This Friday I thought to myself: “Finally, a weekend with no basketball game, no duties from anyone. I’m just going to relax, play some Super Mario Galaxy on my Wii, and basically just staying indoors taking it easy. You think that turned out the way it was supposed to? Never does. Shortly after I’d been thinking about this, I get a message from ace on jabber. “What are you plans for the weekend?”. Of course, I reply none, I’m just going to relax. “Sorry”, he replied. I ask what’s going on. He says he has to go to his grandparent’s cabin this weekend, to remove the snow from the roof. Apparently, there is about 2 meters of snow. I understand where this is going. He wants me with him. Of course he does, who’d want to go do something like that alone. I think about it for a second, and I’m hit with a sudden urge to go to the mountains. Can’t be that bad, I say to myself. Maybe we could even get some time to go snowboarding on Sunday. I tell him it’s ok, I’ll come, and that I would like to go snowboarding when we’re done. He tells me it would probably take about 4-5 hours to remove the snow, so no problem about the snowboarding. I take his word for it, after all, we have no winter cabin in my family, so I’ve never been doing any snow removing from a roof in the mountains. We decide to try and leave early on Saturday, so we’ll have time to finish before sundown, which up here in Norway is about 5PM in January. Maybe you see where this is going? It’s now Sunday, and I’m not snowboarding. I’m sitting inside the cabin, pretty wet, my clothes drying near the fireplace. We’re still not done, and ace is up on the roof finishing the last of it now. Then we only have the outhouse left… What happened is that we didn’t get to leave as early as we wanted on Saturday. We got up at 7.30AM, but we spent way too much time getting our gear together and into the car, even though we had prepared a lot on Friday. We finally left at 10AM. It takes us about 3 hours to drive here, then another hour to get our stuff from the car and ski up to the cabin. You do the math. We finally start digging at around 2PM. That leaves 2-3 hours of sunlight. At 5PM, we get out our headlights, and keep going until we give up at 7PM, go inside to make some dinner, and go to bed. Exhausted. We’re over halfway there, but there’s still a long way to go, and the snowboards won’t be able to come out of the car before we’re home, and have to take them back inside. We slept for about 11 hours tonight, and now, I’m only hoping we’ll be able to leave the cabin before dark. It’s no fun to ski in the dark with a headlight as the only source of light. Especially when you’re as bad a skier as me.
Now you’re probably thinking that I hate this. That’s not entirely true. It’s actually kind of fun, the problem is that things never go as planned. Everything takes longer than one thinks (you know, multiply estimate by pi). But we’ve taken lots of photos, and I’ve learned some valuable things about shoveling snow. Besides, it is kind of relaxing to be up here in the mountains. The air is great, and not polluted. It’s quiet. And my laptop has limited battery capacity, so I can’t use it too much 
But I’m glad I bought a usb modem for internet access via 3G this summer. Comes in handy when I feel like blogging about my frustrations up here 
Well, I better get back into my hopefully slightly less wet clothes and out there again, so we can get done and go home. At least I’ll have a good story to tell my coworkers when I get back to work tomorrow, and the obvious question pops up. “Done something fun this weekend?”