Hello!

Since Gabriele thought I'd fallen into a gracht, I guess I'd better prove that I'm still very much alive.

Biochem is doing its best to put an end to that, though.

Meh.

Busybusybusy! Still going to do NaNoWriMo this year, though! There's another chemistry student who also does NaNo so it'll be teh awesome! We can sit in the Proton room (Proton is the chemistry student organisation) and drink tea and have word wars. Yaay!
Maybe we should go to some of the lectures as well, in the odd chance that we might actually learn something.
Well, to make sure I don't get too caught up in various aspects of Roman daily life I'm not doing historical fiction this year, but a fantastic whodunnit parody called The Snuffing of Jeeves. I am proud to present... A short description of what will soon be a mess of ufos and ninjas!

The 100th annual butler conference is being held in a grand hotel on the Yorkshire moors, once the manor house of the respectable Lord Butterbrayne. But things are not as idyllic as they seem... One of the butlers disappears. Then he is found, but unfortunately he has died in the meantime.
Can superintendent Trenchcoat and his new sidekick, the young and very much inexperienced sergeant Plimsoll, find the murderer without cancelling the traditional village festival?Who knows? More importantly, who cares?

Mhm... I can already smell the Nobel Prize for Literature!

So all in all I'm doing absolutely terrific. I've learned so many things. Well, chemistry obviously. But also, what it means to be a student.

You know you are a student when...

- All your white clothes have turned a delicate shade of blue because you just stuff everything in the washing machine
- You have not worn and will never wear the white Norwegian IChO team t-shirt because it should stay white :P
- "Tea" has its own field on your monthly budget
- Any two ingredients can be combined with tomatoes to make pasta sauce (peanuts and tofu, anyone?)
- socks are overrated
- grandma rocks
- so does McMurry
- and waiting on trainstations because you can read McMurry and get funny glances from the people around you

I think I can say for sure there's more to come :P

Dear mum, dad, uncle, aunt, whoever reads this - last week I ate the last of the Kvikk Lunsj I bought at Gardermoen. SOS!

Does anyone remember me?

I realise it's been a while since I last posted. I've been busy with, well, everything. Never, ever more to another country or study abroad, unless you love going through tons of paperwork. Trust me, lol.

Naah, it's not that bad. I'm finished with the introduction week at Amsterdam uni, but I haven't actually started studying yet. And well, I'm not going to either. Not in Amsterdam anyway. This probably won't come as a surprise... I switched to chemistry. In Utrecht (yaay!). The application deadline for international students is 1. June but they didn't really care, lol.

It was a difficult choice, but I'm sure now that chemistry is the right study for me, and not ancient studies, fascinating though ancient history is. It's because of the chemistry olympiad, of course. Strange to think that I'm now a chemistry student... Probably this wouldn't have happened if the nerd in my chemistry class (remember him?) hadn't beaten me with one point in the first Norwegian round of the olympiad. I don't believe in fate or anything, but it is rather funny :P

Well, I'm very much looking forward to the start of the semester - I'll get to wear a labcoat and mess around in a lab a lot :D:D

Of course I still love history and will continue with my novels but it'll be a hobby and not my profession :)

Right, I'd better get a move on and fill in the last forms :D I hope to get a real post up soon-ish.

I'm going to enjoy this book...

Just started reading The Iron Hand of Mars, the fourth of the Falco novels by Lindsey Davis. I love whodunnits, especially funny ones. I have a feeling this'll be one of the best ever. Falco's mission? Go to the lower Rhenus. Find out what happened to Munius Lupercus. Make Veleda stop telling the Bructeri that killing Romans is good. Figure out where Civilis is, and what he's up to, and stop him in case he's plotting.
Should be a piece of cake, lol.

Which reminds me - *I* still have to figure out what happened to Lupercus. Killed on the way to Veleda is a bit too boring, if you ask me.

Actually, I need to start packing. Going to the Netherlands on Monday! Still haven't got a room. They sent my uni registration papers back 'cause stuff was missing (proof that I have a registered address in the Netherlands - kinda difficult to send that when you don't live there and you're on a mile long waiting list to get a room because the uni doesn't give a damn about the cares of foreign students). Meh.

