It’s snowing here to beat the band now. We haven’t had any snow on the ground at all for about a month now, amazingly enough. Oslo sure is ugly in the winter without that white fluff covering up all the dirty grey mess. Also very dark. It will be nice for the city to be pretty and bright again, but I’m going to miss being able to walk like a normal human being for the rest of the winter (probably a couple of months left). Also means I have to go back to wearing my stupid boots and not my cool boots. I miss the days when snow was solely a good thing.

Dad didn’t like the black background with white text. Well, I agree with him, actually. I wasn’t very fond of the design I’d come up with, so I’m going back to the drawing board.

Working on the design for this blog is the first time I’ve worked on any kind of web design for a long time. I’ve been maintaining the few web sites I designed for other people in the past few years, but that’s just been adding and subtracting stuff–no actual design. Coming back to web design after a long period of inactivity always reminds me how much I actually hate this work.

I’ve been making web pages since 1994, and I’ve earned money from it since 1997. It used to be easier. Back when I was making web pages for the financial services departments at OU (sadly, the web pages haven’t changed since then!), we didn’t worry about standards. Everything pretty much looked the same in the few different browsers that were available, and most people just used Netscape, anyway. CSS was a neat tool for fancy tricks like making a link change when you hovered your mouse over it. You could make the page layout pretty much exactly like you wanted it to be, and everyone used tables to do so. I got a job as webmaster of Opera Software based on my HTML that used tables for layouts. Håkon Wium Lie, one of the inventors of CSS, was impressed with my code (yeah, I’m that cool).

Nowadays, standards are of utmost importance. Content and presentation must be completely separated. CSS controls the appearance of the page, while XHTML tags the kinds of information it contains. Not to even mention standards for accessibility. I was so happy when this philosophy came into vogue, and I still support it wholeheartedly. The only problem is that web design is now a nightmarish job, primarily due to the plethora of different possible ways of interpreting these standards. With the explosive growth of the web came the explosive growth of the browser market. Each of those different browsers, in each of their different versions, and on each of the different platforms, has its own interpretation of the standards, and each should be accommodated. Some web designers just make their pages very simple, à la Jakob Nielsen; others use massive amounts of JavaScript to feed different stylesheets to different browsers and/or calculate page dimensions to allow for layouts that CSS itself doesn’t allow (or layouts mangled by the browser’s interpretation of the CSS standard). Just when you’ve finally found something that works in one browser, it’s total rubbish in another. Web design just isn’t any fun anymore. Not for me, anyway.

Then there’s the fact that I’m just not all that good of a visual designer, period. I have a teeny bit of education in visual design. Enough to be better than 90% of the designers working at my level, but not enough to produce anything spectacular or beautiful. I think the work I’ve done for my father-in-law’s Romerike Helsebygg project is my best. He’s gotten a lot of compliments on it. But then I look at the stuff on CSS Zen Garden and I just drool. This is simply not an area in which I want to try to get employment. I haven’t got the visual design skills to do that part of it, and I hate the implementation part. That’s why I don’t want to be a web designer.

I really like information architecture, however. I like organizing stuff. I like the fact that good IA is based on user research. I like how IA helps people find what they’re looking for, which is the main reason people go to most web sites, anyway. Of course it’s important that the site looks decent, and even more important that the site works properly. It also helps if using the site is a generally pleasant experience. But if the IA isn’t good, there’s a good chance the entire endeavor will fail. In my opinion, IA is the most important part of a complex web site. That’s why I want to be an information architect.

…had a couple of excellent posts today: Some Thoughts on Faith and I’m Paying Money for This Shit?

I’ve just signed up for my yoga school’s yogaferie, or yoga vacation. It’s this summer from June 25th ’til July 2nd in a place in Telemark called “Nisedal”, which translates to “gnome valley” or something similar. (Here is a picture of a nisse, more or less.) I’m very excited about this trip, as it’ll be something totally new and different for me. Spending a week with a bunch of Norwegians I don’t know, doing exercise! It’s the kind of thing where you get up early, do yoga before breakfast, eat only vegetarian, make all the meals together, etc. I’ll bet my Norwegian will be plenty fluent after that trip. Here are some more photos from previous yoga vacations. I’m very excited about this!

We may also take Hurtigruten up the Norwegian coast this summer to go visit Kristoffer. Won’t be cheap–it will be a nine-day cruise, after all!–but it’s supposed to be just a gorgeous trip. It’ll probably cost the same as our whirlwind roadtrip through the middle of the US last summer, and I owe it to myself and Johannes to get to see what’s so beautiful about this country. It should be a very nice summer.

Well, it seems as if the blog thing is working to get me to write more. I can hardly shut up! We’ll see if it lasts.

