Saturday 31 March 2018

Things I haven't missed these last couple of months: alarms, office hour traffic, meetings, canteen food, looking out into a bright and sunny world from behind an office window.

Things I have missed a little: chats over coffee and hot-chocolate, sunshine on the terrace with a view all the way out to the fjord. And possibly, a sense of knowing what I'm doing :). So nothing irreplaceable then :D.


It's been a pretty cool almost-two-months of being out of a job. In fact, I've been out cross-country skiing so much, I think not having a job was a distinct positive this winter! And what a winter! There were a few times we went over tracks we had been to earlier in January, and the volumes of snow had pretty much altered the terrain!


I managed to go cross-country skiing more times and for greater distances than in any other previous season, but still managed to make sure we went somewhere new every time! I loved it! But now it's probably time for some warmth. The snow's slowly been melting and there's some interesting skating rinks in places where there shouldn't be skating rinks. For instance right outside our front door. But the thickness of the ice means we'll just have to wait for it to melt and watch our steps in the mean time :).


It's not all been just cross country though! Managed a couple of more days of downhill. But again, there was just this feeling that in a winter like this, cross country is the way to go :). I'm getting quite a bit better at it too! I think the longest I went in a day was fourteen kilometers. So not quite a proper Norwegian distance then, but still :).


I've also managed to read some books in the mean time. But Dead Lions, the follow up to the very entertaining Slow Horses was somehow a bit of a let down. I''m hoping the next one, Real Tigers will get back to some more entertaining plots. On the other hand there has been The Chess Men.


So, I don't think I've written anything at all about my experience of reading the previous two Lewis trilogy books, The Blackhouse and The Lewis Man. I decided to read all of them before doing that. In someways it's good that I did. Even though you could in theory read each book on its own and enjoy it, I definitely feel reading all three does add something to the experience.


Each book has it's distinct character if you will, anchored to the Isle of Lewis in different ways, but exploring different aspects of it, physically and otherwise. I particularly liked the way the secondary threads that spun off in the first book finally seemed to be tied up in the third. Not always to my liking, but then that's bound to happen with a book written by someone else :).


The other rather big thing this last month has been the saga of getting myself  a new laptop. Bit mundane and boring to go into too much detail, but the punchline is that after a couple of weeks of going back and forth with the shop to get odd things fixed, I've now got myself a fully working and very fast MSi job with programmable keyboard backlighting amongst other things :D. And in a case of upside down causality, ended up started gaming again on a PC for the first time in many years! Hopefully that will wear off soon :P.