Friday, 31.December.04
We're bustling about, getting ready for the New Year party tonight. Everyone is feeling melancholy, as the news of the possibly million dead in the tidal wave in SE Asia is on everyone's mind. At least 500 Norwegians died, which brings it close to home.
To dispell some of the gloom, we borrowed skates from a neighbor and went down to the lake. As we laced the skates on, we could hear muffled booming sloshes, as though the lake trolls had indigestion. Bawooom wooma! Astri skated out a few meters and there was a deep-throated crrackawoom bawoom! A crack unzipped in front of her skates but she didn't stay to watch. "That's the end of skating for today," she informed us.
So we went home and vacuumed.
Thursday, 30.December.04
The moment we awoke, at 11:00, we headed out the door for Oslo. We'd planned to go yesterday, but the snow was too cool to pass up. Today, with another thaw, the roads are safer and the bright lights beckon.
First stop, pizza, croissants, and coffee at the train station. Upload the blog at the one Hot Spot in Oslo, as far as we've been able to tell. Decline to use the 10kr toilets, but head off into the wilds to find David's lice sweater, or yarn to knit it with.
Found both.
A not-so-brief stop at bookstores to get sequels to the Lois McMaster Bujolds, the Mercedes Lackeys, the David Webers, that we've been reading.
By now, of course it was dark, so it was time to look at the Oslo Fortress at the harbor. (We only do our sightseeing in the dark, thank you.) The Spink is entranced by the layers of history that reach out and grab at you in spots like these. War memorial plaques. Portcullis hinges. A pattern of bricks showing that the window's changed sizes. And, of course, that small wicker gate that's inadvertendly been left open.
We stopped at the slushy horse paddock to visit with the horse. A fresh-looking lady came trotting in and offered to show us the mounted police stables. Yes, please!
From black and freezing outside, we and the horse clopped into a warm concrete stable, with sparrows flying everywhere and making remarks. We got to nuzzle at the horses and they back at us.
After rather mediocre Greek food, we went to visit Astri's mom. We had a rousing discussion of Russian Orthodox music and left in high spirits. Sang all the way back to Eidsfoss, where we are now (1:00 tomorrow) reading the new books.
Tuesday, 28.December.04
Before Ellinor left yesterday, she revealed herself as the Mustard Goddess.
After a few delicious days of minus ten degrees Celsius, we had a thaw today. Everything is slushy and The Spink played outside as hard as possible in order not to miss any of the snow.
Our visitor played accordion for us. He's connected with the College of Telemark in Rauland, where he's part of a project of going around to local villages and collecting dance tunes before they vanish. I asked him how he collects; with a tape recorder or what, and he said that much of the music is no longer being played. It has either been written down or already been lost. Fashion music in the form of German Reinlenders and Austrian waltzes came to Norway in the 1800's, but some of the old forms also survive. There's Ganglatts, or walking tunes, Springers, or running tunes, and the ancient Halling involving dancing with a hat on a stick. When he played the older tunes, his foot tapped in an uneven rhythm; one, two, pause, one, two, pause, or one pause, two, three. There are other off-patterns, such as ones sometimes transcribed in 5/8 time or simply not written down as played.
We were invited to a tea party in the afternoon, plentifully supplied with pepper cookies, fruit cake, tea, and screaming kindergarteners. After a week of listening to Swedish, it was a relief to get back to the almost-but-not-quite comprehenesible Norwegian. A few more tea parties would be great, even without pepper cookies.
We arrived back home and surged through it, relentlessly throwing out debris that had been left by the stream of visitors in the past days. When Astri's work table was almost clean and all of her freshly laundered table cloths and napkins ironed, what could we do but work on a quilt? She finished up the last few squares of her mother's gift, and I spent some time on an unfinished quilt I'd worked on last time I was here. But, tastes change. It was just too awful to go on with. Trash.
And now, just before midnight, the situation is as follows: Astri: Elvenblood by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey. The Spink: Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey. Me: Path of the Fury by David Weber. On the CD player: David Francey's Torn Screen Door.
Monday, 27.December.04
An unexpected visitor came by just as we were thinking of going to bed. He went to dogsledding school with Astri, and stopped on the way from one far-away place to another.
One of the stories he told us is from the island his mother grew up on. That island is about 30 km long. One day a man ran into the doctor's office, and said he'd just run all the way from the other end of the island. "You couldn't have done that," said the doctor.
"Wanna bet?" asked the man.
"Not really," said the doctor.
"Hey, I can prove it," said the man. "Really. I'll bet you as many pennies as you can fit between my big toe and the second toe. Come on."
The doctor shrugged and said, "Okay, then."
"Hoo boy," said the man happily. "Just as soon as I can get the witnesses together, I win big!" And he pulled off his shoe to show that he'd cut his big toe off. It was still back on the other side of the island, where he'd been splitting wood.
The photo above left is from a trip I took to St Petersburg a few years ago, and is only here because I like it.
Another story from that island was about some dances at a rock formation that looks like a big overturned boat. The fiddler was said to have learned how to play from the subterranean people, whose boat it is. One night he was fiddling wildly and the dancers were dancing wildly and suddenly a big dog ran out of nowhere and sat on the dance floor. It grew really big and scared everyone away. Nobody danced in that place for quite a while after that. But then, the fear wore off and there was another dance there. The fiddler played just as wildly as before, and the dancers danced as wildly too. Suddenly, the dancers saw a small creature run out of the shadows. It jumped onto the fiddler's head, and he stopped playing. Most of the people went home at once, but a couple of boys came close to see what it was. They saw a little troll man, one of the subterranean creatures, sitting on his head, so they ran away too. They told the village elders, who came to look the next morning. All they saw was a dark thing on the ground. When they got closer, it turned out to be the fiddler, lying there dead as a coffin nail.
Saturday, 25.December.04
We awoke to four inches of snow, and another two arrived through the day. With the four of us staying with Astri, and Ellinor's parents, and a Swedish neighbor family, the brunch was festive and warm.
Yesterday's breakfast may have been spiffy, but today's was stunning. At the top left you can see a small part of the menu; about ten kinds of cheeses, fresh baked bread (as well as stale stuff and knakebrod), fresh baked Strange Lemon Cake (see recipe on the 18th), oodles of sliced meats, including moose and roebuck meats personally shot by Ellinor's dad, and the various mustards and lingonberry jams to spread on it all. After a pleasant conversation, the neighbors played Swedish Christmas songs on mandolin and fiddle, with the toddler helping on pennywhistle.
