A winter that refuses to say goodbye

It's nearly May! Where is this year going?! Like seriously? :) It's not all bad of course :D. Take the skiing season for example. Since my last blog post we managed to nearly double the distance skied for the season! Mainly because there was some extremely unexpected, but highly appreciated snow at Easter!

Since then the snow all but disappeared, aided in no small part by a beautiful few spring days with nearly 20°C. Then somewhat shockingly new snow appeared. Then that disappeared again, as one would expect at the end of April! And now there's more snow forecasted tomorrow. Seriously, what's going on with the weather? I suppose we all know these are ripples of the effects of climate change gathering pace in the not too far distance...

Sometime during the much needed Easter break though, we decided to book another cycling holiday. Having not done one last year, it felt bold. Well, it feels even more bold now that we finally got the bikes out of storage and went for a short exploratory trip this afternoon :D. Ah well, it'll be fine :P.

I'm getting a bit tired of saying work's been crazy actually. So some incidentals to ponder. The less time I have to sort through the thoughts and feelings in my head, the less nice I am to be around I think. Sure, I feel bad afterwards, but that's usually too late to stop me from snapping at people. Deserved really has nothing to do with it, because caring is a habit. And once one starts losing it, inevitably, undeserved hurt follows. (Of course you could argue any kind of hurt is undeserved, but that's neither here nor there.)

The underground golf was a lot of fun though, it has to be said :).

As usual, I've been taking refuge in books whenever I can. Got through the whole Ex-Machina series in pretty much no time. And overall, I don't think my opinion changed much from what it was after reading the first two last month. However, it was indeed interesting to see a graphic novel take on issues of politics, race, gender in quite such a way and deliver a genuinely gripping story.

While I did want to get on to Middle Earth, I was waiting for this month's book club book to show up at the library, and while I waited, I thought, what would be a good graphic novel to pick up that would tide me over in the interim. It had to be a graphic novel, because my head was in too much of a jumbled space to focus on just written words. I settled on The Sandman: Overture. 

What an absolute masterpiece! I've read it a few times now, and each time there's new things that pop up. As with a lot of Gaiman stories, to be honest. I suppose the writing leaves so much space for the reader to fill it with their own imagination, each time is a new experience. Because, after all, each time I'm a slightly different me, with a different set of circumstances, thoughts, experiences in my immediate past giving me a slightly different perspective.

And then finally The Winter Fortress did arrive, and in many ways it was quite a good book! Both in and of itself, and for me to get back into words-only books given my state of mind :). It's a journalistic work digging through some parts of Norway's history during the second World War. It also follows a handful of Norwegians through the years of war in a very personal way. A lot of the material was collected from diaries and interviews.

I could personally relate to a fair bit of the landscape. A lot of the events from the book took place on the other side of one of mountain ridges I posted photos of last month. Familiarity with the Norwegian weather, landscape and lifestyle does give a particularly interesting perspective on things.

There's also the fact that Norway, while very much in the periphery of the main theatre of war, was deeply affected. But because it was not maybe seen as so thoroughly tormented as say France, and maybe to some extent because of the speed with which the country was invaded to start with, there is a deep reluctance on the part of those that saw those years first hand, to share their experiences.

There are many layers to the story of course. But overall I think a good balance is struck in keeping a lot of it very personal. I for one appreciated the author's choice to keep much of the focus on the people caught up in the churn of events bigger than themselves, and doing what they could.

So that brings me up to the present more or less. I finally started reading Unfinished Tales. And I continue to be fascinated, as much by the depth of JRR Tolkien's creation, as by the care with which Christopher Tolkien unfurls the mythology and presents it as a world to explore and experience. Given the latter's tendency to reference The Silmarillion, especially in the stories of the First Age, I ended up getting that book out too and reading them more or less side by side as appropriate :).

It's fun for a change to be able to sink into a story/world/universe/myth/legend without actually needing to know the "what happens next". I already know. I'm now wandering the many meandering paths of "what else is there to discover". Makes for a more relaxed pace of reading. 

Which of course, is a much appreciated change of pace at least in one part of my life at the moment, while other bits continue to run headlong into an uncertain future.

PS. Watched Everything Everywhere All at Once. Was amazed, mesmerized, confused, shocked and generally amused :D.

PPS. Watched A Man Called Otto. Was moved.

