Uthvilt

Wow, that trip to Chicago really took it out of me. I've been sleeping in as late as 7 or even 8 in the morning all this week, and am only now starting to feel caught up.

I was delighted to come home to a blooming garden. Here are a few things that are springing to life in our yard:

This is the most exciting blooming thing, namely our apple tree, which was planted last fall. But there are also quite a few volunteer flowers that I'm very fond of:

This is hvitveis, the classic early spring flower that in some places here blankets the forest floor. We've just started getting a few clumps in our yard. I caught these on film just before KE mowed them down! Then there are these sweet little violets:

I totally love these, but I couldn't get a non-blurry picture since it was a pretty breezy day and I'm not a very patient photographer.

I also finally got around to taking some work-in-progress pictures of the two sweater projects I've got going. The first is that crazy pink mohair yarn that L in Eugene gave me:

I just have to knit the two fronts, finish the second sleeve, sew it together, then figure out what to use for the ruffle edging. I'm thinking of a green that matches the green accents in the yarn. It's a wild project for this drab gal. The other thing I'm working on is much more my style:

 These are the arms for the cabled pullover that I started two weeks ago. It's slow going on size 3mm needles with cables every sixth row.

In other exciting news, I think I have a new hobby! For the longest time I've been wanting to get into orienteering or geocaching or something like that, and yesterday when we walked to the grocery store we were met by some folks from the Nesodden sports club who were selling map packets for this season's "turorientering." Basically, they set up 70 "posts" out in the woods, mark them on the map, and then you walk around finding them and clipping them on a card (there's also a bingo card too for a lottery drawing). Here's the basic equipment:

It's such a totally nerdy thing to do! Today we went out and spent about two hours in the woods. In part we were on familiar trails, but the posts forced us off in new directions too, so it's a great way to get to know the area better. Here's our first every post sighting:

And here's E and I clipping our second family post (KE snuck off while we were relaxing and bagged a third post, but I'm saying that one doesn't count!):

(E did the actual clipping seconds before KE too this picture. I know it looks like I'm the one doing it here, but he did get to do it himself!) It was mostly fun, though E had a few hissy fits along the way, of course. 

Eplekjekk

This was yet another week that has me waking up on Saturday morning exhausted and a little overwhelmed. For the most part it was good, but we did get bad news about our on-going project of building a garage. I don't think I've ever even mentioned that here because it has just taken so incredibly long. At any rate, we have long wanted to build a garage, and it has taken a really long time to get a building permit and to find someone to fell some trees and do the foundation (the garage itself will be delivered and built in just a few days by the company that produces them once the foundation is in place). We finally got a quote for that, and it's at least twice as much as what we had planned for. It will wipe out a lot more of our savings than I had bargained for, and since I'm pretty (okay, incredibly) neurotic about having a savings buffer I totally freaked out. And predictably that led to a big discussion about finances in general, where the conclusion is that I'm a control freak with a compulsive need to know all the exact balances on all accounts at all times. You see, we have separate accounts, even though we've been married over six years, and neither of us has any access to the other's accounts. Is that weird? I think so. But we're working it out now--better late than never!

I spent much of the week in the archives of NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, watching three film versions of Peer Gynt. It was totally fascinating. Even though there are only three films (a taped stage production, a television mini-series and a documentary) there is just so much interesting material to work on. I already have 12 pages written--just my first impressions and ideas about what I want to do in the chapter. While I'm doing that, I'm also reading Hans Midbøe's three-volume performance history of Peer Gynt, and learning a ton about the 1876 stage production (the first ever, almost ten years after publication. Critics said it couldn't be done, but it was a huge success). Needless to say, I'm going to have to visit some theater archives too. And of course the wonderful thing is that since I live here, I can just do that, pretty much any old time I like. This is so different from when I worked in the US and half the time didn't even know what resources were available, let alone visit them. It's great to be able to just poke around and follow where ever what I find leads me. Yay archives!

I have reached a point of frustration with the English course I'm taking. This week we had a class "discussion" that was the farthest thing imaginable from a real discussion. The instructor doesn't appear to have the faintest idea what the purpose or format of a real discussion should be. We were given a list of questions in advance, then divided up into groups of two to discuss them. So far so good, though with only about 10 people in the room that day, not really a necessary step. Then he brought us all together for a large group "discussion" and simply proceeded to lecture us again. One (older) woman and I tried to say stuff, and tried to talk to each other, but it was all so strictly mediated through the instructor that it totally didn't work. I don't remember anyone else even trying to say something. The hilarious thing was that at the end the instructor said "Okay, good discussion today!" Uh, no... From there I went to my own class where every single student in the room was engaged, where they had come with their own questions, and where we learned just as much if not more. The thing is, if you're going to allow discussion in class, you have to trust that the students are actually capable of intelligent thought and the ability to communicate. If you as the instructor are going to control every aspect of the thought process, then really you should dispense with the notion of "discussion" entirely and just lecture.