The Spink went off to play in the snow, and the rest of us ate all day long.
Friday, 24.December.04
Breakfast was, as planned, spiffy. White tablecloth, endless supplies of coffee and Russian caravansery tea, hard boiled eggs, thick and fragrant home baked bread and cheeses. Ellinor's father speaks Swedish but not English, and The Spink and I speak English but neither Norwegian nor Swedish. Things are quite amicable, although since Rolf is a hunter and arrived with moose and roebuck sausages and pates, The Spink has a bit to work through.
Kirsten and The Spink were deep in an origami session when we all decided to rush off to poach a Christmas tree. Astri brandished a small orange saw and we all inched our way down the icy driveway to the lakeside, where the perfect spruce was squashed between two birches.
While everyone else decorated the thing, I finished the tulip painting. Whew.
Norway has a state church, which the king is required to belong to. Religion is taught in school, although you can opt out. Church attendance is tepid at best; the local church is mostly closed for winter. Despite her free-thinker status, Astri's worked as groundskeeper for the three local churches off and on. Today, she was supposed to ring the bells in the empty church to officially start Christmas at 5:00. The Spink, Ellinor, and I went with her, dressed in bunads (the local costume), hoods, and woolen capes.
There are five flights of stairs up to the bat-decorated bell tower. We all had ear protectors, which were barely enough to prevent pain. After throwing open all the windows that work, there were five minutes of furious bell-pulling, followed by a pause, then three minutes of whacking the clapper of one of the bells. Repeat for one hour.
After that, the only thing to do was to eat. Pork, roebuck sausage, pork meatballs, sourkraut, red wine kraut, lingongberry jam, potatoes, and red wine. It was decided that the best way to tackle it was by alternating red food with brown food.
In Northern Europe, people open presents after 5 on the 24th. So we did. Everyone astounded each other with their gifts. The most touching one was given by Kirsten, who had embroidered three towels with ears of wheat. Astri, Ellinor, and I each got one, and when we bake bread, we are supposed to put them on the fresh loaves and think of each other. Awww.
After everyone went to bed, Astri and I stayed up, loudly playing Boggle. Sorry, guys. The last thing before bed was to mash up some Brie in warm milk with sugar and flour, and hope that some kind of Brie-tasting sourdough starter will have formed by tomorrow morning when we bake bread for brunch.
Thursday, 23.December.04
Astri left early today to hang out with the preschool kids. She's on leave, but they've arranged for her to keep up the relationship. In the meantime, The Spink, Ellinor and I decided to scrub the floor. Not that it really needed it, but that was the next thing on Astri's list to prepare for the neighborhood Christmas feast she'll hold in a couple of days.
After a bit of hanging around, we decided to go look for the hat that The Spink had lost on the hillside. It's white, so there was no point in looking for it before the snow thawed. It's a short walk up through spruce, juniper, heather, and lingonberry bushes. What looks like bedrock lies underfoot, covered with duff or reindeer moss. The hat was right there where she dropped it, frozen stiff.
When Astri returned, we started a storm of cooking. Red wine cabbage, meatballs, glogg. A Christmas breakfast is a serious thing, not properly done unless the hostess is totally exhausted by it. Fortunately, she has clueless help so we ought to be able to reduce her to tears in a few more hours.
Astri went through the big trunk that holds her fabric treasures; aprons from her grandmother, hand woven tablecloths from her great-grandmother, petticoat lace from her aunt. She and I bought some of it together; a Moravian folk costume from a truly oily fellow in Prague; a glittery pleated skirt from a second hand shop in Szentendre, Hungary; a red velvet vest from the Barter Fair in Okanogan. Ellinor, too, remembered some of the pieces from trips they took together. It's not just the complex and baffling beauty of the folk art that is so attractive, but the memories that catch themselves on the threads.
I set up a still life with tulips and a peculiar piece of fabric that is used in Mongolian yurts during the day to protect the piled up bedding from evil spirits. (This is a running joke with us - that there are so many folk items that have a specific use that's beyond anything we could invent. Sugar spoons with a curl in the handle so they don't fall into the sugar pot. Butter molds. Lace envelopes in which to store one's nightgown during the day.) One of the things that's frustrating about art is that the skills are so easy to lose. I'm wrestling with the execution of something that, six years ago, seemed much easier to do.
What better thing to do than to procrastinate? I took my life in my hands and invaded the kitchen, where Astri and Ellinor were boiling, chopping, and mashing. In a deft dance, we managed not to do each other damage, and I put together a dinner of cauliflower, lime chutney meatballs, and tzatziki (cucumbers in yoghurt), followed by rose hip soup, which is sold like milk in the dairy section.
The two ladies left to get Ellinor's parents from the bus station, while I washed up and went back to the watercolor. Horrors! All the tulips have warped around and the shadows and orientations are totally different. I'll have to fake it. I poked out briefly to greet The Parents, but the big problem of the hour is how to deal with the tulips.
Wednesday, 22.December.04
Last night it thawed. The stars were against us in other ways today, except that we thoroughly enjoyed it anyway.
I woke at 11, a reasonable time considering my 4:20 bedtime. Astri, Ellinor, and The Spink were on the same schedule, too. After a hasty breakfast, we squished ourselves into the truck and headed for Oslo, where Astri's father and brother live, so they could exchange Christmas gifts. When we were almost there, though, she realized that she'd left the presents behind. Maybe that had something to do with keeping late hours with long term houseguests in a teensy house? In any case, we sang rounds and bloody folksongs so the time passed pleasantly.
At the highway toll booth, a car cut in front of ours just as Astri was driving to the basket where you throw your twenty crowns in. It was an elderly man, who hadn't driven close enough so he had to get out and walk to the basket. But he dropped the coin, and had to search for it. Then, in it went, and he drove through. However, the LED display only read 5 crowns, and so there was a red light. There's a video monitor, and if he doesn't get to an Esso station within three days with his cash, he'll get a major fine. Astri put 15 crowns in, pulled over, and gave the man his 5 crowns back and tried to explain the situation to him. He was unable to understand why the light was red. Eventually, she drove on, leaving him to his dire fate.
