This is the blog of a Norwegian (Marianne, aka 'M') who moved to Australia in 2007 to be with Roger (aka R) and feels lucky to have escaped a comparatively communistic country with ridiculous weather!

This adorable coke ad is on here at the mo. It's American, but I like it anyway. I also like the game. Perfect combo:)

I can't drink coke anymore, cuz I made a deal with R. He will start using sunscreen if I stop drinking coke. (He thinks he's immune to skincancer.) I've been coke free for over a month. Dunno if R is using sunscreen yet o_O

There are so many bitches at the nursing home where I work. A lot of them feel like they still need to tell me what to do, like I'm a complete noob.

I'll be doing my job, minding my own business. As the other, more experienced ppl walk past me, they feel that they need to tell me what to do next. Even tho I didn't ask for their advice and what they tell me to do is what I was gonna do anyway.

Today one patient stopped me as I was doing stuff and asked if I could get him some painkillers, cuz he had a headache. Only the nurse can give them that, so I stopped what I was doing to go and find her. I looked around and asked, only to find that she wasn't around at the moment. Because I wanted to get back to what I was supposed to be doing, I told the person who was responsible for that patient today that he asked for painkillers. That way I could do my job without having to keep an eye on the door for the nurse to come back. (And trust me, with the amount of work and the number of ppl to do it, I didn't need an extra thing to do.)

The person I told, whose job it was to take care of that patient today, snorted like I'd said something funny, and then said 'you're not supposed to be telling Me that!' in a really patronising tone, cuz obviously it was the nurse who needed to know. That pissed me off, cuz I've been working there for 4 months and obviously I knew that I needed to talk to the nurse.

So I told her 'the nurse isn't here, so I'm tellling you' and walked off without waiting for a reply.

That's also the same person who thought torturing hamsters was funny.

I love what I do, but because of the ppl I work with I can't wait to leave.

This is a photo of Crocus vernalis.

I took the photo today. Now I know it's spring:)

Hamster gurl (let's call her T for simplicity) annoyed me again (previously mentioned here and here), so I've decided to completely ignore her. 

I arrived at work and I saw her arrive too, and she saw me. I looked away again without greeting her, even tho she ended up walking about 1 metre behind me.

The first 30 minutes at work are spent getting a report from the night shift ppl about what's been happening, in case there's anything we need to know to get through the day. For my patients today, there was nothing, except how many times they'd been up to pee. This is completely irrelevant to me, it doesn't affect how I do my job at all. Consequently, I didn't make any notes on my paper where it has the patients' names and a box to make notes in. T sat next to me and noticed this. She pointed to my piece of paper and said 'maybe you should be writing this down'. 

I have no idea why she felt she needed to say that. After working at the nursing home for 4 months, nearly full time, does she think the purpose of the morning report - which we have every day - has not yet occurred to me? Or maybe because she's worked there longer than me, and she feels that gives her a right to tell me what to do, just cuz she enjoys giving me orders.

I replied 'I write down what I need'. Then I ignored her the rest of the day, which was quite fun:)  For lunch I went down to the cafeteria with some other ppl. T sat down with us and chatted with some of the others. Then the others had to go, and it was just me and T. I got my phone out and pretended to do stuff. T made a random comment intended to start a conversation. I kept playing with my phone. She looked at me for a while (I saw it in the corner of my eye), and then left.

A lot of ppl seem to enjoy giving me orders, or simply start doing stuff that I'm supposed to do.

Like today, one of my patients has her blood pressure measured twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. After she got up I measured it like I was supposed to. A few hours later an old lady I work with suddenly realised she'd "forgotten" to measure my patient's blood pressure and was about to do it again, when I told her I'd already done it. She seemed surprised.

After dinner one of someone else's patient wanted to go to bed, so she asked one of my coworkers of she could help her get to her room and into bed. My coworker was busy just then, so she told the patient she'd have to wait a lil while. I walked past them, doing stuff of my own. My coworker exclaimed 'Marianne will take you!' and walked away, without asking me if that was ok, and just assumed I had nothing better to do.

