: Time flies.

It's been a bit over a year now since I restarted this blog. It's also been a month since my last update, which means it's already been a month since my birthday. Time flies. During this month I've been mostly playing some new games (Torchlight II and Borderlands 2, as well as quite a bit of FTL), which is the main reason why there hasn't been an update here. Another reason is that I haven't really had anything to write that isn't the same whiny stuff that I've been writing about lately. I've written several posts this month, but I just haven't published any of them. I've just deleted them all, partially because I couldn't put what I wanted to say into words, and partially because I didn't want to be so whiny.

It's been a good month, though, over all. Had my friend Rune basically living at my place for three weeks as we played TLII and BL2 until we dropped (almost literally some days), which was really fun. I didn't really exercise at all during these weeks, and I ate a lot of snacks and stuff, but somehow my weight still went down. Not quite sure why, but I guess it's a combination of increased metabolism and better choices when it comes to the actual food I've been eating. Not to mention that I've started having a lot of smoothies after I got a blender as a birthday present from my grandparents. They say it's supposed to be healthy, so I guess it is. 

I'm back on track with all that stuff now, though, have been exercising a bit again the past week (although it's a bit hard getting back into it after three weeks), and have once again cut out all forms of snacks and stuff like that. Weirdly, my weight seems to have gone slightly up again the past few days, but I guess that's bound to happen some times. It'll go back down again in time.

Other than that... There's really not much to talk about right now. There's nothing new or exciting that has been going on, unfortunately. Nothing that has led anywhere other than to disappointment, anyway. Things are still at a standstill with Lisa, unfortunately, although I do now understand better why. And my attempts at moving on has been fruitless. That's really all there is to say about that.

Hopefully it won't be another month until my next update, and hopefully I'll have something good to write about the next time I write. 

: Ups and downs. UPDATED

Yesterday I felt awesome. I felt a lot better than I had felt in a long time. I don't know why, but it doesn't really matter. I started a new tumblog(?) for my health, although I'm not quite sure exactly what to put up there yet, other than progress pictures of myself as I (hopefully) lose more and more weight. I might post my exercises there too, but for some reason I can't post directly from Fitocracy to a secondary blog, it automatically posts to my primary blog. I don't know if that's a problem with Fitocracy or Tumblr, but it's annoying. On the other hand, the default Fitocracy tumblr-posts are awful, so it might be better to post on my health-blog manually. Anyway...

The first post on my new health-blog on Tumblr.

I also had some fun in the kitchen yesterday. I made the most home-made pizza I've made in years. I still used a pre-made crust, the type that you just roll out and then put stuff on it, but I didn't take any more shortcuts. Previously I have bought those pizza topping mixes, that you mix with the meat and some water and then "yay, finished". I used actual fresh vegetables, namely bell pepper, onion, mushrooms (yes, fresh, not the canned kind) and tomatoes. And I used chicken instead of pork or beef. The result was pretty delicious, although not perfect. I made some notes about how to hopefully make it better next time, though. Now if only I could find a more whole-grain crust...

The result of my kitchen fun. =)

Today I, unfortunately, feel rather crappy. Most likely due to waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to sleep again for over an hour. This has been happening more and more lately, and it's very annoying. It might be because I lost my focus a bit for about a week and a half, and pretty much "fell off the wagon" when it came to both exercise and eating habits. I've gotten back on track now, so I hope it'll get better again soon. But due to my lack of sleep last night, my workout today felt a lot heavier than it should have.

It's a shame the actual effect of my sleeping meds isn't that long. It pretty much just causes me to fall asleep, and then I'm on my own, so to speak. If I do wake up in the middle of the night, the whole thing is essentially cancelled. I mean, I do get the benefit of the rest I've gotten up to that point, but it's hard to fall back asleep, and even when I do it's not as restful as it was before I woke up. Weirdly, though, this doesn't seem to happen if I just have to get up to pee. I guess maybe because I'm sort of still halfway asleep or something? 

Either way. I'll most likely be heading to bed relatively early today, and hopefully I'll get a good nights sleep tonight. If I do, I'm gonna try to reach at least 25mins, hopefully 30, on one of the sessions on the elliptical tomorrow. I've been as high as 35mins, but I honestly don't know what was going on that day. I must've had some sort of amazing energy burst, 'cause the 35min session was the last of three, the first two being 30min and 10min. I want more days like that... 

Update:
I decided to go for a walk tonight. I was about to ready to just zone out with a movie or something until bedtime, just had to take out the trash... Then I got outside, and the cold fresh air was just... Heaven, really. So I decided that I should go for a short walk, despite the rain. By the time I actually got to walking the rain had stopped, and the air felt a bit less fresh, but I went anyway. And I went much farther than I had planned. And I probably could've gone even further if I hadn't forgotten my water bottle. Probably should've done this in the first place, and just skipped the elliptical today. Oh well, now I've done a little bit of both. And I feel a lot better.