Guess what I forgot...

Looking at my last post, I find it quite funny that I actually managed to forget my toothbrush, but hey, whatever - I remembered my labcoat & glasses and that's the important thing.

Anyway. No medals for Norway this year, not even an honourable mention (10% receive a gold medal, 20% silver, 30% bronze, 4% honourable mention), so we're amongst the 36% worst of the best in the world (already I'm not making any sense). Whatever. Someone needs to end 212th. I sort of messed up the practical exam by knocking over some acid and my burette was being very evil so I didn't have enough time to do a thin layer chromotography. The theoretical exam was even worse - forgot everything I knew about organic chemistry (which is very little anyway) so I got very little points there. Well, anyway, I'm just happy I didn't end last. I actually got 29 something points, out of a 100, which means I managed to do almost 3/10 of it. w00t!! Lowest exam score ever for me!

But I did have fun, obviously! Easily the best ten days of my life! First two days in Switzerland (/France), to see...
Mont Blanc (I'm on Aiguille du Midi, 3842 m above sea level. We took a cable car up, btw, lol)

and
CERN (ATLAS is way too big for my camera)

Then Budapest itself: beautiful!

They put our mentors into a 4 star spa hotel on an island in the middle of the Danube, with beautiful views of the city, while we (that is, the students) were shipped off to a uni campus complex an hour's drive from the city. Probably a good thing *coughcheapwinecough*
We had a sightseeing-filled programme. As the only chemistry-related things were two 5-hour exams, there was plenty of time. Basically we were kicked out of bed before 7 AM each morning, then after a rather dodgy breakfast in the even dodgier campus cafeteria (the non-veggie food died sometime back in the 70s by the looks of it and the veggie food was swimming in salty oil) we were hounded into buses each bearing the name of a chemical element. I wonder what I did to deserve the beryllium bus? Oh, don't get me wrong, the other people on the bus were great, but beryllium is one of the nastiest elements around.
The sightseeing left something to be desired, to be honest. Of course we all tried to sleep on the bus but this guide kept telling us to look left and right to look at various huge buildings (which were usually rather uninteresting, big glass & concrete things that were the HQ of some company or other, jeez). And then... "...to the left you can just glimpse the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre, and to the right more Roman ruins, but now they're gone. We're not gonna stop here." Yeah, all right, whatever. We had a busy schedule. Had to go to Visegrad to see the medieval knight show.
Rotflol. Actually it was rather good - they could fight pretty well (though it was quite obviously fake) and there were a couple of good archers (plus guys throwing ninja star things, yaay).

Despite the sightseeing (or maybe because of the sightseeing) there was plenty of time to talk to people. Not everybody spoke English very well though, but we became good friends with the Swedes, the Danes, the Germans, the Slovenians, the Canadians, well just about everyone we met and talked to (there were some 250 students there, no chance of getting to know everyone, unfortunately).
Funny things happened at the olympiad. The Dutch team started getting anonymous letters from a fellow Dutchie... *grins* Guess who. I had 'forgotten' to tell them I was Dutch, and spoken English to them from day 1. Amongst other things I failed wonderfully when "trying" to pronounce Dutch words (they were the ones laughing then... but not for long) so that I would not seem suspicious. It was brilliant. Though I deliberately messed up my handwriting they were still comparing it to the team games list (where everyone was supposed to write down their name). Luckily I had, in a moment of paranoia, asked someone else to write my name there for me so my handwriting would not be on the list. Mwahahaha...

All in all, I had an absolutely wonderful time and did not want to go back home. Going from a campus complex filled with chemistry geeks from all over the world, and back to my boring hometown where people don't even know what a molecule is, is probably the most depressing thing I've ever experienced.
To be completely honest - I was having doubts about my uni application. Why the hell am I not going to study chemistry? I had applied for a chemistry study at NTNU (Trondheim uni), but in the end I decided to continue with the ancient history thing in Amsterdam (but damn, I *will* study chemistry as well, even if it means staying up half the night!!).

