July 31 - August 3, I volunteered at the Oslo Science Fiction Festival, mostly as a "door woman", but also performing other miscellaneous tasks.

It all started last summer, when I read a newspaper article about the festival in the national newspaper Aftenposten. At the time, I thought, "That might be fun!", but didn’t think about it much before I came over it again a few months ago.

The festival is a merger between Norcon and ShadowCon, two former annual Norwegian sci-fi conventions, and has been in its current form for the past two years.

After I showed my interest for volunteering at the festival, I participated at one initial meeting, where I got to know the (faces of the) people running the show. I wasn’t able to participate at the second meeting, however, because I was in the south of Norway at the time.

When I showed up at the festival last Thursday, I expected to be only working at the festival, and not participating in any of the events. My boss, however, encouraged me to find thing of interest, and we would work my shifts around these. And so, I was able, amongst other things, to watch some segments with the Scottish author Iain (M.) Banks, one of the guests of honor, including a book signing, where I got one "mainstream" (his word, not mine) fiction novel dedicated to myself, and one sci-fi novel to my dad.

The volunteers compensation was one "credit" per hour, which could be used for buying food in the cafeteria, a festival t-shirt and a reusable water bottle.  We also had access to the "Ranger room", where we could relax between shifts, and make sandwiches if we were hungry. Those of us working late afternoons and evenings, were given dinners made by the "volunteer uncle" (a guy whose responsibility was the wellbeing of the volunteers).

At the festival’s closing ceremony, there’s a lottery, where the winners can choose amongst a certain number of prizes. Those who win first get the best ones, etc... Personally, I found nothing of interest amongst the prizes, so I didn’t buy any tickets, but some went a bit overboard, and bought entire lottery books... And of course, they won lots of things...

All in all, a good experience, despite the random train schedule, an the fact that the national train company NSB chose this period to start working on the rails going north from Oslo...

My (our) summer plans are falling into place.

Sylvain and I are spending ten days in France after I finish my exam in June. First, we are going to spend about a week with some of Sylvain’s aunt and uncle and grandmother in and near Argelès-sur-mer. The nearest airport is in Perpignan, and to get there, we will fly Norwegian from Gardermoen (Oslo) to Orly (Paris), and then with AirFrance to our destination. From there, we will rent a car to go the half an hour drive to Argelès.

During our time in the south of France, we will go wine hunting and swimming, and of course spend time with my newly "adopted" grandmother (I asked her if it was OK a while ago) and the others.

We will head north on the Friday, but will stop at Orly to go to Evry for the weekend to visit my "mother-in-law". She, in turn, will come visit us in Norway in July, after having taken in the fjords on the west coast.

I’ve also decided to volunteer at the Oslo Science Fiction Festival, which takes place on the Oslo university campus July 31st through August 3rd. I don’t know what my my responsibilities will be yet, but everything has become clearer after I attended a meeting yesterday with some of the people already involved.