I’ve got a major attack of reisefeber. I’ve been trying to get some organization into this trip L and I are supposed to be embarking on, you see.

Right, to put you in the picture, the events so far:

Sometime before Christmas:
L asks if I’d like to go on holiday with her this year, for a week in the summer. I, naturally, reply in the affirmative, with the provisio that we go “somwhere in the British isles” (one track mind, moi?). After a few days we decide on Ireland as the main target.

A little later:
We decide to stick to budget airlines, and figure a stop-over is a good idea what with the flight connections not being guaranteed when you fly Ryanair. One of us (can’t remember which one) starts fantasising about Flemings’ pizza, and we both agree that one night in Worthing is to be desired (we’re equally obsessed with food, one of the reasons it’s so nice going on holiday together), and that it would also be nice to see people there again and go for a pint.

March or so:
I start watching the Ryanair website to ensure we book tickets when they’re cheap. Rolf sends the calendar for this year’s sailing with Spirit of Islay and I realise they will be cruising in Scotland the week after L and I have planned to go to Ireland. I suggest to L she might have to travel back alone as I’ll want to take an extra week off and go to Scotland, she protests and says she wants to come, too.

April/May:
Norwegian announces they are starting a flight route to Stansted, just like Ryanair, but, crucially, flying out from Gardemoen rather than Torp (miles – literally – more convenient), but they don’t fly Saturdays so we’d have to alter our planned date of departure from 28 to 29 June. We decide it’s worth it, and I book tickets from Oslo to Stansted for 29 June with Norwegian and from Stansted to Shannon for 30 June with Ryanair.

17 June:
I get around to booking the B&B (The Moorings, Selden Road – it’s lovely) at Worthing for Sunday night.

23 June:
We still don’t have tickets to get back from Ireland. I finally get around to sending an e-mail to my old collegues to check whether any of them are free Sunday night. Not surprisingly I get a few negatives, however, some people are game and want to know when we’ll be arriving in Worthing. I go to check coach and train times, and realise we’ll be in Worthing at half nine at the earliest and that English pubs close at 11 on Sundays (I must have been in Norway too long when I’ve forgotten this all-important tidbit of information).

24 June:
Having slept on it and checked Ryanair again, I make an executive decision (sorry L, that’s what you get for leaving the bookings to me to go cycling in Öland) and book new tickets from Stansted to Shannon for 1 July. I send a mail off to Worthing asking if, perchance, some people might want to go for a pint Monday night instead…

While I have Ryanair’s attention (well, while I have the webpage up) I also book tickets for both of us from Dublin to Aberdeen for 6 July and from Glasgow to Oslo for L for 9 July (she has to be back for Thursday as she’s got a ridiculous number of people staying over for the Arvika festival).

You’ll notice we’re still missing:
– tickets for me to get back in time for work on 14 July
– the B&B booked for the extra night in Worthing
– any B&Bs in Ireland or Scotland
– any idea of how L is supposed to get to Glasgow in time for her flight

We’re also a bit wooly in our plans for what to do while we’re in Ireland. We want to go to Limerick and read limericks to each other. We’d quite like to see Cork. We’re definitely going to Dublin, well, we’re flying out from Dublin anyway but I want to see the library at Trinity and there’s an old friend of my family living there so it’d be fun to see him (I saw him last at my Christening or something like that). While in Dublin we’re going to visit Guiness.

L: We’re visiting Guiness, are’t we, despite the fact that none of us drink Guiness?
Me: Obviously. You can’t go to Dublin and not see the Guiness factory.
L: No, of course. I think there’s a law, actually, that prevents you leaving the city unless you can prove you’ve been.
Me: There probably is, and if there isn’t, there ought to be.

We also have lots of plans for just generally having a good time, and this is bound to involve a few pubs, a second-hand bookshop or two (or twenty) and some good hearty breakfasts at various B&Bs. We’ve travelled somewhat like this before, though that was in Wales, but we ended up having an absolutely lovely time, so we’re banking on it working just as well in Ireland.

Anyone with tips for things we really shouldn’t miss in Ireland, please make yourselves heard.

So, anyway, now I have a massive attack of reisefeber and the butterflies in my stomach are going wild. It really is unreasonable to expect anyone to work the last week before their holidays, how on earth is one supposed to concentrate? Come to think of it, one ought to be excempt from work the first week after the holidays, too, as one always needs at least a week to recover from all the realaxation.

Voice in my head: whatsisface – Moon River

This or that?

1. Surf sites at random, or have a set list of regular reads?
Both, I have a (fairly short) list of regular reads and in addition I normally spend some time each week popping in to random sites – sometimes I find something worth returning to, but most of the time it’s just for the variety of the thing.

2. Do you visit mostly blogs, or news or other sites?
All three – I visit a couple of blogs almost every day, I try to check at least one online newspaper every day and in addition I use the net for information gathering of all sorts (when’s the first bus to …, where was that restaurant again, which year was Yeats born and so on).

3. Do you go online every day, or just a couple of days a week?
Pretty much every day, unless I’m somewhere with little access to computers.

4. Do you allow comments on your blog, or not?
Of course I allow comments! I love comments! If you want to make me happy, leave me comments!

5. Do you shop online at all, or at regular stores?
I do a little shopping online, but only when I know specifically what I want or when it’s not available locally. I like going in to shops and actually handling things before I buy them.

