Have nothing new to say, so will not say anything.

Oh, btw: Will be working here from June 14th to late August. Svalbard oh Svalbard. Long live the bleak-limbed lovers of the Arctic. The Arctic is sooooooooooo wonderful. I'd only wish there were no polar bears here.

Went to the physiotorture this morning like a good girl, after a weekend with a complaining arm. What's all this nonsense in me, I should be grateful I didn't mess things up as badly as my friend Sisse did: She was a passenger on a scooter and the guy driving it didn't see when the other scoters in front of him stopped (it's a very good idea when driving any kind of vehicle to look in front of you at least every few minutes...), so he crashed into them at full speed and Sisse flew off her scooter and landed shoulder first on the ice. Her shoulder is broken, looks like a minor mountain range and they'll have to open it sometime later and scrape off half of the bone. She might not be able to carry a rucksack again. I'd go insane.

Spring in Longyearbyen (but it's still the Arctic, remember). Some of the inch-thick ice lying EVERYWHERE is melting, and gee am I happy. Don't know how many times I've found myself wildly out of control on the streets of town. To give you an example, this morning I was scaling an iced hill and slid down, backwards, until my foot found hold in some poor little kid playing on the only black spot on the street. "Hey, I'm having a picnic!", the kid announced to the intruder, and really didn't seem to mind being turned into a flight of stairs for a few seconds. Nice kid :)

Was going to go to the UNIS-library today and take a look at a book by some genius who says that there is no environmental crisis going on on the planet and that everyone claiming the opposite is a nitwit. Interesting... but now it's late and Berit the librarian has gone home so I'll have to wait until tomorrow. Amazing how time flies.

Guess what?? Arnon is back from his Altiplano adventure!!! Wow, I wasn't expecting him to turn up in my mailbox until another month from now. Am very happy he's alive and well.

Found a link to this on some guy's blog. Slightly different from CNN, to say the least. Take your time to browse this site, a lot of interesting stuff.

Well, no Kapp Linné for me. The arm protested, and I gave in. Another lazy evening in Longyearbyen, jibbi!!!!

Received a most wonderful offer from Nature to see the full-text edition of this week's volume, AND a 15% discount off subscription. Have, since then, been pressing my nose flat against the screen reading all the articles that are even remotely interesting to me, and gee, it's good. The little science nerd in me is very happy now. Something tells me, however, that the subscription offer is not exactly something for me, I've been trying to find out the prices but the website just takes me in circles and avoids having to tell me what the price is. What I do know is that it is most definitely beyond me, if I remember right some magazine of crystallography (or something equally obscure) cost several hundred GBP pr. year... ehemm, slightly beyond my budget.

On to something different: Where did you other bloggers find your commenting tools??? I want one too!!!! Please let me know, I'd be terribly happy.

Always forgot to tell you I got myself Bjørk's latest CD (about time...). She's the same genius as always, amazing.

All of you who understand Norwegian, take a look at this. Pure genius!

Finding a job as a geologist on the youngest country on the planet is no piece of cake. Why can't our silly government put a little bit more money into science and research instead of pouring billions and billions into keeping every little godsforsaken cluster of windbattered houses in the middle of nowhere inhabited? I have wondered and I have wondered and I cannot see the logic. Even putting science and research aside, I still can't see the logic. Why on Earth am I talking about this???

Anyway, my long-distance search for a summer job in anything to do with geology in Iceland has so far been utterly fruitless. What do the Danes do then?? Yo Svalbard, yo?? Am getting tired of the guidejob in Iceland (gee, unless I got a job as a trekking guide or something similar...), so might spend the summer here in Svalbard. Didn't plan to do that, but am known for other things than sticking rigidly to plans :) Still have a chance of getting a job here, and so might do just that. Was actually beginning to look rather forward to spending the summer in Iceland, working "normal" hours and having time to go for treks in places I've never been. That may have to wait, and I'm sure Iceland will be there for at least as long as I'll be around. My only humble demand is that if any volcano is planning to erupt or any earthquake is planning to strike, that they will either burst out in the latter half of May or contain themselves until whenever it pleases me to return. I'm sick and tired of always missing the fun!!!