: That's life.

I usually try to avoid writing more than one blog post (on the same blog) in a single day, as I don't want to "overexpose" my blog. Usually this is not a problem, as I usually write three to five posts spread over a month, but right now my brain is working overtime, causing me to lose sleep again, and I just have to write it down. I'll probably wait until tomorrow morning to actually submit it, though.

Diabetes

Days like today (technically yesterday), while very nice for my overall life, is not very good for my diabetes. I spent a lot of time out of the house today, walking around, talking with relatives and stuff like that. Basically being my somewhat crippled form of social. But as a result, my rather strict eating-routines have been severely disturbed today. Last time I went to the "diet-adviser", that I go to about once a month due to my diabetes followup program, she told me that I had developed a nice rhythm in my eating habits, but also that I still ate a bit too much every time I ate. So she gave me some new advice, which was basically; Eat even less every time I eat, but also eat more often for a while. The goal, she said, was to make my stomach used to smaller amounts of food at a time, and eventually get back to the old rhythm with the smaller portions. I guess it sounds more complicated than it is.

The problem with this is that it makes my life very... Strict. While it's usually advised that people eat every three-four hours, I now have to eat every two-three hours. And when going out or visiting someone, that's quite a hassle. Today, when I was down in Dokka with my grandmother and some other relatives, I started getting hypoglycemic (low blood sugar, resulting in shaking, feeling ill) because I hadn't eaten in such a long time (which really wasn't more than about four hours, but considering the small amount I ate...), and I ended up buying an ice cream to at least get some sugar in me. And then I was invited to dinner at my grandparents', which is nice, but they were so vague about when that I again went almost four hours between meals, and again almost got hypoglycemic.

I need to make some sort of system for when I get in situations like that.

Exercise

So, April haven't been a good month for walks. Either the weather's been awful or I've been sick. Or it's been easter. So yeah, I haven't really been able to follow up on all those long walks I had in the end of March. But I'm starting to get into a nice habit of other types of exercise, that aren't weather- or health-dependent; I've started using the ancient exercise bike that I got from my grandparents, and I've started doing push-ups. The exercise bike isn't the best thing around. The speedometer/timer-panel has broken off, so I had to tape it back on, and the gear-thing is really weird, so it's really difficult getting it to a resistance that feels ok. But it's good exercise, I'm completely exhausted after 5+10+10 minutes on it. The push-ups aren't something I thought I'd be able to do, but after trying it only from the knees up, instead of full ones, I figured it's better than nothing. I can do about 3x8 of those right now, up from 3x5 when I first started.

Weird things.

I've also gotten these weird things, which I don't know if actually helps in any way. I do feel it in both my hands and arms if I use them for a while, so I guess there it at least some benefit to it. Or something.

Love-life

I don't want to talk too much about this yet, but I have met someone that I really like. Or, I haven't actually met her yet, but I'm hoping that it won't be too long until I can meet her. But I've been talking to her on and off for quite a while, and even more the last few days, and... Yeah. She seems great. I'm looking forward to finding out where this goes. Hopefully it actually goes somewhere. =)

I am a bit concerned about the age-difference, though. She's almost ten years younger than me; She turns 18 in a couple of weeks, I turn 28 in September. But... Yeah. I don't know. Hopefully, I'm worrying about nothing.

Apartment

It's getting there!

I'm still working on getting my apartment ready for LAN's again. Now you might think that it couldn't really be that much work, that it couldn't possibly actually take this much time... And you're right, it really shouldn't. I've been working on it for about two and a half months in total now (or maybe closer to just two), so I really should be done with it by now, several times over even. But it's not as simple as that. First of all; My apartment was in a very, very, very poor state when I started working on it. I had tons of junk that I had to throw away, as it was useful for nothing except wasting space. And I still have stuff that I need to throw away, only I can't without paying for it. And I don't have the money to pay for getting rid of trash. 

Second; I'm not a fast worker when it comes to stuff like cleaning. It's not that I'm bad at it (although I'm not exactly good at it either), it just takes me a long time. And due to my general physical condition (which has been getting better due to exercising), I can't do it for very long at a time. I have to take frequent breaks, which often gets me derailed, and I end up only half-finishing something. 

Combining the poor starting state of my apartment and the fact that it takes me a long time to get things done means that, while there is overall progress, the things that I've finished must be redone several times, which means that the closer I get to finishing, the longer it takes to progress further. It's frustrating. But fortunately, there's a light in the end of the tunnel. I've gotten support from Nav to get my apartment professionally cleaned, once. To get me back to a starting point, meaning I can focus on maintenance rather than restoration. This is a one time deal, and I only get this help now because I never got anything like it back when my sleep disorder was an actual problem. Back then I was so out of it I didn't even notice how bad it was.