On stories, myth and legend, familiar and otherwise

Like it or not, this year seems to be turning into a great snow winter :). I mean, I love it, but I'm increasingly surrounded by people who wish the snow was well and truly gone and spring on it's way already :D.

Having said that, it's not been all plain sailing, what with periods of dramatic thaw that's left roads icy, roofs leaking.. All sorts of drama. Following an unlikely, and frankly quite unfortunate, sequence of events I'm not going to go into, this meant that I ended up getting to shine my pick-axe and axe wielding skills over a weekend. Which I thought was great fun!

Reminds me of that bit from About a Boy where Hugh Grant's character feels somewhat guilty about the fact that he's excited about being able to drive fast behind the ambulance on dead-duck-day... Aside to an aside, did you realize that film's now twenty years old?!! Crikey.

Anyhow, speaking of snow, there's also been some more cross-country skiing :). Although the last time I went out the snow was so heavy and wet that it almost not quite worth it :P. Still, snow is snow, and I'm happy for as long as it lasts. Definitely adds happiness to my life :).

Some weekends ago we also went on a little trip with some friends, and a lot of new acquaintances, to a cabin in the middle of nowhere about a couple of hours' drive away. To be honest, it wasn't that in the middle of nowhere, but the fact that we drove there late on a Friday evening definitely reinforced the feeling of remoteness. It felt a lot nicer driving back on the Sunday afternoon :). In between there was quite a bit of fun! We also ended up spending what felt like most of a day on or near a large frozen lake. That was very cold!

In between all that and the continuing crazy busy work situation, I had quite a variety of books to keep me happy :). First of all Bone. I mean, what a tremendously funny, touching, thought provoking, but ultimately just nice thing! I got the whole series in one volume as a Christmas present and I just loved it to bits! Definitely something I'll read again. Especially whenever I'm feeling a bit down and generally bummed at the world :).

I only even heard about it because of Gaiman's A View from the Cheap Seats. So that was another hit. Not quite the same sort of experience was had reading The Einstein Intersection. Which I acquired for the exact same reason as Bone. I'm not sure what it was, maybe I just didn't pay enough attention to details. Maybe I'm just not as familiar with all of the many cultural references. Either way, I was just generally confused to be honest. There was definitely the feeling that I was leaving a lot unexplored, but at the same time I was very happy to move on.

Between those two, I chanced upon the first couple of volumes of two different graphic novel series. Saga was kinda interesting. In an oddball, pretty out there, but entertaining nonetheless sort of way. Ex Machina was more so. More interesting, more out there, more entertaining :). To be completely honest, I was just browsing around in the library, minding my own business, when I spotted them on some recommended shelves. Read them, returned them, didn't think too much about them.

Then I read the book club book for the month, The Last Girl to Die. OMG! Like, come on! Who writes stuff like that? Actually, more importantly, who reads stuff like that?! And Goodreads is full of raving reviews! Seriously? It was probably one of the worst books I've read in a long time! 

Or rather, it was the book I genuinely disliked the most in a long time. The difference may be subtle, but significant I suppose. Mainly because it's not a badly written book. Just painful reading! It's dark and miserable, but told in an almost light tone that I found seriously disconcerting! I guess for people who don't want to or like to get particularly into the books they read this may just be like a fast paced thriller? But I basically just about got through it as quickly as I could and moved on.

Straight to The Einstein Intersection, but even that was a massive relief! I'd actually kinda gotten used to the fact that often book-club books that I'm uncertain about turn out really interesting or at least thought provoking, and it's just a function of exploring different perspectives. But this one (still talking about Last Girl..) was just plain miserable. A case of the a book really living down to the off-putting blurb.

Anyway, so having spent ten days or so reading a couple of not particularly enjoyable books, my thoughts returned to Brian K Vaughan (the brains behind both Saga and Ex Machina). I eventually ended up acquiring the rest of the latter series, partly out of curiosity, partly just to go back to weirdness I can get into, so that's what's occupying me on my commute at the moment.

In the midst of all that though, on a rather gloomy Saturday, we went to the library where I spent a very enjoyable few hours digging around the forewords, introductions, prefaces, post scripts and such like of The Children of Húrin, The Silmarillion and Beren and Lúthien. There was a distinct feeling of sort of finding my way back into the world that first ignited my excitement and love for fantasy literature. (I suppose strictly speaking, I'd read fantasy before, but this was on a completely different level :).)

