Storsand

Some friends invited us for a visit to the beach house they're renting for the week a little further south on the Oslo fjord, so we spent all day there yesterday. It was such a treat! I had been thinking that Nesodden is already so idyllic in the summer that there was no need to go anywhere else, but it was really refreshing to go even less than an hour's drive for a change of scenery.

The sun was out all day (a rarity lately) and it was warm enough for those of the Norwegian persuasion to swim. I, on the other hand, engaged in a veritable frenzy of beachcombing. I was amazed at how much beautiful beach glass I found on one short stretch of beach. The last time I tried to look for beach glass was when visiting a friend in Southern California, who told me that because plastic had replaced almost all commercial use of glass it was becoming almost impossible to find any more. Here I could pick up three or four pieces every time I bent down.

The snapshot above is from an early sorting. I ended up with an entire freezer box full of glass, after sorting out the ceramic and brick pieces (which I left behind). I got a great range of colors, including two little dark blue pieces.

The larger rocks along the beach where absolutely phenomenal too. The variety of pattern and color was so great that I started to feel a little frantic trying to take them all in. I know nothing about geology, but I have heard occasionally that Norway is particularly rich in geological variation, and boy did we see that on the beach yesterday! We took a short little walk (like half a kilometer) down to the local café to buy ice cream, and we probably spent an hour one way, stopping to look at rocks and skip stones ever few steps.

E was really sweet, tagging along with the two bigger boys who were with us all day. It's great for him to get that kind of exposure--it stretches him physically and mentally I'm sure. At one point in the evening they all ran off to play something, and E came trundling after with the roller suitcase he had packed his toys in. It looked so ridiculous that it became the running joke of the evening--E with his security suitcase!

I'm sorry (well, not really sorry) to say that I got so absorbed in the day that I didn't take many pictures, and the black tunic is still not memorialized, even though I wore it all day yesterday. It functioned perfectly as the light summer tunic I was hoping for. The loose gauge is a little bit of a problem in that it snags very easily, but otherwise I'm really happy with it. It is sweater number 10 for the NaKniSweMoDo.

Fix ferdig

Fix ferdig is another odd Norwegian expression. Not entirely sure I understand what it means. Ferdig is "finished," of course, but what does it mean when you add the English word "fix" to it? It seems to be a little redundant (like the English "all finished"--something is either finished or it isn't, so "all" is unneccessary). After all, Norwegians love their double phrases ("rett og slett," "i bøtte og spann," "ting og tang," etc.), so I suppose I shouldn't waste too much time wondering about "fix." KE will know, but he and E are sleeping in this morning.

At any rate, as you may have guessed, I am thrilled to announce that I repaired the gaping hole and finished up the linen tunic last night. It was actually really easy grafting across the entire front, and I didn't make any additional stupid mistakes along the way, thankfully.

The seam hits just above my bust. It is visible, but since the sweater is black, not distractingly so. I'm hoping that with washing and blocking, perhaps it will become less visible. The problem is actually two things: 1) the gauge of the sweater is really loose, which was hard to replicate with Kitchener stitch, and 2) the gloss of the linen yarn is actually different from different angles. Somehow, the graft yarn is going in a different direction than the main body yarn, so it shines differently.

Regardless of such details, I am just delighted to have made a garment that I thought I had destroyed functional again.

Akk og ve

I have been too demoralized to post for the past three days! I made the mother of all mistakes while finishing off the linen tunic that I was working on this week. I was finally able to write about it on a Ravelry discussion thread. Here's the story:

Soooo, I booked through knitting sweater number 10 in about 4 days, and was feeling really psyched. I sit down in the evening after DS is in bed and DH is at soccer practice to set in the sleeves while watching a movie I wasn’t expecting to like [Gymnaslærer Pedersen]. The first sleeve goes fine, but the movie gets good and I sew in sleeve number two inside out (so that the wrong side is facing out). Gack!

The sweater is in BLACK LINEN. These two words should have been enough to tell me: “do not attempt to undo the seam in the evening while watching a good movie.” Black is hard to see, and linen is not elastic at all. But NO. I tried, and the inevitable happened. I clipped a stitch. Then I pulled on the loose end. AND UNRAVELED AN ENTIRE ROW CLEAR ACROSS THE FRONT OF THE SWEATER.

How's that for aggravating? I consoled myself with potato chips yesterday. But the work on Hamsun is going well and E is making great strides in bicycling, so life is not entirely black.

Regnværsdager

On Wednesday I had had enough with the eyelet cardigan, so I broke out the linen yarn and started in on a black tunic on size 5.5mm needles. Three days later the back is done and I'm halfway done with the front. It's plain stockinette, and I have to admit that I totally love it. The yarn is great and it's satisfying to just crank it out mindlessly. Here's a picture from the pattern on the Garnstudio Drops website:

You can hardly get more basic that that!

