The World in Tonevision

Superstitions, tricks and the best iPhone app ever

My default reaction, when faced with any challenge, is to read up on the topic. Always has been, regardless of the topic. Alas, when the challenge is making a baby sleep, the books are little help. It's not that they don't mention it, but at the end of the day all of them really seem to be stating the obvious: that it's not easy to make another person sleep when you want them to, and that what works for one baby might not work for the next one. Thanks for that!

Our lad is a lovely sleeper, once he drifts off properly (midnightish) he's usually no trouble as long as he's fed on demand through the night. Which I find perfectly reasonable, I never can sleep when I'm hungry either. It's just that we'd love for him to drift off at some point earlier than midnightish, so that we can have a little bit of time to ourselves to do grown-up stuff (like play games on our smartphones or have a bath or a sandwhich, that kind of thing). Besides, the last few hours he's up he can sometimes be a bit of a nuisance, probably because he's cranky and overly tired. Not quality time for anyone.

To deal with the unwelcome evening awakeness (which according to my father is a genetic thing the poor little fellow has inherited from yours truly - a comment which always for some reason is followed by a poorly disguised triumphant "serves you right" - sounding giggle) we have developed the very clever tactic of becoming really superstitious. Whenever bedtime doesn't go according to plan (which is pretty much daily, but with different degrees of severity) we try to think what we did that day and never do that again. So far we know the following isn't conductive to an early night:

• Taking him out in the buggy for too long
• Not taking him out in the buggy at all
• Letting him sleep for too long during the day
• Waking him up if he sleeps for too long
• Me eating spicy food
• Me drinking milk
• Me drinking coffee
• Me eating hazelnuts
• Me eating cream cake
• Having company over
• Having an empty house after having company over
• Trying to put him to sleep in a body rather than pajamas

So basically: everything. In the end it's becoming a bit like wearing a special Cesc Fabregas T-shirt or watching the match from a particular pub to make sure Arsenal wins at soccer. Not that anyone does that. Just an example, obviously.

And then we find a trick that works wonders, and are over the moon. Except the next day it doesn't work any more. Gee, we can't get anything past that baby. Very brainy kid. "A-ha!," he seems to be thinking, "last night I fell asleep in this Mei-Tai and woke up alone in the next room. There's a mistake I won't be making again!"

But we have one trick that has worked for three days running now - touch wood- ; this lovely little iPhone app called White Noise. Best 11 kroner spent ever, the little fellow is sleeping right now to the sound of waves crashing in the next room. How long it takes before he figures it out is anyone's guess of course. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the relative quiet and half an hour to write this. Bliss.

Oh yes: the world cup (or: see how much I care)

Big event, this nordic skiing world cup in Oslo. I guess. There was one in Trondheim in the nineties, which I didn't miss. I remember standing out in the deep snow with a flag and a classmate watching the men's relay event. Waiting, waiting, waiting, then waving the flag for about 1,8 seconds as a skier passed so quickly we could barely make out if they were on the Norwegian team or not. Freezing, waiting some more.

This time, I steered well and truly clear of the whole thing, up to and including staying out of the city centre for the duration. Wheeling around a buggy with a small (well, young) baby in it among crowds of tourists with big rucksacks with flags poking out - poised to take out an eye or two at any given moment - on the tube: Not My Thing. Not unlike skiing itself: also Not My Thing.

I caught some of it on TV though. Not on purpose mind you, but I was flipping through channels and laughing out loud at a picture looking something like this:
and commenting what great television this was, when the picture turned into something like this:

and some ten seconds later, Marit Bjørgen crossed the finish line and took yet another gold medal for Norway (or Trøndelag, if you will). Excellent timing, in less than half a minute I took in all that I would have been interested in seeing had I made a conscious effort to see something. My heart goes out to to those who tried to watch the whole thing.

Now it's over, and people like me are allowed back into the city centre. I plan to celebrate by taking baby Oscar to the cinema. And perhaps sampling the goods from the Ben and Jerry's that opened just in time for the championship.

so what do you do? You start a flickr group, of course!

orange pondscape, originally uploaded by tonbel.

