From snow to slush and beyond

It feels sort of fitting that I spoke about snowboarding last month, with my lasting memory from that trip being of the fresh, soft powder snow on the last day. And now, a month later, I'll talk about snowboarding again, except this time, it was on slush :).

So like last year, work organized an afternoon of downhill (or uphill if you wanted to hike) activity at the local ski centre in Oslo. It was the same time of year as last time too, except, this March has been unseasonably warm. In fact it almost feels like summer's arrived early! The end result? A fun, but rather wet afternoon on my snowboard :).

Otherwise, it's been a month of surprisingly warm sunshine interspersed with cold wind. There was the rather late snow once most of the older snow and ice had disappear, the thing that normally happens at the end of April or in early May. It disappeared just as quickly as the late snow usually does.. In a way I guess the winter was disappointing. But on the other hand, sunshine is always welcome :).

Haven't managed to get out on the bikes yet, although they have been sorted out, so now it's more of a case of using them. I keep thinking I should go out running in the mean time. Holmenkollstafetten is coming up in about a month, and getting a team together has begun. Will I show up any more prepared than last year? I guess time will tell!

On the reading front, I wasn't particularly thrilled by the choice this month, plus (in?)conveniently the copy I'd ordered from the library still hasn't arrived after more than a month of waiting, so I turned to the unread section of my bookshelf, and found a book that had not been picked for book club some years ago, but a friend had thought it would be something I'd like!

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore did turn out something I sort of liked, more than most murder mystery thrillers anyway :). I rather liked the style of writing, oddly floaty and atmospheric. And there were parts of the plot that held rather a lot of promise. As with a lot of these things though, the overall feeling I was left with was somewhat meh. But a positive meh, if there's such a thing :D.

Now I've gotten my hands on The Book of the Ancestor trilogy, and am nearing the end of Red Sister (aka book one). It's good fun! In fact, I think I'm enjoying it rather more than I did the last book of the previous trilogy. One thing that has not changed is the rapid, and often sudden, variations of pace! The style of writing also seems somewhat different, but then again, it's a rather different sort of story :).

What stays the same is the sci-fi fantasy blend which rather fascinates me :). I am trying, and will continue to try to read these books at a somewhat slower pace to try and not tie myself in knots like I did the last time. Let's see how that goes!

Leaving wakes of powder snow clouds

Looking outside today, it feels strange to think that less than three weeks ago we were slaloming through soft fresh powder snow! Yes, it was at a ski resort, but barely a couple of hours away, and even around here there was enough snow to happily go cross country skiing. Now, on the other hand, after a week or more of positive temperatures and not a little amount of rain, the world looks rather different...

It's not like all the snow's gone, but there's a lot of bare surfaces around. Definitely no cross country skiing, and we've even escaped the melting and refreezing ice on the footpaths. Which is certainly a positive :). Somehow though, if this was to be it, and we were heading into an early spring, it wouldn't be all bad.

A big part of that is probably the amazing few days at Norefjell! For most of the time it was quite cold, but beautifully sunny! To the extent that while the night time temperatures would drop below -15°C, once the sun had warmed things up by midday, it would climb up nearly to 0°!

The conditions were gorgeous for some relaxed snowboarding. Not least because we seemed to have picked a week when very few other people had decided to visit those particular slopes! With an under two year old in tow who had only very limited prior exposure to skiing, or indeed snow, we mostly took turns heading out to the slopes. But there were definitely fun times had with all of us just sledding down short declines :).

Sadly I ended up ill at the end of the week, so when the gorgeous weather followed us back to Asker, accompanied by the perfect amounts of snow for cross country, I didn't really get to make any use of it :(. At least we'd done some trips earlier, because by the time I felt fine enough to venture out, things had changed. Such is life though.

The other good thing this month has been the reading! Once I'd manage to get through Cod I started with Prince of Fools, the first book of Mark Lawrence's The Red Queen's War trilogy. Pretty quickly I found myself warming to the irreverent, fast talking, swindling, broke prince :).

