Thursday first. I took my bike for a ride all the way back to Kalbakken to look how Merete had done with the wall we started painting last Thursday. To my surprise, the wall had changed color completely, it wasn’t even the color we used on the first coating. But it turned out that she’d decided to get another color instead. Five of her friends also came around after a while, all female, and not surprisingly topics discussed that evening included

• Color schemes for the living room.
• Pregnancy and child birth.
• Weddings.

As you can probably imagine I didn’t really have that much to contribute to the conversation until I managed to isolate one of the women from the rest of the pack and steer our conversation towards things I know a little bit about. It even turned out she was a computer consultant, so we had something to talk about and it was a good chance for me to brush up on my small talk skills. It turned out they needed a little brushing up.

On Friday I met Cathrine, who recently returned home from a three week visit to her boyfriend in Columbia - of all places. I first bumped into Cathrine in Brazil back in 2002 when we were both attending philosophy studies there. We only stayed in Brazil for three months, but during those three months I managed to develop a small crush on her and I even broke up with my girlfriend at the time partly because of that. But of course Cathrine totally freaked out when I told her about my crush on her and we didn’t see each other again until maybe two or so years later. Now we’re meeting every now and then, and even though she always strikes me as a really nice person, the crush is long gone, thank Jebus - then I don’t run the risk of messing things up once more and having to wait another 2 years before we can meet again.

The good thing is, that despite of her freaking out, we can talk about life, the universe and everything. Come to think about it, I’m capable of talking about life, the universe and everything with everyone who bothers to listen. Hell, I’m doing that right now. With you.

Today is Saturday in case you hadn’t noticed.