Jubileum!

As of this weekend we will have been here in Norway a full year. It's funny how being in another country with a family makes it seem less foreign. Much more of my energy goes to E and KE than to the kinds of things people usually do when they're "abroad." But then again, I've been in Norway so many times before (I think a total of about 5 years prior to this year) that it doesn't really seem that foreign to me here in the first place. Having a home of our own and knowing that I don't have to leave after a certain amount of time changes things too.

I think this year KE and I have really learned how socially isolated the two of us are by nature. For both of us our default mode is to do things alone, and we have been really unwilling to reach out to other people here more than at an absolute minimum. I'm not quite sure what to do about that. E has had some real social challenges in preschool this year. He's doing really well, all things considered. We've recently decided that we want to hold him back from starting school. We think he could really benefit from one more year of socialization and cultivating of independence in preschool before we throw him into the school machine.

I subscribed to Harper's magazine for years and always enjoyed the "Harper's Index." Here's a Kverulantinnen's Index for our family's first year in Norway:

Bachelor of Science degrees earned: 1. Grade point average earned: 4.04 (yup, that's my Summa Cum Laude husband, there!)

Preschools attended: 2

Sheep transported: 2

Sweaters knitted: 14*

Scholarly articles written and accepted for publication: 5

Computers in the home: 6

Trips taken to the USA: 2. Trips taken to Sweden: 2

Visits from Grandma: 2

Motor boats parked in the front yard: 2

Debt incurred: 0

* I am counting the Highlander sweater for KE here! If I hadn't been so tired last night I probably could have finished it then, but my throat was scratchy and I felt like I was coming down with a cold (E has been home almost all week with a bad cough), so I just read for a while and went to bed really early instead. Here's how it looked as of Wednesday:

I can't seem to photograph the color in the low winter light, so you'll just have to believe me when I say it is not pink. It's actually pretty manly, for a fuzzy variegated red yarn (!). Can't wait to see it on KE. Speaking of low winter light: I finally found an advent star that I like, and have replaced the red fiasco that emitted no light at all. Here it is in all its glory in the window by our kitchen table:

I totally love it, and want one for every window. KE says no, I can't spend 1000 NOK on advent stars. Note the darkness outside...this is taken between 4 and 5 o'clock in the evening.

It's no wonder I was tired when I came home from work yesterday. I had a really intense day trying to finish up some grading and the cabin article in Norwegian that is due today. I ended up emailing the editor and asking for an extension, which I never do. Turns out it's totally okay, but I really pride myself on making deadlines. Academics are such a lazy lot! I think I wrote between 6 and 7 pages, which is a lot for me in one day, considering it was in Norwegian rather than English. What's more, I think it's pretty good. In the article I'm covering six different texts (it's just an overview really), so each gets only 2 1/2 pages of analysis, max. The sections on Maurits Hansen's "Luren," Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's "Høifjeldsbilleder," and Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt are done, and I have at least a page each on Knut Hamsun's Pan, André Bjerke's De dødes tjern and Per Petterson's Ut og stjæle hester. Then, amazingly, on the ferry ride home I had a sudden clear notion of what to write in the conclusion, and banged out over a page of that! I think the reason that all this material came pouring out in one day is simply that I've been thinking about the project for a full year now, letting the ideas percolate as it were. At any rate, it was a rare writing rush, which will make it very easy to get the article polished up by my new deadline of next Tuesday.

In between all the writing I was able to finalize the grades for one of the classes (on Cora Sandel) I'm the censor for. I still have a whole set of papers to read for another class. I'm going to have to spend the day on that today, even though I would much rather work on the cabin article. The good thing about this other class (Sammensatte tekster) is that it gave me the opportunity to read DasBeckwerk's Claus Beck-Nielsen (1963-2001). En biografi, which I've been reading about for months now. It was the topic of one of the exam questions that the students could choose to write about. I ended up really liking the book. I found the author far less arrogant than I had expected, rather pathetic, really. I was a bit puzzled to see in the acknowledgments at the end that he thanks Jon Helt Haarder, among other people. Haarder is a literary scholar who has published a ton of articles on DasBeckwerk. It makes me suspicious that perhaps the two of them have cooked up some kind of mutually beneficial scheme whereby they alone create a literary movement and advance their own careers.