Another time, when I was still quite new, I was sitting down with a couple other ppl. A woman I work with (who I cannot stand cuz this kinda stuff is typical for her) was putting up new curtains in that room and decided I was sitting in her way (which I wasn't). She said 'can you sit somewhere else?' and I did, even tho I didn't understand why I'd been asked to. I moved to a chair about 1 metre away, and then I was in her way. She didn't ask me to move again tho. And I didn't. If she'd asked me to move again I woulda prolly asked where I had her permission to sit.

They've always been telling me what to do, but when I was new I didn't mind it so much. But now that I know my job, and I know I know it, it's really getting on my nerves.

After Julie somehow injured the same leg seriously 3 times in one month, I've been restricting how much time my cats spend outside. For their safety and my peace of mind.

So I guess they have a lotta extra energy to get rid of these days. Every night between 5 am and 6 am, they'll start running around, knocking stuff over and roll around on the floor fighting. And they're very noisy. You can hear their bones hit my wooden floor as they do it. And they always do it in my room, cuz being the lovely affectionate cats that they are, they wanna be near me. (Awwwww.)

Yesterday it was warm (we had a tropical 14 degrees) and both cats were outside for about 5 hours. I always hate it when they're gone for more than 10 minutes, but I figured I might actually get some sleep.

But noooo. Sure enough, at 5 am they both started running around, wreaking havoc again. On a couple of occasions Julie decided to run around on me. It was a rather brutal way to wake up...

As always I got pretty fed up with it after a lil while, and to top it off Thomas decided to start whining about something. Prolly that Julie had gone back to sleep and he was bored. So I got up to feed him, hoping it would shut him up. I dunno if it did, but both cats came out of my bedroom to eat, so I simply went back to bed, and closed the door behind them.

And slept like a rock the rest of the night.

I just stumbled across this blog entry about pigs. (The link prolly doesn't work, but the rest of the blog is here.)

She says she met a woman who wouldn't eat pig, and mentions how muslims see eating pigs as we would see eating cats. She basically says that the pig doesn't deserve it's bad reputation. It's true that the meat used to be unhealthy, but with how pigs are kept these days, the meat has become a lot healthier, so there's no reason not to eat it.

She then proceeds to list all the good qualities pigs have, such as being as smart as dogs, being very clean and only rolling in mud to protect their sensitive skin from sunburns and the expression "sweating like a pig" doesn't make sense, because pigs sweat very little.

So I'm wondering if she feels that because the pig is such a wonderful animal, it's ok for the woman she met, and muslims, to eat it?

I would think that with all the good qualities pigs have and their intelligence (and not to mention how adorable piglets are), it should be all the more reason not to eat it.

It's like eating a dog. Or a cat.

I am very pleased to announce the launch of my new blog. It's dedicated to my move to and experiences in Australia. Moving to a foreign country half a world away is a pretty big event in my life, so I think it needs a blog.

Once again R has designed me a perfect blog. Isn't he clever? :)

My new laptop arrived today:) Yay:D

Windows Vista is the operating system on it. On my old computer I refused to install Service Pack 2, because it keeps telling me I don't really wanna do stuff that I wanna do and basically protects my internet experience to death.

So I was curious about how Vista would be, cuz I heard it was worse than SP2. And it is! It's soooo annoying and I'm soooo frustrated at the moment. Vista is supposed to be easy but at the moment it's making my life damn difficult!

First problem: I wanted to network my 2 computers to transfer files by making a shared folder. Vista doesn't like file sharing, cuz obviously I'm too stupid to know which files shouldn't be transferred. After finding out that the name of the workgroup might be the problem and having changed it, I figured the problem was solved. But noooo! Vista decides that my other computer is too dangerous to be allowed to share, and all I get is a message saying my old computer doesn't have access to the workgroup.

And I'm also too stupid to click 'maximise' when I want to maximise a window, so Vista maximises them when I click the x to close them. Not every time tho, just once in a while. Completely at random.

When I click some things that Vista doesn't want me to click, it plays a sound, as if to say 'do you really wanna do this?' to which I growl, 'if I didn't wanna do it, I wouldn't click it!!' and have to click it again to make it do what I wanted it to do. Such as closing IE.

