Maybe I should make this a weather journal... It became big alarm here yesterday. Only some hundreds of meters away from our house is a main road between our town and the next. It's on top of the hill, behind the fields we look over. Yesterday they had to close down that road completely. Because of the storm and the huge amounts of snow coming down, they didn't manage to clean it. Many cars got stuck, and in the end they even had to set in the Red Cross with snow scooters and caterpillars to free them.

What I saw and read yesterday is something I know from the mountain roads... Those roads can be closed for the winter; there you have something that we call 'kolonnekjøring' (a row of cars that need to drive behind a snow plough), not here! I saw it happen straight in front of my door... even cars which got stuck in front of my door... So I can only imagine how it was on top of the hill... What I saw outside is something that I have seen in movies, it felt very unreal...
The police asked us to stay inside and a spokesman talked about the fact that is was almost state of emergency. They only knew this situation from high up north (around 2000 km from here) in the mountains.

The road in front of our house has become a one track road. Even here, where we have more space to get rid of the snow, they don't manage anymore. On both sides the heaps are at many places two meters high.

I don't know if it is true, but they warn that it might become worse today. At this moment it is dry and reasonable light outside, but I understood that up north, in Oslo, and also south of us the heavy snow started again. We'll have to wait and see what happens...

Some other things that are going on here and keeps people talking:

• Today Union, our paper factory and power plant here in town will shut down it's last machine. Around 400 jobs got lost with the closure of this factory. Many of the people have found a new job, but still over 100 haven't. It's a loss for Skien. Personally I also will miss the timber that was always floating through the river.
• Seven children are lying in the hospital with kidney failure. Cause is E-coli bacteria. They think that the source is minced meat, since that was the only similarity they could find in the food that these children ate. Tests on the meat and in different slaughter houses haven't given any possible result though.
• The bird flu is found in our neighbor country Sweden. It is only a matter of time before it will show up here. The disease seems to spread quickly now allover Europe.
  What concerns me is that they have now found the disease as well with a dead cat in Germany. I already had my doubts, but now I have made up my mind: Zadi and Isis will have to stay inside the coming summer. On top it seems that on the west coast a lunatic cat killer is on the loose: hanging them. A reward is offered to catch him.
• A case called the NOKAS robbery: a brutal raid on the Norwegian Cash Service (April 2004) in Stavanger, where a police officer got killed. They link the case now to the robbery of the two paintings of Edvard Munch (the Scream, and the Madonna). The case is handled in court at the moment.
• And ehm.... did I mention the weather..?