Tunnels are a special hazard. There are trolls hiding under bridges, of course, but in tunnels you get angels. You can hear their ethereal voices inside the car, especially if any member of my family is with you. Eventually, every tunnel produced a four-voice choir of angels. Conversation is interrupted and people run out of breath.
Astri's father was a sea captain when she was growing up. He sailed the seven seas, got into fights in places like Rio de Janeiro, and generally lived up to the image. Today, he has an impressive looking uniform and works in the harbor traffic control center, with a spectacular view of the harbor and underlings with multiple computer screen displays of traffic in Oslo Harbor. He said that the storm today (what storm?) was so bad that the Danish ferry had to try several times to dock, and other boats were delayed.
By now it was full dark. We trotted over to the bookstore near the University, where we were to meet Astri's brother. It took three phone calls, but we eventually connected. He looked as cheerful and fresh as ever, but only stayed long enough to greet us all warmly (including all my family members) before vanishing into the Norwegian night.
Next, I wanted a bank. Another example of the difference in money value here, is that a low-level job here pays about 240,000 crowns a year, which at today's exhange rate is $40,000. The money that looked so empowering at home is pretty pitiful here.
Besides a bank, I wanted a place to upload this blog and check my e-mails. Rumor has it that you can buy a card from a kiosk and use it in the designated wireless zone that goes with the card. But none of the vendors in the many kiosks we tried had ever heard of wireless, not to mention selling access to it. And the pee-soaked Internet cafe that we found used to have a way for people to connect their laptops to their modem, but not any more. And no wireless.
Now, the banks were closed. Suddenly, Astri said, "Do you want to go in the basement here and see what there is that we can eat?" An offer like that is impossible to refuse. It was sleazy Oriental food, which vanished almost as soon as we picked up our chopsticks.
I still wanted wireless access and a bank. We spotted The Avalon, a goth haunt with role playing games, fantasy books, and pewter dragons. They'd know. Hansi did, but he wasn't there. A Nice Lady told me that what I wanted was a Hot Spot, where I could get free wireless. Yeah.
You can get money changed at the train station. So, we ambled down the mall, getting sucked into the shops as we went. Eventually, we arrived at the train station, where the exchange machine would not accept my $100 bills. I have to go to a bank. But, wonder of wonders, when I checked for wireless, La Baguette was available. They stayed open just long enough for me to upload the blog, but not long enough to check it or my e-mails. Time for more shopping. We strolled around and ended up at the fortress. Walked around the walls, got in the car, and drove home.
You might think this was the end of it, but no. We had a second dinner, then hung around playing Boggle, reading, and generally not going to bed until 2.
Tuesday, 21.December.04
Winter Solstice. It snowed just a little last night. A mild mannered day. I'm having a hard time remembering anything at all that we did, but of course, when you wake up past noon, the day seems rather short. Yesterday we blanched, skinned, and ground almonds, and today we combined them with powdered sugar and egg white to make marzipan.
Asa and her two-year-old Ella came over, but Ella was firm about no fiddling. Astri made fennel bread, I made challah with rosemary and chili olives. Read Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar, a well written space opera. Did a watercolor of the smithy.
Around 8:30, Ellinor arrived on the bus from Sweden with whiskey, chocolate, and mysterious packages. The hot pink wrapping paper that ended up in the fire starter basket caught my papercutting eye, and I mystified everyone by ironing it. "Just ironing the fire starter," I said. "Time to spruce this place up a bit." When The Spink explained about the kittens romping around in the snow outside, Ellinor said that her mother says the best cat is flat and cold.
The question is, will Astri have the guts to dye my hair a rather trashy red? Or not?
The answer is, yes. You may view the entire process, as photographed by Ellinor, by clicking here
Monday, 20.December.04
After a 2:30 night, we awoke late. Time to go to Tonsburg! Last night's snow was just enough to make the forty-minute drive breathtakingly lovely.
The nice lady at the library said that they'd get wireless in February. Until then, there is none in Tonsburg, and no Internet Cafe either. In the basement of the library are the ruins of a monastary, nicely cemented over and with reading benches pretty much on top of the thousand year old walls.
Then, to the streets. The Salvation Army, where we found a lice sweater for The Spink but not for David, and a nicely illustrated fairy tale book for me. The oekologisk (organic) food store for cheese and honey wafers. A book store for Astri's Christmas gifts. Another book store. A dress shop to visit with the proprietor, a former neighbor of Astri's. Another place where they didn't have David's lice sweater. That same sweater also wasn't at the "big men" store.
"Are you hungry?" asked Astri. Yes. We went to a tandoori place with red decorations and red food. I had chili chicken, which put paid to the cold that's been toying with my immune system. Nan, cucumber-yoghurt, spinach and cheese, rice, raisin chicken. We did it full justice.
Another bookstore, an antiqvariat which had a nice blend of antiques and cheapo books. Our favorite was a falling-apart 1830's book with an ornate red cover called "The Hive of Britain." It was not tongue in cheek. It was about the various laboring classes, with illustrations of shepherds, wainwrights, and shipwrights at work. Alas, the price was just a bit too overpowering to actually get it. But we did get a PG Wodehouse, Harry Potter og Fangen fra Azkaban, and an old one by Jakob Breda Bull for Astri's stepfather.
Not time to leave yet. We climbed up the snowy streets to the kindergarten (I think a kindergarten is a preschool). Right there in the play yard, the Viking king Sigurd's two sons fell in battle, and they built the mounds on top of them. Astri told us about the death of one of St Olav's men, Tormud Kolbrunnarskald, in another battle. He had an arrow through his chest, and was brought to the old women healers. They proposed to feed him leek soup, because if they then could smell leeks around his wound, then he had punctured something vital and wouldn't live. "Nah," said Tormud, ripping the arrow out of his chest and gazing contemplatively at it. "The king feeds me well enough. You see? There's fat around my heart." Whereupon he died.
Then The Spink ordered us to the castle, built on the site of an 800's fortress. It was on a little hill overlooking the partially frozen Tonsburg Bay. Inside the perimeter walls, everything seemed miniature. There were the ruins of a very small church built in the 1190's, St Mikaels Church. The ruins of the stables had about the floor space of my house, which is small. The keep, rebuilt from ruins in the 1800's, was three stories high but only about five or six yards per side. This was the royal residence until the 1300's.