Thursday and Friday I made some progress on the Knut Hamsun paper for the big Hamsun sesquicentennial conference at the end of August. It feels good to be on the right track.

KE and I have had some pretty heavy duty discussions over the past few days--relationship housekeeping you might say. It's always good not to take your life partner for granted! Things are good with us. He also got inspired to knock a hole in the wall between two bedrooms, which unofficially converts our duplex into a single-family dwelling. It's great not to have to go outside to get to the other side of the house!

ETA: Just came across this list of book recommendations on Atheism. Not sure I would bother to read all of them, but it's an interesting list (that includes the Bible).

På bærtur

På bærtur ("on a berry trip") is one of my favorite expressions in Norwegian. It is the rough equivalent of "barking up the wrong tree" in English. At any rate, I really was on a berry trip today, but only in our yard. We have about a half acre that used to be wooded. A lot of it is still "undeveloped" and much to my delight there are quite a few types of wild berries. We have wild strawberries, wild raspberries, a few wild blueberries, and two or three different types of wild cherries. None of them produce all that much, and the fruit is quite small, but it's still pretty darned cool to be able to graze like a denizen of the bronze age in one's own little territory.

Still slow going on the eyelet cardigan. I'm almost to the point were I can divide for the fronts and back. The bottom edge is driving me crazy because it flips up. I've never quite understood why some edges do that and some don't. I think it has something to do with the number of rows of whatever edging you're using (in this case garter stitch). This is such slow knitting that I have no plans to rip this out and re-do it, so it will just have to be that way. Very irritating!

I stained the piece of furniture that we used to have the tv on, and was thus able to free what will be my desk from the living room, where it had been serving as a temporary tv stand. The stained dresser looks okay, though I'm not totally excited about it (but it will certainly do for a good long while). This morning KE very sweetly moved the desk into my little work room, so I can finally get started on setting that up!

Not much going on here as yet. I'm still combing www.finn.no for used book cases with glass doors, but haven't found any yet. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be stored, but I'm really hoping to avoid going the IKEA-route yet again...

Impulsiv

Okay, now I'm a dork. Yesterday morning I woke up with the intense feeling that it was wrong to send the article to Nordic Theatre Studies. I checked the publication venue database, and to my surprise Ibsen Studies counts at level two. I immediately sent off an email to NTS asking to withdraw the article, and then sent it on to IS. I got a very nice email back from the editor at NTS and it sounds like he didn't quite know what to do with what I'd sent him and was relieved, since it was indeed not a good fit. When will I ever learn not to do things so impulsively? When I finish an article I just get so incredibly antsy about it, and am desperate to get it out and under review.

Knitting on the Drops sweater is going slowly. I took some time on Thursday to start another patchwork pillow cover, but haven't finished that either. Yesterday I bought some stain for one of the used dressers that KE bought back in January. If it ends up looking nice we'll probably put it in the living room.

It continues to rain. I heartily admit that it was getting too hot for me back in June, but now I'm starting to miss the sun... If I sound kind of cranky, I guess I am. I miss having full days at work, to be honest, especially since I took so much time off when my mother was here too. I'm just not getting anything done, and I feel such intense pressure to be writing, since I know that's my only chance for ever getting a permanent job here in Norway. I keep telling myself that it's only another week or so and then KE will be done with his school work, but I worry that I won't be able to make up the time.

I've had a nice email exchange with the editor of the new Nordic literary cultures volume on place that I'm going to contribute to, and we've hashed out which texts I'm going to inclue in my article on rural work buildings at the edge of civilization. I love the list:

1. Gísla saga Súrssonar (sometime between 1270-1320)
2. Maurits C. Hansen's "Luren" (1819)
3. Knut Hamsun's Pan (1894)
4. Tove Jansson's Sommarboken (1972)
5. Kerstin Ekman's Rövarna i Skuleskogen (1988; or maybe Moa Martinson's Kvinnor och äppelträd from 1933 or Stina Aronson's Hitom himlen from 1946 instead)
6. Per Petterson's Ut og stjæle hester (2003)

I'm excited about it, and even more excited about the project meeting in Provo in September.