My long list of finishing tasks on the Fanakofte apparently scared me off, and I spontaneously started working on some comfort knitting without a pattern. Actually, I wasn't just scared off, I was foiled by demonic forces in my house. Somehow, things have been disappearing rather inexplicably recently. First E's cowboy had vanished (kind of a crisis because his buddies at school have started a "cowboy club"), even though it hasn't been out of the house, and now my "kit bag" (with scissors, stitch markers, etc.) is completely gone. I had it in the living room last Sunday, and since then I have not seen it. I've checked every imaginable place, of course, and it is gone. Argh.

After doing some desultory knitting on the brown tweed Aran pullover, I'm back to that lace weight alpaca yarn that I've tried repeatedly to use for something, this time trying to make a scarf. I was so enamored of the bias construction of Lanesplitter skirt that I want to make a scarf in the same way. I wanted it to be plain stockinette on tiny needles, but that curls so much I gave up and settled on 1 x 1 rib:

Still not sure whether I like it or not, and I would definitely have to increase every other row instead of every fourth. I may just go back to the stockinette, curling be damned. I've toyed with the idea of double knitting, which might get rid of the curling problem and still give the plain surface I want. With lace weight that might just work (I'm worried about it being too stiff). I may give it a try, though I'll need to find a how-to somewhere on the internet. Though when I compare this experiment with the brown tweed Aran, I have to wonder why I'm even bothering:

I mean, that's actually kind of amazing. I don't know why I can't get more revved up about it. This is actually really quick and easy to knit. This far into it I don't even need to look at the pattern or use stitch markers (a good thing, since they have been spirited away...). Okay, that's it, I'm stuffing the hopeless blue alpaca back into a bag and focusing on this project instead!

KE had promised me an apple tree for my birthday, and yesterday we finally went to pick one out. "Pick one out" is a bit of an exaggeration. It's the end of the season here, so there wasn't much left. We did see a green Gravenstein (the apples we had in my yard growing up) but alas that tree was already sold. All we saw (at first) was a bunch of trees with red apples that we feared would be the mealy kind. I can not abide mealy apples. We were about to give up, but went back for a second look once we found out they were all 50% off. Lo and behold among the mealy ones we found a red Gravenstein. We were bold and bit into one of the apples, and it was absolutely perfect: crisp, tart and juicy. We snapped it up, did some logistical juggling to get it in the car, and KE planted it (I got to pick the spot) right away when we got home:

(I just ran out into the cold wet grass in my pjs to take that picture). It's the very small, spindly tree with the yellow leaves. This is my first time ever having an apple tree as an adult and I am thrilled! Here's what the fruit looks like:

Nifty, eh? According to Wikipedia the Gravenstein is a Danish variety discovered "as a chance seedling" in a town called Gråsten in 1669.

Mens vi venter på våren

It's still cold and bleak here, despite some intense sunshine. I don't understand how the sky could be so brilliant but the air so cold and the ground so barren. It's like Afghanistan or something. KE has been doing his best to perk up the yard. He sowed grass seed on the part of our yard that we cleared and graded last fall:

How unfortunate that we have the manhole covers right there in the middle. Not sure what to do about those. We're also hoping (eventually) to fill in some kind of hedge along the road for privacy and to reduce the amount of dust we get in the yard. Then he planted one of the two rhododendrons:

The good news is that all the soil he used to fill in the hole is from his compost pile, and it looks really rich. Yay compost. He dug out two huge rocks, which meant that he had to back fill with a whole lot of compost. I love rhododendrons because they're evergreen. We have tons of flowering shrubs in our yard, but most of them are deciduous, which is part of the reason everything looks so bleak right now. The one corner that isn't bleak is our little volunteer Christmas tree farm:

Unfortunately, this is more of a problem than an asset. They're on the slope between the upper yard and the lower yard. KE is hoping eventually to clear that slope and reduce the grade so that we have one big open lawn.

