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I was invited to see the Norway – Scotland soccer game in Oslo tonight. It’s heaps of fun with the Scottish, they are great soccer fans…even when they loose! And they lost, oh man…BIG time; 4-0!!

And not because the vikings where playing THAT good, mainly because the referee missed all the fauls and gave yellow cards (as well as a red card for Scotland) when nothing big happened. Someone told me that the guy was from Luxemburg…perhaps he should buy some goggles and go back to be a handball referee orso. 😉

Anyway, the result was as-is, giving Norway still a (small) chance to qualify for the World Championships in South Africa next year.

As said, the Scottish were great and came with many (2500 people!), all singing, cheering, grieving, yet still keeping their great sense of humor!

Validation, a fable about the magic of free parking, a nice lovestory…one with a SMILE! 🙂

I (finally) got my new laptop today, a Dell Latitude E6400, and indeed, I spent most of tonight playing with it! 😉

It’s unfortunately no Apple Macbook Pro 🙁 (silly company policy) which already (!) turned out to be a bad choice…I’ve been able to lock myself out of the OS!! Indeed, I am not able to log in to MS Winblows via the fingerprint reader which I enabled as the only way to log in. I figured that using my fingerprint would be a pretty neat, and fast way to log in (swipe your finger and you’re in!), avoiding the ‘cumbersome’ standard Ctrl-Alt-Del method. It worked like a charm at first, but after the laptop unexpectedly went into standby (thx again Microsoft…), the fingerprint reader stopped working (it says ‘Device closed’ at the Login window) and I got stuck, since I don’t have the option to manually type in my password…WTF…and DAMN!

There seems to be no other option than to bring the laptop back to IT-support tomorrow morning…I hate that!!

What better way to spend the Saturday then buying furniture? Well, it’s actually not too bad if you also find what you are looking for! 😉

The house is quite spacious, so the furniture could be pretty big; THE couch is 3.4m x 2.7m and THE dining table (with THE chairs) is 2.2m x 1.1m…yes indeed, this means that most of the furniture is IN (and to be delivered in 4 weeks), yay!

Besides the fun of shopping at IKEA (?!? ;)), it’s actually a lot of fun putting the goodies together; tonight I have been playing with a bookcase.

I’m always amazed with the very efficient packing and ease of getting the job done, it must be fun to work at their engineering department!

Reuters: “Russian soccer fans have been told to drink whisky on their trip to Wales for next month’s World Cup qualifier to ward off the H1N1 swine flu virus, the head of the country’s supporter association (VOB) said Monday.

“We urge our fans to drink a lot of Welsh whisky as a form of disinfection,” VOB head Alexander Shprygin told Reuters.

“That should cure all symptoms of the disease.”

It’s nice to realize that I am immune to H1N1… 😉

I took 1.5 weeks off from work to get everything arranged for the move out and in, today was my last day and all is well; most of what needed to be done, has been done thanks to Marko, Muriel, Robbert, Suzanne, Rob and Stefanie…thx friends, we couldn’t have done this without y’all!!

Rob and I spent the day putting the sauna together and cleaning the rain gutter (niceeee job! 😉 ). Weather finally cleared up and we concluded that this place is PERFECT when it’s sunny (we actually also concluded that it’s perfect when it rains, and in some months we’ll probably conclude that it’s perfect with snow too! 😉 ).

Rob and Stef left tonight which means that now all our (dutch) helping hands are gone.

After we dropped them off at the airport, we went out to do some furniture shopping and found THE couch, THE dining table with THE seats, YAY! Chilled a bit at IKEA coz we can’t get enough of it! 😉

It was smart to take some days off this week, there’s still SO much to do in the house…luckily Rob and Stefanie are still here to help out.

Most of today was filled with making the skirtings on the new floor…yeah, there’s a bit of progress everyday!

I mounted the satellite dish today; pretty easy as I have done it before (and I still work in satellite communications 😉 )…Google Earth helped out again to find the direction to the satellite, quite handy!

