Header picture - at the beach. Full picture here.
Photo 5 January.
5 January -
Tracy has been away all week in Riga, so Tim has slipped away to the beach this afternoon to enjoy the sunshine.
Minus 3 and lots of snow on nearby mountains, so no swimming in the sea, but a lovely walk anyway.
7 January - Matt leapt back with a squeal. He'd just gone barefoot up to the fire to add a couple more logs when he noticed six moustraps arranged in a neat semicircle around the fire. "What ...?", he enquired. The explanation was quite simple, really. Not that we were expecting fiery rodents to emerge, but that, thankfully, the plague of mice that seems to have affected everyone around here for several weeks has now abated and we've had no mousetrap customers for at least a week. So Tim emptied, washed and dried all the moustraps before re-bating them with fresh cheese just to check for stragglers. After all, we don't want to be offering those poor mice unsanitory eating conditions - as Tim pointed out, we might get bad food reviews on TrapAdvisor (here is Tim's vision of what TrapAdvisor might look like).
"Have you lost your new sofa along the E39 road?" asks the newspaper headline today, showing this photo (right). The article goes on to explain that a brand-new sofa, still in its original packing, is lying in the middle of the dual carriageway outside Ikea in Stavanger.
"The owner", says the article, "who hopefully has now noticed that they have arrived home without a sofa, can contact the police to get it back".
The police add helpfully that the owner will then probably lose his driving license for failing to secure his load properly.
This seems to suggest that the police are really rather hoping that they can keep the sofa for the police-station staff room.
UPDATE: Jon and Tim spotted simultaneously, a little later on Saturday evening, that the article had been updated ...
"Well, my brother and I were just driving along the dual carriageway when suddenly this sofa came flying over the road", says a passer by.
Is it just me, or are there shades of Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy here?
The owner did decide to brave the wrath of the police and turned up to collect his sofa.
The police did not confiscate his driving license but showed their displeasure at not getting their new staff-room sofa by giving him a fine for having the wrong type of trailer license.
8 January -
Wintery mist on the way home from church (click photo, left, for enlargements).
Comments
|
11 January - It's another rough day in southern Norway — more extreme weather warnings, with high winds and all-aboard-the-ark tides — everywhere except in Ørsdalen. Driving home from work today I had to stop and take a very brief film of what happens when strong winds blow across the lake and up the mountainside (click here to watch short film clip).
13 January -
We've sent the all-aboard-the-ark tides and general nastiness off to the coast of SE England: hope you're not affected, Joanna!
In its place, we've got heavy snow (on the way to work today),
which coupled with still warm temperatures (around 0°) made the roads a bit treacherous.
The season is always apparent (even if you can't see it through the window) from the choice of hymns for funerals.
Around Christmas, the most familiar Norwegian carol "Deilig er jorden" is absolute favourite, while Easter sees a burst of the Norwegian version of "Thine by the glory".
Spring is always heralded by a run on "No livnar det i lunder, no lauvast det i li" (lit. "Now the copses are coming to life, now the hillsides are coming into leaf") — so when we had that hymn in today's funeral it seemed like a particularly unsuccessful vote for global warming.
If there are any new leaves around, there's certainly none to be seen in today's pictures, including Katie's snowman (click, right, for enlargement).
Comments
|
14 January -
Farmer Thomas points out that Norway is apparently in the news today in several countries for farming-related reasons.
Children from a nursery school in Steinkjer (near Trondheim and most definately in the southern half of Norway, not "arctic northern Norway" as reported in
The Guardian)
were taken to watch a reindeer slaughtering (now Christmas is over, you've got to get rid of the unemployed reindeer somehow).
Despite the incredulous tone of the Guardian article and the angry comments from abroad, this type of visit is by no means unusual
(though perhaps more common further up into real northern Norway, where, incidentally, you can do "A"-levels in reindeer herding).
According to the news here,
the nursery school wrote on on its Facebook page that "Today the wood beatles [i.e. that particular nursery-school group] were lucky enough to take part in the reindeer slughter at Suseggvola ☺ ... it wasn't long before it all became very "normal and the children were busy clearing skins, feet and heads!"
They add that Rudolph was not among the chosen reindeer ...
PS — The NRK news, always quick to run satirical articles on such news stories, has now added a little satirical film
showing a bunch of nursery-school children being taken out to see the seedier side of life — "O how lucky we are, children; here are some drunks and addicts ..."
15 January - As has been pointed out earlier, the drive between Ørsdalen and Sandnes never gets boring because it looks quite different every day. Here are two photos from this morning's journey.
Comments
|
19 January - the guest - For the last three years, a guest has turned up twice a day (breakfast and suppertime) at the kitchen window of an old lady who lives in a house somewhat east of here. The guest always eats a couple of sandwiches before leaving again for his daily routine. "He's a good friend", says Mette, the lady in question. See photo of Mette and her visitor.
Comments
|
27-30 January - up north -
A trip to Finnsnes, to visit our friends Jon and Sarah.
As Google reckons it to be exactly 2222 km to drive (and Google's estimate of 28 hours' solid driving is hoplessly optimistic),
this meant a flight to Oslo followed by a thousand-mile flight northwards to Bardufoss, where we were treated to one of those spectacular landings in which you could almost lean out of the plane window and grab a handful of snow off the mountaintops as we dropped sharply down to the runway.
Great to be back up north, with the familiar dialect and the casual informality of everything.
An hour's bus ride took us to Finnsnes.
While we were there, a couple of feet of snow fell back home in Ørsdalen, but Finnsnes (300 miles north of the Arctic Circle) was surprisingly unsnowy;
only an inch or two and even that was fast melting into ice on the roads.
The object of the trip, though, was to spend time with Jon and Sarah — with whom we enjoyed a restaurant visit as well as an "international cafe" at Finnsnes Church and a long drive around Norway's largest island (Senja) where we inspected the spectacular scenery, some very Norwegian road tunnels
(one of which had just been treated to the attentions of our beloved Highways Authority, who had put up fancy cladding on the bare walls with the result that the tunnel is now too low for all the lorries for which it was originally built)
and the infamous third-of-a-million-pound golden-walled "loo-with-a-view" public convenience, which comes complete with architectural design awards.
Making good memories!
(Click toilet, right, for photos).
Comments
|