When I delete a file, it asks 'do you really wanna delete this file?' and I click 'yes' and then another window pops up and says 'this action needs confirmation' and I have to confirm that I really really wanna delete the file.

As if deleting the wrong file is such a huge disaster. It doesn't even delete it, it just goes in the bin, from which any idiot could restore it. That's what the bin is for - letting you retreive files you deleted by mistake. When I have to confirm my decision twice, I don't need the bin anymore. Even when I delete it from the bin it asks me if I'm sure I wanna do this.

Vista has some kewl features, and it looks pretty good. I know my way around computers and I don't need frickin Vista to hold my hand every step of the way.

If Microsoft feels that Americans are so computer illiterate that they need all this stuff, then maybe they can make a seperate OS for Americans, and make a proper one for the rest of the world.

Windows Vista is growing on me, now that I know where to find stuff I want. I also figured out how to share a folder with my old computer. It was simply too protected, and that's why it wouldn't let me access my own computer. I've removed a bunch of the safety stuff (such as the firewall, phishing filter and password protected sharing), and as a result the computer is much easier to use.

I also found out how to not have to confirm deleting a file 4839573 times. Now it deletes without asking at all.

When I use my mouse instead of the touchpad, it also stopped maximising instead of closing windows.

Vista looks pretty good, and I'm gonna honour you all with some screenshots. This is my desktop:

This here is the start menu.

I doesn't show, but there is a very cute photo of a kitten above my name:) As you can see (those of you who understand Norwegian) 'my computer' and 'my documents' etc are now simply 'computer' and 'documents'.

This is the documents folder:

This is computer:

And this is 'pictures' (instead of 'my pictures'):

It looks kewl. It shows the photos in the folders in 3D:)

Renaming is also very handy. When I choose rename, it highlights only the file name, but not the extension. But I can still click the extension and change it.

Vista isn't too bad:)

At least if you live in USA. I downloaded Google Earth and was asked to choose my location..

This mac ad is on tv in Australia. It's funny, and it's exactly how Vista is.

He says he could turn it all off and it would never warn him of anything. I wanna find out how I do that. I wish there was a box I could check that says 'never warn me of anything'.

See the other Get a Mac ads. They are funny:)

It seems I'm stuck with windows media player 11. On my old computer I used wmp 10, cuz 11 won't run without SP2. I liked wmp 10. Wmp 11 is just stupid. It looks ridiculous.

This is wmp 10.

Looks good doesn't it? All the colours match.

This is wmp 11:

Now what is with that glaring white thing at the right?! It doesn't fit in with anything. I like the rest of it. The blue thing at the bottom looks good. If only the white area had been the same shade of blue, I wouldn't've had a problem with it. It still wouldn't look as good as the previous one, but better than it looks now.

What's plain white got to do with anything? It no longer shows the total time of the song or playlist, and you can no longer right-click the file it's playing and delete it from your computer.

And they've made it so ridiculous that I can't go back to wmp 10. I tried to download it from the official site, but got a message saying wmp 10 will only run on Win XP. So it looks like I'm stuck with the eyesore that is wmp 11.

I'm working 7 days in a row. I started on Thursday and will work till Wednesday. I was supposed to have the weekend off and was very much looking forward to it, having worked the 5 previous weekends. On Friday afternoon, 30 minutes before i finished work, when I thought I had escaped without being asked to work the weekend, someone asked me if I could. I would say no, but I'm moving half a world away soon and shouldn't say no to work. So I said yes.

When I go to work I get up at 6 am and leave home at 6:35 on weekdays, and get up at 7 am on weekends. The entire time I'm at work (around 7 hours), I usually have no chance to sit down except for my 30 min break.

My body is tired. My back is sore, my legs ache, and my eyes sting. I woke up in the middle of the night last night cuz my back hurt. My back never hurts.

I need a day off.

Thomas is 4 years old today:) My baby boy is all grown up..:)

Actually I don't know Thomas' real b-day, him being adopted, so I just picked a day and a year. I have no idea how old he is. He was an adult when I moved here 2 years ago, so he's at least 3. That's as far as my knowledge about his age goes.

Thomas is my little mystery:)

 

Norries have a weird habit.