For me, seeing the actual sites where stuff happened is a powerful experience. I tend to distance myself from history, thinking of it as black-and-white, or somehow as two-dimensional as the pages of the books where I read about it. But when I can throw a snowball collected on the very steps of the castle entryway, I realize viscerally that centuries of people have done the same. Not only that, but though they may have been shorter than me and less well laundered, their thoughts and emotions must have at least some of the time matched mine as they looked down at the frozen bay or felt a tug of religious feeling at the church doors.
Saturday, 18.December.04
Lovely day. Spent a freezing morning putting a second coat of paint stripper on the chairs and removing it. The kittens helped.
The Spink and I took the three kittens and their mother around to the manor, down the oak mall, and to the frozen lake. The sky was grey, the lake was grey, the kittens were grey, the rocks were grey, the trees were grey. When it's all subtle like that, you forget brilliant colors and see the beauty in minor shifts of texture and temperature.
On the other hand, when we got back, I spent the next two hours ironing brilliant red and orange fabrics, the ones that are the raw material for Astri's mother's quilt. Outside, it snowed just enough to coat the ground and allow The Spink and me to throw snowballs at each other. Orion hung over the horizon so I guess we won't get more snow tonight. Oh, and the North Star is way, way up there. The closer you get to North, the harder it is to find it.
I'm enjoying fitting in to somebody else's domestic routine. With David's erratic schedule and our barely functional household systems, it's never routine at home. Something is always broken, somebody is always unexpectedly there or not there, and the artistic muse is the worst of them all. Here, having brought only a limited amount of art supplies, and staying in a civilized place, there's a chance to breathe. But, it's small inside and very cold outside. We are in each other's laps. I'm used to that from years of small children, but in recent months at home I've had the chance to spend time alone. It's a luxury that's beyond price.
Saturday, 18.December.04
Another domestic day. The gravel pile went from a pile to an inch-thick layer on the grass. "In my country, we would've put a tarp down before dumping the gravel," I said. Astri rolled her eyes. "I assumed the carpenter would do that, but he didn't," she said. So now, we are wondering how to get the stuff out of the lawn. The pieces are big enough to pose a danger for the mower, but small enough so that you can't really pick them up by the each. That's always the question, isn't it, whether to take great care in the prep or whether to just charge ahead and get the job done. Being careful makes much more logical sense, but from what I've seen of how most people work, if they thought they'd have to be careful, they'd never start in the first place. So maybe a bit of horrible aftermath is the price we have to pay for progress.
Then we drove down to the smithy, where Astri and some friends had had a crafts fair. Some of her chairs, candlesticks, and a table were still there in that moldy whitewashed building. The traditional chair of this area is red with a black seat and a short back. Someone had painted two of her chairs lavender, an abomination in the sight of a folk art fanatic. So, I propped them on a handy snowdrift and coated them with paint stripper. Back when I did that as a little girl in California, the paint bubbled up right behind the brush. Here, it took an hour to bubble. Either it's a safety thing, or it's the difference between 90 degree weather and 30 degree weather. By the time I got everything scraped off, it was dark.
But in the meantime, I'd sanded and oiled the little table. We brought it inside to stand next to the stove for a few hours, and now it's in the bedroom with a wonderfully hideous embroidered table doily on it.
We are eating like nobody's business. So Astri had to rush off to the store and get groceries. The perfect time to fiddle. Then, as she made mutton meatballs, I ironed everything in sight, including yesternight's paper cuts. The current load of laundry included the sheets we got at the flea market, which iron quite satisfactorily to Billie Holliday singing about how she needs her man even though he treats her bad. Nothing like a steaming iron in response to that.
Whilst moving the cookbooks to the new shelf above the refrigerator yesterday, we found the recipe for a dessert that we invented last time I was here. It was just as good this time around:
Strange Lemon Cake
Cream:
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar together.
Add 1 tsp baking powder
grated rind of one lemon (actually, after tasting, I added another half grated lemon, and also the juice from it. I like my cakes tart.)
3 grated carrots
2 Tablespoons cocoa powder
1 cup flour
2 teaspoons cinnamon
4 egg yolks
Fold in: 4 whipped egg whites
Bake like a cake until done.
Strange Boiled Lemon Icing
Boil together: 1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup cocoa
juice of that lemon you grated when making the cake
Then to the brass candlesticks! While Astri quilted her mom's log cabin Christmas present, I read Terry Pratchett's The Monstrous Regiment aloud to The Spink while we both polished brass candlesticks. Wow. It's almost enough to convert me over to polishing stuff for myself. Almost.
Friday, 17.December.04
We decided to be domestic today. Astri made a shelf for above the two refrigerators and started a bed railing. While installing the shelf, we discovered that the window did not line up with the door or the ceiling, and none of those matched the level. The wall curved away from the shelf by an inch in six feet. Astri re-screwed and cursed. I moved wheelbarrows of gravel from her lawn to the muddy potholes in the driveway. We vacuumed, dusted, washed, and generally bustled. Astri got a splinter in her eyelid when she was skilsawing (no goggles), and went to the clinic where it was fixed without fuss.
Late in the day, Astri went off to dinner with the neighbors. To the tune of Gillian Welsh, the Spink did her algebra and I did a papercut of a fish. It's one in the morning and past time for bed.
Thursday, 16.December.04
It turns out that Sweden, while doubtless a wonderful country, doesn't have wireless internet access either.
To find this out, we left Eidsfoss at 9. The thaw is pretty much complete now, and farms looked prim and tidy with their yellow stubble or short green cover crops or big clayey lumps of ploughed rows laid out in rectangles. We passed a fox roadkill. With different company, I would've suggested breaking in the new freezer with it.
Through tunnels and across the Oslo Fjord on the ferry and through more tunnels to the woods of Sweden. "We're doing a Harry trip," said Astri. Harries wear baggy jogging suits and get drunk in lawn chairs in front of their campers and go to Sweden to buy pork, exactly like us.