I thought I had the uni application mess sorted out, but nooo.... I still haven't got a room. I've subscribed to this room organization, and I will get a room sooner if I can prove I live in Norway. Unfortunately, the city council is being unusually slow. Then there's the scholarships. I decided to get a Norwegian one because Dutch bureaucracy sucks. Now I need to prove that I am a student at Amsterdam uni. I have a proof of admission thing from the uni, but it's in Dutch, and it doesn't say what I have to pay in tuition fees (which the Norwegian scholarship people want to know, obviously). So I sent the uni a very nice email asking if they could please send me some proof of admission in English, where it also says what the tuition fees are. The reply: "We sent you a Dutch proof of admission. Get it translated".

Sure, no problem. Dutch to Norwegian translation by an authorised translator. Cheapest thing in the world *urge to kick something*

Ah well. Two weeks till I leave! Somehow I'll get it all sorted out (payed my tuition fees today... tuition fees suck. Education should be free!) and find a place to sleep. I'm looking forward to seeing my Dutch family again, plus the Dutch chemistry olympiad team (though one of them is still a bit pissed at me because of the letters, lol).

Buda castle by night! They'd hired a luxury river boat for the evening after the last exam, and we got to see our mentors again. Except for the rain storm that came out of nowhere, it was wonderful :) And no, it wasn't just the wine (which wasn't cheap on that boat, it was free, lol)

Budapest! Budapest! Budapest!

Lalalala! *does a little happy dance*

Lab coat? Check
Lab glasses? Check.
Oversized chemistry textbook? Check.

That's all I need, right? Oh, toothbrush. Right. Well, see you all in about two weeks!

*shoves Geravan, Marcus and Imerix into a nearby cupboard and puts a ninja guard outside*

I'm going to CERN!

Omg! Omg! OMG!!!!1

Uh, yeah. CERN fangirl :)

Those profs at Oslo uni decided to take us along for a short trip to Switzerland before going to Budapest, so we'll get to see CERN! We'll get to see ISOLDE and ATLAS, according to the website. Can't effing wait!

I've just come back from Oslo - four days of chemistry. It was great, as usual. Spent a couple of hours messing around in the lab (organic lab is particularly awesome, except that the smell of ether makes my head go fuzzy) and some more hours with those bloody prep problems. By now I'm sure that at Hungarian universities, you can get a master's degree for completely butchering Nernst's equation without bothering to explain what you're doing, just because it suits your present needs.
And btw, I now have my very own labcoat!

Time for a meme? *glares at Gabriele* No, actually this one is pretty cool.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've read six and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles– Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis (well, I don’t love them all. The Last Battle positively sucks)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (can I have those hours of my life back, please?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan (my aunt keeps bugging me to read it, so I guess it must be good)
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (I read it when I was about eight and liked it and want to read it again, so)
74 Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A.S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (I started it once but didn’t have time to finish it)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (wouldn’t that be covered in Shakespeare’s complete works? Lol)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (one day I want to read it in French. That day is not today)

I've got most of the books I've italicised on my shelf, but I lack the time to read them all. The reason I've read so few of the 'classics' is because English classics are no big deal in Norway. We read Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men during English a few years ago and that's basically it. We do have literature history at school (or we did, since I just finished school, omg), but that's all Norwegian literature. So we'd learn about rather obscure authors like Hans Kinck and Nini Roll Anker, while Dickens (just to name someone) isn't even mentioned. We hardly even read anything written by them, it was mostly excerpts. I've read, let's see, three works of literature at school - Bjørnson's Synnøve Solbakken (zzzz), Ibsen's Gengangere (zzz) and Gunnlaug's saga (no zzz).

Right, that was rather off topic. Right now I'm reading a book about organic chemistry. Theoretical organic chemistry is also rather fun, though there's a lot to remember.

Edited because I just finished Lord of the Flies.