Today it was sunny and very springlike. And it is typical for my ppl to leave all windows and doors wide open, "cuz it's spring". Doesn't matter that it was a puny 5 degrees today and it snowed this morning and again in the afternoon.

At work today I sat down for my break. Everyone else was there too. The window was wide open, and I had goose bumps on my arms. Most of the others sat closer to the window than me, and still no one made a move to close it. I went and did it myself in the end. And was ignored. No one made any comments about how nice it was to not be cold anymore.

Well here's a newsflash for ya: This is Norway. Sun doesn't necessarily mean it's warm. And today it was cold! Keep the damn windows and doors closed!

I've been tagged by Cathrine. The idea is to do a good deed/help someone. [Need ideas on how to help?]

I work at a nursing home and help old people get through their day every day. They need help with the simplest tasks, such as getting out of bed and putting clothes on. One could argue that because it's my job and I get paid for it, it's not really a good deed. That's ok.

I have decided to help someone by donating money. Money can do a lot of good, if it's used the right way. I no longer trust the Norwegian Red Cross to spend my money wisely. I donated a lot of money to them once, and a week later I received a letter where they thanked me for my gift. That means they spent some of the money I sent them to send me a letter. Who knows what they spent the rest on. So they no longer get any of my money.

My money goes to Doctors Without Borders. They do good work, and help civilians who have accidentally ended up in the middle of a war, no matter what side their country is on. War is stupid. It never does any good.

As Agatha Christie once said: "One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one."

And Jeannette Rankin said "You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."

DWB also help people affected by natural or man-made disasters, epidemics or exclusion from health care.

So that's the first half of my money. I wanna do something for animals too, cuz I love animals and too many of them are still treated so badly. The other half of my money goes to the non-profit animal rights organisation Animal Liberation Victoria (ALV). You can read more about them here.

Helping feels good. Everyone can make a difference:)

I now leave it up to Jan Inge (and anyone else who wants to) to find a good deed and blog about it afterwards.

Everyone who knows me know I hate men. There are a few exceptions, but I hate every man I don't know, and dislike some that I do know. The reason is that so many men are players, cheaters and liars. I have no respect for ppl like that.

Women in Europe and the rest of the modern world think that we're so free. And we are free in many many ways. We think it's bad that women in the middle east are required by law to cover up. I think middle eastern men make their women cover up because their religion tells them it's bad to be tempted by women and have dirty thoughts, and it's easier to make women cover up than have to deal with their own dirty thoughts and have to have enough self discipline to divert their eyes when they see female skin.

Men in my part of the world have as many dirty thoughts as anyone. And here they're allowed to perv at women, and it's nuthin more than anyone would expect a man to do. After all, it's a woman's fault that men perv at her because of the clothes she wears. She could just cover up.

I cover up. I don't want any man to see anything that make them think things about my body that I only share with my special someone. When it's warm, and I'd rather not wear so much clothes, I still do, but I watch where they look all the time cuz I know men will perv at me, and that stops them.

And men perv at the stupidest things. If a woman plays with her hair, a man will think she's flirting, even tho that woman might have done nuthin more than have a bad hair day and needed to fix her hair.

If a woman wears a bikini, especially at a beach, that would be less tempting to a man than if she wore a top over her bikini that he could look down. Cuz then he'd see something he's not supposed to see, and men love that. Just like they would perv if they saw the top line of a woman's underwear over her jeans. With men it's all about seeing something they are not supposed to see.

You might not have noticed men perving at you. That's cuz they're all experts at hiding it. They wait till you're not looking. which proves they *do* have the ability to avert their eyes when they need to - when they don't wanna get caught. 

If a woman covers up, or wears ridiculously little clothes even when it's cold, she wears what she wears because of men, either to stop them perving or to deliberately have them perv. I think it's sad that men still control what women wear.

So here's a question. I'm not asking to be difficult or funny, it's a sincere question and I really want to know.

People of African descent have dark skin, and their palms and the soles of their feet have a lighter colour. Up till now I figured this is because those areas don't need the extra pigmentation as protection from the sun.

Humans have never walked around naked. Even in the most primitive cultures people cover up their intimate areas. Armpits aren't exposed either.

So if those areas have been covered up for 1000s of years, why are they still dark?