I suppose what was really interesting for me was how personal it all was. Christopher Tolkien gives us such a beautiful view into the inner world of the creator of Middle Earth. Even though I've read The Silmarillion a few times, it had never spoken to me in the same way the letter from JRR to Milton Waldman in 1951 did. Naturally :). I was particularly intrigued by how JRR returned time and again to the same tales and would explore expand or just re-write them in different ways at different times.

All in all, I was left with a profound need to get back to Middle Earth. Maybe after my foray into Vaughan's alternative NYC :).

Life in between moments

Yup, February has also gone by in a flash. However, there's a very different feel to how this month has gone by compared to January. In a good way. I guess the week and a half away has had a lot to do with it, in more ways than one.

A first trip back to India in almost four years... in some ways I could tell, in others, it felt like I'd hardly been away :). The weather was great! Bright sunny days with the temperature bouncing between 15 and 30 ºC. A perfect getaway from the deep freeze of the Norwegian winter.

Made the most of what felt like very little time, visiting family, checking out old haunts and new. Meeting people I'd heard about for years and not met before. Found out yet again why I like clothes made in India :). Took some more steps towards making peace with the fact that while we're not looking, the world is constantly changing around us.

Dadu 1926 - 2023

I'm also grateful we could see my grandfather one last time.

No account of a trip back to India can possibly be complete without mention of the food, of course :). Given that this was not mango season, it made sense that I didn't have any of the fresh, sweet, juicy mangoes that I crave most of the time. Other than that, had pretty much everything :D.

Even went so far as getting some phuchkas from one of the local phuchkawallas on the trip to Shantiniketan for the really complete Bengali food experience! (Note that the link is not to Wikipedia since they seem to have made the shocking decision of redirecting to pani puri, which anyone would tell you is nothing like phuchka. Only phuchka is phuchka, ok? Good. Moving on.)

It was all over too soon of course, but hopefully the next trip will be rather sooner than four years :). All the travelling worked out quite well in the end. A bit of a tight connection through Dubai on the way back notwithstanding. The checked in bags didn't make it, but hey, that meant we didn't have to lug heavy stuff over ice and grit and got them delivered at home the next day :).

Since then things have been busy, but not too busy. And I think at least in part this has been a case of perspective. And letting things go a bit. Which is something I felt I'd gotten better at, but I guess it's one of those things that's never really sorted forever. A bit like cleaning the house. You clean it, and then after a while you need to clean it again. In between, life happens.

Speaking of, reading's been happening. In between things. I'm finally done with the Culture. Even took the books back to my friend who'd lent them in a big shopping bag yesterday. What can I say? It's been an experience that has forever changed my perspective on sci-fi. The boundaries of possible have shifted. And it's an immense loss that Iain M Banks is no more and there will be no more Culture novels.

The story itself had it all :). While nothing, in my mind, comes close to the shock and awe of Use of Weapons, The Hydrogen Sonata very much holds it's own compared to any other Culture novel. The scope and extent of the story, the variety of the characters. Mix of Minds, various pan-human and more exotic species. The long view of the evolution of a society while maintaining focus on individual lives. It was a treat :).

Since then I've also finished reading the book club book for the month, The Tiger's Wife. An amazingly visualized fabric of story with beautifully fleshed out characters. Neither the story nor the characters were sacrificed. Add to that the layering of generations of lives in the mercurial social political and religious landscape of the Balkans and it was a genuinely eye opening experience.

And now I'm finding myself sinking into the world of Bone with a very contented and relaxed sigh (metaphorically speaking, haven't read any of it this weekend :P).

One thing that happened before the India trip of course, was the weekend trip to Norefjell! To go downhill! And what a great weekend of snowboarding it was! The lack of recent experience was definitely on show the first hour or so, but after that it was like the last three years melted away. 

There was fresh snow both days, so the surface conditions were amazing. And on top of that the weather was brilliant with lots of sunshine. There was a lot of wind the Sunday morning which shut the upper slopes, but luckily Norefjell has quite a lot of more sheltered slopes, so we enjoyed our time regardless :).

That weekend now, unsurprisingly, feels like a long time ago :). There's been a surprising amount of fresh snow this week though, and yesterday I decided to head out on a solo expedition on cross-country skis for a change. 