But before the pork, we parked in downtown Stromstad, a quaint little seaport with a canal running down the main street and wooden curlicues ornamenting eaves and balconies. We rushed around in the rain, peering into the shops, trying unsuccessfully to find wireless internet, and feeding the parking meter. Astri treated us to a hearty goulash at a modest cafe. Before we left we folded our napkins into origami cranes.
There were advertisements everywhere for a flea market to benefit the sailors' rescue guild. In a growing gale, we walked along boulders around which buildings were tucked, but eventually resorted to the car to find it. There it was, between a boatyard and a Middle Eastern grocery store. It turned out to be a warehouse full of the most amazing kitsch. The Spink bought a gilded vase with a shepherdess on it, Astri narrowly missed buying a rocking chair, and I got a linen bedsheet. The guy at the desk, an old salt if I ever saw one, gave me a set of pamphlets on the wooden ship that was "our own." When we left, someone had checked out the back of the truck but the doors were still locked.
Next, the pork. We drove to a mall designed for the Harrys of the world. The biggest section was a supermarket like a Winco, or a Costco without quality control, and with a Scandinavian flair. There was a wall of herring, another of flatbread, and we had to search for chicken that didn't come pre-salted and -sugared. It was great!
Made a brief stop in the car to schnarf down grilled chicken, bread, and chocolate, and then trotted across the dark, rainy parking lot to the shops. There was only one for us: an Indian import store kind of like Pier One. We inspected every item thoroughly, delighting in the lime greens, pinks, silks, mirrors, beads, patchouli, and brass statues.
Time to leave. Just into Norway, though, The Spink reminded us that there was an old fortress just off the highway, and could we see it? Well, okay, if we must. We must.
That fortress was the highlight of the day. We were the only tourists at that time of evening, in the gale and the rain, but there were floodlights and reasonable signage. It was on the top of a rocky hill, overlooking Sweden, which has invaded or threatened to invade many times. Walls, bunkers, and buildings were dated from the 1600's to the 1900's. There were curtain walls, the Upper and Lower Dragon's Bastions, and a wildly thrashing Christmas tree guarding a row of cannons. The Spink ran around like a windup toy, shrieking with delight at each new match with one of the fantasy books she's been reading. She even found a little wicker gate at the back that was accidentally left open (can't remember whether that was Brian Jacques or Terry Pratchett), and a dank jail cell with an iron door and a ceiling that dripped. She saved a blade of grass plucked from within ten feet of where King Karl XII of Sweden had been killed, possibly by his own troops who were tired of being unsuccessfully led to invade Norway.
Wednesday, 15.December.04
The Spink is working on a juniper wood spoon. She has a collection of traditional knives in scabbards, which she sharpens sedulously as she works. There is only one bloody knuckle, so far.
Asa came by to borrow, then return the vacuum cleaner. She stayed the second time to play fiddle. She remembered the tunes I taught her 18 months ago. We worked on the new ones from Still Reeling the Waldron Way (Ruby got the print shop to do three right then and there so I could bring them here with me).
After she left, the three of us went on a rather slushy walk to enjoy dusk. Along the lake, then up a service road paralleling the ski trail. Incongruously in the juniper pine forest, there are street lamps that lit as we walked. The trail took us down to a cluster of houses that's peppered with Astri's friends. We barged into Merethe's house. "What's for dinner?"
Lapscouse (vegetable and hot dog stew) and dinner rolls. Afterwards, the 7 year old boy and his friend set up a scenario with their action figures so that we were under fire. The 10 year old, who is studying English, vanished lest he be called upon to perform. The 14 year old played Mancala with his mom. I taught them a clapping game involving a lot of pounding on the table (an American tradition).
David's asked me to get one of those traditional sweaters they call "lice sweaters" here, for the little specks of contrasting wool knitted into the design for extra warmth (not for the lice). We saw some, sold by Pakistanis, at street stands in Oslo, but the large ones were sold out. Merethe had knitted all the ones in her closet, and loaned me the pattern. We'll see.
Tuesday, 14.December.04
Maybe late mornings will be the norm. Astri's dad gave her a refrigerator and freezer for Christmas, so she went off to Holmestrand to pick them out, along with her neighbor Asa, who needs a vacuum cleaner. The Spink and I stayed behind, doing origami (Spink) and embroidery (me).
Astri and Asa returned in high spirits. Instead of a vacuum cleaner, Asa had accidentally bought a waffle iron. They'd had to ask a neighbor to help drive up the icy driveway. It's thawing now, and so the ice is wet. The Spink and I went out to help unload the appliances and muscle them around. The freezer went into the cellar, where it will begin its useful life Thursday when we return from Sweden with meat for the Christmas feast. The refrigerator is a box that could hold a crouching adult in it, or perhaps a kneeling ostrich with its head in the sand. It will replace the larger one that's been mainly used for storing moldy jars of jam, or so Astri claims. Me, I can't imagine how all the stuff in the old one will fit into the new one. But then, I'm the lady with a cooler on the back porch and no refrigerator at all, so I suppose it's possible.
Asa stayed for tea. Her English isn't perfect but her lively conversation confirmed what I've noticed before; that cheerful confidence will get you much further in social situations than careful correctness. We sang rounds and then she left to pick her toddler up from daycare, promising to return tomorrow for fiddling. Last time I was here, she astonished me with her ability to commit a fiddle tune to memory after hearing it once. She'd even remember them a week later. "Well then," she explained it. "I've been playing on stage for many year and one must learn to pick things up, you see."
I've never gotten the skill of memorizing; don't understand what to work on in order to get there. I can't even remember jokes from one hour to the next (though I do know when I've heard one before). I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance but not the Preamble to the Constitution, which I had to say every morning for the 180 days of sixth grade. I know the first verses of about two hundred folksongs and the second verse of about five. After playing fiddle tunes on the piano, flute, mandolin, or fiddle since I was twelve, I can play "Over the Waterfall" from memory, and sometimes "Angelina Baker."
