Grand Hotel, Moss

In the 1920's a friend of my father came to work in

Moss. He first lived at the Grand Hotel, close to the

railway and the canal.

I don't know when it stopped being a hotel, but these

days there seem to be apartments on the upper floors

and businesses on the street floor.

The end wall was recently replastered.

Did it also get six new windows or were those

there before?

I am not quite sure.

Autumn in Moss

Kirkeparken with the statue of the elk / moose

in the background.

Simple fun

This is a copy of the cheese slicer my Norwegian

grandmother had in her home in Oslo.

I have now bought a copy of that cheese slicer.

It looks beautiful, and every time I will use it,

I will fondly remember my grandmother.

Simple fun.

"More humane, tolerant and eager to share"

My friend Norberto from Brasil wrote, in a longer text with

thoughts after a trip abroad:

In that respect, revisiting places and meeting old friends,

has the dual effect of registering and incorporating changes,

and reviving old feelings through smells, tastes, images,

and in less extent sounds.

The name of the game is perfecting oneself, this endless game,

the increase of consciousness and well-being regardless of

our health conditions.

The feeling of belonging to someone, a family, a musical

group, a country, or the human race is always reassuring,

and it can be achieved by listening to a symphony,

looking to a landscape either in a painting or through

a real scenery, or trivially sharing one sorrows and hopes

with a long-standing friend.

This feeling makes us more humane, tolerant, and eager to share.

Forgiveness

I used to think that forgiveness only was possible

if the person who had done something I considered

wrong or hurtful to me, asked me for forgiveness and

probably also in a convincing way.

Now I feel that forgiveness has more to do with a

conscious decision from my side to let the grievance

go emotionally.

I like these two quotes Jerry sent me:

"When deep injury is done to us,

we never recover until we forgive.
Forgiveness does not change the past,

but it does enlarge the future."
Mary Karen

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old

grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business.

Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control. . .

to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage

and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always.

The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past.

Forgiveness frees the forgiver.

It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare."
Lance Morrow

"Forgiveness frees the forgiver". I like that.

Summer vacation in Sweden

I am not yet three years old on this photo,

but I remember when it was taken.

Lately I have realized that I have a few very clear

memories from the age of two and a half to three.

Renting a cottage for a ski vacation in 1939

Among my father's correspondence, I found this letter

he had received back in February 1939:

Thanks for the letter I received yesterday.

As already mentioned I can supply "dyner"

( bedcover with feathers) and pillows, but I

assume you bring woolen blankets,

because those I cannot supply.

Bread you can buy up here.

Greetings,

70 years later I think about my father and his friends

planning to rent a cottage up in the mountains to go

skiing and having a good time. I also imagine my father

volunteering to find and rent a cottage.

Then the whole group sitting on the train from Oslo

with their packpacks, including woolen blankets....

Swedish crossword

Who would have believed it?

I not only finished one of those big crosswords

in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, but

won their symbolic lottery ticket too.

Quite proud of that!

Interesting where all those Swedish words are stored

in my brain.....

After all, my mother tongue is Norwegian, though my

mother's mother tongue is Swedish.

I could probably say both sentences and be right:

My mother tongue is Norwegian.

My mother tongue is Swedish.

I once heard that immigrants often learn their children's

mother tongue from their own children.

H embroidered on an old pillowcase?

Or is it R or K?

Photo versus scanning

This is part of the embroidery on my grandmother's

Sunday kitchen tablebloth.

I decided to do an experiment, first scanning it

(see above)

and then taking a photograph.

A day of rest

I put this embroidered tablecloth on my grandparents'

diningtable.

My mother told me that her mother-in-law, my

grandmother, put this on her kitchen counter on Sundays,

as a way of showing that Sunday was different from the

other days of the week.

We think the embroidery was done by my paternal aunt

Kari, but it could also have been made by my grandmother.

These days, in most Norwegian homes, I doubt that an

embroidered tablecloth is placed on the kitchen counter

on Sundays.

Kate in October 2009

As Halloween is one of the holidays Kate will grow up

with, this is one of the holidays her grandma will have

to learn a little more about.

The price of travelling

It is true that Ryanair is starting up a new route

from the local airport here in Moss, but even as

a PR stunt I don't know how they can afford it.

But fact is that somebody I know is flying from Moss

to Skavsta airport near Nykoping in Sweden and the

ticket, one way, costs 58 Norwegian kroner for a flight

that lasts around one hour.

58 kr. is roughly ten dollars.

By comparison, a local bustrip in Moss will

cost you 25 kr.

Then this same person is going from Skavsta airport

in Sweden to Warszawa in Poland, and will then use

an Hungarian airline called WIZZ. The two hours flight

will cost around 210 Norwegian kroner.

Roughly 35 dollars.

True, in both cases, with only ten kilo of handluggage,

no meal, no extra insurances.

The price of travelling......

