Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Hectic life, Murphy's Law, travels, and Northern Lights


These last two days were hectic... lots of work accumulated for a week away from the office, deadlines for conference abstracts, teaching a subject I don't know much myself, and preparing for a presentation I'm giving at the end of the week in Rome. Whew...
Hehehe, something like this!

Not just that but considering how hard it is to make friends here and how little time I've been spending in the city I decided to host a dinner for 4 friends on Monday. Arrived back from Greece on Sunday at 11pm, woke up at 7 to go to work, ran around all day, and then Murphy's law came into action and I missed the train I needed to get to arrive in Oslo for grocery shopping. Thankfully the station where I was waiting for the next train has a little shop and therefore I was able to get the basics for a less fancy meal and head straight home. I arrived 15 minutes before the guests... It was a great evening though and it was nice to see that there are reasons to stay in Oslo more often.

On Tuesday I woke up at 7am again, tram-train-bus later arrived at the office, final adjustments in the class I would teach and off I went to the classroom. It was the first class this semester and all was going smooth, until the projector failed right when I was about to show a video I found at TED:com that was nicely related to my topic. I ran off, found the IT guy, ran back while students were waiting... he came, fuzzed around and... it did not work. Well, let the students go home and asked them to watch it online.

Worked, submitted abstracts, meetings with MS students, meeting with boss, conference call and then I realized I had signed up to go to a visit to the Solar Observatory that day itself! Yikes! Run faster with stuff and head off to the bus at 4:30pm. The visit was definitely worth it, we even saw Northern Lights! It is very rare to see them this far South and we were told that 70% of the time the is cloudy (meaning you don't see anything) so we were very lucky. Got home at 11:30pm and still had to finish the presentation I needed to send off. At half past midnight I sent it and just as I was getting ready to log off a good friend with whom I had not talked for in  a while called me on skype. Finally went to bed at 1:30am.

This is what I saw (this was taken from a different point in the city... we didn't have the light pollution)

Today I woke up knowing I still had to pack, and hopefully finish a document before heading to the airport for my flight at 11:55am. Don't know why I thought I had time for laundry and a leisurely breakfast... Conclusion is that by the time I had to leave the house I was stuck with nothing in my bag and a steaming wet laundry load that was not ready (and a black shirt that decided to stain all other clothes). I could not just leave the laundry in the machine... it would rot by the time I get back on Sunday (plus my super neat roommate would have a fit). So I pulled the clothes out of the machine, burning fingers on the way (I did not check to which temperature of the water was set, supposing no one had used it after I washed my another load 2 days ago... it turned out to be 90oC (140oF)! Who washes clothes at that temperature anyway??? My roommate...). Finally rinsed the clothes in the sink, sort of set them to dry on the rack and literally ran to the train station. Barely made it into the train and was already worried if I'd make it to the flight, since by my calculations this train would arrive at the airport 50 minutes before the flight. While running up the escalators I was silently thanking trains for never being late here in Norway. Went to the electronic board to find my check in counter... and my flight was not there! Oh my... I almost panicked, thinking that they might have closed check in already. I ran to the self-check-in and the machine would not accept my credit card (and I also forgot to get the reservation number)... Ah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And then I checked my cell for the time and realized that it was 10:20... which meant I was too early! I miscalculated the time I had to leave by 1 hour! And check in would only open 1 hour before the flight. So now I'm here, typing away while waiting for check in. Let's hope I can make it through the rest of the week!!

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