Blah blah

Well, I'm getting somewhere with the prep. problems. I've done almost all of them now (except the ones about organic chemistry - I can hardly remember even the electrofile/nucleofile mess so I'm leaving that till next week when I'm at Oslo uni again).

I've got my exam results - a 5 for nynorsk, and 6s for bokmål, written math and oral chemistry. In other words, I've scraped together 23 6s and 3 fives over the last three years. That should mean one of the best diplomas in the country, harhar. Should be good enough for Amsterdam uni anyway...
Oh, I also got my TOEFL results (a really stupid multiple choice English exam). I got 677 out of 677 points and I needed only 550 for uni. Jeez. I still can't believe I paid 140 $ for it (and got up at 6 am to catch the buss to Trondheim). What a waste. I want my time and money back, lol.

And some more good news - the plotbunny about the Frisian revolt is growing! It'll be a sort of prequel to NaNo06 which is about the Batavian revolt (revolts rock my socks, btw). Apart from featuring the fathers/grandfathers of Geravan and Embric (who is a Frisian now, and no longer a Bructerian), Claudius Labeo will have a part as well, to explain why he and Civilis are so pissed at each other. Yes, this year I intend to write a serious story - no ninjas, no ufos, no talking salmon. Ha! As if.

I've also found out that Imerix' story isn't connected to Geravan's/Embric's in any way. Imerix did kill his brother (but it was an accident - "He sorta fell onto my sword accidentally. Seventeen times") and he's running away from his past, but his past is catching up with him. Once I get back from Budapest there should be plenty of time to write :)

And I've got a new blog for the 'blogs I read' list - my dear cousin is going to South Africa as an exchange student next year and has promised to blog all her adventures. We had a sort of farewell party today, since we're both leaving Norway. It'll be weird to leave good ol' Trøndelag, but I have to admit I'd love a short winter with real daylight, lol. Amsterdam here I come!

Oh, and I've changed my display name. Celedë_Anthaas is the username I made when I signed up for councilofelrond.com, when I was about 14. It's an ok username, but it's a bit, dunno, silly, long, unpractical. Whatever. So now I'm Smarty, which is what my kiwi cousins call me (silly English-speaking people - can't pronounce Marte). And it was also my russ name. Yaay.

Chemistry = fun

Woohoo, oral chemistry exam! It was great to do very little and still get top grades :P

But now I'm finished with school (I'm actually going to miss it, it was such a great school...) and I have two weeks to learn some very advanced chemistry before I'm going to Oslo again for a three day chemistry crash course. The olympiad people have sent over a booklet of preparatory problems and they are extremely difficult (except problem 4 which is ridiculously easy). It took me about 5 hours to finish just half a problem. The fact that Hungarians use different symbols doesn't make things easier (L? L?! It's K_sp people!!). And they do funny things with Nernst's equation without explaining.

Mhm... my hovercraft is full of eels.

Nearly finished with school

Whew. Three exams down, one oral exam to go. I should be studying but I can't since I don't know what the subject is. They'll tell us tomorrow, and then we have two days during which we can study (or panic, or jump on the first plane to Siberia). With my luck I'll probably get either physics or religion (it's an ok subject, but unfortunately my teacher is a nutcase). I ended up with math for my third written exam. Typical. It was either math, physics or chemistry, and math was the only subject where I couldn't be bothered to read the entire textbook during the schoolyear. So I had to learn an entire chapter of statistics in just a couple of days. The exam went all right though, except for a slightly nasty trigonometric equation with sin^2 2x and cos 2x. Meh.

Anyway, the weather has been too nice to be inside these last two weeks (around 25*C, aka way too hot) so I've mostly been outside, writing. NaNo 2007 has reached that point where I have no idea what's going on anymore.

The rain's returned now, though, and it seems like it'll last for a while, so maybe I can get the storyline figured out.

