Yessss, *this* is how a festival is supposed to be: rock bands on stage while the sun shines and the beer flows 😉 , enjoying a fantastic festival atmosphere with friends, yayyy!
I just saw The Deaf (The Hague rock-city), and upcoming are Within Temptation, Chef’Special, Selah Sue, The Computers and Elbow…life’s great!!
I am up bp bright and early, the rain is gone and sun is here (to stay? 😉 )…YESSS, we are ON DA ROAD!!
A festival weekend full of sun, fun, music, friends, some drinks and more: Lowlands here we come, HELL YEAH!!!
I just arrived in NL, hehe well in time for this weekends festivities: the Lowlands festival!! 😉
I’ll first work my ass off (extremely busy times) from our dutch office tomorrow (while that is still possible, as the office will unfortunately close by year-end 🙁 ), and then hope to have a great and sunny Lowlands festival from Friday to Monday!
It feels pretty special being here: it will most likely be the last time that I am in NL before I become ‘daddy’, somewhere end of September/early October…wow!!
A twist to the Manuel Antonio Road Sign I posted last week…whoever came up with this storyline is amazingly creative…haha, his/her driving test results must have been great!
Click on the picture to enlarge.
OK, enough with wizard tricks, spells, potions, Death Eaters, elves and more…I am done with magic for a while; the Harry Potter week has ended now that we watched all eight movies (each with a 2h-2.5h runtime) in just seven nights! 😉
We saw the first seven at the movie theater nearest to me, the ‘@Home’ cinema, and we just went to see the last one, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, in the cinema. Again a great movie and the 3D experience made it a true grand finale…fantastic!!
Living in an area where having a car is a must, and with a baby on its way, we decided to explore the car market once more. There are quite some advantages in having an electric car in Norway, specifically when using it for commuting to work; you don’t pay toll, there is free charging at work and you can use the bus/taxi lanes to avoid traffic jams.
I did the calculations and I can lease or finance an electric car for roughly the same amount as what I am paying monthly for my commute…in other words, have two cars for the cost of one, a no-brainer! (a pure economical decision, and not so much an environmental choice: one should realize that electric cars are not that much ‘greener’ than gasoline cars…electricity is not ‘free’ either, eh?)
The challenge so far has been that there were no models that I would consider driving (except for the Tesla Roadster 😉 ), until I saw the Nissan Leaf…finally an electric car that does not look like a dinky-toy! 😉
And it comes packed with options: heated seats and steering wheel, navigation, rear-view camera and there is an iPhone App available that provides you with all sorts of status info on the car and batteries…nice!
We can test drive it in September and if that lives up to expectations, we’ll most likely buy it…first deliveries are in November, just in time to enjoy it in Norwegian winter time! 😉
An interesting read, something to chew on this weekend… 😉
Salon.com: “Psychologist Christopher Ryan and co-author/wife Cacilda Jethá are out to defeat an archetypal figure in the mythology of monogamy…Our hunting and gathering ancestors were nonmonogamous — the implication being that, biologically speaking, sexual exclusivity is unnatural…Cacilda and I don’t dispute that love is a very important human emotion and is deeply embedded in our nature. In fact, one of the things that we do best is love other people. But what we do dispute is that it’s necessarily linked to sexual exclusivity. I think that’s something that’s very much culturally encouraged in our possessive, imperialistic society.”
Check out these three FANTASTIC short films, all only around 1 minute in length, originally described as:
3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage… all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films…..
= a trip of a lifetime.
MOVE, EAT, LEARN
Ok, ok, fiiiinallyyyy according to some (perhaps most in this world 😉 ) I am watching a Harry Potter movie!
Uhh, one movie? How about six? 😉 This week will be semi-official Harry Potter week at the movie theater nearest to me, as we plan to watch the first six Harry Potter movies this week in the ‘@Home’ cinema! 😉
Tonight the first one, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone…have to admit, so far so good (up to the first ice cream break that is 😉 )!!