This blankness doesn't seem to interfere with my ability to know stuff; I score high on academic tests, and seem to be able to teach up through 12th grade fairly well. But ask me to be exact and you'll be disappointed. I wonder if it might have something to do with having learned to read very young. I never needed to remember stuff because I could always look it up. And it might have something to do with how I organize knowledge. I seem to have a sense of larger structures and what their rules are. But the details are, apparantly, of almost no interest (a friend once bluntly said, "form over content"). And it could have something to do with my sense that things are, in general, open to change. Last time I looked, the world population was 6 billion but it's bound to be more today. I don't cook by recipies but by my sense of cooking chemistry, ethnic combinations, and what's in the cooler at the time. And I can't hear chord changes very well so it's pretty silly to get all worried about what's blues and what isn't.
As I get older, what memory I have is weaker. Last year, for example, I taught astronomy and cosmology. They're interesting enough but, aside from giving me a framework on which to hang my understanding of the Universe, not fundamentally thrilling for me. Simultaneously with teaching it, I took an astronomy course from the University of Wisconsin, bookmarked some NASA and amateur websites, and wrote sample papers for my students on the planets, stars, and cosmology. But what do I remember? Um. The Summer Triangle and the Coathanger constellation in it, visible through binoculars. Some quirks of nanotechnology. A collapsed star, Lucy, that's a huge diamond. Lots of overall stuff but very few details.
I do not believe, with Sherlock Holmes, that the mind is like a desk with only so many cubbyholes and when you fill them up, you can't learn any more. Quite the contrary. It's been my experience that the more you learn in any one field, the more you're able to navigate in any other field, if you pay attention (In education, some studies show that kids can't easily extend knowledge from one micro category to another. But I think that has to do with faith. If you believe, as I do, that at a deep level things make sense, then linking and networking knowledge becomes a conscious practice that someone without that faith would find a waste of time.)
But, you want to know about Norway. Walked along the frozen lake this afternoon in the blue light of the protracted sunset. The yellow house lights reflecting off the blue-white ice is very pretty. Met nobody on the road, and only a very few cars. There's a widespread opinion here that Americans are fat because they get no exercise, but I certainly see more people out and about back home than here. But there's no denying that everyone I've seen here is thin.
After a huge and greasy lamb dinner, a neighbor came by to look at Astri's button collection. They very kindly stopped the conversation in the middle to tell me that she was telling a very interesting story about a bargain the devil made with a fiddler. It is occasionally amusing to not understand the language. A few days ago, a similar experience happened when we met Leif on the road. Astri interrupted the conversation only once, to tell me that he wanted to borrow the other saw instead. "Ja," I said. And then there are the (rare) occasions when a patch of Norwegian conversations shimmers up through the fog into comprehensible. Strange stuff.
In order to prevent too much Norwegian from ruining the day, we played Scrabble until midnight.
Monday, 13.December.04
Today's Santa Lucia, but we all overslept and so it passed away in the icy fog that's covering the lakes.
Camilla and I went on a long walk along the lower, unfrozen lake. Eidsfoss is a one-street town which dribbles along the county road, bordered by the lake on one side and low cliffs on the other. Houses are very small, trim and tidy looking with electric tiered candlesticks in the windows. It only took a half hour to pass the last of the houses and walk along a swampy meadow at the lakeside.
After a spinach and pasta dinner, we cut out several traditional mitten patterns to embroider, read aloud from Terry Pratchett's The Monstrous Regiment, sang Norwegian Christmas carols (but only after blowing out the Chanukah candles), folded origami cranes, and decided to go to Sweden Thursday so Astri could buy food for the Christmas breakfast she'll give to the neighbors. Norway's not part of the European Union partly because it doesn't want to give up its stricter environmental and food quality laws (although now that Bush has been elected, they're talking about joining up in order to make Europe a stronger counterbalance). Norwegians in general like that their food is more likely to be organic and grown under sustainable conditions, but when faced with buying enough for a feast, Sweden's much cheaper.
12.December.04
Started the day with a moose papercut. Moose are big, so that took most of the morning. Then we walked across the creek and up the hill to cut a juniper from the foundry forest. "Isn't that illegal?" we asked nervously. "No, why should it be? I'm just going to get some juniper," said our lovely hostess. The boughs will be for a wreath, the trunk to carve butter knives with. So now you know.
In the evening, we went to Sandvika for a salmon dinner with Solvi and Ole Bjorn. The atmosphere was convivial, and we made tentative plans to meet again in Rendalen, "Reindeer Valley" where they live part time.
We've been throwing plans around right and left. Maybe we could go to Provence where Solvi has a place built into the walls of a castle? Maybe we could make the three-day drive north of the Arctic Circle and visit some of Astri's old friends? Maybe we should hold a crafts fair next weekend? In addition to these ideas, all of which we eventually (tomorrow) decided not to do, there are the Real Plans which include a visit from Elinor, a mutual friend from Sweden, who will stay here for a week while her parents stay at the manor house, a visit to Rendalen, and home improvement stuff like painting the bed and cupboards, making and installing curtains, and making bookshelves.
I lay in bed drowsing in and out of sleep until 7 the next morning, when I finally fell thoroughly asleep.
Saturday, 11.December.04
Jet lag's an odd thing. Couldn't get to sleep last night, finally dropped off at three. Woke up at six. Did yoga, then a bird papercut, then cleaned the ashes out in the stove and laid a fire, split a few pieces of kindling, and made a six-egg chicken and olive omelette. The two others woke reluctantly at 10, and I accidentally fell asleep at 11.
After brunch, Astri decided to go to Holmestrand for groceries. She rounded us all up and off we went around several small frozen lakes and cute red farmhouses. She says that the larger farms would paint their outbuildings with yellow ochre and the main house with white, while poorer folk used the cheapest paint, red. Even in town, you don't see many other house colors, but here in the countryside it's either white, red, brown, or the very occasional yellow.
Holmestrand, as the name suggests, is on the beach, but it's in a fjord so it looks much like the San Juan Islands; flat sea, not very distant islands, gulls. Hardware store for brass house numbers. Anatolian grocery store for chili olives. A botique saturated with twee little trolls for fresh ground coffee. A seedy grocery store for flour, onions, and toilet paper; and a classier grocery store for Danish ryebread, marinated raw salmon (gravlaks), and St Alban's cheese.
At home, we were greeted by three fuzzy kittens and their mother, The Empress. They skittered over the ice and sat on the groceries as Astri searched her pockets for the door key. She let them in and, since they were staring at her in a marked manner, opened a can of cat food. WHAM! The Empress was so eager to get at the food that she sank her teeth into Astri's hand. In a trice, they had finished off the bowl. We were aghast. Does nobody feed them? The neighbors who are owned by The Empress apparantly left for the holidays without making proper arrangements for her. 