Exams, knots and bunnies

What the hell am I doing online anyway? I've got my first exam on Thursday, and it's just beginning to dawn on me that I have some 700 pages to read - both this year's and last year's Norwegian textbook. Literature & literature for the last thousand years, plus literary analysis. There will be four or five different essay topics to choose from so there really is no reason to learn everything, but the more I know the better, right? Anyway, I'm just going to forget about literature after the 1960s because a) I don't understand all that modernistic and post modernistic crap (does anyone?) and b) I'd rather fail the exam than spend two days reading Kjartan Fløgstad.

Instead I'll focus on Old Norse and saga literature :) Who knows, I might be lucky...

Then I've got another Norwegian exam on Monday (gotta love living in a country with two official variants of the same bloody language) and a maths, physics or chemistry exam next Thursday. It's the sneaky Norwegian exam style - they tell you the subject two or three days in advance.

I was going to start reading those 700 pages weeks ago but because of the russ celebrations I kinda forgot... I got a fair few knots though...
Smarty was my russ name. The knots from left to right:
Paper with 'That 80s show' written on it: Participated in the russ revue (which was called That 80s show)
Half a russ card: Ate the other half
Paperclip: Held a 10 min lecture on a totally irrelevant topic (42 & the meaning of life) for the first years
Pencil: Joined the first years for a science class
Lego guy: Bought ice cream for an entire kindergarten
Candle: Was at school every day during the russ time
Eraser: Sat under my desk an entire lesson
Bohus-logo: Went into a furniture store (Bohus is a furniture store) and asked for 'faenskap'. It's a very bad pun. 'Skap' is Norwegian for closet, cupboard. 'Faenskap', however, means something like devilry.
Pointy stick: Barbecue outside the fitness centre (yes, evil, I know)
Retroreflector: Traffic control with a retroreflectorvest and a hairdrier. The cars actually slowed down, rotflol
Bicycle bell: Gave my answers in Jeopardy style during an entire lesson ("Pliiing! What is...?"). It was hilarious. Everybody joined in.

Knots I wanted to take but didn't (because nobody wanted to come with me - you need two fellow russ as witnesses)
Entertain the audience for five minutes before the movie starts in a cinema
Camp in a roundabout
Earn 25 kr by dancing and singing in the street
Guide a bustrip

17 May was, for once, great. They always organise these extremely old-fashioned and cheesy parades (kids with plastic smiles stuck on their faces, marching in neat lines and waving flags *gag*). Well, as a russ I could finally do what I've been wanting to do for the last ten years (ever since they forced a flag in my hand and told me to be happy): wreck havoc. It wasn't difficult. I just walked straight into the parade, annoyed the marching band (all russ are equiped with very shrill whistles...) and then gave all the little kids russ cards. Chaos ensued! The primary school teachers were so extremely pissed off (rotflol). One old hag almost punched me in the face.

And, you know, I think the plotbunnies attack only when I'm busy. The Leif Eriksson bunny has disappeared, but I'm stuck with a 'Geese of the Capitol' bunny plus new ideas for both NaNo06 & 07.
2007 is going to need a total cleanup. Imerix will join the new Batavian cohorts right after the revolt and fight some random battles in Britain before Frontinus' campaign. I'll have to sneak Finvagar in as a recruit (and btw Finvagar, who told you you could die? I've got other plans for you damn it!). And Istill have to figure out whose side Flavius Labeo is on (and find a new name for him).
2006 will get a prequel to explain the whole conflict between Geravan and Embric. It goes back two generations, to the Frisian revolt (28 AD) and the attack on Flevum. To make this work, Embric has to become a Frisian. The Frisian Bob family will be Bructeri instead.
There are still a lot of things to figure out. Claudius Labeo for one - prefect of the Batavian cavalry and Civilis' enemy, yet he led the cavalry against the Romans, thus deciding the outcome of a battle (but afterwards he waged a guerilla war on Civilis, possibly because Civilis sent him into exile instead of saying 'thank you'). I've decided to let Thiadulf kick Labeo aside and take command of the cavalry. Which brings me to problem two... Thiadulf the Heroic Freedom Fighter just doesn't fit. Especially now that Embric becomes one of Civilis' most important allies.
So there'll be hostages. Liaueld (Geravan's & Thiadulf's sister) will be sent to the Frisians to ensure the brothers don't murder Embric, and Geravan will be in a hostage-ish situation with the Cananefates for a while so that Thiadulf cooperates with the cavalry and all. This is getting confusing. Finally, there's Verax. I have several ideas for him, but I dunno which will fit.