R woke me up by messaging me at 9:15 today. He told me to go back to sleep, which I thought was weird cuz I usually get up at 10, but I'm not one to say no to extra sleep.

I got up at 10:30 and did my usual morning stuff. After that I decided to get some breakfast. I walked into my kitchen and looked at the clock there. It said 10:15. I thought 'wooot?? I didn't get up that early!'

I walked back to my computer and looked at the time on it. It said 11:15. And then it dawned on me ('finally' you might think): Daylight savings time started at 2 am last night. Or 3 am depending on how you look at it. And R woulda thought he woke me up at 8:15.

Now it's officially summer. And a true summer morning it is at 11.7 degrees, sunny and kinda hazy. (And if you ignore the snow in the mountains.)

Awwwwwwwww:)

I've been tagged by Undre.

First thing I have to do is put my music player on random and write the first 5 songs. I put all my 581 songs in it as a playlist and hit random:

Toby Mac - God is not a secret

Natasha Bedingfield - These words

Skillet - Locked in a cage

DC Talk - I wish we'd all been ready

Strangely, WMP picked either one of my few Christian songs or a song I haven't listened to for years. Excellent. (Time to clean out the music folder perhaps...) Yes, I know there are only 4 songs. 4 suits me better than 5, and it's my blog so I do whatever I want:p

Next thing I do is pick 4 (supposed to be 5) people from my blog roll (they are also the ones I tag):

Lenemor

Røverdatter

Violent Dream

Jan Inge

Then I give each blogger a song.

Jan Inge gets God is not a secet. Cuz to you He's not, and you love telling people about Him.

Violent Dreams gets Locked in a Cage, because you kind of are at the moment. A cage of nausea. Feel better:)

Røverdatter gets These words. I dunno, but I think that song suits you, somehow.

Lenemor gets I wish we'd all been ready. Well there was only that song left, and I didn't really have a choice...:)

Mum: It's so nice that you get to live in Australia for a while.
Me: Yeah, but it's forever.
Mum: Is it??
Me: Yeah.
Mum: It might not be forever...
Me: Yeah it is.... *understands what she means* Even if Roger and I break up I'm still gonna stay there. I like Australia.
Mum: Oh... You shouldn't expect it to last forever, and get your hopes up and then it ends and you were completely unprepared for it. You should have average expectations, then you don't get disappointed.
Me: You should have high expectations, means you accomplish more. It's like positive thinking. If I expect it to last forever there's a bigger chance that it will.
Mum: But then you might get hurt.
Me: But if I expect it to last forever then I'll be happy, even if it ends after 10 years, at least I will be happy for those 10 years.
Mum: So you'd rather be happy for 10 years and then be unhappy?
Me: Yeah, I'd rather be very happy for a while than be mediocrely happy my entire life.

I wanna marry R. He is my soulmate and we were designed for each other. But there is something that really annoys me. I can't figure out why I wanna marry him.

Obviously because I love him, but I don't need to marry him to love him. What does marriage do to a relationship that love and commitment doesn't?  If you don't have love and commitment before you marry, you're not gonna get it afterwards either.

I've been trying to come up with a good reason to marry him for weeks. With no luck. I even googled 'good reasons to get married' to get some ideas. Here's the list:

• Because you're in love
• To make a commitment
• It's part of your culture
• To start a family
• To celebrate
• It's the right time

Yeah, that's all good, but you don't have to be married to have any of that. I'm already in love and committed, so I don't need to get married for that. To celebrate would be good, but then we could just throw a party in honour of ourselves and skip the wedding ceremony. The 'it's part of your culture' reason, should be on the list of bad reasons, cuz then you'd only do it cuz that's what everyone else does. And that's silly.

Here are some bad reasons to marry:

• To make your relationship secure
• Fear of being alone
• For the children
• You want a big wedding
• To recover from divorce
• To have sex

And I'm not gonna use one of these bad reasons as my reason (obviously).

If I can't think of a good reason, then the only reason I wanna get married is cuz I've been brainwashed by my culture into thinking that 'that's what ppl in love do'. And I don't do stuff just cuz everyone else is doing it. I'm not a sheep.