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It is becoming a tradition since we moved to Gjerdrum; the Xmas mood only begins until after The Real Choir Xmas concert, the second Sunday in December! The good thing is that this day will *always* be after Sinterklaas, which keeps things in the right order for us dutchies! 😉

It was a fantastic concert, once again…a great way to end a nice weekend in the mountains!

And YES, Xmas mood is definitely here (so now the house can be Xmas’ized! 😉

Rick Pitino: “When you build bridges you can keep crossing them.”

Yay, it has been snowing some more last night, true winter wonderland outside and we are ‘på hyttetur’!! That is, go to a cottage in the mountains with friends and relax…also do some hiking through stunning nature, enjoy great dinners and ‘some’ drinks…it is the typical norwegian thing to do in the weekend (and also the reason that traffic out of Oslo on Friday’s and back into Oslo on Sunday’s is a disaster! 😉 ).
Henning and Ida invited us for this weekends hyttetur, it has been some time ago since we were at their hytte (our first hyttetur). It obviously is Misha’s first hyttetur, and as he had his first Julebord last week, he is on track with his integration into the Norwegian way of living! 😉

I added some options for y’all to share the posts on this blog on various Social Networks, you will find the buttons at the bottom of each blogpost. The first row of buttons gives you the option to do a direct Facebook Share, Twitter tweet, Gmail email, or StumbleUpon recommendation. The second row allows you to Like the post on Facebook, share the blog link on Twitter, ‘+1’ it on Google+ or submit the post to StumbleUpon.

It is a nice thing of running the WordPress blogging software on the back-end; there are a zillion plugins available to extend functionality and the Sociable plugin did it for me this time!

So, “Be Sociable, Share”! 😉

Yayyy, it has been snowing (a lot, 20cm) last night…fiiiinally as wintersnow came much earlier in the past years!

The first snow of the year always makes nice pictures as you can see below, but it also meant that I have been snow plowing to clear the area in front of the garage this morning. That, *and* the traditional ‘first-snow-of-the-year-traffic-jam’ are the down sides of living in winter wonderland…other than that, it is PERFECT!! 😉

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I just noticed that I have 365 FaceBook friends…ha, that’s a friend a day! (yeah, yeah, I need to find one more friend for coming year as 2012 is a leap year! 😉 )

Obviously, only a portion of those are the ones who are really close to you and whom you stay in touch with on a daily basis, updates from another group are great to have so you keep yourself somewhat connected to their lives, and there is the group of people from ‘a’ past that you don’t pay too much attention to…it is still nice to have them there though, they are after all part of the story of your life and who knows, they might boomerang back in your life for some reason and you too can bring past back to the future if you want, or need…giving fate a hand in accomplishing what it is written in the stars?!? 😉

Hmm, that Google+ implementation of ‘circles’ makes sense, eh?

Disclaimer: I don’t see the number of FB friends as an accomplishment of any kind, anyone can easily have over a 1000 ‘friends’…really, who cares!

Margaret Cho: “Sometimes when we are generous in small, barely detectable ways it can change someone else’s life forever.”

Even though the ‘official’ celebration of the Dutch Sinterklaas tradition is tomorrow, most homes have been visited by the Saint and his ‘Black Petes’ (Zwarte Pieten) this weekend…we got lucky as he managed to find the way Up North too, yay!

We celebrated it with dutch friends tonight and as you can see below, little Misha loved it too! 😉

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I recently (re)discovered Antony and the Johnsons, their song ‘Bird Gerhl‘ from the ‘I am a Bird Now‘ album is perfect companon for this nice and quiet Saturday.

My tip: light up some candles, switch off the light, press play and close your eyes…Njoy!

Tonight we have ‘Julebord‘ with work; this is the traditional Norwegian Xmas dinner/party and while the literal word julebord translates to ‘Christmas table’, the actual meaning seems to be: ‘drink till you drop on your boss’s expense, while enjoying some food’! 😉

Well, I will make sure not to ‘drop’ as I am a responsible dad now…Kissy and Misha are coming too so it will be great no matter what! 😉

I am pretty sure that the food and atmosphere will help in making it extra special too as we will be dining/partying at the Alfred restaurant (next to the Alfred Nobel peace center) in Oslo, NICE!

Wayne Dyer: “The more I give myself permission to live in the moment and enjoy it without feeling guilty or judgmental about any other time, the better I feel about the quality of my work.”