As it happens in such situations, I proceeded to dive headlong through the whole series! (With a brief diversion into The Future, but we'll come back to that later.) Which I'm not sure was the best thing to have done to be honest :/. (The rapid pace of reading, not the detour.) 

The trilogy covers a period of time that is nominally about a year. But because of the nature of the tale and the effect it has on the main protagonist, it may have been better to give it a bit of time. Get used to the changes as they happened. Well, that's all retrospective wisdom. But the end result is that while I really enjoyed the first book a lot, the subsequent two, The Liar's Key and The Wheel of Osheim, never seemed to hit the same heights. 

For one thing, the stories are told in varying cadences, there's the baseline of the nominal adventurer on a journey where things happen, then there are flashbacks told by fellow travellers, then there are magic induced dream sequences which may or may not be memories, and finally, the adventurer's own memories resurfacing at unwanted moments possibly as dreams? I wasn't totally certain of that last one. But the general feeling I was left with was a bit stop-start.

The premise itself I found to be really enjoyable, and novel, I must add. Unlike the usual fantasy that seems to generally be set in the past, compared to sci-fi which is generally set in the future, where past and future are obviously relative to the author's time, the world of the broken empire seems to be set squarely in the future, in fact, it's set in a sort of post sci-fi apocalypse future, which makes this almost sci-fi in a fantasy skin? Not that genres matter too much, because in this case the result was excellent :). 

I particularly enjoyed the random bits of past surfacing in this future. (Spoiler alert) like the grenade that's the cardinal's holy stone and the defunct smart phone that's his holy tablet, dead relics of a forgotten past. Well, not quite so dead in some cases as it turns out. There's also builder's stone (concrete), builder's suns (fission bombs), plasteek armies (mannequins), silver steel (steel) that never corrodes and so on.

I think I generally enjoyed the stumbling, haphazard run that was the plot. I certainly liked the stretches where Jalan and Snorri were together. On his own, Jalan tended to be a bit too much. In the end I was mostly left with a feeling of having rushed through too much too quickly and finding it hard to digest it all. Would it have been better if I'd read slower? Who knows :). 

I do think I'd like to read more from Lawrence. Not sure the next thing is going to be Broken Empire though, given how bloody and dark that one's expected to be. Maybe Book of the Ancestor would be better, we shall see.

Coming back to the other book I read this month, The Future was certainly an interesting experience, and for very different reasons than The Red Queen's War. It's a bit of a weird book in some ways, and I felt the best way to read it was to think of it as a satirist's take on the current state of the world. So, not so much a plot driven or even character driven book, but an idea driven book.

Once (if) one accepts that oversimplification of the techno-commerce empires and their influence on the rest of the world, it's not too hard to follow the lines of thinking being presented. The whole philosophy around the fox and rabbit was a bit overdone, but does raise some interesting questions around the pros and cons of controlling our environment to increasing degrees. The good thing I suppose is that I never felt the author tried to push the fox or the rabbit as the "right" approach.

As with some of these sorts of books though, if the author is not willing to just leave the reader with a lot of unanswered questions to ponder, the endgame gets a bit messy. There were clearly holes in the timeline, some things happened, but then they couldn't have happened. It's that thing of twists in the narrative only working when going forward, if one stops to track back and check if this still fits with everything else we've been told, then things stop making sense.

The weird thing with this book I think is that I definitely remember having an overwhelmingly positive emotional response to it at the point when I'd just finished reading it, late one night, because I was so gripped by the narrative. But the next morning, and each time I've thought about it since, I remember less and less the reasons I liked it and find more things that don't quite add up :|. I guess that maybe says more about me than the book though?

So now I've decided to take a bit of a break from rapid reading and started slowly working my way through a thriller I'd been given some years ago, but never really gotten around to :).

PS. Switching phones seems to have come along in leaps and bounds even compared to four years ago! Especially if one sticks to the same sort of phone. I find myself wondering more about how to make things a bit different rather than having it just how it was! Battery life's a lot better though, unsurprisingly :D.