Don't know if I'm going to Kapp Linné. The winds are too high for a helicopter, and my arm is rather tired after the training with the fysiotherapist. Don't know if it will do it any good sitting on a scooter and holding on for dear life for whole 80 kilometers. Any it's not the best weather for driving a scooter either, but these girls I'm maybe going with kalla nu ekki allt ømmu sina i theim efnum!!

Apart from negotiation talks with my boss about summer work the day's been spent putting diapositives into frames and prate skit at Busen, the old miners' cafe in Longyearbyen. Verí næs.

Bought a new CD yesterday: Eight seasons. It's Mari Boine who sings, she's a Sami who sings in Sami. It's bloody brilliant.

Oh, life is good again. Last Monday a spontaneous party broke out at my place, we sat there some 6 people from work drinking red wine and having an "advanced topic" conversation until late in the night, and it was such fun. Can't be mad at these cowboys anymore :)

Tuesday the weather was fabulous and I went with some guys from work to Origo (a boat frozen into the ice in Tempelfjorden) to have a good dinner and enjoy life. I'm not driving the scooter yet, so I was a passenger. Gee, these cowboys ride like maniacs!! But it was such fun, and the evening was so beautiful with not a breeze even up in the mountainpasses and not one single cloud in the sky. I think I didn't realize until then how much I miss the outdoors here, after more than two weeks in town. The trip really gave me "blod på tann" as the Norwegians say, so now I'm dying to get out of town again. That will probably be tomorrow, when I'm heading for Kapp Linné (yep, where I knocked my shoulder out). A whole bunch of people are going there this weekend and I thought I might be of some help out there... and have some fun at the same time! As of now I don't know how I'll get there, if I'll catch a ride with some girls going there tomorrow or maybe, if I'm very lucky, get a lift with a helicopter (!!!) that's maybe going there tomorrow...

This not-working-period is really something strange. I thought in the beginning, oh well what the heck, there are so many things I can do... read and write and visit people andandand. Hmmm... it's true, but still I haven't done anything. I mean, there is just no motivation for doing anything. Strange. I started going to physiotherapy this week and that has helped me get up in the morning (although of course I missed the first session since I overslept...), and it also makes me feel better in the arm and shoulder, and that makes me feel better overall. Jibbi!!! Not good enough to drive a scooter though, so i guess I'll have to be a pensjonist on the Norwegian state a bit longer. An active pensjonist, hopefully, they have a system here that allows you to go to work and do what you can and feel like doing without losing your sykepenger. Brilliant system. Has definitely saved many people from depression and suicidal tendencies (no, I'm not that bad. Yet).

Got my pictures from S-America back from developing. It turned out to be 31 (!!!!!) films (no wonder Arnon thought I was a japanese in disguise). Out of those, 17 from Antarctica. 17x36=612. Thereof ca. 300 with penguins on it. I must be mad. O well, it will keep me occupied for a few days, sorting out the rubbish and putting the usable ones into albums and frames. And, needless to say, ruin my economy :)

Helvítis djøfulsins andskotans helvítis kúkatølva. Tholir ekki fjóra glugga opna i einu, thá frýs hún... aaaarrrgggg!

Never mind, never mind. Heatwave over, all was frozen when I left this lovely little piece of crap last night to go to the pub. Decided not to be foxy and went there with my hiking boots, but in this weird little town noone could care less. There are some things about Longyearbyen that I love more than words can ever convey. What I don't love is the impossibility of having some kind of "advanced topic" conversation here. Or maybe Scandinavian males are inherently more limited brainwise than many other breeds. I've been working with some of these cowboys for three seasons now, and they can't ever get further than the "you, me, boyfriend, girlfriend?!?!" stage. And hey, you're not silly enough to even imagine their intentions are honorable. I'm thoroughly glad to be a woman, I mean, is there any one of us who'd trade PMS once a month for being a mind-crippled idiot all your life?!?!

