I'm a 31 year old American expat living in Oslo, Norway, with my bulldog, Ada, and my husband, Johannes. My interests include interaction design, especially information architecture, philosophy of mind and ethics, cognitive psychology, sociobiology, feminism, yoga, fat acceptance, knitting, pottery, and cooking.
Here are some pictures of what I make myself to eat when Johannes isn’t coming home for dinner:
Chinjiew Chicken:
General Tso’s Chicken:
From Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s “The Chinese Kitchen”. I credit that cookbook with making me into the chef I am today. I make damn good food, and that’s a damn good cookbook. If only she had one on photography…
This is the scarf I made for my husband’s uncle’s 60th birthday. It’s the first major thing I have finished. I made it in mistake rib, based on various recipes I saw online. I used plain ol’ Alaska wool yarn from Drops, which was really kind of a nasty thing to do to the gorgeous variegated hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn I got from Carpool at the NAAFA convention this summer. “Night Trees” was the color of the Carpool-yarn. So evocative! I am truly sad to have let that yarn go, but I can at least say that every inch of it went through my fingers at least three times on its way out. And I have more. 
Anyone want something made with it? I can’t wear wool myself…
ETA: Yeah, the scarf was about 72″ by 6″, and the file that “thumbnail” up there links to is 813K. 
Second best is from Uncle Scott. I got 92% - 20 miles average error in 361 seconds. Who the fuck cares where Delaware is?!? *grumble*
It’s hypnotic. Perhaps it’s only because I’ve been up for way more than 24 hours and feel like I’m on an acid trip anyway (really fucking hard to type!), but man does that video ever take me back. I was smack in the middle of that “Barbie Dance Party” demographic when I was a kid—I was this little girl:
And the kid on the left there?
That’s Matt Schoenefeld, the skater dude I had a crush on. Bleachy mullet, pegged jeans, pubey ’stache and all. And the girl dancing beside him was the girl I wanted to be.
…
Yeah. You know, I was just talking to Johannes the other day about how I thought it was sad that we’re no longer “the target demographic”, but maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all. Being the target demographic was tacky and clichéd. It’s fun to watch it in a video, though, and the music’s still rad.
The night before his JavaZone presentation, Johannes and I had fun making diagrams for some of the slides in his presentation. He had prepared some basic sketches of the concepts he wanted to get across, and asked me to help him transform those sketches into comprehensible drawings done in an informal style. So I whipped out my tablet and went to work.
This was the original deployment sketch:
And this is what I turned it into:
That one was by far the easiest and most straightforward diagram to make.
Here is the original lifecycle sketch:
I turned it into this:
That one took a little more adjustment.
Here is a copy of the original dependency sketch:
Considering the fact that I’m not a programmer and know nothing about this particular subject matter, trying to understand these rather technical concepts, let alone creating a diagram to communicate them, was a complete and total nightmare. Some of the relationships described by the sketch represent processes, and some represent content hierarchies, e.g. the application module contains the WAR file, which contains the business logic; the .zip file is dependent on the assembly plugin, which is in turn packages on the WAR file (into the ZIP file). Some of the items in the diagram are files, some are plugins, and some are modules. Johannes was patient in explaining all this stuff to me. We went through innumerable iterations of “Is this right?”…”No, this arrow needs to point this way.”…”OK, how about this?”… The final diagram ended up like this:
The slides have gotten a lot of positive comments. I’m happy with the results, and I really enjoyed this whole process. I’m glad I got to put to use some of the skills I intend to use if I ever become an information architect, and it’s nice have a better idea of what Johannes is working with in his job.
The brown people on the East-side are causing problems again: the city districts that have the most immigrants are also the city districts that receive the most kontantstøtte.
