Back to Reality

We have been in the apartment for a little over two weeks and life is returning to normal. Our air shipment arrived on Monday so we now have 6 boxes of stuff to make the apartment feel a little more like "home". According to our relocation website our sea shipment has yet to leave Norway- which is more then fine with us.

Work is going fine for Jason and I am trying to fill my time - Target seems to be a constant draw. I do think I have OD'd on reality TV- particularly House Hunters and anything having to do with weddings. I have an unnatural draw to those shows I think. The company has scheduled us for a repatriation workshop in two weeks but I have to admit there are already things that I notice that are weird for me. Obviously none of them are so strange that I can't deal with it but I do notice them a lot. They include:

• People not wearing helmets on motorcycles or bikes (really you are going 75 mph without a helmet!)
• The lack of ability to recycle- I still find myself folding cardboard and rinsing plastic
• How in the world does the dryer dry things so quickly? I swear I put a load in the other day and it was dry in 10 minutes....
• I continue to leave the oven on- it doesn't make any noise to tell me it's on- our old oven had a loud fan
• The over abundance of plastic bags at the grocery store - I swear the bagger must be instructed to use as many bags as possible on each customer and they seem to be multiplying under my sink
• Radio edit (and TV censoring too) I am still thrown off when the words in the song are different. And I had to laugh at just how conservative the US is - last night on Survivor they were blurring the crotch area of men in full coverage underwear...really?

And now for a Dopler update. The vet ran all kinds of tests and we found out that he is healthy as a horse. Still not interested in food so we got his teeth cleaned (which went really well). And he is still being really fussy so we are now chalking it up to grief. So with our vets guidance we are letting him eat when he wants and see if he can work it out on his own.

For anyone that knew both dogs....Dopler never used to hold his ears straight up....strange

Unfamiliar Views

After spending two days in Beaumont with Jason's parents and Dopler we headed to Houston to check into the new apartment and get settled before Dopler joined us. The apartment is in the Medical Center part of town and is in a really great location - only about 20 minutes from downtown for Jason. The apartment is fully furnished and very nice but it will be an adjustment for us to go from 1900 square feet to 750 square feet. After checking out the apartment we headed down the street to one of my favorite things about the new area:

The next day we headed out to look at homes in Houston with our realtor. We were pleased to see there are some nice options in some decent areas within our price range. We also spent part of Thursday with our realtor and feel pretty good about our options if we stay in Houston. Then we did what I was excited about and dreading at the same time- the grocery store! It was as overwhelming as I expected. So many choices! I had a hard time remembering what we used to eat, plus there are so many new options and of course so many more choices then Norway! At one point I had 5 different boxes of cereal in my hand, trying to read the labels with Jason laughing at me!

On two different evenings we were able to catch up with our good friends Natalie and Gavin and Phil and Crystal (and ate some good food!). On Friday went to Rudy's BBQ which was amazing- we haven't had Texas BBQ for over 2 years. We forgot how good it was and were surprised how good potato salad was! Then Jason's parents arrived with Dopler- he was very excited and he got to ride in the elevator. We had a quiet weekend trying to give Dopler some stability since he has had a lot of change recently. But alas he is not interested in food and struggling to eat so we are off to the vet first thing this morning.

So here are my initial observations about living here again:

• My workout view has changed from the Trondheim fjord to the Astrodome (which is the 8th wonder of the world)
• There are a LOT of obese people (so much more then I remember)
• People talk to you randomly - which kind of scares me each time
• Things are really inexpensive but many things are not as cheap as I remember (like cases of soda!)
• The roads and traffic are slightly overwhelming- 5 lanes in one directions is crazy
• It is SO diverse here- standing in the US Citizen line at immigration in Newark I must have heard 6 different languages
• Many things are exactly as I remember them in Houston but it is taking awhile to remember all the details of places, food and roads. We drive along like tourists!

Ready, Set, Go....

The movers arrived wearing kilts and packed us up quickly. By noon on day two all our worldly possessions (minus 6 checked bags and 4 carry-ons) were on a truck on the way to Oslo. We originally planned to leave on Sunday but since the packing was finished early we moved the flight to Saturday. We sold the car, finished cleaning the house, said some final good-byes then had a nice dinner with our expat friends.

All packed- I would like to note that the curtains are not ours!

Our last night in Trondheim

Then Saturday morning we headed out pretty early and got on the plane. We had nice easy flights with no problems. And we avoided extra baggage fees which was pretty impressive! We were welcomed back to the US by a nice immigration agent in Newark after waiting in a ridiculously long line. Jason's parents picked us up in Houston and after about 75 minutes on the road we were truly greeted home by Dopler. He was pretty excited to see us and we were more then excited to see him. He has stuck pretty close to us - I think he was unsure what was going to happen next. Sunday morning we had homemade french toast and did some shopping. It is strange to think we aren't returning to Norway. We don't need to eat as much good food as possible or buy everything we can't get- we have lots of time....