Vegetarian

Yes, I am a vegetarian for about 18 years and yes that means that I made the decision to not eat meat and fish when I was about 12. My mother accepted it right away and more or less ate vegetarian meals with me at home - of course she was a little worried that I may miss some important nutrients but we had all kinds of books listing vegetables which are good for vegetarians and my mother just cooked more of those. My grandmother didn't really want to accept it but I strictly only ate the side dishes and the salad (no, I don't want the sauce where the duck was baked in...). Going to a restaurant at that time was somewhat harder since traditional German cuisine is mostly with meat or fish. Luckily it was just about the time when more and more people started to become more conscious about what they ate, so most restaurants offered at least two choices of vegetarian meals. During school times, I even got a vegetarian kebab - which is baked feta cheese instead of the meat (that was really good actually). I think that Germany is now a very vegetarian friendly country - most restaurants have a vegetarian section on the menu and you have such a big choice of cheese and other dairy products that you can choose the cheese without the rennet and the yoghurt without the gelatin (seriously what does gelatin do in yoghurt?).
So it was a little bit like going to the middle ages when coming to Norway. There are a few vegetarian restaurants and at most international places (Indian, Italian, Chinese ..) it is usually quite easy to find vegetarian choices. However, when people go out for a meal, they don't ask the ONLY vegetarian (of ~50 people) where she would prefer to eat and I don't blame them (since I am not fanatic about vegetarianism - it is my choice). So I ended up at places where they had not a single dish without any dead animal (not even the salads or soups). Of course then I try to negotiate with the waiters if they could make me something without the meat and they are quite friendly and co-operative but at times you end up with only half cooked vegetables or a strange sauce, etc.... Oh and a real vegetarian doesn't eat fish - that is something which people here have problems to understand - probably because there are many people who say that they are vegetarians but eat fish. Of course that is fine with me but they could say that they are a pescetarian or a semi-vegetarian ... then a real vegetarian wouldn't constantly get served fish. Well I have learned and now will not forget to mention this fact.
The choices in the supermarkets are also not really that great - cheese is usually quite tasteless and so you just go for the one with the most taste (whatever rennet it has). A majority of yoghurts still have gelatin so I stay away from those, there are usually only two producers of milk (both of course not ecological), the only thing you really get is free-range biological eggs. And if you don't go to the really big supermarkets or the Turkish shops (which are quite far away for me so I would need at least half a day only to go shopping there), then the choice of vegetables and fruits is also quite limited.
I am sorry for the somewhat long essay but it still seems to be a certain issue at least here in Norway. Of course you may ask why I am still eating vegetarian if it is so hard here, so here are my reasons:

1. I don't like meat and fish and actually never did eat much as a child. I put this as the very first reason to show that for me it is not a hardship to not eat meat out of principles which, of course, I also have.

2. Ethics. This is mostly about factory farming (mass animal farming) and the treatmeant of animals like transport and slaughtering techniques. Of course something is about the ethics of killing because I also wouldn't eat game out of principal (not because of reason 1).

3. Environmental issues. This is about what people feed to animals in factory farming so that they get fat and what medicaments and hormones they inject. Logically, this also effects animal products and that's why I buy eggs and milk and cheese from organic farming if I have the choice. I could go as far as not buying milk and cheese but I think that would be going too far at the moment. Something like the recent dioxine scandal in Germany will not affect you if you buy organic products.

4. Diseases. Only a minor point but since there have been a few scandals about old meat being repacked and sold, there is a chance you can get some parasites or other nasty stuff ...


Oh yes and I do eat gummy bears - without gelatin of course (imported from Germany, as usual)
During school times we went to visit a factory which produces gelatin. It stank horribly but what really shocked me was the fact that they took leather pieces coming from a shoe factory which already had been coloured. So first they put in chemicals to remove the colour which surely wasn't that harmless either and then they produced the gelatin out of it ... yummy!

Mission travel bug completed!

This time I was successful reaching the destination AND finding the cache. It was a hiking trip in the snow - according to the GPS ~5.2 km in a nice round trip. Since a few people have used the path, hiking was fairly easy except for a few rare areas where I sank in. And the big advantage: no people on the trails at all - they are all skiing on the illuminated track. Since it was getting dark I even saw two moose which is the very first time I've ever seen them close to Oslo. Due to the lack of light and them moving away from me very fast and a missing zoom lens I couldn't take a picture to proove I've seen them :(
Yet I can show some other moose pictures from Alaska:

Running ...

... looking...

... picking up junior...

... and into the woods.

All taken from the car in the middle of the day (on a road with no cars though). We didn't understand why she was running parallel to the road but after the small one turned up to our surprise it was clear where she was running to.

