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2 November -
The annual bazar in Ørsdalen passed without casualties (click photo, left, for pictures).
Katie bought a microscope for 30 kroner and a book-reading light, not to mention a number of buns, so she's very pleased.
The bazar always makes a good deal of money for good causes - this year's two-hour event raised £1200, which isn't bad for a tiny community.
The auction. -
Norah reminded us recently about the joy of auctions.
We went to an auction at a farmhouse in Anglesey some while ago - before we were married.
Amidst the heaps of unlisted and seemingly undesirable objects in cardboard boxes was a sorry-looking heap of books: a tattered novel, a second-hand hymn book and -
an original copy of an extremely rare mid-18th century book, L'art du facteur d'orgues by Dom Bédos de Celles.
We bid on the books and got them for £5 or so.
We've never been back to an auction since, but today there was an antiques auction in Sandnes.
Our strategy - in order not to spend too much money - was to bid on half a dozen items, putting in bids well under the estimate, on the assumption that we might strike lucky.
In the event we ended up driving home with two items, which rather filled the car.
One was a walnut table and the other was a grandfather clock - which set us back all of £30.
As I write it's just bonging 10 - bedtime.
4 November - Tracy had a hand operation today (for CTS) and is now recovering at home. All sympathy, red wine and chocolate are welcome (!) She'll be bandaged for a fortnight and is off work initially for 3 weeks (possibly longer). It all went (and is still going ) better than she expected.
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6 November - Hand is now in good company, as today featured a leg operation (quite separately and at a different hospital). Tracy is now so extensively bandaged that we could pass her off as a mummy. (The Egyptian sort, I mean).
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7 November - A few weeks before we moved here in 2009, the car ferry that for many years had run between Newcastle and Stavanger stopped operating. Ever since then there's been talk of starting the route up again, but as no-one had managed to make it pay in an age of cheap air fares it's never got beyond the talk. Today, however, came an announcement that the boat is to start up again from Easter 2014. This time it will be a new ship (the old Venus, a cronky tub which we suspect had been running ever since it was built by the Vikings, has been retired). So next year it will be even easier to visit!
9 November - BUT: today, the statement about the boat route has been withdrawn. "Someone has evidently drunk too much Møller's cod-liver oil", (see her for the meaning of this term) says the local director of tourism in a new statement. It seems that, despite what the British company promised at a public meeting two days ago, they don't yet have a ship, nor do they have finance in place and it's only "possible" that they will get the route operating in 2014. Unlikely, in other words. There's now some puzzlement because the British spokesman who came over for the public meeting apparently showed pictures of the new ship and described it in detail, gave precise information about the timetable and the start-up date. Something doesn't quite add up.
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10 November -
So far, we've not seen any real sign of winter.
This is, of course, in line with what we booked, but rather surprising nevertheless.
This morning, a month or so "late", we saw the first signs that winter might be on the way -
a small amount of snow on the road by the tunnel.
But further down the valley it's still autumn (click right for two photos).
Long may it continue!
Concerts and hoopla - Someone asked me today what Norwegian law had to say about arranging concerts, so I looked it up. The relevant law says (translated): "Anyone who wishes to organise concerts, dramatic presentations and similar, as well as circuses, pantomines, shooting arcades, ring throwing or similar, or who as a business venture wishes to hold public dancing, masquerades, carusels or similar, must have permission from the police (sheriff)". I'm almost tempted to organise some public ring-throwing in Ørsdalen just so that I can go to our local policemen to ask him for a license. I can just see him giving his coffee another stir while he tries to imagine which form to fill in for the official hoopla-permit.
Today is Father's Day in Norway (as in most of northern Scandinavia), marked with a chocolate-orange cheesecake made by Katie and Tracy (dig in, left)
and by greatly-appreciated gifts, including one that probably no other father in the whole country received - half a trailer.
I'll leave that one to your imagination.
14 November - Making a mousse The pupils of a nursery school in southern Norway have had some help to make a mousse. Sounds straightforward? See pictures here.
The English test - Katie had an English test at school (!!) the other day, in which she had to write a short story about a dog that did something special. Here is what she produced. Entertaining as usual (one of the characters showing some slight Terry-Pratchet-influence).
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While Matthew was home this weekend, there was, as usual, a good deal of chess playing. The rest of Norway, inspired by the new hero Magnus Carlson (currently fighting it out in India to become World Champion), is also catching on to chess (apparently chess boards are currently sold out in Norway), but it's never been out of fashion in this house. Andrew in particular has been practicing for some time with a neighbour. In the current series he has won two games out of five against Tim and is proving an alarming opponent. Matthew is also very good - but in this picture (right - click for enlargement) he is looking stunned to find himself (playing white) in check mate against his brother after only four moves.
Matthew has now returned by train to Bodø (some 30 hours of solid train travelling) - in usual style carrying a large rucksack and an additional bag about the size and weight of a large teenager. This bag contained one of those "hamster-wheel" balls that a person can get inside. The journey took him through the worst hurricane for twenty years, which closed roads and caused widespread damage, so we did wonder whether we were going to wake up to headlines: "Train stranded in mid-Norway - passenger escaped in inflatable ball, last seen bouncing over Sweden". But he got back all right.