Three English lads went to Iceland in 1999 and did a good job putting their almost 1500 pictures on the Internet. Indulge and enjoy!

Jaises. Can't believe I'm still sitting here, at the computer in the old SPOT-storage house. It's half past eleven on a Saturday evening. Hmmm, should go home, put on my Birkenstock sandals (foxy lady) and head for the pub (original name: Puben) (which happens to be just 5 steps from my front door), and see if there's anyone dancing the Safari-dance there.

Erik is one of my favorite guys on Svalbard, but his computer is a big pain in the butt. Keeps freezing all the time, especially after I've written a loooooong e-mail to someone but not sent it off yet, or even a witty little blog post. And the screen, oh man, if it's on for more than one hour it starts flashing in weird colors and emitting scary, threatening sounds.

So, what have I achieved today?

Managed to keep the alarm on my mobile peeping at me with 6 min. intervals for 2 hours. Now beat that! I consider this a remarkable proof of the patience I've been training on for the last... 14 days and 3 hours. Everyone else would have already flushed that stubborn little monster down the toilet (or, if they were the mobile monster itself, flushed me down the toilet). After that I got up and dressed, had some cornflakes and read every word in our gorgeous little local newspaper Svalbardposten. Made it to our modest little version of Harrod's (original name, Svalbardbuttikken) where I went straight to the outdoors section (another original name; Arctica) to stare with hungry eyes at all the fancy outdoors equipment that my heart longs for: Therma-A-Rest mattress, a new multi-fuel stove, windblock fleece... ah, it's like a candy store for me.

Went home exhausted after all the longing and threw myself on my mattress, still with my shoes on (which makes me what the Israeli would call a hrapash). Slept like a baby until my dearest Helen called, and went to see her at the very fashionable Barista coffee shop. There we sat in indescribable boredom-doing-nothingness until we got too bored and decided to move to Kroa to continue the indescribable boredom-doing-nothingness there. Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day. I am vegetating.

Ó já, let's not forget the heatwave. We've had plus-degrees for a week now. PLUS. I'm not sure you guys realize what this means. I'm writing you from 78 degrees north. It's the high Arctic, and it's not supposed to be summer here yet. Poor polar bears. Poor seals. Lucky little penguins, to be down in the cold Antarctic (did you know that at everything above zero degrees a penguin will lie flat down, spread it's wings and pant??). Poor us, wading the slush and dropping our scooters into melting rivers. Hver er eiginlega meiningin med thessu?!?!

Totally devoid of original thoughts at the moment. Wouldn't mind being original, great, gorgeous, walking on air (take a look at my friend Stina's blog).

My sister's birthday. Congratulations, Lára!!! The first day of the midnight sun. That makes my sister to a child of the midnight sun :)

Anyone interested in corporate intrigues on Svalbard? Hmmm... take a look at my employer. A fusion of the arch-rivals, Safari and SPOT (a good name for my ex-employer, considering the state of my face...).

Does anyone of you know of a great university to study environmental geology??? A university that will fully sponsor me, give me a great academic background and allow me to do fieldwork in Bolivia or some other far-away, fun country. Any suggestions welcome.

And Stina, why should the guys always put the seat down when they're done? Why shouldn't we girls always take the seat up when we're done? Didn't someone say equal rights???

Takk stelpur!!! All my loving goes to Erna og Stina for clarifying this mystery.

And Stina, don't take the English translation of The Second Sex at face value. It was done by someone who didn't know s*** about philosophy, so all the philosophical terms are misinterpreted by him/her, in places completely changing the meaning of what Simone was trying to say. Or so it says in the introduction to the Norwegian edition.

Just came here from the Kroa pub, where Oli Ingolfs and I met over a beer. Oli is a professor of geology at UNIS (and HI), and really good fun to talk with. We sat there for some few hours (and some few beers) discussing everything from South American history through fatalism in the Icelandic sagas to conservation of the global gene pool and the global environmental disaster waiting around the corner. Found out that all the private swimming pools in the deserts of Arizona are probably to blame.

Profa einu sinni enn, og ekkert ensggukjaftædi her. Svalbardi rokkar en vedrid ekki.