Kontantstøtte is the money the government gives to parents if they don’t have their kid enrolled in a public preschool. Some people think families should lose kontantstøtte for their other kids if they have a four-year-old who doesn’t know Norwegian; some people think the entire program should be dismantled because “so many” immigrants’ kids end up starting school without knowing Norwegian. I figured that when people were complaining that these kids didn’t know Norwegian when they started school, they were talking about 6-year-olds (until recently, 7-year-olds). So I understood the concern about integration and the motivation to do something about it, although I most definitely wouldn’t agree that denying families this money would be the answer. But then I found out that kontantstøtte is only given to parents of children who are between one and three years of age. So people in this society seriously believe that after mothers’ one year of paid maternity leave is up, they should turn their babies, their one year old babies, over to the state to raise while they, the mothers, go back to work. WTF?!? Why have kids at all? Just to create more workers, I guess.
The general attitude here is that we need to liberate these immigrant women and their families, that we need to teach them that the proper way to live is to kick your kid out of the house and into pre-school ASAP so the women can get back to work. That there is no value in raising your own kids or being a homemaker, that wanting to do so is incomprehensible at best and generally not worthy of respect, and that no sensible woman would make such a choice…and therefore that those women who do stay home with their kids are actively forced to do so by their families or at the very least brainwashed by their patriarchal cultures. That families who don’t follow the Norwegian pattern in life are ignorant, and if we just enlighten them, they’ll eventually come over to the Norwegian way of thinking.
This is an extremely common form of hubris here: I’ve seen it recently in articles about health and “friluftsliv” lately:
“We’ve seen that the gap between the east and west sides of town hasn’t closed as expected given the increased focus on nutrition. Part of the reason might be that information about nutrition from the government doesn’t reach some demographics and that they are influenced by their social milieu as a result.”
So it’s because us East-siders (shorthand for blue-collar people and foreigners) are ignorant that we’re not as obsessed with health as the West-siders. It can’t be that eating healthily is more difficult for poorer people, that people who have to work many hours to get by don’t have the time or energy to eat in accordance with the government’s recommendations. It can’t be that status isn’t tied to thinness amongst the working-class in the same way it is amongst the rich. It can’t be that we know what the government thinks is healthy, but we just don’t care. No, we’re just stupid.
“Even though some Norwegians are born with skis on their feet and backpacks on their backs, and seem to be always on the way to the top of a glacier you’ve probably never heard of, there are some of us that need both a kick in the ass and good tips and advice before we get out and hike.”
So it’s not the case that some people are outdoorsy and some aren’t; it’s the case that we’re all supposed to be outdoorsy, but some of us need a kick in our surely-fat asses to get us off the couch and into the mountains and forests where we belong.
Can you tell that I’ve had some nasty run-ins with these attitudes before? This sort of thing is by far one of my least favorite things about this country.
“The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face.” (Possibly NSFW)
I’ve got a N91, not an E70. The N91 is customized to be an mp3 player, so it doesn’t have the fold-out keyboard, but it can do everything else the E70 can. And I’ve had it for a year and a half. I think it’s so funny to read the articles coming out in the US about the iPhone: “Oooh, it has Wi-Fi! And a web browser! And custom ringtones you make from iTunes songs…for 99 cents in addition to the price of the song!” I’m so sure! You can’t even use your own mp3’s to make ringtones? What century is this?
ETA “One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t:” (Probably NSFW) Johannes’s computer is on the fritz (his computers are always on the fritz) and he’s started whining about wanting a mac. That’ll be lovely—then when that computer goes on the fritz, we won’t be able to fix it. Or does the 23.990 NOK purchase price—that’s 4,261.70 in USD—include service?
Today I bought and tried this:
It reminded me of this:
Perhaps the problem is that I’m not a teenager anymore?
On the front page of Aftenposten’s online edition today is an article about Hamna preschool in Frogner, Oslo, where sugar is forbidden. Yes, forbidden. The following foods are not allowed to be brought from home or served in the preschool:
Prim and brown goat cheese, traditional Norwegian sandwich toppings, are no longer served in the preschool, but they are allowed to be brought from home. Sugar-free variants of yoghurt and jam aren’t allowed either, because it’s not easily possible to tell whether or not the foods in question are actually sugar-free. In Norway, cocoa and blackcurrant toddy are traditionally served during breaks when hiking, but this, too, is forbidden in Hamna preschool. The kids are instead served caffiene-free fruit tea–with no sugar added, of course. Sometimes they’re allowed to have warm milk with honey.
