dog

It´s weekend again

Hi! How are you all doing? In Oslo we´ve been having some nice weather, but today is grey and it´s been raining a little, too. March is bipolar, they say, and I have to agree with that. The problem is that I´m both lazy and capricious.  And the weather doesn´t help, either. I´ve been struggling with what looks like a spring asthenia- low energy and an exaggerated need for sleep- so I´ve done my best to take some extra walks and go hiking in the woods with my Sammy. I don´t know if it helps, yet, but at least when I´m not home, I can´t sleep. hahha! 😉

Today however, I felt like doing everything at once and decided in the end to take Sammy for a city walk to Grunnerløkka, where they “happened” to sell a Ted Baker purse at Fretex, the Salvation Army store. Needless to say it was gorgeous and a bargain, so the walk and the coffee were just a bonus.

This evening me, Vuong and some friends are going to see the Romanian movie “I´m a Communist Biddy” and then have a bite or two. I´ll let you know what I think of it. 🙂

Meanwhile, enjoy some pictures of Sam and his girlfriend, Emi, while I take my long-awaited nap.

Kisses, Alina

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I´m back!

In case you´ve missed me, I´ve been down with a terrible cold with fever and sneezing and the whole shabam. And since I had some work to do instead of  nurturing my cold it took me ages to recover. Now I´m back on track and ready to roll!;-)

Anyway. Let me tell you about the week that passed. It kind of started on Wednesday, before that I was too sick and too tired to care about anything else than work and sleep. To sum it up, it was all about eating and socializing, as I was lucky not to have too much work on my agenda.

Wednesday- lunch with my lovely friend Elif at The Nighthawk Diner, burgers and fries. Chit chatting and chilling, the perks of being a freelancer finally pay off.

Thursday- out with my friend Kristin, dinner and margaritas at Taco Republica. It´s a fairly new and trendy eatery in Oslo, where they only serve organic food in a cosmopolitan environment.

Friday I had lots of time for my beauty sleep, but also for a walk with Sammie, his girlfriend and a couple of friends. In the evening we attended a fare-well party for a Danish friend who´s both moving back to Copenhagen and getting married. Now that´s what I call a wonderful excuse for social get-together and some bubbles!

Saturday greeted us with sunshine, Vuong took Sammy to the woods while I saw The Forsyte Saga. We then met some friends for coffee, had Chinese dim-sum  at Taste of China and made some pizza for a couple of friends in the evening.

Today was for a good day for soup and reading The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. It´s a compelling book, but not really my type of writing, so I can’t wait to start a new one.

Here are some pictures.  Hope you had a good week!

xx, Alina

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Tales of spring and hope

Although it´s still February, we´ve seen the sun a couple of times, it snowed  and the snow melted again, in a few words- I´m in the mood for spring. Thought I´d share with you a couple of pictures of our apartment and our life while waiting for spring. 🙂

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Sam

My baby boy is growing with each day that passes. He has a girlfriend now- a shiba- and some human friends he´s very fond of. One of them is Kjersti, a cutie pie that studies photography. And she loves him back. Whenever she visits it´s Christmas and birthday at the same time, as we say in Norwegian. 😉 Here you have a couple of pictures!

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2013 in pictures

2013 was a good year in many ways. I established myself as an interpreter and worked hard, so hard that I needed almost a month´s break to realize how burnt out I was. I won´t repeat that mistake in 2014. Besides, I alienated many of my friends because I didn´t even have time for myself, let alone for others.

On a personal level, we´re still going strong, trying to have a baby one way or the other.  Meanwhile, we decided to get a dog and that´s how Sam the samoyed entered our lives. We got him in February and he´s been filling every day with pure bliss ever since. He´s such a good natured pup and so affectionate, I never thought you could love anybody as much as we love him! He even befriended our 9 years old cat, at least at a frenemy-level.

Family-wise,  I rejoiced in my niece´s presence when I visited my family in Romania for Easter, as well as in everybody else´s. My parents visited us in July, when Norway showed itself from its best side, it was hot and not a cloud in the sky. Christmas was spent with friends and my husband´s family.

