A few things have changed around here...

So. Several news items to report.

By far the most important - I finally beat my Venezuelan friend at squash! Now, he had a head start on me (had played for a year or two, while I was a rank beginner), but you really would think that I should have beaten him by now. We've been playing for at least three months, and I hadn't beaten him until tonight. I'm normally not that competitive, but having a guy that works with you (in fact, I supervise his work, often) beat you three or four games per night, twice a week gets to even me, eventually. So, tonight, celebration! (While remembering that he still beat me 3 games out of 4, even tonight).

We have now officially passed the average-coldest day of the year (January 25th, here in our area). It was 4 degrees and raining. Hardly difficult to take. While we certainly won't get away without a few more cold snaps, winter here really has been quite manageable, weather-wise. People here seem surprised when I tell them that I'm really happy with how warm and dry it is. Then I explain that the last place I lived was St. John's, Newfoundland.

We have been skiing twice since our return, and will go again this weekend. In fact, there hasn't been as much snow as many of the mountains here would like, but the cabin we'll be at this weekend has both a sauna and a hot tub, so we expect that we'll be able to last out the snow shortage quite handily, should it happen to continue.

The CEO of the Ulstein Group, Gunvor Ulstein, had a baby early in January. This is big news in a town where she's the largest employer (and overwhelmingly the largest employer of local people.) For whatever reason, this got me to thinking about baby names (she named the new girl "Tora" - I'm guessing that her brother's name, Tore, and her partner's, Torunn, had something to do with it). In Norway, because you have to register with the government whenever you move anywhere, and thus the government basically has a constantly-running census, all the time, with basic information on every citizen (where they live, what their name is, when they were born), there are all sorts of neat bits and pieces available on the internet.

For example, the Central Statistics Office, via this link: http://www.ssb.no/navn/, allows you to find out all sorts of interesting things, like the fact that there are 37 Ashleys in Norway, though only 12 are men. There 48 Kathryns in Norway, though none are men.

The most popular baby names last year were Lucas (or Lukas) for boys, and Linnea for girls. The second is a Swedish name that has something to do with Lime flowers ("Lind" in Swedish). What's probably more interesting is that, in Oslo, the most common name for boys was "Mohammad", with 2.3% of all boys born in Oslo called that.

Relevant to that kind of discussion is the fact that "Mohammad" didn't even make it onto the top 20 list of baby names anywhere else in the country (stats are available for every fylke, so that's 23 different lists). This division between Oslo and "everywhere else" is reinforced by the fact that Oslo had a net international migration of over 8,000 people in the first 9 months of this year, while it had a net internal migration of 18. That's not a typo - it's the largest city in the country, but people from here don't want to go there. Or at least, almost as many want to get out!

I really hope, for the social health of the country, that perhaps what is happening is this: Immigrants "get off the boat" in Oslo but, within a few years, many move on to other places in Norway. However, I fear that that's not the case. As a result, I think that there is a starker and starker division building between "Norway" and "Oslo". As someone who's grown up in Canada, and seen the real benefit that immigration can have to a country, I worry a bit - I feel like Norway's not getting as lucky as Canada was. Sure, in Canada, the majority of immigrants go to our large cities. Still, there are very significant immigrant communities in every major city in Canada, not just one. This is part of why it works, I think. Almost everyone, on both sides of the immigration storyline (and, of course, over time, every immigrant eventually moves to the other side!) ends up interacting with those on the other side.

Well, anyway, that's enough of a political, or at least demographic, discussion for this evening.

I will leave you with a link - www.ulsteinlab.com This is where my company puts up its "cool stuff", the primary among these being the videos patched together when a ship is built, showing the engineers hard at work, the empty hull being floated in, the various pieces being welded, painted, etc., cable being pulled, and eventually the finished product.

Well, that, and you can download a ringtone based on the music that features in one of the videos. But I'm not sure anyone's actually done that for real, though we considered doing it to the guy down the hall's phone when the site first went live.

Oh, geez, and I almost forgot! There's been more bar ownership drama! First, our favourite place went bankrupt (clearly, we're not hard enough drinkers, I guess!), but now it is being resurrected by a trio of owners, two of whom are folks we know. They say that it will be a real pub, which Ulsteinvik lacks at the moment. Here's hoping they're successful!

Cheers,

Ashley