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1 April - April Fool? -
We woke up this morning to find this outside (left - click for enlargement) -
gale-force winds and heavy snow.
The weather seems to have a sense of humour - especially as it's done this once before, on 1 April 2012.
Up at the ski centre there's still some 5-foot depth of snow — almost unheard of as late as April — so the owners are predicting a good Easter season.
This afternoon, though, the weather's clearing up in typical April fashion and becoming brighter (photo here). Perhaps because it can't continue with its April foolery after lunchtime?
Chocolate fool? -
The predominant make of chocolate in Norway is Freia, which is marketed as part of the Norwegian tradition,
using slogans like "a little piece of Norway" (see anglicised advert, right), "a taste of childhood", and such things.
Their PR department decided recently that it would be a good exercise to get the Norwegian people involved in this process,
by inviting them to contribute new slogans.
Suggestions could be entered on their website and would appear immediately on Freia's Facebook page.
The experiment didn't last long.
The new slogans which appeared on their website were all along the lines of:
"A little piece of Rainforest" and
"a taste of palm oil".
There's one advertising consultant that won't be getting an early promotion.
Poetical fool? -
Driving into Sandnes the other day I was listening to the mid-German radio station Figaro (the marvels of modern technology!),
which in a moment of light and not especially novel entertainment (evidently a slow news morning) was taking pieces of Goethe's poetry
and using Google Translate to translate them into Welsh (of all things), then taking the Welsh text and translating it into Azerbaijani, then translating the resultant text back into German. They were then reading the comical results with great delight.
It being a slow blog day I thought I would do the same for a bit of Wordsworth.
After all, it's always good to have something to laugh at.
So the famous daffodils headed into Welsh (it seemed very appropriate, especially in March), then into Azerbaijani before returning to English.
And blow me, the clouds were still floating o'er vales and hills and the daffodils were still dancing in the breeze.
In increasing desperation I sent it back into Japanese and anything else I could think of, but the blessed daffodils kept coming back almost unsullied.
To go through English → Azerbaijani → Welsh → Khmer → Yiddish → English and to end up with:
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden Daffodils
is nothing short of depressing. That attempt at entertainment was a conspicuous failure.
2 April -
Made good use of a glorious day (before church this evening) for games in the garden (left - click for enlargements)
and dog walking in Ørsdalen (right - click for enlargements)
3 April - Norway is doing what it does best. Only two days after storm and snow, the sun is now shining so strongly that we were out sunbathing in the hammock on the balcony: and Tracy dared to say the words "it's too hot out here!". Snow on the mountains and heatwave down in the valley - what could be better?
Some neighbours tried running a cafe up by the ski centre this Easter, but due to a lack of publicity they didn't get as many customers as they'd reckoned on and have a lot of food left over. Much of it is going to charities, but things that won't last that long are being hastily used. So we've been hard at work getting — amongst other things — quantities of cauliflower cheese in the freezer (photos here). After all that cooking, it was left to Katie to make us our dinner — Japanese style. Very tasty!
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6 April - As all good vicars should, Tracy has had Easter free — at least until this evening, when Norkirken had its Easter service for those returning to town from their skiing trips to the mountains. Photos here.
10 April -
All the usual signs of spring are now present in our garden (see photos here).
Because of this, we decided to take advantage of a sunny day out on the beach with the dogs (photo, left - click for enlargement).
This was a mistake.
At the seaside, a strong and chilly wind was blowing a light drizzle off the sea and into the mist that was lying low over the beach.
Still, the dogs enjoyed it.
We did too, if truth be told.
It's traditional to have a lighted candle in the window of Norwegian homes (from the days when travellers used to be lost in the woods - it also represents the light of Christ). "Here", says Tracy, "is the Christ light — also useful for getting rid of the smell of wet dog". Nothing like dual-purpose illumination (photo, right - click for enlargement).
Wolf!
We've mentioned earlier that wolves have been sighted on the moors between here and Tonstad (some 10 miles to the east).
Today's newspaper contains reports of at least one wolf on the moors beyond Vikeså (west of here).
There has been some debate about what it was that had been dismantling deer on our drive one night.
We had assumed that it was lynx; but maybe it was a wolf in transit?
Correction from Thomas Andrew - no, definately lynx.
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13 April - the first Monday after Easter Monday - Sounds like an odd "special day", but actually it's an important day in the calendar — the day on which, according to the law, winter tyres have to be removed from the car and replaced by summer tyres (at least in southern Norway — the north gets another week yet). So to celebrate the occasion, the weather has returned to minus degrees, heavy snow and a strong wind. Snow ploughs have been out all night on the main road through western Norway and the road out of Ørsdalen is again impassable with summer tyres. Good job we've not changed them yet!
15 April - Three of today's national news stories:
"It's up to individuals to decide what activities they like to do in bed", said a spokesman on today's NRK news. It's apparently in the part of Norway around Ålesund that you're most likely to find people "bed-surfing". Disappointingly, this is not an aquatic sport — it's a reference to using the internet on mobile devices while in bed.
"Beaver dies in work-related accident", was the headline attached to this sad photo. A zoologist tells NRK that "this was an extremely unlucky beaver". (Good thing we have zoologists, isn't it?). According to the zoologist, either the beaver jumped to the wrong side when it felled the tree, or else there were two beavers, one of which wasn't paying attention when the other one shouted "timber!"