The day was perfectly sunny, the tracks were pretty close to pristine seeing how it was the school winter holidays which meant most people were away, leaving the tracks more or less empty :). To be fair, I also probably picked the relatively less frequented ones anyway. Starting from the tracks beside the local train station, taking it easy and stopping often, to take photos or catch my breath, I made it all the way to Spikkestad in a bit over three hours. The train back took ten minutes :D.

Keep calm and carry on

So, another new year, more snow, cross-country skiing and wondering at exactly what point in life did I gain this mostly seamless understanding of which and how many layers to put on to survive a given level of cold...

On the other hand, this year seems to have started at absolutely break-neck speed. Leaving me a little breathless already. It's surprising in a way that for the first time I can remember we are barely through January and it already feels like 2023's been going on for a while. Not sure that's a good sign :(.

Either way, to focus on one of the better things about life at the moment, the snow!! It did end up snowing a bunch, a couple of times this month, leading to a reasonably good amount of cross-country skiing so far. Although the fresh snow has stayed away for a bit over a week and the temperature flitting between positive and negative values on a daily basis has left things rather hard and icy. Maybe there will some more of the good stuff before too long :).

There's been a little bit of travelling too! Back to Stockholm for work, and this time I got the chance to actually look around a little bit! It felt quite different from the other Nordic capitals I've being to. Oslo, Helsinki, Reykjavik and even Copenhagen to some extent feel decidedly small and laid back in comparison! I suppose what I'd really like is to be able to go back in the spring, or maybe summer. I keep getting told winter doesn't really show the city's best side :).

There was also a very brief but fun weekend trip back to the UK for a belated celebration. Pleasantly, the entire travel situation worked beautifully and without a hitch. Except of course some amount of panic getting to Oslo airport on Friday evening as the train services decided to descend into chaos. We managed to get to the gate pretty well in time in the end, only to have to wait because the flight was delayed. Reason? The flight crew, who were coming in from Oslo got delayed because of the same train issues :D.

In general though, I feel life has been somewhat busier than I'd like it to be. Mostly, if not entirely, because of work. I mean, I realize it's always better to be busy at work rather than have nothing to do, but still. I think I appreciate having a bit of headspace to be able to reflect on things. Plan, consider, evaluate. At the moment all I seem to have space for is plunging headlong through an unending and seemingly insurmountable list of things to get done. But this too shall pass, and in the meantime, I'm trying to keep calm and carry on :).

Naturally, reading has been happening a bit less. Even missed the monthly book club meeting for the first time in years. When I have had the time though, The Hydrogen Sonata has been providing me with a welcome escape. I'm about half way through and things are warming up :). Sadly, I'm reading this with the nearly constant thought in the back of my head that this is the last one.

I have been wondering if/when I'm going to go looking for the rest of the stuff by Banks. I'm not sure. I think I'm quite happy that a lot of the astute if cynical views he has (had?) on life are presented in the mostly benevolent and benign context if the Culture. Not sure I want to go delving into it all without that comforting blanket.

In another attempt to bring some light-hearted balance to life, we've started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, and loving it! I've been aware of it for a long time, but never thought to make an effort. The first season was un-dubbed, and great fun to watch, but turns out the next two are only available on our chosen streaming service with Norwegian audio. It's no great impediment, we even get most of the jokes, but given that some of the characters are dubbed with somewhat strong west coast accents/dialects, it's a little more effort :). I guess there's a way to go before we feel as comfortable in Norwegian as we do in English...

I almost forgot! I did actually also finish reading the book club book for this month! And it was one of my suggestions! But one I had picked more or less at random from the fantasy racks at the library. So it was with some curiosity that I started The Starless Sea. It was certainly worth the time :). Weird and wonderful is probably an apt way of describing it. The author certainly seems to have an amazing imagination.

While the story itself was interesting, and the world it was set in extremely diverse and intriguing, I'm not sure what to make of the individual characters. With the possible exception of Madam Love and Kat, I wouldn't say I ever really warmed to any of the rest of them. They felt more like placeholders for the story and the author's tools rather than actual people.

(While trying to remember some character names, I also stumbled across this! :D. So, I don't agree with the overall view that the book was unreadable and a waste of time. However, I do very much love the way she describes the book. Felt accurate. And extremely funny :).)

Right. So.... There's actually a lot to look forward to in the next month! Visitors, downhill! (Downhill! Snowboarding!) And finally that trip back to India. But in the mean time, keeping calm and carrying on.