I do now, though, and this is the one big thing that's keeping me down at the moment, to the point that it's, indirectly, one of the main reasons why the relationship between Wenche and I broke. And... Yeah. I just want to get things to a point where I can feel good about having visitors. I mean, I don't really feel too bad about it anymore, but there's still a lot of improvements that need to be done. And until they're done I really don't want to have any LAN's.

Almost ready for LAN, but not quite.

The only problem now is that I have no idea when I'll get this professional help...

Well, that was a little bit about everything that's been going on in my life recently. I've probably forgotten something, but I think this is more than enough for one update. =P

: Netherlands, February 2-6, 2012

My mom, her boyfriend Hans, and me, went to the Netherlands for a few days.

Thursday, February 2nd

There isn't too much to say about Thursday, really. We arrived at Schiphol sometime around 21:30, I think, got our stuff, and met up with Aldert, one of mom's cousins. He had to go get the car and told us to wait inside, and that he'd come back inside to get us when he was at the pick-up point, or whatever it's called. Instead, we went outside, walked over to where he might park, and waited. Which in itself wasn't such a bad idea, as he did show up there. But... Damn, it was cold. Or, the actual temperature wasn't so bad, but the wind was just... Freezing.

Well, anyway. Aldert showed up with the car, we drove to Alkmaar, and he dropped us off at his brother, Ronald's, place. It was already rather late, but we still stayed up a bit, talking to Ronald and Yvonne, and their son Myron. Aldert also stayed for a bit. 

We eventually went to bed. All three of us had to share a room, me in a single bed, mom and Hans in a huge blow-up bed. I have to admit, when I first heard that we had to share a room, I wasn't too happy about it. But, it was all right.

Friday, February 3rd

When we arrived on Thursday, it was cold, but no snow anywhere. At least not that I could see. When I woke up on Friday it was snowing heavily. More than what they're used to in the Netherlands, according to everyone I've talked to. Compared to what we get in Norway, it wasn't much, but this wasn't Norway.

Ronald had planned a walk in the dunes today. I wasn't looking too much forward to that, as we had gone for a walk in the dunes when we were there in September as well, and walking in the sand was a bit too much for me. But because of the snow, the walk was pretty nice this time. We also walked in a completely different part of the dunes, so it's hard to say what it would've been like with no snow, but still. I wasn't half dead when we were finished.

Snow-covered sand-dunes.

When we finished our walk, we went to a small restaurant nearby to eat some pea soup. It was good.

Pea-soup; Very good. Whatever that meat is; Not so good

Didn't do much for the rest of that day. I went up to bed shortly after we returned, as I was extremely tired, for some reason. I hadn't really planned to either, I was just going up to our room to check something on my laptop, and just sort of fell halfway asleep. Mom wasn't too happy about that, tried making a big deal of it, saying it was impolite not to come back down and tell everyone that I was going to bed for a bit. Maybe it was, but... Eh.

Came back down to dinner. Had some kind of traditional Dutch meal called hutspot. It's not that different from what we in Norway know as lapskaus, to be honest. Either way, it was very good. After dinner Myron, Hans and I went to the store to buy some stroopwafel-icecream for dessert. Stroopwafels are delicious, icecream is delicious, and stroopwafel-icecream... Is double-delicious!

I went back to bed not too long after that. Was still dead tired, even though I had a Monster. Made sure I told everyone this time. =P

Saturday, February 4th

Was woken up very early by an SMS from Chess, saying I had used 80% of my monthly quota of data-traffic when outside Norway. When we landed, I got an SMS saying that I could use no more than 80NOK a day, which was equal to 50MB, and that I'd get an SMS when that quota was used. As far as I had calculated, I was nowhere near that amount, and particularly not that early in the morning.

So I started checking things out, and it turns out the SMS I got when we landed wasn't even from Chess. Why the hell I got that SMS I have no idea. The actual price was 19NOK per MB, with a monthly limit of just under 500NOK, which is way too expensive. If I had known that was the actual price, I wouldn't have used my mobile net. Oh well. At least I didn't use it anymore after that.

Spent Saturday with Aldert, mostly at his place, but also went out to buy some typical dutch food to bring home, like stroopwafels and hagelslag. Unfortunately, we didn't plan ahead, and forgot to take out enough money before we went to the store. For some reason, Dutch stores doesn't take VISA. Who knows why, but it's damn inconvenient. Fortunately, Aldert's wife, Josée, came to the rescue and paid for us.