It's not just beavers that have been unlucky today. They say it's always raining in Bergen. But a biologist, walking on the snowy hills just outside Bergen, found that it was raining worms — thousands of them had fallen from the sky. It's apparently an unusual event, but by no means unique (such reports crop up every few decades). In a comment that rather reminds me of the zoologist in the previous story, the biologist reports to the NRK news that "Det er ikke så smart av dem å lande på snø" ("it was not very clever of them to land on snow") because most of them caught colds and died. Presumably they should have checked the weather forecast before deciding where to land. Elsewhere in the same article, the same expert remarks (seemingly innocently) that "Som biolog er jeg veldig mye ute i skog og mark." The Norwegian word "mark" means either "fields" or "worms", so his statement reads: "As a biologist I spend a lot of time out [walking] in forests and mark". Does this mean that it happens more often than we realised?
17 April - turbo tractor -
Thomas Andrew has extended his tractor collection.
His little red tractor has acquired a big — and more powerful — brother (photo, left - click for enlargement).
He did it up for someone else, who in the end was unable to take it, so he ended up buying it from them at a knock-down price.
Note his personal patent design features:
the bent-over exhaust funnel (stops rain getting in)
and the added turbo (just underneath the word "Ferguson").
"Come on in: the water's lovely!" It being a beautiful sunny day (even though it was snowing when I was on the way home yesterday evening) Fudge decided to take the first dip of the season in the river by the house (photo, right - click for enlargement).
18 April - just one more animal story from the news -
The well-known zoo at Kristiansand — the place from where we usually get the boat to Denmark — has just sent a lynx to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Centre.
While changing flights at New York it apparently fancied getting out for a bit of sight-seeing and made a not completely succesful bid to chew through the bars of its cage.
"Animal almost escapes from cage" was evidently not a good enough headline for the American newspapers,
so the New York Post painted a dramatic scene as six policemen raced to contain the "mass-murdering psycho-killer wolverine"
(see headline here, or, if you want a real laugh, the whole story here).
"But it's a kind, friendly lynx", says Kristiansand Zoo vet Rolf Arne Ølberg
to today's NRK news.
They should have just sent it here: it would have made a nice kind friend for Ørsdalen's other psycho-killer lynx.
Glancing at the website for the New York Post I see that they have quite a tradition for dramatic animal stories:
the next news story there is headlined "Driver blames coffee-drinking parrot for car crash" and ends "... the bird was safely removed from the vehicle."
Now there's a thought: perhaps that lynx had been at the caffeine as well.
20 April - Happy birthday Matt!
Although there's still plenty of snow at the ski centre by the Ørsdalen tunnel, they closed today for the summer. Now that Easter is over, there's a general feeling that winter should be put away and we should begin to think of warmer things. For this reason, we've changed over the tyres on both cars today - a warm job with temperatures up in the 20s. Summer is hereby declared! Click photo, right, for some pictures of the thaw.
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21 April Tracy meets all sorts of people in the course of a working day. Here (above left - click for pictures) are three pictures showing a bit of the variety.
24 April - A walk in "Scotland"
On our way home from Sandnes today, we stopped off to exlore a track near Ivesdal that we've often driven past but never walked before.
We ended up walking for an hour across a landscape that reminded us of Scotland or the Lancashire/Yorkshire moors;
no great mountains but lots of colour!
Click photo, right, for enlargements.
26 April - On the way to work -
I (Tim) ended an extremely busy working week with a weekend containing three confirmation services at Sandnes Church, followed by a baptism, choir practice and concert on a new organ in Sandnes.
Despite our declaring summer at the start of this week it snowed heavily overnight on the mountains -
with even a light dusting of snow on the road up by the tunnel (photo, left - click for enlargement).
Others seem to have declared summer as well, though -
a boat has been got out ready on a small lake near Ivesdal (also photo, left).
27 April - Cutting the lawn in the snow - Monday dawned bright, sunny and warm. As it's a day "off" (actually I'm supposed to be preparing for a concert and lecture tomorrow, but never mind) I decided optimistically to give the lawn its first cut of the year. The lawnmower reluctantly came to life, after a few objections, and a few neat stripes appeared in the previously rather tufty lawn. As I looked up, clouds were busy rushing to the spot, darkening a previously clear blue sky. I cut a few more stripes. This was rewarded with a few light drops of rain. By then it was too late to stop, with quarter of the lawn done. By the time two thirds of the lawn was finished it was raining a steady light drizzle. By the time it was three-quarters done it had turned to snow. Just managed to get it finished and have now retreated inside to watch white flakes falling gently on the newly-cut lawn. We are not amused.
30 April - 50 miles from Ørsdalen was the epicentre of an earthquake last night, measuring 3.75 on the Richter scale. We slept through it, but people interviewed by the news this morning explained what they had thought it was. "I thought it was a snow plough going past", said one. "I though it was an avalanche", said another. The familiar noises of Norway.
It's still snowing, incidentally. Each morning we've woken up to more new snow, including on the road up by the tunnel.
Good job we didn't update the header picture as suggested 10 days ago!
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