An-be-het-else

I never thought I would say it, but I had a fabulous time at the two-day nynorsk course. I learned a ton, and discovered that despite the fact that I've never formally studied nynorsk I have a pretty significant passive knowledge of the language. Although I made many mistakes, I was actually able to translate documents from bokmål to nynorsk all on my own, and I pretty quickly started to see why things are the way they are. As a non-native speaker of Norwegian, I'm kind of amazed that I was able to pull it off. I started out afraid I'd be kicked out of the course. To be honest, I have never even considered trying to write in nynorsk because it just seemed too much of a stretch, but now I see that it isn't as bad as I had imagined.

The teacher of this course was absolutely fantastic. She really focused on the essentials, and so many things that just seemed random and weird now appear consistent and rational. I can't recommend the course highly enough to any bokmål user who struggles with (or is even just interested in) nynorsk. It was organized by DIFI, so I got to hang out with a bunch of bureaucrats. I felt a little out of place, but thankfully there wasn't a lot of pressure to network or make social connections.

Møkkavær

Today we woke up to a blustery snow storm. I am not happy, to put it mildly. It's May, for goodness sake! For some odd reason I couldn't find my knitting bag last night, and since I had a bunch of left over Garnstudio Drops Eskimo and a crochet hook handy in my basket, I decided to start crocheting a hat rather than get off the sofa to look for my knitting. It's a rough life I lead. Turns out it was a good thing I did because it was so frigid on the way to work this morning that I really needed a toque. This one turned out better than nearly all my previous sorry attempts at making a warm hat for myself. Here it is:

It's supposed to be one-color with pompoms, but I'm not much of a pompom person (no surprise there), and I ran out of the rust. Luckily, there's a change in the pattern (from DC to SC) right where I ran out, so it seems almost natural to switch colors there too. It fits really well and is warm, though not the most attractive thing in the world. It's Drops number 93-36.

Today was a productive day at work, at least in terms of small nagging tasks. I took a little extra time on the way home to stop off in some clothing stores in Oslo. My clothing situation is becoming critical. Unfortunately, it was incredibly depressing to shop for clothes. There is so little that I even like, or that I think would be flattering and comfortable, and what little that does appeal to me here in Norway ends up being outrageously expensive. I don't know what it is with all the embellishments on women's clothing. Even a simple thing like a pair of jeans here has to have rhinestones or ridiculous heraldic crests on the back pockets. To make matters worse, this season's palette of colors is totally wrong for me. Lots of pastels and navy and cold tones of other colors, or else brilliant lipstick red. None of it works on me. It's a strange experience to walk into a store and feel totally turned off by just the impression that the range of colors makes.

Tomorrow and Thursday I'll be attending a two-day workshop on nynorsk i arbeidet, a crash course on how to improve one's communication in Nynorsk for state employees. I'm one of about 15 participants, and as far as I can tell the only non-native speaker. I'm actually pretty excited about it, though I'm afraid they're just going to kick me out since I've never had any formal training in Nynorsk at all. Should be interesting!