Buggre Alle this for a Larke

With the first snow of the season come and gone, I guess you could honestly say that it's now winter. And yet :). The temperatures have ventured into the teens, and while most of the trees have relinquished their leaves for another year, there are some that have held on doggedly. If only we had the sunshine for the flaming reds and oranges to look their best.

With it looking more and more like there'll be no travelling out of country for the rest of the year, we decided the best thing to do would be take a nice long weekend off. And not do too much with it :). So we ended up in the vicinity of the Rondane National Park once more.

This time though, instead of cycling around, we drove. And stayed at a very nice hotel with a very nice restaurant and indoor swimming pools, looking out onto some fantastically minimalist landscape :). We did go walking around, but that was more to break things up a bit, get in some properly fresh air.

A much needed break, methinks. All this darkness and now the accompanied return to judicious confinement can get to you, no? It's important to have some highs to celebrate and look back on/forward to.

That was a few weeks ago though. Before and since, the weeks seem to be floating by. It's been raining a lot. I heard from someone at work today that we (aka the Oslo region) have beat Bergen in the total rainfall received in October. This is significant because Bergen is the rainy place in Norway. Like, it's famous for it. Yeah, little things do keep me entertained :).

October is also notable because of the amount of reading I seem to have managed! Without particularly noticing it, I have to say. I've spent less than the usual amount of time on trains, seeing how I've been in to the office significantly less, but somehow I've managed to get through:

• Death (Amaaaaaaazing!!)
• The Yacoubian Building (Hmm, interesting, somewhat weird in bits, and also quite confusing. But then it was a book club book and I'm not that familiar with Egypt. In fact this book made me realize how unfamiliar I am with Egypt, despite, you know, all those pyramids I've been reading about for thirty odd years.)
• The Sandman: Book of Dreams (Some cool stuff, some strange stuff, and occasionally, an absolute gem of a short story!)
• Good Omens (More on this later.)
• Toe to Toe (Another book club book, in the main rather entertaining, but very "young writer" feeling. Or maybe just a different target audience? It was very quick to read, had very little by way of anything actually happening, and then it was all over and I was a bit like, whaaaaaa?! *confused face*)

Speaking of the gem in that pile though, Good Omens, what a book :D. I read it about eight years ago for the first time. Absolutely looooooooved it, and then for some reason (potentially related to travelling light, back when I was still into that sort of thing) left my copy with my cousin in Boston. Said copy has since travelled with him to Houston and then more recently back to New York and yet seems no closer to seeing the shores of Norway.

But then, somewhat out of the blue, I noticed a copy in the local library. The book had been on my mind for a while, ever since I'd heard that the new TV series had come out. So I checked it out, meaning to suggest it for book club reading next month, and promptly proceeded to read it very quickly last month...

Anyway, what a book!! There had been a small part of me that had been vaguely worried that I was recalling my previous reading experience with rose-tinted glasses etc. Not at all! The mix of Gaiman and Pratchett makes for particularly potent enjoyment. I was also quite bemused by how relevant some aspects of the narrative are today, climate change, consumerism, obsessing over aliens... Ok, maybe not that last one.

So yeah, I suppose on that front October was pretty cool. Always good to have some highlights to look back on and feel that warm fuzzy feeling that will help get past the otherwise dingy, dark, miserable and wet existence that is November in Norway.

Or maybe there'll be some early snow that'll actually stay all the way through to April and we'll have loads of fun cross-country skiing! Wishful thinking perhaps, but you never know! :)