friendship

Friends

Friends make your life worthwhile. I´ve never had tons of them, but I had a couple of close friends in school up until I moved to Bucharest to study languages, 15 years ago. Quite on the sociable side, it has always been easy to find a person to chat with over a coffee or two. A close friend however is not something you stumble upon at any street corner. It took me in fact years of either trying too hard or giving up too easily on new friendships to find the right people. For ages, I used to think that I had no close friends anymore. That they somehow belonged to a closed chapter of my life and that the new ones were more or less acquaintances. People to have a beer and mingle at parties with. Somebody to invite over for dinner from time to time.

Two years ago I worked in Bergen for 3 months, so I would only come home in the weekends. It was a strange experience, a good one in many ways. I hardly had time for my husband, my pets and my closest friends and that´s when I discovered I did have some close friends, whom I really missed while away. Little by little I gave up on friendships that mostly stole my time and my focus away from things that matter.

I´ve been a little under the weather for the last couple  of days and I had to ask my friends for practical help. It was so difficult to ask and yet they offered their help without even blinking! Today things are starting to  look up. I came home to find a card from Paris sent by my best friend friend from high school. It´s amazing how the little things in life are the ones that count the most!

It just felt right to write down a couple of lines paying homage to friendship. Because it´s so precious. And because without it, you stand alone.

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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Perfect Saturday

How are you doing? I´ve had perfect Saturday doing only things I enjoy! I went to town hand in hand with my husband, found a gift from Piet Hein for my friend Cristina, had lunch and got in touch with a guy doing research about Roma people from Romania (fate wanted that to happen since I´m a Romanian interpreter and they need one to accompany them for field trips to Stockholm and Copenhagen!), ate Mexican tapas with close friends to celebrate Cristina´s birthday and stayed up late chit chatting in bed with the birthday girl like teen agers on high school trips.

We also got around to order a new bedroom lamp from George Nelson since I decided that 2014 is the year we get our apartment in order. I already arranged a meeting with a professional to design a new wardrobe and we´re also looking for somebody to paint our walls and dig for the original floors. 😉 A few more baskets for the shoes and Sam and his crate out of the bedroom and it´ll finally turn into a romantic place you actually want to go to sleep in! Do you have that problem,too? That your bedroom is just one big mess of unfolded bedding and socks and orchids that stopped blooming ten years ago? Any advice is much appreciated! Have a lovely Sunday!

http://www.flick.com

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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