Right. That's it. I'm off. Henrik Ibsen is calling.

Computer trouble

It's my computer's fault I haven't been online for nearly two weeks. First msn started giving me error messages, then I couldn't access the control panel anymore, then it refused to load google search results and blocked half of the websites in the world (including blogger and hotmail).
The virus scanner, which is supposed to do an automatic virus scan every three weeks or so, apparently deleted itself a while ago (which is why there was no warning).
Luckily there was still some anti-spyware programme installed, and fortunately I was able to download a new virus scanner (good thing that site wasn't blocked), so I'm slowly getting things back on track.
Msn and the control panel are still giving me error messages (though only on my account, not on my brother's), google still refuses to load, but I was able to check my email & blog just now.

Obviously I've still got a lot of patching up to do. I hardly have time for that now, so I might not be online until June. Exams start next week, and tonight I need to work on a chemistry project which is due tomorrow. I dunno what I'll do - try to wrestle it from my computer or start over again.

On the bright side, I got the results of my Dutch exams - passed them all.

(If you hadn't already guessed, I'm writing this on my dad's computer)

...

Let me tell you about my fantastic week.

1) Got an email from the IB-Groep. They're the guys who keep messing around with my uni stuff (though they're not actually connected to the uni - they're in charge of scholarships and entrance exams and demand that I send everything in threefold, maybe because they lose two out of three files). Anyway. The email said I needed to apply for a scholarship. I go to their website, read through eight paragraphs of, well, crap. "With this you can benefit from the ease of our fantastic new system while you're studying". At least they have a sense of humour. The small text at the bottom reads: "Unfortunately you can't use our fantastic new system if you live outside the Netherlands. You'll have to fill in these forms instead". Bugger. To order said forms, I had to call them. Unfortunately, they'd all decided to take a week off. That in itself is no crime. I mean, it's hard work, messing up people's applications. But it should at least be possible to order forms by clicking on a link on their website. It's the 21st century, after all.

2) My physics teacher thought it'd be a good idea to have a 5 hour physics test on Wednesday. In the middle of the russ celebrations. Eeeeeevil.

3) I'd been planning a trip to Trondheim with friends for the last two weeks. Then, in the last minute, my friend's parents decide they're going, which means we can't go because my friend has a slightly insane dog which can't be left home alone. Never mind the fact that we're russ only for seventeen days and want to get some knots in Trondheim (there are a couple of hilarious ones which can't be done where I live). Hmpf.

4) Remember the painting of that Batavian guy with the crocodile slippers? I've been working on it for months (though only about an hour or two a week, I'll admit that). It's gone. Can't find it anywhere. I'm sure I left it on it's usual place by the paint supplies at art school, but it's nowhere to be found.

5) My chocolate supply seems to have vaporised, and a Leif Eiriksson plotbunny is nibbling at my toes (this is not a good time for that!)

I'm whining, sorry. Bad case of pms.

Russ celebrations - Norway at its best

I've mentioned russ a couple of times in my posts, so I thought I'd better give you a full and detailed account of what exactly russ are.

According to Wikipedia, the tradition goes back to the time when there were no universities in Norway (in other words, before 1811). Norwegians who wanted to study had to go to Copenhagen (I wonder how 18th century Danish bureaucracy was compared to modern Dutch bureaucracy, lol). They took entrance examinations and then put horns on their heads which they weren't allowed to take off before they got their exam results (and passed). Apparently, the word 'russ' comes from cornua depositurus, 'bound to put aside one's horns'.
Modern Norwegian russ celebrations started in 1905, which was also when the russ caps were first used. Russ are now students in their last year of high school. Back in the good old days exams were held around 10. May, and then the russ would celebrate for a few days afterwards, until 17. May, which is Norwegian Constitution Day.
Well, in the 70s some bright politicians thought the partying was getting out of hand and decided to move the exams 'till after 17. May so that the russ would spend more time studying and less time drinking. Needless to say, it didn't work. Today, russ celebrations start sometime during the first days of May or the last days of April, and last until 17. May, with exams shortly afterwards (yaaaaay...).