From autumn to winter

Yesterday morning it was minus 2 degrees Celsius

outside my kitchen window, but it turned out to warm

up a little as it became a very sunny day.

This morning the rain is pouring down

and just now it is plus three degrees Celsius outside.

But I should remember we are in the middle of

October already. As a child living up in the Norwegian

mountains I remember that we often had snow in the

end of September.

Moss definitely has a milder climate than most places in

Norway, and I am grateful for that!

Travelling

Tonight, through the internet, I ordered tickets for a trip

I want to take towards the end of December to my

second country.

I will be using an airline I did not even

know existed, and I will be going through an airport

I have never visited.

The most important part is that these are the cheapest

tickets I could find.

Cheap means I will travel with 10 kilo of

handluggage and nothing more, and that weight will

include the food I bring with me to eat on the plane....

:-)

Driving licence from 1914 - for a velocipede

That same Swedish greatgrandfather, back in 1914,

before he had bought his T Ford, used

a bicycle.

How far could he go on a bicycle at the age of 46?

It is far from his farm to this town.

In any case, the document above shows that he had

obtained the permission to ride his bicycle, here called

velocipede, in the town of Nykøping, Sweden.

More surprisingly, this was issued in November 1914 - brrrh, cold!

There were many rules to follow. One of them was

that he had to keep a metal plate at least eight cm high

on the back of the saddle with the issued number

4594 clearly showing in red numbers.

Hearing the word velocipede I immediately thought of

those really old bicycles with an enormous front wheel,

but googling around, my greatgrandfather's bicycle

probably looked like this

Source of photo:

http://www9.vgregion.se/vastarvet/va/resultat_enpost.asp?nr=VGM_A78229

T Ford Touring 1924

It is just a photo copy, but it still feels rather special.

In September 1924 my Swedish greatgrandfather

had bought a T Ford Touring and it cost him

2200 Swedish crowns, including 5 crowns for the

number plate he had borrowed!

He was a farmer and a politician and he must have

understood the advantages of getting around in a car

quite early. He must also have had the necessary money!

Looking for how the car had looked, I found this photo

on this website

http://www.automotivehistoryonline.com/Ford1924.htm

My mother thinks it was how her grandfather's car looked.

After he bought a second car , probably in the beginning

of the 1930's, this car ended up in the forest as a playground

for the children in the family!

Halloween 2008 and 2009

Halloween is one of those holidays I have seen on

American movies and read about in American literature.

Now that my son lives in the States, it is interesting

to see what is going on in real life,

at least through the family photos.

Last year I loved the photo of these two pumpkins

safely strapped in when they were brought back from

the farm.

That was 2008, with a baby on the way.

And here she is - Kate - in 2009.

She seems to enjoy the pumkin farm very much.

What a difference one year can make!

Listening

Photo : Cheryl

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it. J. Krishnamurti Thanks, Jerry!

A blunt pencil

As someone who needs to write down things,

I liked this quote:

A blunt pencil is better than a sharp mind.

Kate

In August 2008, my son and his wife were

visiting us here in Norway, and we knew there was

a baby on the way.

During that visit my son's three cousins gave them

a book - "1000 words and Pictures in Norwegian

and English" - urging the coming parents to

teach the baby Norwegian.

So here, in this photo taken in the States a few months

ago, Kate seems to have taken matters into her own

hands, so to speak.

Will she one day learn Norwegian?

Lesson : Banana boxes are strong

A friendly piece of advice I got when I came to Norway:

If you need boxes for moving, use cardboard banana boxes.

If you need boxes for storing, use cardboard banana boxes.

They are strong and sturdy.

Just for the joke

Cigarettes, me?!

I have been lucky.

I never smoked one single cigarette in my life.

Some of my coworkers are smokers, and go out a

few times a day for a smoke. I do not envy them

the nicotine, but the break of five minutes would have

been great.....

So up came the idea that I should get my own cigarettes,

either made out of chocolate or of chewing gum.

This way I too, would be able to take a break for

"smoking".

In Norway you cannot buy these "cigarettes",

but a very kind woman living close to the Swedish border

liked the joke and bought me two boxes, one of each kind.

But an old habit is hard to break.

Even with this three dimentional excuse, I cannot bring

myself to go out to "smoke".

So today I opened up one box and tasted the chocolate

version - just for fun.

Thor Bjørklund and the cheese slicer

Thor Bjørklund was a carpenter at Lillehammer

back in 1925.

He did not like the fact that it was hard

to cut the cheese with a knife.

Using one of his carpenter tools as an inspiration,

he invented the cheese slicer - ostehøvel, in Norwegian.

Bjorklund's contribution to the world.

He started the production in 1927 and his firm has existed

at Lillehammer till now.

I found they had a website in English and in Norwegian

http://www.bjorklund-1925.no/

Cheese slicers now come in very many shapes, and the

firm also produced cake slicers, cutlery for serving

salads etc.

Imagine how sad it was to read this afternoon that

the firm had been declared bankcrupt in the end of

September 2009.