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19 November - Time for change - Each year since we came to Ørsdalen, a heavy snowfall in October has forced us to change over to winter wheels on the cars. In all the years we've spent in Norway, we've never still been using summer wheels in November, until this year. Today, with one eye on the calendar and the other on the weather forecast, I decided it was time (photo, left - click to inflate). And sure enough, even as I was working in the garage, big white flakes began to fall gently outside ...
20 November -
"You're how far from Vikeså?", asked the repair man, his voice rising an octave or so.
Even as he spoke, I could hear his van swerving into a layby, and I knew just what was coming next.
Or rather, just who was not coming next.
Nearly three years ago, we bought a new washing machine.
This was particularly memorable because our purchase included home delivery, and the machine eventually arrived in, of all things, a taxi,
whose meter was already showing about ten times the price we'd paid for the machine.
We never normally buy the optional "extended warranty" that electrical shops like to sell, but as we've never managed to make a washing machine last more than a couple of years
we happily signed up for the full 5-year deal.
This was a good thing, because for the last few weeks the machine has been making loud grinding noises of the
"show-me-one-more-pair-of-socks-and-I'll-explode" kind.
So I emailed the shop and within a fortnight or so I was in the midst of an extended email correspondence with Electrolux in Stockholm,
which after another week or so and a deal of comings and goings resulted in a message that a service engineer would call on us this morning, provided we had some decent coffee ready.
It was at 2 this afternoon when he rang, wanting directions from Egersund.
Once he understood that his destination was an hour's drive away, rather than the expected 10 minutes, he started muttering.
"It'll cost two-and-a-half thousand kroner for me to drive right out there. Are you sure that's covered by your warranty?"
I pointed out that no-where did it say that it wasn't, but just to be on the safe side I rang a nice lady somewhere in Sweden to check.
"We'll only cover repair costs up to 2250 kroner: if the total bill comes to more than that, then it's cheaper for us to buy you a new washing machine", she said.
"But we can't order a new machine without a report from the repair man, confirming what's wrong with your existing one".
"But he'll charge at least that much just to come", I pointed out.
"Oh dear", she said. "Talk to him again. I suppose he'd better just come to you".
I rang the repair man back. He was just having a coffee to recover from the shock and consider his situation.
When I gave him the message from the Swedish lady, he was ready for it.
"I've been working it out", he said. "I'll have to charge 3500 kroner [nearly £400] to come to you, and then the repairs will come on top.
It's really not worth me coming all the way to Ørsdalen".
I rang the nice lady in Sweden again. "It's now 3500 kroner, but he won't come anyway".
There was a slight clicking noise on the line.
"A new Zanussi has now been ordered and will arrive by taxi from Alpha Centuri in due course - and they'll take the old one away".
Once in a while, the distances work in our favour in other ways as well. As you know, our internet connection has been ... erratic (it took a while to find a suitably polite description), resulting in many trips over the river in bad weather to re-set the wireless sender and many weekends without any coverage at all. So when our neigbour mentioned the other day that the national telephone company Telenor has now built out its (wired) internet coverage as far as Ørsdalen, I was on the phone to them within half an hour. They promised to send an engineer to connect us up. In due course. Today, far earlier than planned, a Telenor engineer arrived up the drive. "I came to connect up the neighbouring farm", he said, but there are some complications there and we'll have to come back with more equipment. So since I've come all the way to Ørsdalen I might as well connect you up now. Which he duly did, and was rewarded with the washing-machine-man's coffee and chocolate cake. So this page is now being updated via a new, faster and hopefully more reliable internet connection. Time will tell.
21 November - Happy birthday to Thomas Andrew (19)!
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24 November - anyone for cards? Click photo, left, for enlargement.
26 November - Free to good home -
We've written several times before about the website that offers things - often quite extraordinary things - "free to a good home".
We've had items of furniture and all sorts of useful objects;
but we've failed to take advantage of several boats (to be collected from current location at the bottom of a fjord) or even of entire houses (come and take it away).
Andrew has just pointed out the latest offering - a road tunnel.
It's 2 km long and has good lighting (and a tarmac surface), but the Highways Agency doesn't need it any more, so anyone who wants it can have it.
Now hang on, we could do with a new Ørsdalen tunnel ...
The sound of running water - I've just put the diswasher on and it's producing a pleasant gurgling noise in the kitchen. And I've filled the kettle for a cup of tea, and even washed the bathroom floor. It's so great having water. If you're wondering why the wet rhapsodies, it's because the pump that brings the water a few hundred meters up from our well broke down on Saturday, so we've been living off water from buckets until three hours ago, when a plumber (plumbers be blessed!) arrived and replaced various bits of the machinery. So now we're all ready for the new washing machine, which is arriving on Thursday afternoon!
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