We waited a bit so they wouldn't vomit, and then Astri fed them a can of tuna. Being less eager this time, each cat grabbed a tuna chunk and ran off under something to eat, growling ferociously, then ran back for more until that bowl was also licked clean. Oh dear. We waited a bit longer, then fed them a quarter of a cooked chicken, which they ate, bones and all.
Across the creek and up the hill lives one of Astri's oldest friends, Marethe. We negotiated the icy driveway and hung out at her kitchen table, rolling out pepper cookie dough and drinking glogg, a kind of clove-prune beverage which is usually spiked, but not this time because of The Spink and Marethe's three children.
The Spink and I begged off early, and went home via the Manor House, which was all lit up for Christmas, with guests in tuxedos and candles and stuff. We went home and it's bedtime.
Friday, 10.December.04
We meant to wake up early to go to Oslo, but didn't. Not only that, but then I realized that if I wanted to get the photos printed for the exhibit, they'd want them in at 300dpi and sized to 15x20 cm. So that took a while. But finally, we were on our way.
Oslo is about an hour north through snowy farmland. The outskirts look about like any other city. Many of the buildings in the Sentrum date from the late 1800's (there's also a medieval fortress), and feature either rounded walls or terraced roof lines. To the left you see an image of the Parliament Building, which is just down the hill from the Royal Palace. As the banner hints, today was the day that they granted the Nobel Peace Prize to that African environmentalist; she says that without a healthy environment, people don't have good food or good health, and without those things, there is no peace. She's famous here for remarking that AIDS was a European plot to wipe out the Africans but I guess that's just expected bycatch from her effective, take-no-prisoners personality that gets stuff done.
We rushed about. With the dollar at less than 6 crowns, prices were gulpingly high. A paperback book, for example, is $30. To develop one 15x20 photo, it's $9. Not knowing whether I could even sell one, I decided to wait after I got home to have them printed. We went in and out of places, including an antique store, two science fiction stores, a pastry store, and whatnot. The Spink was drawn to the Royal Palace.
We crept up the very icy ceremonial steps in the dark (it was after four) down which a vip wife had once driven her car after a state function, and stood on the ice to watch the guards march back and forth to keep from freezing to death, and watched a car go through the gates, and generally get thrilled by the proximity of hereditary might. Norway and Denmark shared a king after the Black Plague in the 1400's, which killed off the entire Norwegian royal line. In 1814 they got a constitution and united with Sweden. In 1905, they became independent, trolling for kings from the Danish Royal family. We followed up the Palace visit by a costume store.
When we emerged, there were rib-thumping booms, and the sky turned red. Then green. Then red, and after casting about a bit we decided that the Nobel Prize must have just been awarded. We narrowly avoided being run down by police motorcycles with blinking blue lights (see photo right), followed by the black limo in which we thought we could actually see her (don't bother to look at the photo, which I took one second before the limo drove by), but maybe it was Oprah, who was also there.
Then a quick visit to Astri's mom in Sandvika, and home to dinner, watercolors, Boggle, Algebra (The Spink), and general late night fun.
Thursday, 9.December.04
Having breakfasted sumptuously, The Spink and I went on a walk while Astri went on a cleaning binge (nothing to do with us, I'm sure). The Spink once said it was like taking a dog on a walk, but instead of checking every tree for pee-mail, I check every window for photographability.
Eidsfoss is an ironworks town. The foundry was built in 1697, says the plaque above the seedy looking main office just down Astri's driveway. There's a deserted looking yard surrounded by abandoned looking buildings. The place used to make wood stoves, and finished up its life drawing wire. I'm not sure what's going on there now, but not manufacturing. There's a museum that's always closed.
Down the path along the lakeside is an old bathhouse. The plaque says it was built in 1915, and public health improved dramatically thereafter. Especially in winter, people used to die of tuberculosis right and left.
Further on is a train station, built around the same time as the bathhouse and also abandoned. There's a pile of roof tiles in the woods near a tree that hass a sign nailed to it that says "pissegrop." Across the road in the woods is the public daycare, full of fat-suited screaming short people who yelled "hei!" at us for quite some time.
The Spink wanted to go to the frozen lake again, so I took her down the highway to the church. The graveyard isn't as interesting as it could be, since nobody gets to rest in peace for very long. The tiny church graveyards fill up in about thirty years, so earlier remains are exhumed and ... well, I don't know what heappens to them, but in any case, the gravestones date from the 1980's.
On the way home, The Spink had to listen to me Make Remarks. She's an island girl, used to walking in the middle of the road and not moving out of the way at once when she hears the sound of a car (which is the same sound that wind in Douglas-firs makes). The Norwegians, on the other hand, don't seem to do defensive driving. Everyone speeds, tailgates, and generally drives like guys in silver sublimation cars. The Spink pointed out that if she walked in the ditch when a car came, she'd get snow in her boots. Luckily, there's a shortcut through the Manor House grounds, also built in the late 1600's. We went there, and I found some windows. The Spink played in the snow.
Back home, I worked on the 93 (!) new photos while everyone else read. Dinner was chicken salad and a whole lot of chocolate, followed by chocolate, Boggle, embroidery, more reading, fiddling, chocolate, and a walk on the ice in bare feet.
Wednesday, 8.December.04
Did yoga in the middle of the night, hoping that I could go back to sleep. Sort of. Read half of Elizabeth Moon's Trading in Danger, a well written space opera. Her The Deed of Paksenarion was more tightly written, though. Went through hundreds of photos from the last month and decided to sort out the ones that are mostly white. Astri and I have half-decided to put on a Christmas Fair in the Renaissance building she has access to. Maybe it will happen. Maybe I'll sell some photos of white things. It will be fun to work towards it, anyway.
We started the morning with a bread, cheese, and fish feast (the neighbor's cat suddenly splayed herself against the window in a subtle hint that she was available to help with the fish). Gravlaks is raw salmon marinated in salt, sugar, pepper, and dill. We kept on eating for a long time. Afterwards, nipped down to the grocery to pick up some coffee, but nixed the dental floss because it was $6. Then, up a steep hill on a snowy path under oaks, and back around home.