Jeez, what a day yesterday! Moving is always a bit chaotic and hectical, but it was all worth it. We had a successful handover of the old house to the owners (I’ve never seen the house so clean, thanks to all out friends!) and all our stuff made it to the new place, most of it still unpacked in the garage… 😉
We had a great first night, everyone slept like a baby (being completely knackered 😉 ).
We took it relatively easy today, went swimming in the lake nearby (just 300m), enjoyed the sun and opened the BBQ season on the new veranda, yay!
Willy and Katka invited us for some Guitar Hero tonight, great to set the mind to something else…hehe, I’m gonna ROCK! 😉

Heyhey, it’s a big day today; Moving Day!!
We have three couples, our best friends from NL, helping us out…it’s great to share this special moment with them!
Everyone got up bright and early and the work is divided; the men do the heavy lifting and move everything to the new place, the woman pack the last things and clean.
3.5h left until we have to hand in the keys of the ‘old’ house…tick, tock… 😉

Time’s ticking, and we’re counting hours instead of days now (14:50h to go 😉 )…the floor is almost done (an hour of work left), which means that the house is (kind of ) ready for the move! We picked up the dishwasher and oven/cooking plate today, the freezer/fridge will be delivered tomorrow so the kitchen is A-ok.

We just had the last dinner, the last night and the last wake up call…soon to be followed by the first dinner, evening and night in the new house! 😉

D-Day is coming close, and the work far from done…the work on the floor is progressing, but not finished today as I hoped. Oh well, change of plans and we’ll continue tomorrow. Robbert arrives tonight so an extra pair of hands tomorrow will (have to) get the work done!

Quite a lot happening in life these days; working on new beginnings, going through a lot of changes, challenges everywhere…not always easy, but at least energy in motion!

My first blog-post from the new house! Yes, indeed…ladies and gentlemen, we are connected!!  I love it when a plan comes together… 😉

It seems that the more we do in the house, the more work comes our way…we have ourself to blame since we took down a wall today! 😉 Quite some work, but it should make life easier tomorrow when we’re putting the floor together AND it gives us a lot more space in the kitchen/dining room!

Everything is fully prepared for tomorrow; the floor is clean and all required items are there, hehe, we’re ready to set a record time for the 65 m^2, EASY! 😉

The hard work is followed by a cold beer, some time in the sauna and relaxing afterwards! 😉

The real work started today: getting out the old laminate floor was relatively easy, the surprise of the day was the SECOND old laminate floor underneath!! Aaahhhh! 😉

We managed and after that we took down the indoor brick wall (which was protecting the wooden wall underneath against the heat coming of the fireplace). Since the fireplace will go somewhere else, the bricks could go off…and that meant brick by brick (aahhh!); taking that wall down was HARD work!!

In the mean time, back ‘home’, almost everything was packed by the girls, we divided the work and we’re right on schedule!

I have to say, everything is actually going quite according to plan, everything except for the cleaning of the new house…this is quite a big thing in Norway, especially when I compare it to NL where the first thing one does when entering a new house is: cleaning! Well, in Norway the seller should make sure that the house is SO clean that the buyer should not have to clean it anymore…as you can guess, the cleaning was hardly done, and the broker seems to try to play tricks on us, F#CKFACE! The last word has definitely not been said about this…

Sunday turned out to be garden furniture day; we found a trendy set consisting of a big couch with lounge parts, soft pillows and a glass table…I’d say, let the sun shine!! Especially now that we also own an original Weber BBQ (the One Touch Gold, as burning charcoal still gives the best bbq experience if you ask me! 😉 ).

Marko and Muriel came over with their kids and are camping in their caravan on our parking lot! 😉

They’re gonna help us with the packing, cleaning and laying the new floor, which we’re gonna start with tomorrow morning, wish us luck!

Quite an intense day today; bought a floor, a dishwasher, oven and cooking plate AND found a store with some fabulous furniture…that’s for coming week though.

It’s our last evening together in this  house; from tomorrow we have guests coming over from NL to help us with the packing, cleaning and the new floor…Moving Day is coming closer and closer…

I had my last day at work today, am taking off for 1.5 week (I wonder why? 😉 )…it was the last time I drove from work to the soon to be called ex-home, wow!

Still 8 days to go before the big move, and just to get used to it, we moved the first boxes tonight. 😉

And also we managed to get the kitchen equipment sorted out…gonna order tomorrow/the weekend!