After we were finished in the store, we went to eat some herring. Apparently also typical Dutch? I don't know, tasted very similar to Norwegian herring, except for the pickles on the side. Either way, it's not something I'd pay to eat. Wasn't bad, but just... Not my thing.

Later we ate dinner at Aldert's. Something called nasi, which was basically some sort of rice and chicken thing with peanut putter sauce. I remember being very skeptical to the peanut butter sauce when we visited back in September, but it's actually very good. Weird, but very good.

Mom and Aldert, at Aldert's place.

After dinner we went back to Ronald's place for his birthday party. I have to say, Dutch customs for birthdays (and other similar occasions) is a bit weird to a Norwegian. Basically, everyone congratulate each other. Whenever someone new arrived at the party, they went around shaking everyone's hand (and did the kisses-on-the-cheeks thing), and congratulated them. Here in Norway, we really just congratulate the one actually having the birthday. The only time where people congratulate everyone, is when someone has been born, I think? Only thing I can think of.

I once again went to bed rather early. No wonder, as I was woken up so early by that damn SMS. 

Sunday, February 5th 

Got to sleep in a bit on Sunday. After breakfast, we didn't really do much other than sit around and talk, and get ready for Aldert and Josée's 25-year anniversary party.

At about 4pm, I think, we went into Alkmaar and arrived at the party. It was quite nice, despite the fact that I couldn't really understand much. Fortunately, Myron and Imara, Aldert's oldest daughter, sat down and spoke English with me for a while. It was rather nice. The only problem was that it was slightly cramped where we were, which made the noise-level a bit much for me. It's not that I can't handle the volume, it's just that with that much talking going on around me, I'm almost unable to focus on what the person I'm talking to is saying. Even if everyone else is speaking a language I can't really understand yet.

After a while we went into the dining room and sat down for dinner. I sat at the end of the table.

Left to right: Hans, Mom, Hans (oldest brother of moms cousins), Yvonne (Hans' wife).

Right to left: Ronald, Yvonne, Imara, Mirgina (the daughter of the oldest sister of moms cousins), Wesley (Hans' son), and Michelle (Wesley's girlfriend).

These are the best pictures I got of the people at the table. =P

In front of us, as we sat down, were a menu, with three appetizers and three main courses. I went with tomato soup for appetizer and chicken sate for the main course. The tomato soup was really good and spicy, probably the best tomato soup I've had. The chicken sate was also very good, although I think we ate almost the same thing at Aldert's place when we visited in September. It was basically chicken-pieces on sticks, with a "vinegar-marinated" salad and peanut butter sauce. Sounds weird, but it was really delicious.

I went more or less straight to bed after we got back from the party. Or rather, I went straight up to our room and changed back to regular clothes, and stayed there, in the silence, until I went to sleep. My head, and my ears, were really tired from all the background noise at the party. 

Monday, February 6th 

Once again got to sleep in for a while. Then had to pack after breakfast. Left Ronald's place at around 3pm, I think? Ronald drove us to Abcoude, to moms brother, Lex. He had invited us to dinner before we went back home. 

Ronald on the left, Lex on the right.

Had something called boerenkool-stamppot, which is some sort of fancy version of sausages and mashed potatoes. The mash consisted of potatoes, boerenkool and bacon, and was very nice. The sausage was delicious, very different from what we're used to here in Norway.

Also got to say hello to Saskai, Lex' wife, and their children, my cousins, Daan, Floor and Jeroen, before we had to leave for the airport. The oldest child, Charlotte, is on some kind of trip around the world or something? I think she's in Australia atm.

Got very disappointed when we got to the airport. Checking in and going through security went rather fast, despite the guy in front of us who had lost his luggage or something like that. But when we got past security, we ended up in some kind of really small area with no real stores, just a tiny tax-free kiosk consisting of just a couple of shelves, and some sort of cafe. Not the same place we were at in June and September. Huge disappointment, as I had planned to buy a couple of things there. Oh well. 

Future plans 

Mom and I have been talking about sending me to my great aunt's place for three-four weeks, hopefully later this year, so she can teach me the Dutch language properly. She lives alone in a place called Exloo, and she used to teach immigrants Dutch, so it will hopefully be a lot more effective than any of the trips down there so far.

We haven't talked to her about it yet, though. I'm first gonna speak with Nav and such, see if they have any objections to it, for any reason. I don't want to risk losing my money by going to the Netherlands for so long. I don't think it will be a big problem, though, as long as I keep working on my health while I'm there. But we'll see.


I'm pretty sure I have forgotten to mention quite a lot. But I forgot to write stuff down every day, as I had planned to, so... Yeah. =P

Also; Yay, a post with pictures. =P