A thousand words

Wow! I never actually got to those photos from the US I was planning to post! In fact, I don't think I've even managed to sort them all out and even get them pointing the right way up or stitched together where that might be possible. Yup, it has been that busy!

Best thing though! Snow!!! Yes! Snow in November! That's like the whole miserable pre-winterness slashed to bits :). In case you were wondering, snow in winter in Norway is a good thing! The darkness doesn't seem quite as dark any more and skiing plans can start getting made! To be fair, snow that comes this early is hardly usable. Ordinarily this would be true, but this time around we actually managed to get a couple of pretty decent days of cross-country skiing!

One of those was actually in the night. Without the lights switched on by the kommune, no doubt highly sceptical of the possibilities of anyone deciding to go cross country skiing on a Friday evening :). As it turned out though, the moon was out and the clouds were not! So we had quite the fantastic time in the surreal bright snow covered landscape :).

Then of course it all melted, or nearly all of it. There was enough cold to keep some of the local lakes well enough iced over to allow a particularly adventurous fisherman to walk on, drilling holes into said ice looking for fish. Yeah, people can be weird like that here :P.

The other thing worth mentioning would be the travelling I suppose. My first visit to the Netherlands! It was quite nice! Despite the slight wetness and windiness. It was like winding the season clock backwards for one long weekend! Suddenly trees had leaves, and leaves had colour! And then of course there were stroopwaffels, pancakes with bacon and ginger, cumin flavoured cheese and other such awesome things :). Well worth the flatness shock for one used to Norway! Although the train ride from Schipol did remind me a lot of train rides in West Bengal. Lots and lots of flat green fields.

My first trip to Cambridge (the English version, not the American) was, in contrast, spent mostly at the mercy of a 4 month old :). Although I should add that lately I'm not quite so terrified around human beings that are too little to actually speak!

And finally there was Funny Girl. I hadn't actually read Nick Hornby in some time! Even one of the older ones I love. (I don't think I even re-read A Long Way Down before going to watch the film when that came out, what was it? Last year? Or maybe it was the year before. Time really has been getting away from me lately!) So it was quite interesting to see that I'd almost forgotten what it was like to read him. But I suspect some significant part of it may just have been that the author himself is a rather different person now than say when he wrote Fever Pitch!. 

It was a more relaxed read I found. I wouldn't rate it higher than the current holders of my personal top-rated-Nick-Hornby-novel award (which currently is a toss up between Fever Pitch and A Long Way Down with About A Boy a not too distant third) but it was definitely a solid middle-of-the-pack :). I particularly enjoyed the very end, having been rather let down on my second or third read of A Long Way Down when I though my copy must be missing a few chapters only to realize that my head had written in quite a bit of story after the actual ending in the book!

So there we have it. Autumn has firmly turned into winter and this year seems to be, if anything, hurtling even faster towards the end! But what a happening year it has been :). I'm not even going to pretend this time that the photos that should go with this post will appear within any reasonable sort of time-frame :D.