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1 August.
Several days have passed without any comment - sorry! We've had a pleasant time with guests from England and enjoying our summer while it lasts.
In only a couple of weeks school re-starts and we'll be back to the term-time routine.
In the meantime Tracy and the children are on a very quick trip to Scotland and England.
During the summer both Tracy and Tim's churches had an outdoor service each, and for this purpose Tim borrowed an accordian, which proved quite difficult to play, especially because the one service was very windy (how are you supposed to hold the hymn book down?) and the other service was on the wettest Sunday of the summer. In any event, Tim had to put in a good deal of practice to get the thing to sound roughly as it should. Today's news reports that a man in Haugesund (just North of Stavanger) rang the police to complain that someone nearby kept playing the same tune on a harmonium, over and over again, every evening. The police apparently called round on the performer to suggest that a little variety would be no bad thing. Maybe it was another organist preparing for a summer service?
2 August. 7am. Early-morning mist announces a hot and beautiful day (photo, right; click for enlargement).
7pm. Just been down to the bottom of the drive with a wheelbarrow full of carefully-sorted bags of rubbish (it's bin day tomorrow - the first collection for four weeks due to summer holidays), accompanied by two dogs and two lambs, all following closely at heel.
Came back and chased a neighbour's bullock out of the garden.
All the usual dramas of �rsdalen life.
3 August.
Want a house? Advert here for a house to be given away - buyer collects!
4 August. We seem to have had a "moose" theme for the past half year, and it's hard to resist the headline on one of today's NRK news stories: "Ran into moose on motorbike". They're obviously getting more and more adventurous (photo, left).
Rush-hour traffic queue in �rsdalen (photo, right, click for enlargement).
This time of year there's always a rush of reports from tourist guides around the country about Things Those Americans Have Said This Year. The latest two:
5 August.
Tracy, Andrew and Katie are safely home and unwinding after a hectic trip.
I'm not terribly good at knowing which birds are especially interesting and rare, but these Great Grey (Lapland) Owls,
spotted somewhat east of here, certainly look the part (photo, right; click to enlarge).
17 August.
We arrived home last night after 10 days in Andalucia (hence no entries to this page).
We all had a wonderful time, exploring Roman sewers under Medina Sidonia (as well as all sorts of attractive things above ground),
the wanted posters in the waiting room at a genuine Spanish police station (after someone had put a large rock through the window of our hire car in the hope of finding things worth stealing, and got away with a swim suit and a damp towel),
and - more positively - the swimming pool at our villa and some glorious beaches.
We also had a trip to Gibraltar in order to be able to boast of looking at Africa whilst standing in the United Kingdom and tossing pebbles into Spain.
Gibraltar was faintly surreal - spending British money at Marks and Spencer in 40 degrees and baking sunshine,
driving on the right in the streets but using a multi-storey car park that was designed (if that's not too strong a word) for driving on the left.
Nothing worse than other people's holiday snaps, but if you can cope, there are 8 of them here (click photo, left, to view sequence).
Now back to normality (including back to school today for Andrew and Katie).
At least it would be normal, except that the council seems to have decided to put lights into the �rsdalen tunnel - something that we have mixed opinions about.
I told the electrician that we'd prefer some tarmac, but he said he didn't have any of that.
20 August. Main headline in today's national news is one of those that will take a while to get to grips with. It reads: "Mysterious masked person is visiting Norwegian churches, imitating Martin Luther. The police are hunting for him."
If it's any consolation, another story to which the NRK (BBc-equivalent) news has devoted a full web page concerns a 2-year-old who can recognise makes of cars (there's even a recording of him going round a car park: "Hyundai, Golf ...") - see full story if interested here.
The things that go on these days.
21 August. Just eaten the first of this year's plums from the garden- they are wonderful!
The days are shortening - the school bus now arrives almost together with dawn (picture, left: click for larger picture. No, Dawn is not a pupil. On the larger picture, the bus headlights are just at the bottom of the picture, in the middle.).