There are different types of russ, depending on your high school course, and each type has its own colour. Allmennruss (general studies) have red as their colour, the others are hardly worth mentioning since they're not half as cool as the red russ. All right then. Blue is for economics, black for vocational courses, green for agricultural studies.
Russ wear uniforms in their respective colours. The uniform consists of a pair of trousers, a russ cap (more about that later) and in Trøndelag also a long white coat (like a lab coat) which is then decorated.

So what do russ do? Well, we (yes, obviously I'm a russ this year, or I wouldn't be writing this) celebrate. I have no idea what we celebrate, though. Russ time is an excuse to do things which you couldn't (or wouldn't) do normally. Like talking to brick walls, camping on roundabouts or having a pet can of tuna (maybe that's what Merula's been doing...)
For these things you get awarded: a small item (simply called a knot) is tied to the russ cap (it's got a long string attached to it). Every school makes its own 'knot rules'. You can get knots for everything from public nudity and showing up drunk at school to going swimming (in the fjord) in April and spending a night in a tree.

Then there are the russ vans (or buses, if you live in Oslo and have rich parents, lol) and the russ cards (which kids collect).

To the right is my russ card (the cap I'm wearing is the russ cap).

Below is the back of my russ coat.





'Pholloruss' simply means 'russ from Phollo'. The place where my school is built is called Follo (it used to be a farm), but the russ have always spelt it Phollo.

And the front of my coat...













I've got Snoopy at his typewriter, a Roman legionary from Asterix, an ethanol molecule, the four Led Zeppelin symbols, Pink Floyd's refracting prism, a Kvikk Lunsj (Norwegian KitKat, just ten times better) and in the place of honour (on the back) Findus.

It took me hours and hours, but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I just need to put something on the sleeves, it looks weird now.

Wanted: bookends

Several heavy volumes fell right on top of my alarm clock, but unfortunately they didn't manage to smash it.

Does anybody remember me?

I'm finally back after a long absence, though I fear I'll be leaving again pretty soon. Russ celebrations are coming up (17 days of madness) and exams are right after that (whose bright idea was that?). And I'm still catching up from those two weeks of school I missed while I was being nerdy in Oslo. Gah.

Who cares. Those were two great weeks :) A couple of others participated in both the chemistry & the physics finals as well, so there were a lot of geeky inside chemistry jokes floating about. I've started using ångstrøm instead of metres in everyday conversations. Much more fun, especially the funny looks I get :)
I got 6th place in the physics finals btw (but do you think that matters to my physics teacher? Nooo... he hasn't even mentioned it! *glares*)

Okay, on my to-do-list this week:
Finish that bloody religion project I've been 'working' on for weeks
Study for a religion test
Clean - no wait, disinfect my room
Do half a chapter of maths (ah bugger, that's due tomorrow *head --> desk* )
Write four Norwegian essays
Read fifty pages about changes in the Norwegian language in the 20th century (the guys of the Norwegian Language Council really had - and have - too much spare time on their hands)
Finish (actually I still need to start) a horrendously boring chemistry project about iron (why can't it be about crystal structures?)
Physics. Physics. Physics
Study for the international chemistry finals
Paint my Russ coat. Yaay.
Eat chocolate (what? I want the satisfaction of at least getting one thing done)

Blah blah blah. Pic? Of course you want a pic.

This is a cookie that has been soaked in liquid oxygen, and then set fire to. Those chemistry olympiad people were insane, but it's shiny.

And for those of you who prefer bits of old stone...
A sculpted rope, to strengthen the window. This is from the Dom Church in Utrecht. Apparently, medieval stonemasons had a sense of humour.