Of travelling ceiling lamps, lost electricity meters and slushy snow

Recency bias is a thing. I mean, I know for a fact that I've definitely felt run off my feet during most of March, yet, having had a nice and very relaxed Easter break for most of the last week, I'm feeling closer to chill than I have done at any point this year. Yeah, crazy! Well, that's how it feels anyway.

But yes, it has been very nice to be able to kinda slow down. Took the first couple of days to just sleep in really! And since then it's been more about pottering about the flat, sorting a few more things out. To be honest, after the initial spurt and the visitors, there hasn't been that much headspace to do all that much really. Although it must be said, getting used to a move takes time, so it's probably for the best that we didn't try and do too many things too soon.

The internet's working properly though!! Yay! And it took most of three months, but we finally have all our ducks in a row when it comes to transferring over all the bits and pieces from the previous owners. We think. How boring does that sound?! :D. I feel like there's nothing that makes you feel more like an adult (in all the mostly boring/blah ways) than owning a place.

So why didn't it feel this way the last time around? Hmm. Food for thought. I wonder if it had something to do with the fact that at that point I was also trying to adjust to landlubber life after nearly a decade of offshore rotations? Adulting has many faces. Mostly though, it seems to be about figuring out that the adults never really had anything figured out anyway. Hurray!

On to the more mundane (or exciting, depending..) matters of weather and such, spring is definitely on the way. In that wet, damp and somewhat miserable way it has sometimes when the snow disappears more from getting washed away while the world stays enveloped in fog, rather than getting melted away in the more exciting company of blue skies and sunshine! But hey, the crocuses are trying to put in an appearance, so I'm not necessarily complaining. 

Somehow I'm not unhappy at all to see the back of the snow at this point. Maybe it's because we did manage to get in one more day of some pretty fun cross country skiing. And even an afternoon of snowboarding! But the cross country first.

Got invited to a weekend away to Blefjell with some acquaintances, so we get there Friday evening and settle in. All of Saturday is basically a blizzard blowing outside, the likes of one I've never seen before! Once the winds abated and the clear skies came out, there was a bit of work to be done to dig the cars out :/.

The Sunday was just amazing weather though! So we made the most of it :).

Then later the same week, we had a Winter Day with work, which involved carting our choice of snow shredding equipment to work and heading off the Tryvann Winterpark at lunchtime! The rest of the day was spent enjoying some of the very slopes where I took my first very shaky steps on a snowboard sixteen years ago!! Time does fly.

So that was most of the excitement, but I've also been reading a little bit! Richard Osman's latest was entertaining enough, if not spectacular. Although, I did have a very enjoyable time on the train to work one day, so much so that a fellow passenger had to sneak a peek at what I was reading to see what was making me shake quite so much while I tried to stifle my laughter :).

After that I decided to try some more Norwegian, but this time took the easy way out with Batman: Earth One. Norwegian translations of which are to be found in our local library :). Quite an interesting take on Gotham's finest. I mean, weird, but kinda novel!

While I was at the library, also decided to pick up a copy of Fight Club. Why? Not entirely sure. I guess it had something to do with the fact that the staff had decided to stick it on the recommended shelf? I'd watched the film, maybe a couple of times, but nearly twenty years ago and was left suitably dazed/shocked. The book though, is entirely at another level.

One interesting thing was to try and keep my knowledge of the protagonist/Tylor Durden relationship from messing too much with the reading experience. But then I'd see sentences like this:

"I know this because Tyler knows this."

Anyway. I think I got a bit creeped out by some of it. The satire is very very dark for my taste. But then again, was that really unexpected? So now the book's just sitting there on the living room table, waiting for me to pick it up again. I think I'd like to finish it. We'll see.

Well, there's one more day of the break left before getting chucked back out into the churn and bustle of the world. To be honest, not looking forward to it. Maybe I just need a longer break. Don't we all though?