My parents are visiting us this weekend, a pit-stop after their (so far) 7500km trip through Scandinavia in the past 6 weeks (!!). It is super to see them again, and a nice side-effect is that we are getting things off the ‘things to do in the house’ list! Haha, great to have a handy-man dad!! 😉
The company I work for has been sold last Sunday (at least, the acquisition was announced, the actual sale will still take some months).
Personally I believe this is a great development, with many opportunities on the horizon. For the ones who believe this is the time to seek another job, give IKEA a try…the job interview could be a challenge though! 😉
So much has been said about the U.S. Debt (ceiling) the past days…so, how much is the approximate $15 trillion really? usdebt.kleptocracy.us created a nice visualization…wow, that is a shitload of $100 notes!!
On a related note: in the past weeks Apple (‘just’ a tech company) reached a position of having more cash on hand than the U.S. Treasury (!!): over $76 billion, uhhh, money talks it seems…well, it is important to realize that life is about much more than that!!
Yayyy…tonight LIVE: Prince in concert at Oslo Spektrum, just 1.5 week after the initial concert date, July 23, which got obviously postponed after the terrible July 22 attacks on Oslo/Norway.
It has been about 7 years ago since I saw ‘His Royal Badness‘ perform live, so I am REALLY looking forward to see him on stage tonight, especially after the magical shows he had in NL last week!
Let’s Go Crazy!! 😉
It is the first day of a new month and since I started it by saying ‘rabbit, rabbit‘ I will receive good luck for the rest of August, GREAT!!
July 31 2011, the day where I should have moved into a new house! Uhh, hahaha…well, at least *if* I would follow the two year moving cycle that I have had the past four years. 😉 I moved into the first house in Norway on July 31 2007 , a beautiful red painted house close to the forest. It was a rental house and since we liked living in Norway so much, we decided to buy a house when the owners came back to Norway. Coincidence or not (I personally don’t believe in it 😉 ), we moved into our *own* house exactly two years later, on July 31 2009. And we still love living here…today was a great example; enjoying the sun on the veranda, go for a swim in the nearby lake (400m) to cool down and then drive within 25 minutes to Oslo city center…NICE!!
Oh, and to put things into perspective; a house is mostly just four walls with a roof…the size and location don’t really matter, since you can make any place feel like home, as long as you put your heart in it!
The city of Oslo is FILLED with flowers and candles…intense…
Some of you might know (and occasionally play) the game Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Wikipedia: “Paper-rock-scissors is a hand game played by two or more people…The game is often used as a selection method in a way similar to coin flipping, drawing straws, or throwing dice. However, unlike truly random selection methods, rock-paper-scissors can be played with a degree of skill, especially if the game extends over many sessions with the same players; it is often possible to recognize and exploit the non-random behavior of an opponent.”
Well, as you can see from the picture below, there is a way to always win the game…ha, I choose ROCK! 😉
Alexander Rybak played Sven Nyhus’ “Bergrosa” last night at the Rose March ceremony in Oslo center. The original broadcasted sound was off (it sounded as if he played out of tune), but I now found an alternative version…it is beautiful, and emotional…
There were several moments today when whole of Norway (and beyond) stood still to remember the victims of last Friday’s attacks in Oslo and at Utøya. Stood still in complete silence at 12:00h today, and during a ‘Rose March‘ with 200,000 people attending…roses spread love through out the city, Norway united.
Another great initiative is 
‘Hold together – Hold hands‘ where over 750,000 people are virtually holding hands, creating a chain to protest against violence and in sympathy with those affected.
Join us!
A german newspaper article said: “Even in their deepest sorrow the norwegians don’t get hysterical. They resist the hate. It is amazing to see how politicians and the whole country reacts. They are sad to the deepest thread of their souls. They cry in dignity. But nobody swears to take revenge. Instead they want even more humanity and democracy. That is one of the most remarkable strengths of that little country.”
The Rådhus square was PACKED with people
raymondpoort.com is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