Being torn between going to the movies or going straight home in order to tidy before my parents' visit tomorrow, I found myself - like so often - doing something else altogether: suddenly it seemed all-important that Flickr should have somewhere for the pond-picture-takers (like yours truly) to meet and enjoy each other's pondscapes. Hence the birth of the Pondscapes group. For now it's an elite group of one, but I am sure that if I just invite enough of the other nerdy people (no offense) out there to bring on the pondscapes, someone is going to post something one day. At the moment it looks a little silly, but there is something so Zen about the look of the surface of a pond that surely it can't just be me that's crawling around on all fours with their DSLRS looking like idiots, trying to get exactly the right amount of sky and the right amount of leaf in the frame? Surely not!

Although if it should turn out that there really isn't, that's ok as well. I found 22 pondscapes in my own photostream and posted them so it doesn't look too bare. I can easily take more. And if I get a couple of friends to join I can already start doing pondscape of the month-competitions, and display a featured pondscape on the front page. How cool am I? (Yes, I know)

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Update: the first other person added their picture. And such a nice one, too! Yay!

One person is just one person, but 2 people are a group!

Quite the evening at the movies

via www.imdb.com

Went to see 2012 in the movies this weekend, and wowie kazowie what a ride that was! I'm not saying it was a good film. But the total experience was like something out of - well -the movies, I guess.

We made the decision to go to the movies at all ten minutes before the movie was set to begin - which pans out nicely since it's a ten minute walk to the cinema and we only had to make one stop on the way that was just a few minutes out of the way, so no problem there. Meaning we were at the cinema only five minutes after official starting time which everyone knows is plenty of time to not only buy tickets and snacks but also make a short stop in the ladies' room, find your seats and catch the last few trailers. Except of course 70% of the 12-15-year-olds in Oslo apparently had about the same idea as us. As we all know, groups of teenagers never buy their tickets together even if they are seated together, seing as no one thirteenyearold will be able to afford to pay for more than the one ticket. I totally respect that. I was the same. My zen-like ability to maintain peace of mind under the most stressful of circumstances enabled me to stand in the line for the full ten minutes it took to buy the tickets while my better half stepped out of the queue and made an effort to stand still, think of something else and not kill anybody. And lo and behold, we actually made it into the screening room just in time to find another couple seated in our seats (no such thing as free seating in Norwegian movie theatres) watching the opening credits. The mistake (theirs, not mine of course) was quickly resolved -securing me the pleasure of being seated next to a teenaged girl who inexplicably wept loudly for about half an hour of the two and a half we were there - and we didn't actually miss anything.

The film itself was grandiose, that is not to say particularly good, but spectacular nonetheless and the reception of it was like nothing I have ever experienced. Every time someone did something heroic in the movie (which was very often) or something funny for that matter, someone in the middle of the audience of 750 people started clapping, and it caught on. Soon I found myself cheering for every little feeble effort at saving humanity myself. I got the impression that half the audience was seeing the movie for the second or third time, judging by the cult-like enthusiasm. As it had only been released in Norway for one day, that is probably not right though.

At the end of the movie, when the end credits started, what sounded like someone grown-up compared to the rest of the audience loudly exclaimed that "what we all need to take from this is that the only one who can save us in such a situation is Jesus. Jesus is alive!" which only made the whole thing even more... SPECIAL, is the word I'm looking for. What an outing!

Getting lost in strange places

I like to get a little bit lost sometimes.This is a shot from when I got a little bit lost in Riga last week. I was only going to the Statoil station for a coffee, then decided to make a little walk around the block of it. Turns out the blocks in Riga are a great deal bigger than the ones I'm used to. On my way around the block I saw this beautiful church, I saw two statoil stations and a narvesen kiosk - both of which gave me the oddly pleasing feeling of being a cultural imperialist that is in fact quite rare when you come from Norway, and I got heckled at in Latvian by a couple of twelve year olds -I'm guessing it was because of my big camera, but who knows really. I also found myself a new favourite ice cream and had a thrilling feeling that I actually might be really lost. All in the course of half an hour or so - not bad, huh?

The waltzing flowerpot

On my way home from work after a weekend spent cooking soup and coffee and packing lunches, I spotted this very peculiar thing: a flowerpot dancing by numbers. The footprints are easy to spot. Cheered me up!

Rulletrapp

Rulletrapp
Originally uploaded by tonbel.

De bygger om i vikakvartalet. Det skal bli veldig fint etterhvert sikkert, men inntil videre roter jeg meg bort mens jeg prøver å finne inngangen til meny. Akkja, sånn er livet.