Of flowers, real and otherwise

Well, summer is well and truly here! As if to punctuate this, Norway is experiencing it's hottest May on record. So, good thing that we're not in Norway then? That depends on how much you love cloudy weather :-). It is actually a fair bit cooler here than the temperatures yr.no is reporting for Asker on my weather app, so I'm not exactly complaining.

But let us rewind just a little bit. As the weather started warming up, I finally managed to get on the bike and get some trips in! Nothing spectacular, just the usual bits around Asker and the fjords. But seeing that I had done a sum total of one trip all of last summer, this is good news :-).

On the down side, this was the first year since moving to Norway that I didn't end up participating in the Holmenkollstafetten. One wonders if circumstances will conspire to make this an aberration or otherwise.

But I'm having too much fun to notice to be entirely honest :-). Managed to finish reading the InterWorld series. Which has an interesting authorship situation, it would appear. The first one was co-written by Neil Gaiman, hence my interest. The next two seem to not be. Now whether I felt this way because I noticed the complexity of separate 'written by' and 'story by' bits on the covers or just noticed it in the writing, the first book definitely feels a lot more distinctively Gaiman.

Which is not to say the other books are not worth a read. It's just that with Gaiman, you could pick up any of his books, regardless of target audience and find a certain level of thoughtfulness. This is present and accounted for in InterWorld, but seems to fade out and get rather overwhelmed by an excess of happenings in rather quick succession in the next two instalments.

Happily, the other book I finished in the mean time, Real Tigers by Mick Herron, gave me no such issues whatsoever :D. Having thoroughly enjoyed the first book of his Jackson Lamb series, I had felt a little bit let down by the second. This third one however, completely restores my faith in Herron as a writer capable of proper intrigue! It's a fast read this book, and kept me engaged without going even a little 'oh come on! really?!!' So enthralled was I with Real Tigers that I started immediately after with Spook Street... and came to a crashing halt a few pages in when my favourite character ended up with his head blown off...

I guess these things happen. But somehow, I've still not mastered the art of properly enjoying a book without getting at least somewhat sentimentally invested in the characters. So when, every so often, authors decide to just kill their fictional creations off, I am left with the burden of not quite fictional sorrow. Oh well.

Fortunately, with a wedding coming up in two days, and all the preparations for it, there have been other things on my mind! For one thing, there is the cake!! We've practically been baking for a week, with other preparations having gone on even longer (I present the 17th of May cake from earlier this month). 

(As an aside for anyone confused, it's not like I got married and transformed overnight into a master baker. It's just that my better half enjoys letting me help :-). Oh and also, the 17th of May! This year we decided to celebrate the Norwegian national day right at home in Asker with some friends. One of their daughters was participating in the kids parade for the first time, so it was definitely a bit of a special occasion.) 

So back to this wedding cake then. In this particular instance seven different flavours will be stacked up into one single cake. Preferably into ten tiers, but we shall see. People are losing sleep over how to get this mega-structure from here to where the reception is. Hopefully all shall be well.

So yes, life is happening and while we've lost one of the cats in this house, the other one seems friendlier than ever before. I guess you win some, you lose some.

PS. Go-karting is awesome!!! I can't believe I haven't written more about that! But oh well.