23 August. Sea-fishing trip today: brought home lots of mackerel. (Photo, right: click for sequence).
25 August. Wednesday was a rainy day in �rsdalen (click photo, right, for picture sequence).
Molde airport was closed for a period today because two cars had collided on the runway
(one was a service vehicle but the other was just the private car of someone who worked at the airport - it's not clear what they were doing driving down the runway).
Reminds us of Gibraltar (forgot to mention earlier that whilst on holiday we had the experience of driving into Gibraltar, which entails crossing the main runway at the airport.
There are level-crossing-like traffic lights and barrier which closes when a plane is coming in) (photo, left).
Fire practice time! As you may remember, every year we have a fire practice in the valley.
We are so far from the nearest fire station that there's no point at all phoning them in the case of fire:
we have to ring the neighbours instead.
We all have access to the key for the little fire station in the valley, with its pumps and hoses, so we have an annual practice at using it.
As our house is the highest up and furthest from the river, the practice was here this year.
Click photo, left, to see a sequence of four pictures.
27 August. Curious visitor to our balcony this evening (Photo, right: click for enlargement).
Thanks to all those who've helped identify it (including the Norwegian Entomological Association, who provided the answer).
It's a Birch Sawfly, which apparently "favours habitats where Birch trees are found" so it wasn't far off the mark!
More details and caterpillar picture on the Norwegian Wikipedia.
29 August. Bob tries his hand at salmon fishing in the Bjerkreim river. Click photo, left, to see how it went.
Heavy snow has closed roads in Norway today, including Valdresflyet, which is one of the major roads heading north from Lillehammer, in southern Norway.
Still further north in Norway, in Tana, temperatures fell to -5.7° C tonight.
No snow here, though - warm and sunny weather! (Photo, right: click for enlargement).
31 August. Congratulations to Matt on driving test!
Matt knows how to park properly, unlike the coffee guest in the photo (left).
While we're on the subject of parking, there was a good advert on FINN (the Norwegian equivalent of Ebay) today (click photo, right, to see the advert, with an English translation at the bottom).
Found the name of our caterpillar (see an inch or two further up this page).
4 September.
Andrew off putting up snow fences for the ski slope today; here returning in a sheep trailer (photo, right; click for enlargement)
Took Tracy on a Saturday shopping chopping trip today (photo, left; click for picture sequence)
6 September. Today's national news (click picture, left for news report (in Norwegian)) tells us that farmers have been told to train their cows to use emergency exits in case of fire, and to hold fire practices for their cows.
Also in today's news: two men in Tananger (the docks area outside Stavanger) attempted to rob a bin lorry on Sunday night. "It doesn't seem as though they chose very carefully", said operation leader Kjell-Arne Sletthei in Rogaland police headquarters.
7 September. First meeting of the children's club this Autumn - a barbeque and general good time down by the lake.
Click photo, right, for more pictures
10 September. Autumn has arrived (though it's still warm, dry and sunny) and the leaves are starting to change colour.
The day is shortening (though still longer than in the UK!) and the sun much lower in the sky (Click photo of sun over nearby Austrumdal Lake, left, for larger copy).
Andrew has been out all weekend, collecting sheep to bring them down to the valley, so that they will be easier to bring in when the snow arrives.
Photos are expected and will be available shortly.
As reported earlier, some interfering safety officer drove through the tunnel into �rsdalen a few months ago and demanded that it should be equipped with lights, emergency telephones and what not.
These have now been installed and switched on. It looks very strange to have emergency telephones every few yards through this deserted, largely unsurfaced tunnel.
Unfortunately, the lights have made the tunnel far more dangerous than before because there are now pools of shadow everywhere.
There were some kids walking in the tunnel today and we nearly ran them over because it's now impossible to see anything between the lights.
14 September. Strange evening and morning. It started last night with a whisper in the valley that the Highways Agency was closing the road to Vikes� for maintenance - from 8am to 9pm every weekday for the next two months.