There are still some CSS bugs and some pages I haven’t even touched yet, but overall I’ve gotten a lot of work done on the site tonight. I’m not really wild about the design, but hey, I’m not a designer, after all! I’ve got to quit for today and go to bed.

Back when I was moderating the NAAFA discussion forums, one of the posters there mentioned a site called FitDay. At that time, the site allowed members to record their daily food intake–for free–and then calculate things like total calories, percentage of calories from fat/carbs/protein, etc. The site now sells software that allows you to do that and more–stuff like see reports of calorie balance as a function of mood, whether or not you’re getting enough nutrients over time, etc. I bought the software a year or two ago, and have used it for short stints of monitoring my food intake once or twice. I’m doing so now.

Lucky me, I’ve never been a real dieter, so I only feel educated by monitoring every last bit of stuff that goes into my mouth, not harassed. Likewise, I don’t freak out when I see my weight on a scale. You learn a lot of things by keeping a food journal, and I’m glad I’m able to do so without freaking out. I’ve learned that I actually eat less when I’m depressed–by quite a bit. I’ve learned that I don’t really eat that much for a person of my size and activity level–usually between 1500 and 2500 calories a day. I’ve learned that I hardly eat any vegetables at all (but I already knew that!). I learned that the more water I drink, the less I eat. And most importantly, I learned how incredibly many calories I’ll drink in soda if I drink as much as I would like to. Analysis from this program is a big part of the reason I decided to lay off the Coke.

The program also thinks that I’m eating significantly fewer calories than I’m burning, but I don’t think that’s the case, since I’m not losing weight. You can change the settings for your metabolism, choosing levels from sedentary to very active. You can also customize your metabolism, which is what I did, since I sleep so much. My custom number of calories burned per day. given the activities I usually do, is just a bit above “sedentary” levels, and still the program thinks I should be losing weight based on what it thinks I burn versus what I tell it I eat. I’m not lying about what I eat (I log even the butter on the corn!), so this just points out how metabolism is not one-size-fits-all. It’s not even a small-medium-large-XL-thing. My metabolism must be extremely slow for my weight to be stable given my caloric intake. I wonder why.

So, what lesson do I take from the above statistics? Life isn’t fair. I knew that before, certainly my life has taught me this lesson before. But this is just another example of the fact. Every day I walk up 50 steps to get into my apartment, at least once, and I take the dog on a walk. Once a week I do an hour and 45 minutes of yoga, some of which is extremely strenuous (sun salutations, anyone?). A couple of days a week I run errands, which involve walking anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple of hours, during which I’m carrying a heavy backpack around. Granted, this is nothing compared to the government’s new guidelines for physical activity, but I know it’s more than many Americans do. And I know that it’s a helluva lot more than most people my size do. I also know that I don’t eat all that much, although I could eat more veggies.

So, no, it’s not fair. I know this, and I know that life’s not supposed to be fair, but that doesn’t make accepting it any easier. Everyone tells you that if you just eat less and exercise more, you will lose weight. Well, I’m not going to eat less. I’m hungry a reasonable amount of the time, and I eat reasonable amounts, and if I deny myself when I’m hungry, I’m just going to end up bingeing later. I thought I’d lose weight when I moved to the city since I’d be walking around so much more. I did walk around a lot more, but all it got me was huge calves. I thought I’d lose weight when I started doing yoga classes twice a week. I’ve reaped a ton of benefits from the yoga, but weight loss wasn’t one of them. I’m going to be starting Aikido now, and practices are twice a week for an hour and a half at a time. Something tells me I’m not going to lose weight then, either. I’d like to hope that going off the coke will make me lose weight, but I doubt that, too–cutting out all those calories is just going to make me add them somewhere else. Weight loss was never the goal for any of these changes–walking cutting out coke, yoga, or aikido–but I always hoped that the changes would result in weight loss in addition to the other benefits they bring. No weight loss. No, it’s not fair.

Lately life’s been telling me that I have to learn how to accept things that aren’t fair. This is something that’s come up repeatedly in the past couple of years. It’s so hard to learn those lessons, though, when you come from the US. American culture wants people to believe that any problem is surmountable, if only you want to fix it bad enough. And while I don’t believe that’s true–I don’t believe it’s possible for everyone to be thin, or even not-fat, for example–it’s so hard to learn to accept reality when there are constant and ubiquitous messages screaming the opposite. How do you learn to accept reality when life’s just not fair?

OK, so it looks like crap in my newsreader. Lots more work left to be done. Everything is readable and functional right now though, so far as I can tell. I’m going to take a break for a while.

I’m working on a style for the blog now, so things might be weird for a bit.