When this sugar-hysteria first came to Norway, I was troubled when I saw how it was affecting the traditional, and extremely healthy and well-balanced, Norwegian food traditions. So many of the forbidden items on the list–rolls, rice porridge, jam, juice, cocoa, and brown goat cheese–are important components of that traditional food culture. And forbidding yoghurt and peanut butter? Things have really gone too far.
Aftenposten consulted some actual scientists about this development, and they, what with degrees in nutrition and all, had some sensible things to say.
- Jeg synes faktisk det både er misvisende og useriøst å operere med et slikt begrep. Det er ganske ekstremt, og det er noe jeg ikke er enig i. Sukker er ikke gift, og det er praktisk umulig å få til en helt sukkerfri barnehage, sier Svein Olav Kolset, professor i ernæringsmedisin ved Universitetet i Oslo til Aftenposten.no. [emphasis in original text]
Svein Olav Kolset, a professer of medical nutrition at the University of Oslo, thinks that “it’s both misleading and irresponsible to operate under this kind of concept. It’s quite extreme, and something I’m not in agreement with. Sugar is not poison, and it’s in practice impossible to create an entirely sugar-free preschool” [emphasis mine].
He continues:
- Jeg skjønner ikke den pedagogiske tankegangen her. Det går ikke an å melde seg ut av resten av matsamfunnet på den måten. Maten i barnehagene bør reflektere et normalt kosthold, og sukker er en naturlig del av den maten et menneske får i seg. Barnehagene bør forholde seg til de generelle kostholdsanbefalingene, sier han.
“I don’t understand the pedagogical mindset here. It’s not possible to check out of the rest of society’s food culture in this way. The food provided in preschools should reflect a normal diet, and sugar is a natural part of the food a person eats. Preschools should operate under general nutritional recommendations”.
Amen, Stein Olav. Hamna is not a private preschool, which means that it receives state funding, and therefore the city government’s implicit approval of its operating principles. It’s irresponsible behavior for a governmental institution to support a nutritional philosophy that is so extreme.
Nutririonist Line Kristin Johnson at the Center for Obesity at the Southeastern Norway Regional Health Authority, who has 19 years of experience in the field, is concerned that this sugar-hysteria results in the prohibition of foods containing important nutrients:
- Det er for eksempel sukker i de fleste yoghurter, men det er også både kalsium, proteiner og B-vitaminer. Dette er ting barn trenger når de vokser opp, sier Johnson, som som har jobbet som ernæringsfysiolog i 19 år.
As an example, she says that although most yoghurts contain sugar, they also contain calcium, protein, and B-vitamins–nutrients children need to grow.
I know that adults are trying to do right by children when they enforce such draconian nutritional rules on their kids. I understand that there’s little we can do about the way individual parents raise their children. Individual parents have generally not got the resources to consult nutritionists about the best way to feed their kids. Given the health care crisis in the US, many parents there won’t even be able to get nutritional advice from their pediatricians…advice that might not be terribly trustworthy, anyway, since most doctors have virtually no education whatsoever in the subject of nutrition.
Governmentally-funded preschools, do, however, have the resources to help them make decisions about how to run their programs. When preschool employees view their preschools’ nutritional policies as carte blanche to evangelize a non-nutritionist-approved meal program, the need for professional guidance in choosing these policies becomes even more evident. “Vi vil gi barna kunnskap om at sukker ikke er sunt for kroppen eller tennene”, says Eva Sollie, administrative assistant at Hamna preschool. “We want to give children the knowledge that sugar isn’t healthy for the body or the teeth“, she says.
I know that if I had a kid, I’d certainly want the meals it received at preschool to be planned by an administrative assistant. I mean, she probably reads “Hjemmet” and everything right?