Travel-wise, I savored Palma de Mallorca during our summer holidays, unfortunately we didn´t think of bringing the camera with us, so only Instagram can tell the tale. The fall was busy and stressful, but a short break to Berlin for a conference made it bearable. To get into Christmas mood we went to Tallinn for 3 days and it proved to be a terrific idea. Christmas break was long and lazy, I indulged myself in doing as little as possible.

2014 is the year! I´ll get my driving license, travel outside Europe and work my body in good shape again. And be kind. I´ll start with myself. Have a good one!

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At home

Tired again. I make some changes and then I end up right back on the old path- working too much, eating junk or just drinking coffee and then plunging in bed. Today was one of those days again. I was supposed to be home at 3 and take another walk in the woods with Sam and instead I wasn´t home until 8 and too tired to even speak. Don´t get me wrong, nobody´s forcing me to work this much, it´s just that in this game, you´re either in our you´re out. I kind of feel that I have to. And I love my work while I´m doing it, so it´s easy to forget how tired I feel afterwards.

Enough about that. There´s something about fall and the cold sneaking up on us again, I feel so grateful for having a home, a place of my own, a warm and cosy cave to creep into. I never feel so attached to my home and my little family as I do this time of the year. Thought I´d share some pictures of my home and loved ones with you.

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Walk in the woods

Today was a perfect fall day- sunshine, crisp air and not a gust of wind. I was home early and what better to do than take my Sammy to the woods. We Oslo people are very lucky to have nature just outside the city center, the only thing you need to do is  get on a subway and in half an hour you´ll be in the forrest.  So we went to Frogneseteren today, where we had a fabulous time bonding and breathing in fresh air. Sammy was besides himself with joy, he bathed and grazed and barked at the trees out of joy. For my part, the best of it all was the sour cream porridge and the muffin I could get in the café. And the bonus was to be able to enjoy it outside in the sun.

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Sam the samoyed

A friend of mine asked me to write an entry on Sam, the sweetest dog in the whole world, who came into our lives in February this year. I already showed you a couple of pictures with the biggest white fluff ever, but I guess he deserves a whole bunch more.

I grew up with cats at my grandma´s,  so I´ve always been a cat person. When I moved to a house with my parents in ´97 we got Jackie, a German Shepard puppy. He was adorable, he couldn´t even hold his ears straight when my dad brought him home. We were great buddies for a couple of years, but somehow he stopped liking me when I moved away. The first chance he got, I was home for a weekend, he bit me in the face. No permanent damage done, it was probably just a warning. And I still like dogs, I just have difficulties trusting big ones.

For a while- 9 years- we had two cats, but last year we had to put one of them to sleep due to kidney failure. It was awfully sad, both for us and for the other cat. Little by little, I started yearning for a puppy. We´d been talking about it for at least a couple of years, but we were always afraid we´re not sporty or disciplined enough. We agreed we should get a puppy when I´d be back from an extensive trial in Bergen and one day before the trial I was told it was off. So we started searching for puppies on the internet. We were interested in samoyed, chow chow or akita. Then we found Sam and it was love at first sight! He looked like a seal puppy, not at all like a dog, but he was the cutest thing we´d ever seen in our lives! And he´s been such a blessing. I´ve never met a more gentle being. He´s playful and sweet, friends with the cat and with everyone he meets. Introducing you to Sam the samoyed, aka Samululu!

Little Sam

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Missing everyday life

We´re on holiday in Mallorca and it´s great! You have the weather, the beach, cava, the seafood, the shopping.  But the thing with holidays is that they always make you think more about your everyday life. And somehow you miss it more than you´re supposed to. You start thinking that you should be more creative while cooking, enjoy a good breakfast more often, find the time for a hobby, this sort of things. You hear about people going on a surfing holiday, others on a cycling holiday while you, you´re just happy to be away from daily routine. That´s until it sneaks up on you and you start missing the cat, the dog, your toiletries, your plants, everything. And then it´s good there´s only three days left before going home.

Little Sam
Little Sam

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