It won't work. Am trying to insert a link to the Svalbard pages by using a small globe-shape button on my Blogger edit page, and I get all kinds of (what I think is) HTML in response, but no results are seen on my page. It's hard for me sometimes to like computers.

Am still trying to find out how to do this. Aren't you dying to find out more about Svalbard?

Found another book to dive into: The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir. In Norwegian. I love it!!!

People in Longyearbyen are tearing their hair in anguish: It is PLUS 3 degrees outside and rain. Almost everyone in this weird little town would prefer it to be MINUS 3, or better still, -30.

I've also been meaning to tell you what I want to become when I grow up. I seriously think I finally found out.

Once I thought I'd become an astrophysicist and my mom freaked out. She's probably not the only mom who ever freaked out faced with a Major-Tom scenario, where it's her kid in the capsule. Then I changed to anthropology and then acting and then guiding, considered becoming a pre-school teacher for a while and also throskathjalfi (what the hell is that in English???). Dropped into a good-fun geology course on my way to becoming an arqueologist and have a BS-degree in geology today. However, I can't remember ever having wanted to become a hair-dresser (but then I never was "normal", anyway).

So, what is it? Spy? CNN reporter on the West Bank? Or a toilet-diver, the most derogative thing we could imagine when we very 5 and a little bit less silly than we are today? Nope. Nothing as exciting as that. But as I sat in the shitcold bus driving into Potosi in Bolivia, something amazing happened in my head. A river flows through town, a perfectly normal river, except that at first sight it didn't look like water, this liquid flowing in it, but rather like molten aluminum. The kids playing in the river didn't seem to notice, but a lucky little Icelander who is raised in her clean little Iceland got a small shock. Gee, there's a job to be done out there. And in that bus, faced with that disgusting river, it became very clear to me that it was a job for me.

Reading, ummm. Have been meaning to tell you about some absolutely brilliant books, and some less brilliant books, I've come across lately.

"Guns, Germs and Steel" (and a subtitle - but I hate subtitles) by a bloke called Jared Diamond. Came across it in Bolsa del Deporte (my home in Bariloche, Argentina) while I was waiting for Arnon to emerge re-born in spirit from his meeting with the birds and nature in nearby Lanin National Park. This Diamond guy is a biologist of sorts and has, while studying birds in Papua New Guinea and other places, been wondering why on Earth white people came to dominate. The name of the book tells it all. But, why did the white man and not the Incas, or the Aboriginals, get the guns and the germs and the steel?!?! Gee, I was far into chapter 4 and just beginning to see the light, and then some idiot fellow traveller stole the book...

Sorry, but there are few places that I've been that are more morose than an ultra-modern Scandinavian capital in heavy late-winter wind and drizzling rain. No wonder Carsten was depressed when he left Denmark on some January day to see the world. "I Have Seen The World Begin" by Carsten Jensen is just as depressing as these winter days in our seriously affluent, ultra-modern Scandinavian bubble, but I can't really tell if it is because this divorced, in-a-mid-life-crisis guy has such a hard time telling himself apart from the surroundings or if the surroundings really were so bleak and terrible. This depression annoys me, and the terribly pretentious style he uses from time to time, but nevertheless I get just glued to the book everytime I pick it up. Annoyance de-glues me. Give it a try, a lot of people seem to have liked it a lot.

My Spanish needed a brushing-up when I came to Chile and I got the terrific idea of buying Mario Vargas Llosa's "Pantaleon y las visitadoras" (it was cheap and had a wonderfully ridiculous b/w photo of girls in swimsuits smoking cigarettes on the cover). Someone with a Ph.D. in Spanish would have problems reading that book!!!! Lucky me, to have a mini-mini-dictionary with me, found there maybe 1 in every 20 words I looked up. Well, I guess I was the German nerd at school but now I know how you other guys felt with a German short story in front of you... Guessing could be good fun, though, and often I was quite surprised to find out that everything I had been THINKING I was reading the last 2 hours was just crap, the guy was in a jail and not in a whorehouse etc. Anyway, the book is hilarious, it has been translated into Icelandic and you really really really should read it.