Sigh. I don't even want to see or hear about gardens in Oregon, Washington, and England right now. Spring (or what passes as "spring" here in Norway) is definitely the hardest time of the year for me. I can deal with winter because I take it for what it is here, but every spring I am programmed with a set of expectations based on having grown up in a mild climate. Those expectations are invariably dashed here. So disheartening. But I did find one small encouraging sign yesterday:

Hvitveis, or (as Hans E. Kinck would say) hvitsymre, Anemone nemorosa. I think it's called Wood Anemone in English. Lovely, and the first time I've noticed clumps of it on our property. The picture's terrible since gusts of wind kept blowing these tender little flowers. I hope they continue to spread!

Knitting: Finished the back of the Silky Wool pullover yesterday, and got most of the ribbing for the front done yesterday.

ETA: found this Aftenposten article about a little wooden house in the center of Oslo. If you click on the link under the title you can see 15 pictures of the interior. Very cute.

L'Heure bleue

My, I'm getting all French all the sudden, what with knitting in French and all. How many times can you use "all" in a sentence?

It's finally really starting to feel like spring here. We are also starting to beat back the virus that has had us all feeling miserable. Today E went to preschool for the first time in over a week, and on the way to pick him up KE and I swung by the farm that sells gardening supplies here on Nesodden and bought grass seed (for the lower part of our yard that we cleared out last summer) and two rhododendron plants. I realized a while back that a garden isn't really a garden for me unless it has at least one rhododendron bush. Chalk that up to growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I guess.

Preschool also made it possible for me to get a bunch of work done without having to make the long trek into campus. I dusted off the article on the two classic children's books that has been on ice for over a month. It was a little hard to get back into the project, but at least I made a good start at it today. I always feel so much more optimistic about life in general when I'm getting writing done. Here's a visual representation:

It's probably just me, but I find this picture--or rather the juxtapositioning of two early twentieth century, right wing Norwegian children's books and Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture--hilarious. Not sure if it's going to work, but I am using Bhabha to talk about the construction of national identity in these books. We'll see...

I can't believe I was so ambivalent about the Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool yarn for so long! It's knitting up really nicely, and I'm discovering that I love the color. I thought it was more of a navy, but now that I have it out in the light it's a much richer, more muted indigo than I thought:

This picture is too dark, and the next one is too light:

It's somewhere in between, but my woeful camera skills aren't up to the challenge of capturing it. Regardless, I like it a lot, and have some hope that this will be a wearable finished product.

ETA: the cat's out of the bag now, and the recipient has received it, so I can finally reveal this year's best gag gift, the OS-mössa, OL-lue, or Swedish Olympics Toque in all its (oversized) glory:

I must have a weird sense of humor because I find this totally hilarious on all kinds of levels. Why do I find crochet so funny? I totally screwed this up by using the wrong size crochet hook. It is the size of a large purse. The colors are, as Grannie used to say, as ugly as home made sin. The two skeins of blue yarn that I used are different dye lots and they totally don't match. But it makes me gleefully happy, and I especially find it funny to think of the poor guy I made it for opening the package and thinking "WTF?!" and then being mortified at the thought of having to wear it in public some time. Hehehe.

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...)!

Vårstell

I know everyone else in the northern hemisphere has been working in their yards and are well underway with spring activities, but we've been a little slow. Yesterday we finally went to a local nursery and bought a lot of great stuff for both indoors and outdoors. It was a bit rainy, so we didn't really get a chance to plant or do much in they yard afterwards, but today was a glorious day so we finally feel like we're getting somewhere. We got a lot done and took a walk down to Hellviktangen to play in the tidepools. We also started moving a few boxes of things into the other unit, mostly to create more room in our storage room (we still can't close the door!). And I got a lot of knitting done on the Whisper cardigan. It was a lovely day. Here are some snapshots.

KE cleaning up one of the flower beds and adding bark. He's a happy camper. I'm glad I married an avid gardener!

Here's another bed. KE split and transplanted a bleeding heart. I think it looks great with all the tulips that the renters planted.

E had a lot of fun finding out what was inside the boxes we moved. He found all sorts of stuff and got a little silly...
Here's what will be our kitchen window once we get moved in. We bought the two geranium plants on sale.We also bought the white pots with a little row of beading, which I think are quite pretty. White is good since we don't know whether the flowers will be red, pink, or white. I'm very curious to see what color they end up being!

And finally a shot of the Whisper cardigan in progress. I'm done with the upper part (sleeves and back) and am now picking up nearly 300 stitches around the opening for the collar and rest of the body.

I had trouble casting off the second sleeve loosely enough. I ended up having to do it over again with a much larger needle and it's now a little better, but still not very good. Maybe the miracle of blocking will help?