Right now my schedule is fully 12 hours rotated from normal. I went to sleep at about 8 AM this morning, and got up this evening. This happens to me pretty often. My body really seems to prefer being awake during the late-night hours. I am much more productive late at night, and for that reason I have been loath to force myself into a “normal” schedule. Sure, it would make it easier to hold down a job and get practical things done, that I don’t deny. I’m not sure it’s even possible for me to have a normal sleep cycle, though, so I figure I may as well take advantage of these hours when I’m so productive.

Johannes stayed up all night tonight, sort of skipping a day. We got up late on Saturday, went out to eat and to a movie. After we got home, he sat down in the recliner with the computer on his lap and got majorly absorbed in a project, hardly moving for the next 7 hours. Around 7 AM, I asked him if he was planning on going to sleep. He decided not to, and while I went to bed, he stayed up all day programming. He used to do that sort of thing a lot when he was in college, to a great extent to get to talk to me online. Now that he has a job, he doesn’t do it much anymore, but I get the idea that he does still enjoy it a bit. I know that he’s productive in the wee hours just like I am.

Well, Johannes’s family called repeatedly today (Sunday) while I was asleep. I didn’t hear the phone, since I’ve got things set up so we won’t be disturbed by its ringing while we sleep. (I’m one of those Luddites who believe the phone exists for my convenience, not that of others.) They called on the land line, Johannes’s cell, and my cell, and didn’t get an answer on any of them. Johannes said that he doesn’t like to talk to people on the phone when he hasn’t slept for 24 hours, and he refuses to talk to anyone on the phone when he hasn’t eaten for 12 hours (a very good policy, considering his low-blood-sugar-bitchiness issues!). I don’t know what messages got left on Johannes’s mobile, and Elias, Johannes’s little brother, hadn’t left a message on the land line when he called there. But Elisabeth left a message on my mobile, saying something like “Well, I guess you’ve slept away the Sunday, so it’s too late to get to do anything together.” Hmm, we hadn’t had anything planned.

Johannes’s family has a totally different relationship to time than I do, and that statement really outlines the difference in bold. I don’t know if it’s just Johannes’s family, or if it’s more a generally Norwegian thing–probably a little bit of both. It’s interesting to think about a statement like “sleeping away the Sunday” in terms of framing (à la George Lakoff). It implies that certain hours of the day are the “real” Sunday, the hours that count. So, it doesn’t matter if you were awake and working your ass off from midnight ’til 8 AM; if you slept from 8 AM ’til 5 PM, you “wasted” the day. Lakoff talked quite a bit about the “time is money” ICM (idealized cognitive model) in “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things“, and I think the idea of sleeping away the day fits this ICM, however peripherally.

I’m not sure if I buy into this ICM. I know I don’t believe that certain hours of the day are more valuable than others. My own experience belies that idea. I don’t disagree that it’s easier to be social and get practical stuff done–in Norway, at least–if you’re awake during the daylight hours. But I run into this kind of thinking so often in this country. It’s so hard to be different here, and this is just another example of why. Society itself is structured for everyone to be awake at the same time and sleep at the same time. There are no 24-hour stores except for a few convenience stores, and those are almost all in the center of the city (where we live now, thank God!). The vast majority of grocery stores close at 9 on weekdays and 6 on weekends. The other stores are even worse, with many closing as early as 2 PM on Saturdays. Nothing but the convenience stores are open on Sundays. Christ, I’d hate to go on a road trip in this country! I remember when the government finally legislated that stores could be open on Sundays. That didn’t last long. I remember when one grocery store close to here decided to stay open ’til 10 PM. I went up there one day to shop a little after 9 not too long after that to find that they’d closed. Apparently there just hadn’t been enough customers that late at night to justify keeping the store open another hour. Bah. So, it’s not just that the opening hours are legislated–people here just aren’t night-owls, I guess. Or, perhaps more likely, the night-owls that are here have been taught by society to look upon their schedules as freakish and irresponsible, and thus not worthy of accommodation by society. If friggin’ Norman, OK, population 72,000, can keep several all-night restaurants and stores open, then friggin Oslo, Norway, population 500,000 ought to be able to, too.

And none of this even touches on the fact that my husband works his ass off during the week. He’s constantly sleep deprived because, like me, he’s most productive later in the day. His job requires him to get up and go to work early in the morning, so he does, but he then either works late at night or stays out networking. He’s good at his job, precisely because he spends so much time outside of work networking and learning. As much as I’d like for him not to have to be sleep deprived, I’d never want him to have to give up his most productive hours for sleep. And he doesn’t. It pisses me off that there seems to be no way for people like him to be accommodated by this society. He suffers for it. He gets on average 6 hours of sleep per night on work nights, often considerably less. So more power to him if he wants to sleep away his Sundays! He deserves at least that much.