In the photo, you can see the frozen Lake Bergsvanne (the name means "mountain water") in the center. The Spink is running down the hill in red, and on the left is a bunker from WWII.
At home, settled down to a long, pleasant afternoon of jet lag and cocoa. Astri made a menorah for us by cutting a piece of laminated board in an arc. In the picture, she's sanding it. Then, she drilled nine holes, and assigned us to paint it tomorrow.
At dusk (3:00), we visited the neighbors quail coop and got an offer to use his music practice building. That'll be good, because I'm not sure how to fiddle in a duplex where the neighbors are always home.
In the evening, while Astri rushed around cleaning up after the construction crew, I made a feast from lamb ribs with lingonberry jam, sauteed carrots and onions, and the charmingly named "lompe," which are a cross between tortillas and latkes.
Just as we finished off the wine and I put the pear upside-down cake in the oven, we realized that it was 7:00 (temperature dropping from zero Celsius to minus three) and the library was going to close soon. So we rushed out across the driveway and got books on birds and mittens. The librarian, a guant, sweet looking woman in her 70's, nearly had a cow when she saw The Spink's bare feet.
Tuesday, 7.December.04
Obviously, the first thing to do was to visit Ikea. We did that. Oslo is snow covered and snug looking. Then off to the grocery store and bank. We tried to stay up as late as possible and barely made it to 9:00.
But ah! such a barely! Astri's remodeling is almost finished. The "almost" included a lot of razors, screws, shavings, sawdust, and nicked knives left by the electrician. In between unpacking pecans and woolies and washing maple syrup off of things, we swept and scrubbed.
Somewhere in there was cheese and bread served on lime green plates. There was even a (small) bowl of minced green onion for those of us of the vegetable-eating persuasion.
Take Two, of course. It was either that, Scrabble, or Boggle. Then a very slippery walk around the stream that connects the large frozen upper lake to the smaller unfrozen lower lake. The Spink and I need to work on negotiating ice. She collected an armful of interesting snowy bits to take home, but finally realized that a good portion of the subcontinent is covered with it so maybe she could just come back tomorrow for another look. Astri put a considerable chunk of it down my back for reasons that I do not care to disclose.
Final note: While it says Tuesday, 7 December, 5:10 pm on my computer, it says Wednesday, 2:10 am on my watch. If anyone wants to know what the future is like, I'm in it.
Monday, 5.December.04
Yesterday anticipated today with lovely photos. We continued the "away" direction with more ferry ride, then the in-laws. Tried to visit Bk on the way but his roommate claimed he was studying for finals. Dropped off his copy of Spirited Away, a must-see movie.
Went to The Eating Factory, a Japanese restaurant, where we must have met some kind of gourmand standard with boiled sea squirt, heavily horseradished octopus legs, and creme brulee.
Then a pleasant evening (see left) arranged around cold egg nog, warm conversation, and a hot bath.
6.December.04
And the following day, we rolled around the pits of Seatac, looking for a notary public to certify David's note that it was okay for The Spink to come with me. One of those stuffed-into-their-nylons, powder-blue women at a real estate agency obligingly whapped her stamp onto his affadavit, but after we left, we realized that any bureaucrat worth his salt would have nixed it on the grounds that she didn't verify David's ID. So we found a person named Tiffany
at an agency that gives $50 loans for $7.50 and performs various other loan shark type services, and she did exactly what we wanted for $5. Having taken these precautions, nobody asked.
Everything went well. Security checks were quick. One bottle of maple syrup came apart (were they checking for syrup bombs?) but everything in that suitcase was individually wrapped in plastic bags so it was okay. I read half of Jung and Synchronicity, about synchronicity as a third factor in the universe along with causality and teleology (working towards rather than out of) and Camilla read half of The Queen's Fool, about a Jewish conversa who worked for the Renaissance Queens Mary and Elizabeth.
By the time we got to Oslo we had just about enough of pretzels, buns, rice, potatoes, and bread but luckily Astri was there to meet us. With purple hair.
4.December.04
Tomorrow we'll start the first leg of the journey to Norway. And, because I'm writing this tomorrow, I already know what happened and can show you a sneak preview of the boat ride off, followed by the hasty junk food at the ferry landing and then the ferry ride itself.
And today, well, we spent it packing and repacking. There's clothes, of course, but mostly it's been trying to keep a balance between taking enough stuff to do so that we won't racket around Astri's house being annoying, but not so much stuff that we have insulated ourselves against the new experience. Whereas I pride myself on being able to pack a large daypack with what I'll need for a month on the road in Central Europe, now I'm looking at four suicases so large that The Spink could comfortably fit into two of them, and uncomfortably into the other two.
Is there a virtue in packing light? Well, yeah. If everybody pared down their needs to next to nothing, we'd be able to cram far more people onto the planet. Most spiritual traditions preach the virtue of poverty. It's not just for social justice but because you shouldn't clutter your mind up with stuff that, in the big picture really doesn't matter.
On the other hand, here's a little proof that you'll end up with too much stuff:
Either you have too much, just enough, or too little.
If you have too much, point proven.
You are unlikely to have just enough because your needs keep changing. You'd seldom monitor fast enough, and so you'd seldom be in this state.
If you have too little, then you'd need more stuff. In 21st century America, almost nobody is unable to meet their needs. It is the nature of middleclass life that we will quickly glom on to the things we need to fix the "too little" problem. And then we'd either have a perfect amount (see above), or too much.
QED
3.December.04
I have incredibly profound thoughts, oh yes, and they keep roiling around in my incredibly profound mind, sometimes accompanied by a wisp of dream so that I know that it was the dream that structured the thought or vicey-versey, but then if I don't write them down they melt away like a bowl of caramel ice cream left three days in the refrigerator, with a hard rind of sugary stuff and probably salmonella oodling through it but nothing that can be used, and it is for this reason that I wonder if literacy is such a good thing, if it is the fact that I'm so dang literate that memories only have worth if they have been recorded; which may be why I cannot remember the intensity, the rightness of the insights that sit, now sticky and toxic, in the refrigerator of my mind.
2.December.04
Gave The Dancer a haircut.
1.Decmber.04
It's my birthday! Time to pour cement pilings!
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