July's almost over, so in some ways "summer" is too. Which is obviously objectively not true, but maybe the years in Norway are rubbing off on me gradually :). I did get to enjoy the peace and quiet for at least part of the holiday month! Cleared the decks a bit, sorted out some things that had been waiting to be sorted.
Yet somehow I'm left with the feeling that the crowds are going to come streaming back, the trickle will turn into a flood, and I'm going to end up feeling like there wasn't quite enough of the quiet. Oh well, it's quite possible that no amount of time would have done that anyway :).
Seems like we managed to more or less sidestep the properly warm weather though. The day we were leaving for the UK (more on that later) marked the start of the warmest part of the summer in Norway so far this year, and simultaneously a cooling off in England after a particularly long warm and dry spell. And it started raining again in Norway the day before I came back...
I suppose in a way it's not surprising that July in Norway felt short seeing how I was away for almost half of it :D. The time away was perfectly nice, meeting family, having some quiet days. It was the travel on both ends that ended up rather fraught. It was almost comical how closely the sequence of events on the two flights mirrored each other - trains to the airport worked like a charm, comfortable amble through the airport, boarded more or less on time, the aircraft pushed back from the gate, then boom, technical issues :(.
The difference was of course that while the flight to the UK ended up getting cancelled after we'd been sitting on it for a couple of hours (and we ended up getting rebooked for the next day), on the way back it did take off the same day, albeit an hour and a half later than expected :|. Well, we got to enjoy the rather nice breakfast at the airport hotel at least :P.
But now I'm back, and it's raining. Except, it's actually sunny at the moment, but I'm too tired to properly entertain the idea of going out on the bike. Maybe the forecast for the weekend will turn out wrong and there'll be a stretch of time when I can go for a ride and not get drenched :).
Speaking of water, I genuinely didn't know that octopuses could survive out of it for several minutes at a time! Yes, I've attempted a rather awkward segue from the random happenings segment to the books segment of this post :P. I speak of Remarkably Bright Creatures of course. I still think it was quite a fun read :). But there are buts.
To start with, there were characters whose arcs I enjoyed, and those whose arcs I didn't. There were attempts to create depths, but it felt a little half hearted. But mainly, I wish there was more of the octopus! It almost felt like Marcellus was there to draw us into the story and then quietly disappeared into the background. To be fair, maybe that was the point. But I didn't like that.
For the most part thought, it was an enjoyable read. Even though I did have to coax myself to keep going from time to time :). As often happens though, the closer I got to the end the faster I went along, until almost suddenly, I ran out of story! Not only that, almost before I'd realized it, I found myself most of the way through a short story that had nothing to do with Marcellus, or Sowell Bay. Left me in rather a tangle to be honest! Made it a lot harder to just stop and reflect on how I felt about the book. Oh well. I'll just have to be more careful about booby trapped endings in the future.
Anyway, so after that, I started on The Martian. Yes!! I finally managed to find a copy! But only because a colleague kindly lent my hers. And not because the Norwegian public library system had suddenly uncovered an English language copy of the book that wasn't in fact a DVD. (This is the point where I wish my retro keyboard emoji skills were better so I could make an eye-roll with o's and stuff. As an aside to an aside, I'm weirdly reluctant to use actual emojis.. ¯\\(ツ)/¯.)
Anyhoo, the book!! So I first came across Andy Weir with Project Hail Mary, like three years ago, and quickly followed that up with Artemis, copies of both of which were very conveniently in the local library. It's only a while later that I realized the rather famous Matt Damon starring film was actually based on one if his creations as well!
Somehow though, I've never actually seen the film. Which may be a good thing, as it allowed me to approach the book with no real pre-conceptions. And it was great fun! :) The mostly accurate yet easy to follow science was present and accounted for, as was the almost nervous humour, and his books are always a rapid read! So much so that I actually had to stop myself from reading too quickly so that I'd have enough left the flight back. Which there would have been, had said flight lasted the scheduled length of time ಠ_ಠ.
So now we're back to waiting for a book to arrive at the library. Also, incidentally, back to flying solo for a month. I guess I know a bit of what to expect from last summer, so it's not completely uncharted territory at this point :). Maybe I'll actually get on the bike a bit. We shall see.
