The Susanne

I long for a new camera.

Obvi­ously food pho­to­graphy is out of my reach for a while. Still wanted to illus­trate this though: in about one minute I’m off to a wine and cheese picnic in the park, this is my non-​dairy altern­at­ive: bacon-​wrapped prunes and asparagus. Yum!

My camera and I were in a ter­rible acci­dent on the tram to uni last Friday morn­ing when my water bottle became unscrewed in my hand­bag. I tried open­ing up the camera and drying it but to no avail — my baby is dead!

So now I must save for a new one. I love the new IXUS 990is (kind of my camrea’s grand­child I guess) but as it’s really quite expens­ive I’m also toying with the idea of finally get­ting a dslr. I’ve been want­ing one for years, ever since the digital cam­eras took over the world. I used to borrow mum’s slr all the time back in 2002-2003 and I loved taking photos and devel­op­ing them. But times have changed and I’m going to need a digital camera. The EOS 450D is only 2000kr more than the IXUS 990is — maybe I should just get it.

When one door closes another opens, and maybe this is my door open­ing to a dslr. I’ll have to wait a long time before I can afford a new camera any­ways, as I’m not exactly making a lot of money from my part time jobs and I have to ’save’ for rent during the two summer months when there is no stu­dent loan coming in.

But maybe, just maybe, I could use my tax refund and my hol­i­day money for a camera! I’m not get­ting much as I didn’t make much money last year or pay much income tax(obviously) but it’ll be something… and pos­sibly enough to buy the camera I want!

On another note, I finally got around to making pierogi! I found a recipe for Ruskie Pierogi and only used the instruc­tions for the dough; I wanted to try and re-​create the first pierogi I had in Kraków. They were simply called ‘Pierogi with meat’ on the menu but I’ll bet any­thing that’s down to the not too per­fect Eng­lish of who­ever trans­lated the menu. I was able to pin­point a few things whilst eating them though: they were made with very finely ground pork, onion and loads of paprika.

As I’m having some weird feel­ings about pork lately (just seem to find it kind of…disgusting!) I made mine with minced beef which I browned with a diced onion, salt, pepper, paprika and some Knorr Beef & Wine bouillon.  Then i got my immer­sion blender out and just whizzed through the whole thing, turn­ing it into a fine mass. After making the dough and assem­bling the pierogi (which was sur­pris­ingly simple!) — and boil­ing up a large pot of water, I star­ted cook­ing the pierogi and as the first four floated to the top my impa­tience grew too great and I just had to fish them out and eat! I didn’t even bother sort­ing out the onion and bacon butter that’s sup­posed to go with, or the petit pois I’d been plan­ning to have on the side. I just sat down and ate the four most amaz­ing pierogi I’ve ever had! I can hon­estly say they even beat the ones I had in Kraków(sorry, K). Yum! I packed the rest in freezer bags and put in the freezer for quick and easy din­ners later on. Not to men­tion delicious…

Here’s a photo of the pierogi cool­ing down, note that it’s taken with my camera phone. Sad.

And here are a few of the last photos I got to take with my old camera. I miss it.

You know that feel­ing when you’ve just com­pleted a big task, met a dead­line or even finally done that spring clean­ing you’ve been mean­ing to for months, and all of a sudden you have all this spare time on your hands. I don’t really under­stand where all that extra time is coming from — there are no more hours in the day and the number of lec­tures hasn’t changed and it still takes forever to boil that egg for break­fast. But still — some­thing has changed. I think it must be the need to pro­cras­tin­ate — it’s sud­denly gone. What this does to me, is I make a mental list of all the useful things I can finally get to such as catch up on my read­ing, do research for my master thesis (trying to come up with one is the hard­est part! I swear), go to the gym and get a head start on the layout for the next issue of Filo­lo­gen. Then, of course, I end up doing just a tiny little bit of each. Which is com­pletely use­less and almost as bad as wast­ing the whole day watch­ing House. (By the way, I used to think House was a cool tv series, until I dis­covered that Hugh Laurie is a comedian chum of Stephen Fry’s, at which point the whole series rose to unex­pec­ted great­ness in my estimation.)

So today I’ve read a couple of pages from about ten dif­fer­ent art­icles on lit­er­ary theory, two chapters about Nor­we­gian writes in the early-to-mid-1900s, and about thirty pages of A Proper Mar­riage by Doris Less­ing(which left me racked with guilt for wast­ing time on some­thing so frivol­ous and not useful). I’ve played around with InDes­ign for a while, and I’ve been put­ting off that trip to the gym all day telling myself I’ll go tonight or per­haps tomor­row morn­ing will be better. I am obvi­ously com­pletely use­less when it comes to man­aging my time.

At least I’ve not done any­thing ridicu­lous such as spend­ing my whole day watch­ing epis­ode after epis­ode of a silly tv series.

Also am com­pletely hooked on the song You’re The Top by Cole Porter. It makes me feel Top! but it means I must remem­ber to keep the door to my room closed so my flat­mate doesn’t have a stroke…

In my capa­city as res­id­ent assist­ant I have to come up with one social event for the stu­dents at the stu­dent vil­lage each semester. I decided to take my min­ions to the museum of sci­ence and tech­no­logy, because I used to abso­lutely love that place when I was little. Stu­dent Hous­ing paid for it all so I booked a tour as well – but as we’re not little they didn’t have any spe­cial­ised tours to offer us so we only got the ‘highlights’-tour. It was cool though: we were allowed inside an old Cara­v­elle plane from the ’60s, com­plete with the 50-year-old smell of cigar­ettes, air sick­ness bags in the seat backs and a septic tank that’s never been emp­tied because appar­ently it would respond some­what sim­il­arly to a bottle of coke that’s been shaken vig­or­ously for sev­eral minutes before open­ing. We got to see the first ever auto mobile in Norway — which is in excep­tion­ally good shape, the best in the world in fact,  due to the fact that the com­pany that impor­ted it couldn’t afford to keep it in use. We had 90 seconds to climb and crawl through a pitch black labyrinth which is used as part of the train­ing for crews to work on the oil rigs, and we learned that the reason why trams in Norway are called ‘Trikk’ is because it’s short for ‘elektrikk’. Although the first trikk was pulled by horses because the com­pany couldn’t afford the elec­tric power after going over budget buying the car­riage and laying the tracks. After the tour we walked around, saw the cli­mate exhibit Klima X, and played with the sci­ence stuff. I whispered to one of the other girls across a crowded room and froze my own shadow.

Here are a few high­lights of what I saw after the tour:

And so does a lovely dinner of Cozze alla Marinara