Christmasy weekend

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We went to the concert of Chrous Felix (my parent’s choir) on Thursday.

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The Christmas tree at work, taken on my way home from the Christmas party on Friday. Our food was terribly late because of an accident on the motorway so I had to leave “early” to catch the train, but I had a ton of fun.

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Everything that was made yesterday when we had a big Christmas baking event at home. I am very happy about the number of different things we made and all the fantastic people who were here.

This has been such a good weekend. Party at work on Friday, baking with friends and family, nice dinner with Erik and house warming party with friends on Saturday. Today we had breakfast with Pia, saw The Nutcracker at the Opera and spent the evening with Ruben who is back on holiday from Texas.

A second hand Friday

This is not so long ago, actually. We were going to Åse and Martin for boardgames and I was looking for something warm, comfortable and nice. It’s been a long time since I wore this dress, made by me of a sweather from H&M, a skirt my grandmother knitted and pearls I sewed on.
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And it was the day I got my coats from the dry cleaner so I had to use the pink coat. I had been dreaming about it for weeks and now I could finally wear it!
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I love it, so big and thick, and those pockets… 🙂
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Å rane barn gir barneran

Utdrag fra debattinnlegget til en av de smartere folka i Oslo, Don Martin.

Men så hørte jeg denne uka at de skal legge ned Jordal fritidsklubb. Ikke bare det, men at Jordal-klubben er den eneste i et område som spenner seg over Jordal, Galgeberg, Vålenga, Kampen, Ensjø, Tøyen og Grønland.

 

Oslo er en vanvittig trygg hovedstad. Det er den mye på grunn av alle som engasjerer seg for den. Og på grunn av alle underbetalte lærere, deltidsarbeidende fritidsklubbledere, frivillige i foreninger. En del av dem kommer sjøl fra en vanskelig oppvekst – og bruker det til å gjøre andres bedre.

 

En lektor fra politihøyskolen mente denne uka at dagens ungdom er bedre enn «noensinne». For en som har hatt et anstrengt forhold til politiet mye av livet, er det morsomt å se hvor enige vi er. Men ikke ta det for gitt. Bra ting tar tid å bygge opp, og det nytter ikke å komme etterpå med “strakstiltak” om dere ødelegger for en ny generasjon av Oslo-ungdommer.

Jeg bor tydeligvis i en bare middels by, når jeg har en ordfører som sier:

Jeg er litt lei av å høre at eldresentre og fritidsklubber skal nedlegges når vi vet at resultatet sjelden blir at de faktisk blir lagt ned, sa Stang.

Heldigvis svarer andre:

Å si at det ikke skjer… Da tror jeg faktisk ikke at du bor i byen. Du har en helt annen virkelighetsforståelse enn vi har, sa Tellevik Dahl.

Og så finner jeg ut:

Er det bærekraftig utvikling når bystyret innkaller til en gedigen fest? En gedigen fest der man bare informerer om at by the way så kommer det nye biblioteket i Bjørvika til å koste 2,7 milliarder, ikke 1,2 milliarder.

Tenk at vi bruker ekstra 1,5 milliarder på et nytt bibliotek, men ikke har råd til fritidsklubber. Det er så man får lyst til å bli politiker så man kan slå de andre i hodet med noe hardt.

Dinner last night

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For once I found a dish on the internet and almost didn’t alter it at all. Or, you know, just a little.

  1. Peel and dice sweet potato, fry in the oven with salt, pepper and olive oil.
  2. Add whole garlic cloves, red onion and kidney beans to the sweet potato.
  3. Dice tomato, pepper (paprika) and chop some spring onion and add to a bowl.
  4. Roast pumpkin seeds in a dry frying pan and add to the bowl as well.
  5. Add the hot ingredients from the oven and mix.
  6. Add some cottage cheese and keep your favorite hard cheese handy (we used Manchego).

I wish we had a fresh citrus fruit for dressing, it would have been really good with the mix.

Soju

Today is the first Christmas party of two, this season. I guess it’s the universe making up for zero Christmas parties in 2012. Today is the party for the whole of UMB and I will use it as an excuse to have free dinner, but not much more.

I therefore post pictures from our night with soju in Korea.

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With the soju came cabbage and pasta free of charge. Strange Koreans.

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We only found one decent beer:

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Soju:

Soju (Hangul 소주; Hanja 燒酒) is a distilled beverage native to Korea. Jinro and Lotte soju are the first and third top selling alcohol brands in the world.[1] It is usually consumed neat.

Most brands of soju are made in South Korea. It is traditionally made from ricewheatbarley, but modern producers of soju use supplements or even replace rice with other starches, such as potatoessweet potatoes, or tapioca.

Shared meals

I wish we could have more ways of shearing meals here in Norway, like they do in Korea. That you go to restaurants where the food is supposed to be shared.

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Ruben trying to make sense of the menu.

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You know this is going to be hot when:

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Getting help deciding what to eat.

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We first got some kind of soup with meat and vegetables and after we finished they put rice in the pot, mixed everything and this is what if looked like after the second “round”. Very good and a cool way of doing it.

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Beer also cools the heartburn…

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I wish there were restaurants like this in Oslo, fantastic for a meal with friends 🙂

1 year

This Monday last year was my first day on the job as a PhD candidate. I settled into my office, got to know people, tried to get all the papers in order and to understand what I should really be doing here. I have now completed 1/3 of my time here and I am quite sure I have not completed 1/3 of the work of my PhD. That’s probably the only thing I can be absolutely sure of. It’s not that I haven’t done things, I’m just training and practicing and then you’re not very efficient.

