Våryr

Spring has sprung, at least tentatively! Today was a gorgeous day, and we went out for a little walk around the neighborhood to find out what's been going on under all that snow, ice, and darkness  for the past half year. Nothing much, as it turns out, but as always I love looking at the houses and cabins in my neighborhood.

E was home sick from school for three days last week, which meant I got in plenty of knitting time on the Porticus pullover. Here it is, just before the last waist increase and before I'm supposed to start doing the pattern again as a bottom edging:

I can never get my camera to photograph the green of this yarn accurately, which drives me crazy.

Yesterday E was feeling pretty perky, so we took the ferry into Oslo to get a bagel (his standing request--one of the things he misses most about living in the US) and go to the Cultural Historical Museum, which E raced through, but seemed to enjoy anyway. Personally I think it's a pretty poor excuse for a museum. On past visits alone I had only ever been on the first floor, which documents Norwegian cultural history from the stone age up to medieval times. E was eager to race through the exhibitions on all four floors, and I was certainly not impressed by the hackneyed ethnographic displays they apparently haven't touched for the last 50 years or more. Now everyone knows I'm a huge fan of Norway and love living here, but this museum is a good example of what occasionally drives me crazy about this country. Norway is one of the richest countries in the world, and they spend millions on all kinds of things, but they seem to have no idea what to do to improve this museum. The first floor displays are exactly as I remember them from the early 1990s, including the ridiculously stupid embroidered goddess-y "art" installations that are supposed to do ... something? ... to enhance the Viking era display. Grr!

But really, the point of the expedition was to get E out of the house and give him some new experiences, and in that sense it was a totally successful day. He bought his own orange juice on the ferry ride home, and you could tell it was a big deal to stand in line and pay all by himself.

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.