA swoops in with their new rating system: IZEARanks – Real Ranks for Real Bloggers.

IZEARank ranks your blog according to actual website statistics. It doesn’t care who links to you, or how many (although obviously being linked to will in most cases increase your site traffic). All you need to do to get your site ranked is register and put a snippet of code in your website coding, to make the stats start rolling in. It will then display your current IZEARank, as well as a graph showing the changes in your site’s RealRank.

All this can be yours for a one-time fee of NOTHING! NADA! INGENTING! So what are you waiting for, blogger? Go join the revolution! Be free!

Quote Aldous Huxley.

I just finished booking our summer vacation. Spurred on by my newfound love for historical France and Versailles, we are going to Paris for a week in July. Hopefully I haven’t made any mistakes concerning the hotel I’ve booked a room at - I can’t exactly claim to know the good locations for lodging in Paris. It’s located in the 9e arrondissement - Opéra. According to the map it’s “close” to Champs Elysees, and not too far away from Louvre, but I don’t really trust maps that much.

Anyway, I can’t wait! In the excitement I have ordered a book to learn French - this time with a CD so that I can learn proper pronounciation. According to one of my co-workers, the first two phrases I need to learn are “excuse me, do you speak English?” and “my French is not very good”. ;) I am proud to say I’ve allready got the first one covered.

July can’t come quickly enough now. :D

I’ve been back for almost a month, I just haven’t posted, because… I don’t know why. Well, here I am now.

To start off my return to blogging, I bring you… My entry about our trip to Vilnius. Now, I’m too lazy to type all of it, or even to copy/paste it and get the pictures in where they belong, so I’ll just link to my Vox entry.

The long awaited travel entry

Feel free to make any comments here or there, I don’t mind. Also, if you’d like to try Vox out, I’ve still got one invite left. :)

We’re leaving in approximately 6 hours. The bus doesn’t leave until 23:30, but I want to be there early to make sure we get on the right bus and all… We’ll be at the airport around 7:30 tomorrow morning, so we’ll have to wait quite a few hours there before our plane leaves. But it was either that, or arriving there with about 30 minutes to spare before check-in.

I’m so antsy. I haven’t packed yet, I just can’t seem to get to it. I’ve found the clothes I’m bringing - very little, so that if something unforeseen happens, I will have to buy new ones, OH NO - but nothing else. However, I’ve told myself that as long as we bring our travel papers, passports, credit cards and cameras, we’ll be fine!

Speaking of cameras… Tor got a new one (Canon Powershot S3 IS) last week, so we went out to take some photos and try it out. I brought my camera too, results here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/neratema/sets/72157594203842201/
Those are all taken with my trusty little Samsung camera, except for the one of me, which is taken with Tor’s.

I’m so glad Tor’s mom is staying here while we’re away, so I won’t have to worry about the cats or the apartment. One less thing to worry about is nice, as I have plenty of worries allready.

Allright, I should get to it and get that packing done. Then a shower, dinner, phone home, laze around.

Hurray! :hero:
Actually, I came here tuesday afternoon, but I couldn’t be bothered blogging before now. Strange computer and all that. And I kinda didn’t remember my WP password, so I had to reset that. <.<

The trip here was painfully boring. First of all, I had to get up at 5 am to get ready to go to the airport. We left home at 5:45, arrived at the airport at 6:15. I got checked in, after one of those automatic check-in machines first refused to give me my boarding passes and luggage tags. Gahhh, silly machines.

The flight from Trondheim to Bodø was ok. We weren’t much delayed, which is amazing, as Norway has a severe shortage of air traffic controllers, due to some…stuff that I won’t bother going into here, cause no one would bother reading it. :pirate:
Arrived in Bodø at about 8:10 am, and ran to the ticket desk to ask if I could change my flight out to Stokmarknes to an earlier one. Alas, no luck. They had free seats, but I had an economy ticket, so no changing anything, missy.
So I had to wait. I met up with Magda, a friend of mine from both back home and Trondheim, but she had an early flight, lucky girl. I did some reading, eating, sleeping and walking, and finally 7.5 hours had passed, and it was time to board the plane. We were only about 10 minutes late taking off from Bodø, and I arrived at Stokmarknes around 4 pm. My mom picked me up, and all was well.

We went shopping both wednesday and thursday, and I also got to visit my grandfather (my dad’s dad). He’s a stubborn old man and won’t spend Christmas with us, but at least we got the news today that one of the local retirement center places had an opening for him during Christmas, so he won’t just have to be all alone. :)

So that’s about it… All Christmas gifts are bought and wrapped, we’re decorating the tree later tonight, I miss Tor a lot, and the dog is crazy in love with me because I’m new and exciting and I scratch her behind the ears a lot.