Kjønn

The "Art and Gender" class that KE is taking is making its mark on our daily chatter, and has even infiltrated Lego play recently:

It's been raining like crazy the past few days, so a little bit of cabin fever is setting in. I've been going back and forth between reading (I'm now onto the last of the trilogy, Den sidste Glæde) and knitting on the tenth NaKniSweMoDo sweater. It's another Garnstudio pattern, a short sleeved cardigan with an eyelet pattern using the Silke-Tweed that I bought on sale a few months back. I've got the sleeves done and about 4 inches on the body (it's knitted in one piece back and forth). I had to go down from 3.5 to 2.5 mm needles to get gauge, and I'm still a bit worried that it will billow. We'll just have to see. Here's how it looks right now:

I got all the papers for the panel I'm going to participate in at the conference in Stockholm next month. I was excited to see that I get to be the "opponent" for the paper on Kerstin Ekman's Händelser vid vatten, which is one of my very favorite novels. I couldn't resist re-reading my own paper, and I got kind of impulsive and decided to just shoot it off to a level two journal for review. I have no idea whether there will be a conference proceedings volume, but thinking strategically it makes sense to get it out under review now rather than after the conference, since the process takes so long. Maybe I should have waited for the feedback from the panel, but I can always incorporate that in the revisions if it is actually of use.

Blomstring

KE's flowers continue to bloom and bloom. He has done a nice job of planning the beds so that something is always opening up. Just as the peonies are fading, the fire weed and delphiniums are coming into bloom. Love the soft colors together. The peonies were as big as E's head. I'm sorry I didn't get a snapshot of that!

I have officially declared my Ibsen article finished and just now sent it off to Nordic Theatre Studies. And last night I started reading Hamsun's Under Høststjærnen (1906). It is just so darned good. I read the whole thing with a lump in my throat, which is how I know that a text really resonates for me. Today I start on En Vandrer spiller med Sordin, the follow up book. I know I won't like it as much, so I'm a little hesitant to start.

The back of the Gathered Pullover is done and I should be able to knit up the fronts and sew it together in the next day or two. Yay!

ETA: Yay, it's done (too hot to put it on right now here in Norway, though...)!

Bøker

Yikes. I looked at two of my regular blogs today and both of the authors were writing about books that are in preparation to come out. Meanwhile, my own second book festers and wanes. It's been more or less done since March 2007, and over two years later I still see no signs of it being published any time soon, despite the fact that I actually have a publisher for it! None of the three articles I revised this winter have come out yet either. So tiresome. Or rather, I'm so impatient. Boo hoo.

Of course I'm supposed to be slogging away at book number three, but that just doesn't seem to be getting off the ground. Little projects keep getting in the way, and though most of them are at least tangentially related to the larger project, it sure doesn't feel like I'm getting anywhere.

I'm closing in on finishing the Ibsen article. I think one more day of revising and I'm probably at a point where I can submit it to a journal. I spent a couple of minutes today checking out potential journals. The university system in Norway has a two-tiered ranking of publishing venues (journals and publishing houses). You get a lot more "points" (a.k.a. "money"!) for your home department (and thus you) if you publish in tier 2 venues rather than tier 1. I had originally thought of submitting to Ibsen Studies (duh, it's an article on an Ibsen play) but that's only tier 1. I discovered a journal that I've never even heard of before called Nordic Theatre Studies that is tier 2, so obviously it's worth submitting it there first, since the pay off is larger for the same amount of work. And if it gets rejected there I can always still submit it to Ibsen Studies of course.

If I can just get this thing off my desk, then I can dive back into the Hamsun paper that has been on hold since March. I just picked up the books at the library so I can start reading them again. it's the first "wanderer" trilogy that I'm going to write about: Under Høststjærnen, En Vandrer spiller med Sordin, and Den sidste Glæde. They are by all accounts "bad" Hamsun novels, but I love them dearly for all their weirdness. It is such an interesting period in his career--the transition from the proto-modernism of the 1890s to the reactionary realism of the interwar years. From just reading the first 10 or so pages of Under Høststjærnen I can tell I'm going to have a ton of material to work with!

Yesterday E and I took most of the day to go to the Technical Museum. He had so much fun on the preschool field trip there that he has been asking about going there ever since. We had a really nice time, and he was so patient and good throughout the long travel time to get there. We had to take a 5-minute bus ride, a 25-minute ferry ride, and a 30-minute tram ride each way. He really got into the museum displays, and though he claims that driving the cars was his favorite part, I think he actually had the most fun at the telephone display. They have a bunch of old phones hooked up to an internal switchboard, so museum visitors can call each other from various booths. It was a fun day! (I admit I had another garter stitch shawl with me to work on, so I didn't lose patience once.)

Confession: there was another big Garnstudio yarn sale at Tjorven. I have been coveting the Drops Lin yarn for half a year, and at 40% off I just had to get some. I bought 14 skeins of black 100% linen. It's so glossy and smooth--much nicer than the Louet Euroflax I bought in the fall. It will be such fun to experiment with the Lin. I'm thinking a loose tunic, and if there is any left over a crocheted traveller's bag.