From today.
"Surely it can't be possible", we all said. "Someone would have mentioned something", we all said. "How will the children get home from school every day?", we all asked.
We emailed the Mayor and called in to see him at 8 o'clock this morning.
It was true - and they hadn't told him either. He was rather cross about it.
There was talk of re-opening the old school in �rsdalen for a couple of months.
But it was all sorted at the last minute with special permission for the school bus to drive past (the workers take another coffee break at that point, which they didn't object to).
This morning's other oddity was the mouse trap. There are a lot of mice this year and - apologetically - we've put a mouse trap out on the doorstep every night. And emptied it every morning. But this morning it was gone. Obviously a plot: the mice were so fed up of their losses that they've teamed together and taken it away. (Picture, left).
Thanks to visitor labour, the woodpile is looking steadily healthier (Picture, above right - click for enlargement).
Our local church is 175 years old, which was celebrated last weekend with a concert and a special service.
A few months ago Tim was at a meeting regarding the weekend, and by the time he emerged from it
he found that he had somehow agreed to write some new music for the occasion, for an ad-hoc choir and rag-bag of instruments.
Being too late to regret it he had to write the thing, and the result - to his surprise - has been something of a "hit", with other groups wanting to perform it.
There's a recording of Friday's first performance of the piece here.
18 September.
We've coped well with the closure of the "main" road to Vikes�, which is intended to make some of the most dangerous bits safer
(photos of the mayor standing in the road, left - not taken this week! - and of the overhanging rocks - click for enlargement).
It's open for half an hour a couple of specified times during the day, so it's rather like having to catch a ferry to go anywhere.
Yesterday (Friday) the road workers had the day off, so the road was open all day long.
There was a suspicion that some motorists were driving back and too just to enjoy the freedom of being able to.
20 September. It has poured down continuously for a week and I think it's enough now.
23 September. Today is the autumn equinox - the day on which everyone has the same length of daylight.
In other words, until today we've had more hours of daylight than (for instance) the UK - but as of tomorrow we begin to lose out.
Until 20 March next year, that is, when we're ahead again.
Roll on, Spring!
24 September.
Dissent in the council hall.
There was a meeting of the Borough Council on Wednesday night, and the resulting discussion was awarded a full page in the regional paper (a bit of the report, right - click for enlargement).
The report reads as follows:
"When Mayor Marthon Sk�rland began to get hungry during the Borough Council meeting on Wednesday evening, he as usual asked Karl Gjedrem to start off singing grace ...
so that the representatives could get on with their open sandwiches, chocolate cake and coconut and prune cake with yellow cream filling - and two or three cups of coffee. As usual."
But then something unusual happened. Magne Vaule (Labour) asked whether the Borough Council ought to be singing grace before they ate.
The Mayor (who is every inch the jolly man of the people) apparently rattled his Mayoral chain and said that he'd never thought about it ("we've always done it") but that it was "a question that has to be resolved tonight".
The subsequent discussion is carefully reported and occupies a whole page of the newspaper.
The final result was 13 votes to 4 that the Council should continue to sing grace before eating their open sandwiches, chocolate cake and coconut and prune cake with yellow cream filling and drinking their coffee.
In case you're wondering, coconut and prune cake with yellow cream filling is delicious and well worth trying.
27 September.
As our visitors' plane takes off, taking with it a fortnight of almost constant rain, thick cloud and low temperatures, the skies clear once more to their usual brilliant blue, the thermometer needle is creeping up to 35° C (95 F) and the weather forecast lady is going into ecstacies.
Our next visitor is due in a week, so (on past experience) the rain will probably return about then.
But in the meantime, Matt is due here today, so he will have a fine first week.
And we will all be thrilled to have him home.
28 September.
Matt arrived safely from England yesterday (Monday) evening - and starts his new and fantastic job in Sandnes (not far from Tracy's church) at 9am tomorrow.
Not much rest there.
But he's very pleased - and we're delighted.