Is this too early to be wishing for spring?

Not that I want to wish any of this year away. Despite the extra day, February felt brutally short :/. Although, while my abiding feeling about it, a bit like with January, is that it was incredibly busy with not a moment to catch my breath, that's probably, mostly, proximity bias :). I mean, this last week's been a bit crazy, but there've definitely been some quieter bits.

For instance, there was that Saturday evening when I went cross country skiing with my brother-in-law. It was snowing somewhat softly to start with. The woods were slowly darkening with dusk and it felt like we had the whole world to ourselves. Of course, that was in the midst of a weekend when I went skiing four times, and by the time we were getting back to the car the snow was practically driving horizontally into our eyes :D.

So, we've had our first visitors in the new place! Always best with family, particularly family you get along well with, to try out new things, like how easily can six adults and a nine month old fit in the apartment you moved into a couple of weeks earlier :D. The answer is, very happily, I'm glad to report!

And yes, we went skiing, sometimes all together, sometimes in smaller groups. It was a good thing too, the snow was nice and fresh, and it was nice to have an excuse to really make good use of it. Since then, there's neither been the time, nor the weather really. It's been above 0°C most of the month, and raining :(. Well, such is life.

I did get back to reading a bit more. In fact, I'm really chuffed that I managed to read a whole book in Norwegian! The book club book for the month was At Risk. But it wasn't available in English from the library. Or rather, someone had already borrowed the English copy. I noticed, however, that there was one available in Norwegian, and more or less as an experiment, decided to get it.

So, it happens to be the debut novel of former MI5 spymaster Stella Rimington, who I'd never heard of before, to be honest. And it's a spy novel :). The first of a whole series apparently. As far as debut novels go, I guess it was fine. I mean, this was no Slow Horses, but neither was it a difficult read, or annoying in any particular way.

That doesn't really sound like a roaring review does it? I suppose the main thing I found was that reading fiction in Norwegian, and fiction translated from English at that, reminded me of reading books borrowed from the library at school, nearly thirty-odd years ago :). There was a sense that I was probably missing some details, but at the same time, I was definitely getting the gist of the story and plot just fine :). Or some version of it at least!

Since then I've moved on to The Last Devil to Die, the fourth instalment of the Thursday Murder Club series. So far, I feel it's taking me a little bit more effort to get into. Possibly because of the significant gap since I read books one to three back to back :). Still good fun though!

Right, now if only the remaining stuff around the apartment would just fix itself, some new snow just show up so we can go skiing some more, and I could feel just a little bit less run off my feet, everything would be just perfect :D.

PS: Those new cross country skiing boots are just amaaaaaazing!!! :)