Hey, dear readers of my random thoughts and analysis!
This is the time of the year when you can get cynical – Christmas is not quite here yet, and if you were to achieve anything special this yea the time for that probably was sring, when everything looked brighter and lighter each day. Instead, at least here in Oslo, Norway, we have the equivanet of the amound of rain that we have during the rest of the year, and it’s cloudy most of the time – although still not resembling anywhere close to the level of bad weather that one can experience in Schuby. I said fall is nice and the colors are bright and warm? Well, yes, they are, but when you’re close to run out of money (like me), things look a whole lot different. Every drop of energy that I am loosing due to exposure of my skin to the weather turns into another post on the budget in the form of food.
Of course I have tried to move things around in the energy/food/money-equation by trying to convert some of the consumation of food into intake of pure heat – or “energy” as it’s also called. And why? Well heat is simple, and heat doesn’t cost anything for a person living in a student house. Unfortunately did it only take me a day to figure out that cranking up the heat to the maximum (in my room, the kitchen and the bathroom) as well as leaving an open oven blow air that supposedly is close to 200 centigrade right into my living space only makes me dizzy and the huger doesn’t quite disappear…
And it’s not only me. One of my friends met me yesterday at the food court at the university: “I have to confess, I’m not the considerate and reflected perosn you think I am,” he started, “I really am rather neurotic.” As he explained, he had stopped paying his electricity bill since January, and either that included his internet bill or he ddn’t pay that either. “They first turned the internet speed down, but then they turned the entire electricity of, “he was about to give me an overview og his situation, “yesterday I was sitting there which a jacket and a scarf warming myself with a candle.”
He now spends most of his time at the univeristy in order to get as warm as possible during the day. And although the bill has been paid, it will take quite a long time before they will turn electricity back on. “And they’ll take 2000 kr. for it!”, my friend is outraged, although 2000kr (roughly 125 USD) is the “slow and cheap version”, which will turn his energy back on much slower than the “expensive and fast version” for 3000kr.