Full moon

Some experiments with tripod and zoom lens. Not as perfect as I wanted them but not too bad ;)

Geocaching

Actually I have been infected by him a while ago. Several times, we went out geocaching together and it was great fun to look for the hidden boxes :). Yet, I hadn't quite made up my mind if I wanted to buy a GPS or not. Things changed when my quite old mobile phone gave up to work and I needed a new one so I decided to get one with GPS receiver. The GPS itself was actually quite accurate once it worked but it always needed some time until it started to work and the biggest disadvantage was the battery - it was only good for about half a day and of course a phone doesn't use normal batteries, you could easily take with you. So, finally I got a real GPS and am really happy with it.
Between Christmas and New Year, I picked up a travel bug which had Norway as one of it's preferred destinations so I took it with me and am now trying to set it out.
The first time I went skiing on the illuminated track since it was already dark and unfortunately couldn't find the cache although I must have been close to it.
The second time I tried to ski in the backcountry on a hiking trail and didn't come very far - snowshoes would have been better because the top of the snow cover was frozen and the ground rather uneven - oh well at least I didn't meet any people and that was the main goal :)



Looks like fluffy nice snow but it is more like cement ;)






That's the so called Swedish wall - normally out of rocks.



The sky looked very nice unfortunately I didn't really get a good spot completely without trees.



And a blurred moon ... looked much better of course

Tea

Well, I really love tea! In the mornings, I prefer black tea but I also like green tea and all kinds of herbal teas. The only condition for the black tea especially: it has to be REAL tea - not those small cheap tea bags with an almost indefinable powder which hardly tastes like anything - no loose tea where you actually still can see the leaves. To have some variety in the mornings, I usually have quite some assortment of flavoured black tea (vanilla, earl grey, amaretto, cherry, cranberry, caramel ....) so that I can choose a different one each day and will not get tired of one type.
Unfortunately, Norway is not really a "tea" country (although I start to wonder if it is good for any type of food at all) so among the few teas you get in the normal supermarked, you usually have the choice between 5 different bag teas. In the very good supermarkets, you get one loose tea but usually only one brand which is not that good. I recently was in a medium sized German supermarked and the tea section is now ~ 10-15 m long, 2 m high all densely packed with all kinds of tea (herabal, ecological, loose, bags).
Alternatively of course, you can go to a tea shop and they have a very good choice and very friendly people working there (like in almost every tea shop) but as most good things here in Norway they are REALLY expensive.
So, everytime I come back from Germany, I import loads of tea. Some of it I buy in the German supermarked and some I order at a quite good German online shop (they probably would deliver to Norway as well but then you never know if they put additional tax on it or if they keep the tea at the customs - a lot has happened here).
Of course it's not only the tea I have to take with me, so I usually have to go home with at least a half empty bag to fill it up once I return and still I have to do without many things which I really like but I have to make choices and one of them is the tea ;)

High Hopes

Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young
In a world of magnets and miracles
Our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary
The ringing of the division bell had begun
Along the long road and on down to the causeway
Do they still LIVE there by the cut
There was a ragged band that followed in our footsteps
Running before time took our dreams away
Leaving the myriad small creatures trying to tie us to the ground
To a life consumed by slow decay

The grass was greener
The light was brighter
With friends surrounded
The nights of wonder ...

Tongue out!

White Christmas

Since I haven't posted too many pictures lately and since a white Christmas is not that common anymore, here proof of snow on the 25th of December 2010 ;)

Re-re-re-revised revision

Found this while cleaning up my e-mail account:

Sample Cover Letter for Journal Manuscript Resubmissions by Roy F.
Baumeister

Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:
Enclosed is our latest version of Ms # 85-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the
re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again
rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed
the goddamn running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change
we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that
your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure
than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations
by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary
exercise of tyrannical power over helpless authors like ourselves who
happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of
the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they'd probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him or her to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers' comments we couldn't do anything about. For example, if (as review C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by Reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews.

We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you;
please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to your journal.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote
acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we
liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held
the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle,
restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper
into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn't, or wouldn't, have done it
without your input.

Sincerely,
...

Happy New Year!

Yes, I'm a little late but I would also like to take the opportunity to wish everybody a successful and especially healthy year 2011. Actually I had similar thoughts like the ones expressed in the quote below.

"New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that coome with thte coming of drakness on other nights." ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

For some reason, humans need this repetitive celebration at a random time once set by some of our ancestors (of course not completely random since our planet travels around the sun in approximately that time). But we could as well celebrate the new year in the middle of summer or in March or any other month. Or we could celebrate the beginning of every single day. Then we could also wish each other a happy new day, we could have new day's resolutions which may be more realistic than the plans we have at the beginning of a year and which we will have forgotten by the end of January. Maybe we could live in the moment instead of the past or the future and every day could be special. Maybe we would succeed to seize the day instead of following the monotonous daily routine while forgetting which day of the week and which week of the month we have.
So I wish you 365 happy new days, that most days may be successful and special to you and a lot of strength and support for the demanding, unhappy, tough days we all have to survive as well.
Or expressing it in the words of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 BC - 8 BC) commonly known as Horace:
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
"Pluck the day, putting as little trust as possible in the future"
which have become even more famous due to being quoted in the " Dead Poet's Society" (an extraordinary and excellent film in my opinion).