In a week I will (hopefully) have completed 25 of the 30 credits I need and in three weeks I will have even more results from the transition disequilibrium test ready for my supervisor group. I really like working right now, because my days are varied, what is do is interesting and I know what to do, I just need to figure out how. And I guess that this “treasure hunt” for methods and being clever is what I really like about research. That you have to use everything you know and be super smart to do really good research.

Many things have changed the last year, but the two most important things are still the same, my passions at work and in love. The next year I will have to work on the first two of in total three manuscripts that will become my thesis, so there are many things to look forward to and to aim at. Still a lot go get done and find out.

Imagine a whole year in the same place with the same people and the same daily rhythm. It’s the good live, I tell you.

Yet another committee meeting

So this weekend I have been in Drøbak with my committee for our monthly meeting. We met up on Friday for dinner, a workshop on the platform TeamworkPM and light talk. Yesterday we did “big discussions” on program development, project management, what we should spend our time doing the next year. Today we have the actual meeting and later I will have a calm Sunday at home.

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Hiking in Yeosu

Here is one of many eventful and beautiful days we had in Korea together with Ruben. We spent some days by the sea on the South shore in a place called Yeosu. They had the world exhibition there, but also very nice landscape.This day we went hiking and stumbled upon “kirkekaffe” in a Buddhist temple.

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First we had noodles for breakfast at the G25, because nothing was open. But lots of school children did the same thing, so it must be ok.

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This is where we parked the car.

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My boys.

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The map we tried to follow. We went up on the mountain, did a round and went down again.

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Erik had just bought a new backpack in Seattle and it was perfect for short hike like this.

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What Koreans who hike look like. Long sleeves, west, hat, gloves, long pants and scarves. We looked like aliens, but at least we also had colourful clothes…

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We finally reached the top!

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It was incredibly hot and humid.

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Even Erik is getting the hang of the hand gestures 😉

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The view from the other side of the mountain.

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You couldn’t see far because of the humidity.

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When we came down on the other side we found a temple.

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Had to go and say hi.

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They were in the middle of a service, so we waited on the outside and got some rest.

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We went inside when they were finished to take some pictures, and it was clear that they didn’t get much tourists up there, because they invited us to their meal afterwards.

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One of the women there also showed us how to pray in the temple.

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Love this slightly loopsided tiger.

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I didn’t dare take any pictures inside, put when we went into the common house, we queued for food, got noodles with vegetables and kimchi, ate at a big table in a big room together with all the others and listened to their talk. When we were finished we did our dishes and drove home.

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The rest of the temple goers finding their cars and going home.

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It was both such a surreal and normal thing to do, go to the temple, share food and be part of a community. And the fact that we had no common language was no problem.

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When we came back we spent more time at what almost became our regular coffee shop, making a ruckus when we asked to move a table outdoors.

Dinner with friends

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So last night we were out with friends at Olympen to have whole roasted (suckle?) pig. I love coming together like this and really wish we could do it more often. To share a meal, have some really wonderful food and spend an evening with amazing people. I highly recommend the whole roasted pig at Olympen if you want a place for your Christmasparty or a friend get together like we did. It is already a tradition!

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Did trustworthy red yesterday 😉

Dinner with friends

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So last night we were out with friends at Olympen to have whole roasted (suckle?) pig. I love coming together like this and really wish we could do it more often. To share a meal, have some really wonderful food and spend an evening with amazing people. I highly recommend the whole roasted pig at Olympen if you want a place for your Christmasparty or a friend get together like we did. It is already a tradition!

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Did trustworthy red yesterday 😉

Next summer

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This is what the Tøyen park will look like next summer. This is our neighborhood park and I am happy to say that the Øya festival has chosen to be on the other side of the park. But stage 2 will be facing us, so it will be interesting to see how much we hear of the festival.

Life expectancy vs per capita spending on healthcare

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How would you interpret this graph?

Firstly, don’t think about the line. A linear regression with this kind of spread of the data is just silly and is probably not the best way of presenting a tendency.

What is really important here are the two axes, the spending per capita (person) and the life expectancy. The further up you go, the longer people live, while the further to the right you go, the more the country spend on health care.

So if you draw a line from top to bottom in the middle of the x-axis, you will have all the big spenders on the right and the cheap ones on the left. Which means that we in Norway are joined by USA, Denmark, Switzerland, Canada, Germany and France. While countries like Mexico, Hungary, Korea and Greece all spend very little on health care.

The second line you should draw is from left to right, in the middle of the y-axis. The countries with high life expectancy will be on top and low expectancy will be on the bottom. But notice that most of the countries all lie between 80 and 86, so no matter how much a country spend, the difference is usually no more that 6 years. (Fun fact: the life expectancy in Oslo differs by 4 years between east and west.)

So what you have to look at then, is how well money spent on health care is correlated with life expectancy. Well, “not really”, is the answer to that. And also “this is complicated”. The only interesting outlier here is USA, really. Because Mexico spends very little and has very low life expectancy, so it’s really just the opposite of Norway. While USA spends significantly more that anyone else, but still has a low life expectancy.

What we all should think about is why we in the West (right side) send so much more money than the East (left side), but still have the same life expectancy?