In between yesterday and tomorrow

So for the first time in a few years, it's time for a post from the phone :-). Mainly because it's the end of the year and we're not actually going to be home till the new year! So here I am, sitting by a stunningly crackling log fire and a prettily lit Christmas tree, typing into my phone :-D.

We're back in the UK for the Christmas holidays. Which still feels like a bit of a special treat even a couple of years on from Covid. Although, by the sounds of it the no longer so novel coronavirus doesn't seem to be ready to head off quietly just yet. Luckily, barring the cold at the end of November, we've managed to avoid further respiratory drama.

It's been a relatively quiet holiday time this year. Which I've rather appreciated. It's true of most years, but feels particularly the case this time around, this feeling that the year has just rushed past. Spring feels at once hardly any time ago and at the same time so far away that I can hardly remember the details from our long awaited India trip.

The cross-country skiing was really good this year though! With some longer trips as the daylight hours got longer helping me feel like I was getting back to really stretching myself on the skiis rather than just trundling along :-). Which came in quite handy once we started cycling! The first downhill skiing weekend in many years also feels like a highlight worth mentioning. Maybe it'll be nice to do some more of that this time around.

I think in many ways one of the highlights of the year was the cycling! We managed to more or less consistently cycle throughout the snow-less months, all the way from April to October!! And out of the various cycling adventures, the most utterly crazy one was obviously the 400km North Sea cycle in May :-). A bit like the Hallingdal and Numedal cycle in 2020, it continues to feel a bit surreal that we actually managed to do it!

But the fact that we ended up cycling three times as much as we drove in the summer was less down to that one trip and more down to the fact that afterwards, we kept going out on the bikes almost every week, not least all the trips to and from work :-). Hopefully that's something I'll keep doing next year! It's a good feeling, the distance getting easier, finding a level of fitness I'd missed...

On the travel front it was a bit of a mixed bag, the most I've travelled for work in years, but also a fair bit to visit family and friends! India was a highlight, as were the weeks in Bath in the autumn and of course the trip to Jordan more recently.

No post these days is really complete without a little bit about the books :-). The Culture series, of course was a highlight, although most of that I read last year except for the last book. What followed, now that I look back, seems to have been a heady mix of book club books, graphic novels and Middle Earth! And genuinely, it's been really fantastic!

All the Brian K Vaughan stuff was slightly weird, but gripping, Monstress was definitely eye opening and fresh. And then Gaiman was, well, Gaiman :-). But the most fun I had immersing myself into books this year was reading Tolkien! Sometimes the old stuff is the best stuff!

On a more immediate note, I have actually started reading again. The book club book for this month, The Girl with the Louding Voice, was an interesting one. I had very little idea as to what to expect and I have to say,  found it generally engaging. The writing is quite nice, particularly the evolving English as the story progresses. It will be interesting to see how the different members of the club made of the overall story.

I then decided to start on next month's book, one None of this is True, which is rather a different kettle of fish. I don't like thriller types that are trying to be oh so clever :-|. They annoy me. And I find myself trying to get through this one as quickly as I can so that I can return it to the library before the return date. Turns out someone else actually wants it, 'cos I can't actually extend the date any more...

The biggest deal of course was the new apartment! And it's properly official, now that we've got the keys and everything :-). Hopefully the moving will be as painless as everything else has been up to this point :-). I guess that one is definitely the beginning of a hopefully long journey.

So, as I often do in such situations, I went hunting for my post from when I got the keys for our old apartment (which is only old as a contrast to the new one at the moment, seeing how we haven't actually moved yet). I genuinely think, if someone had told me at that point that I'd live there for ten and a half years, I'd not have believed them! I mean, up until that point in my life, I'd never lived anywhere for that long at a stretch :-). Just goes to show, one really doesn't know what's around the next corner in life.

I guess that's as good a place as any to call it a day/month/year. Looking back and appreciating much of what has been, looking forward in hope for the things to come :-).

PS. This one also has a bright red door :-D.