"The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling. You all know this one. Mowgli and Rikka-Tikki-Tavi and the elephant dance. Fallegt. Undurfallegt.

Then there was the weirdest ride Arnon and I ever got on our hitch-hiking in Patagonia. Two ultra-nerds from Berkely University discovering Patagonia, in a Nissan Micra without a CD-player, in just under 4 days. Now get yourself a world map. Look at South America. Find Patagonia. Imagine Kjolur- and Sprengisandur-type roads. Listen while you're at it to salsa-trash. You've got their trip in a nutshell. They were so wonderful, the one driving even tried to explain string theory to Arnon and I!! Ok, I didn't understand a word, so in the next town I bought the famous "The Character of Physical Law" by Richard P. Feynman (in Spanish, actually, but it was just piece of cake after the Vargas Llosa ordeal). Yes!, an idiot-proof bluff-your-way guide to physics. Or so I thought, until already on the first page the author warns his readers from being a reader like I. Bø. The book is brilliant, though, it's not Feynman's fault that abstract thinking hasn't been my cup of tea lately (i.e. not since the happy few weeks in 4. grade in MR when Yngvi Petursson taught me math).

Any other books of note? The phone book... these crazy Norwegians put a short story in last years phone catalogue! It was utter crap. But the fact that I read it maybe tells you something about the kind of boredom I'm experiencing these days....

Another day at the office. Øystein was just using the new copy-machine that I had the honour of installing last week. Take out a few screws and it was ready. Thought I. Made 20 copies of the General Conditions-form, but there was nothing on them. Invisible ink? Almost. Just forgot to open the ink box.

So, you see my life is full of exciting and interesting things these days. I could use an earthquake right now, or a meteor crashing into the fiord. Or a stray polar bear in town. Maybe I'll settle for an episode of ER.

Have been very formally indeed invited to join Svalbard Tourist Council at the general meeting on Thursday, and for lunch afterwards, not because I'm so terribly important but because I'm one of the newly authorized Svalbard guides!!!!! Here you have to apply for authorization and so we did, a few of us, and we got it. Iha! What it basically means is that you get yet another badge to decorate your scooter-dress with. Wonder if I'm the first one-handed guide to become authorized to take tourists on scooter-trips here?? Is there too much self-pity on this page? Oh, sod it!

I'm sure there was something else terribly interesting that I was meaning to tell you about.

Oh yes, of course. I've added links to my blog. And what about the new template? The other one was getting SOOO boring. Just scroll down the page, and there are the links. You can even drop me a line from now on!!!

Names, I need names from you guys. First, for a mare. Do we have any famous mare in Iceland???? Second, a mule. Are there any mules in Iceland? Did Don Quijote have a mule or a donkey? What was its name???

Spent yesterday evening watching football (!!!!! me, watching football !!!!) on TV with my workmate Håkan who had dropped in for a visit. Meanwhile, my flatmate Henrik was adoring the new ski-sail he'd gotten the same day. I guess you can call us nerds.

Welcome to the most frequently updated blog ever ;)

This time I have a very good excuse. Last Saturday I was taking a group of tourists to Kapp Linne and tok a dramatically wrong turn once, ending in an ice-covered hill where my scooter tipped over and threw me, shoulder first, on the ice. It hurt one hell of a lot!!!!! At Kapp Linne we found out that the shoulder was displaced (ur lid, er thad ekki displaced a enssgu?), so we called the doctor and before I knew it the helicopter from Longyearbyen had arrived and took me to the hospital in town. The doctor met me on the airstrip in his car, excellent service!

Jaja, never a dull moment in my life :) Hmmm, actually the next few weeks might become dull since I'm not supposed to work anything until the end of the month. The doctor advised me from driving a scooter again this season. Hmmmm, and I have a S-America-trip to pay for... this will be interesting! But of course there won't have to be a single dull moment; I have plenty of books to read and study and plenty of people to visit, and a climate-change conference that started 10 minutes ago at UNIS...