6. Have you ever done online bill-paying/banking, or not?
I pay all my bills online now – why would I do anything else?

7. Which news site do you prefer… MSNBC.com or CNN.com? Or do you prefer some other one?
None of the above, certainly. I tend to use Nettavisen and other Norwegian papers, and occasionally the BBC.

8. Live chat rooms, or message boards?
Neither much, but I’m at least registered at a few message boards.

9. Instant messaging or e-mail?
I prefer e-mail, partly because I have a slow and cost-per-minute connection at home and that’s where I try to do most of my private messaging/e-mail.

10. Yes or no: have you ever met, or at least talked on the phone with, another blogger? If not, would you want to? Why or why not?
There are a few I’d like to meet, yes. I’ve met at least one, but that was before I had begun blogging myself – we had met via the internet, though.

A beautiful entry at Wanderlost, all about reading which is what makes it beautiful. Those bookshelves sound perfectly normal to me, but then I’m probably not the right person to ask. He has a new word for us, too: Bibliovoyeurism – wanting to know what everyone else is reading. I too crane my neck to catch the title and author of the paperbacks in my fellow travellers’ hands. How could you not wonder?

What with the questions being short this week and the answers potentially interesting, I will do today’s Monday Mission despite having almost decided to drop it off my meme list…

1.What is the difference between spirituality and religion?
Spirituality is having an awareness that there is another sort of reality which reaches beyond the physical reality of science. Religion is a formulated set of beliefs about that reality. You can have spirituality without religion, but religion without spirituality would be like the shop-fronts in old westerns, two-dimensional and fake.

2. What is the difference between someone listening to what you say and hearing what you say?
I’d say “listening” means actually taking something in and trying to understand it and react to it, whereas “hearing” simply implies that the ear picks the sound up and sends the signals to your brain, leaving your brain free to ignore them or deal with them depending on its (or your) whim. I know people who’d put those definitions the other way around, though.

3. What’s the difference between a Father, and a Daddy?
Well, I call my father the equivalent of “daddy” in Norwegian (“Pappa”), and “father” sounds a lot more formal to me when I say it. It depends on the person who says it, though, I know people who’ve been used to saying “father” all their lives and it does not sound formal in their mouths. So I don’t really think there is a difference.

4. What’s the difference between being married and living together?
Marriage is a whole different sort of commitment in my eyes, and living together just seems so much more casual. I do, however, recognise that some people are unable to subscribe to the various societal forms of marriage and “just” live together but feel as deep a commitment to their relationship as a marriage would entail to me.

5. What’s the difference between growing up and growing old?
Growing up is about taking responsibility for your own actions. Growing old is one of two things: A. losing your childishness and growing stale in your thoughts or B. the physical fact of wrinkles, hairloss, bad hearing, achy joints and shaky legs.

6. What’s the difference between getting what you want and getting what you need?
Big. Obviously. What you need might not be what you want at all.

7. What’s the difference between punishment and discipline?
Real discipline should be able to exisist without punishment, it’s got to do with respect and responsibility. Punishment should act as a reminder that discipline has been broken, not as the only incentive to keep it.

Voice in my head: Fleetwood Mac – I wanna be with you everywhere (which is not the answer to the bonus question, but does include the line “Can you hear me calling out your name?”)

I was attempting something clever with my mail filters this weekend which didn’t quite work as expected. When I logged on to webmail this morning the “clever” thing automatically deleted (and I mean deleted, not “put in trash folder”) all mail.

(And I get paid for getting computers to work? Honestly.)

So if you sent me mail between 5pm CET yesterday and now, could you please resend it?

Voices in my head: Ronan Keating and Lulu – We’ve got tonight (they were playing it downstairs in the coffee shop, I’m starting to regret stopping off for coffee)

My top 20 referral words still include “Mysteriet” and “deg”. Which means Bjørn Eidsvåg and Lisa Nilsson are responsible for a lot of my random traffic. Which is nice of them.

(Incidentally, if you find this entry looking for the lyrics to Mysteriet deg, they’re here.)

A late and hairy Friday Five this morning:

1. Is your hair naturally curly, wavy, or straight? Long or short?
Straight as nails. It’s about chin-length at the moment, and has been for a few years now (it’s only longer occasionally when I haven’t gotten round to cutting it for a while).

2. How has your hair changed over your lifetime?
Well, it’s been almost waist-length (that was a pain) and a few centimetres short, and it’s been a lot of interesting colours (purple, for example, and pitch black – not a great success) – you could say I’ve experimented a bit.

3. How do your normally wear your hair?
The only way it’s really possible to wear it is hanging straight. Whenever I try something else it’s usually hanging straight again after an hour or two, so I normally can’t be bothered.

4. If you could change your hair this minute, what would it look like?
If I had the colouring to go with it I’d quite like long, slightly curly hair of that distinctly Irish darkish red sort of colour, but as it is I’ll keep my own, thanks.

5. Ever had a hair disaster? What happened?
Weeeel. I once used a dark red (“do not on lighter shades”) wash-in-wash-out satchet to colour my hair pink for the evening. Unfortunately, the wash-in-wash-out didn’t. Wash out, I mean. So my hair was still quite shockingly pink on Monday morning when I showed up for work. That was interesting.

Voice in my head: Erik Bye – Skomværsvalsen