Traust transport

We bought a car today! It was a pragmatic decision, and certainly nothing sexy about it. We bought a 2002 Opel Astra station wagon with 120,000 km. It was so bleeping cold in Oslo walking from car dealer to car dealer that we practically froze. Luckily all the cars themselves are inside. KE was the only one to test drive it, since we had E with us in his old stroller but no car seat, and we were all getting kind of wiped out by the cold and the walking. Hope it's a decent car! Here's a picture:

Not the worst looking station wagon in the world. The good thing is that Opels are kind of cruder versions of Volkswagens, so all the controls and everything are more or less in the same place as they were in our old car. Thus the learning curve won't be very long or steep. Unfortunately we can't pick it up until after the 8th, which is to say after our next two social events (for which a car would have been a huge help). But it will have been through the major service and have a trailer hitch attached, so it's worth the wait. Now if we can all just thaw out...

Advarsel

This link almost makes me want to be back in the states so that I could use these in hotels... Okay so my sense of humor is puerile. I know that already.

Mariusgenseren

This post is intended to be in the spirit of Archival Clothing. Consider me the honorary Nordic correspondent...
The Marius sweater pattern is one of the best modern classics for ski wear. It's named for Stein Eriksen's handsome (but less athletic) brother Marius Eriksen. This article gives a good overview of the controversy surrounding the origin of and rights to the design. It's only in Norwegian, but be sure to to scroll down through the article anyway to get other kitchy photos and especially the label shots. Clearly I'm going to have to make one of these for E for next winter.

The image is from the "ski comedy" film Troll i Ord fom 1954. Henki Kolstad and Marius Eriksen are wearing Marius sweaters, and Inger Marie Andersen is wearing a different Søiland Dale sweater (Foto: Merkur Film).

Hybelen vår

I thought it might be fun to post some snapshots from the "hybel"--our rental unit, which we'll be living in until May. The main part of the house is rented out until then. Here is an evening picture from the main room, with the boys hard at work (although I admit it was me that sorted the legos according to color):

The round table is the only furniture that we actually purchased ourselves. Everything else is a freebie, and will probably stay in the hybel when we move into the main house. We hope to actually decorate that with things we choose ourselves. This room is a combined kitchen, living room, and dining room. We also have an entry, a bathroom (with washing machine and shower), and two very small bedrooms. I think it's about 60 square meters (roughly 600 sq. feet).

Here is a snapshot of the exterior of the hybel from two summers ago. It was taken with the camera on my laptop, so it is reversed:

Here's another (reversed) exterior shot, this time showing the side entrance to the hybel:

And here's a shot of the yard, showing one of the many birch trees on the property. This shot is looking from the house toward the street. It's a one-"mål" lot, which is to say about a half an acre:

Pretty nice, huh? KE designed the house himself and had it built in 1996 or 1997, I think. He inherited the lot from his father. There used to be an old cabin on it that he had to pull down. He had to clear the lot and did a huge amount of work on the yard by hand. We're excited to take over the whole property, and have lots of plans for small changes and improvements on the main house.

Døgnvilt

We're struggling with the time adjustment. It's hard to convince a four-year-old to try to sleep at night when he feels totally awake, and even harder to keep him awake during the day when he is sleepy. This is now day four, and it's almost seven in the evening and he's still very concentrated on his legos, so there's hope that all three of us might actually sleep through the night for the first time.

I've come down with a cold and have really low energy today. We all took it really easy, but still have got the apartment more or less in order. There's just a few boxes to dispose of, and a few suitcases to move from the closet to the attic, but really it came together astoundingly quickly. We're not really nesting, since we'll only be in this part of the house ("hybelen," our rental unit) until 1 May, but we do definitely want to be comfortable for the next few months. Now that everything is put away we're dreading that big crate of stuff that is going to arrive in eight weeks!

We're looking into buying a car (a used Volvo!), and otherwise trying to figure out our priorities and budget. We might go car shopping tomorrow if we all get a good night's sleep. And I still have to go register with the police in Oslo.

Knit wise, I'm working on a project I feel a little guilty about. My friend L in Eugene and I traded sweaters right before I left--she got one of my old two-color stranded Norwegian jackets, and she gave me her beautiful unfinished "Obi," which is a striped, very cropped kimono knitted in two colors of Jamieson's heathered yarn. It is lovely and her knitting is meticulous and beautiful. She gave it to me because she knew she was never going to wear it, and after pondering and trying it on as many ways as I could think to try, I came to the sad realization that it will never fit me either. It is just way too wide and boxy for both of us. After much gnashing of teeth, I decided that the yarn was just too lovely to let it languish, and set into ripping it out.

While ripping I searched Ravelry for a pattern that would work for the yarn, and came upon yet another free Drops pattern that I think is going to work perfectly. It's knitted from side to side and is another garter stitch project (believe it or not) with short row shaping. The yarn is DK weight, rather than the fingering weight of my Drops "rillejakke," and much less splitty, so I'm actually enjoying the garter stitch this time. Here's the image from the Drops catalog:

I feel bad for ripping out all of L's exquisite knitting, but I think the yarn is going to work so much better for this particular jacket and I do think she would want me to use the yarn for a garment that will get a lot of wear and love, which I definitely think will be the case with this one.

It has been fascinating (and oddly intimate) to rip out someone else's work. There are so many idiosyncrasies that appear only when you literally start to pick apart a piece of knitting. I always assume that everyone knits the same way, but of course there are dozens of ways (probably more) to deal with any given issue, and if you add together all the technical and design decisions that go into a single knitting project, the variations increase exponentially.

Hjemme? Borte?

And just like that we're here in Norway. The past five days were very intense: grading, cleaning, packing, traveling in one big whirlwind rush. We arrived at Gardermoen airport late last night to silence and cold, and stayed the night in a nearby hotel. It was so lovely--duvets, radiant heat in the floor, wood, peaceful quiet, and amazing Norwegian bread at breakfast. Waves of relief and anticipation of my new life are rushing over me.

It started to hit me on the flight from San Francisco to Munich that I'm now really and truly an expat for the first time in my life. All my other sojourns abroad have had an end date. Not this one!

Tre dager igjen...

Obviously other things have been preoccupying me lately, but I did want to do a little knitting update (weird, I first wrote "oppdate"! Talk about code switching). I finished the size large Frijoles refritos hourglass sweater while down in New Mexico, and am hugely disappointed to find that (yet again) I am not a size large person. When will I ever learn? I'm taking it to a dinner party tonight to give away to whomever it fits. I have the luxury of having enough of the same yarn that I can just re-knit the same sweater in the correct size.

I had taken two other little projects down with me because I knew I would finish the hourglass sweater, and ended up deciding to start an "old shale" or "feather and fan" lacy scarf, since that was the most mindless of the two projects. I'm using really nice hand-dyed merino fingering weight yarn by nummanumma that I bought on Ravelry. The color is called "bleu cheese" and it has a lovely range of blues and some mouldy green too. It's a little grannie-ish, but that's okay. And the skein had something like 530 yards, so it's going to be really long.

Here's an in-progress snapshot taken with the camera on my computer, since our digital camera is packed already. And no, I don't usually wear scarves as I knit them:


Okay, lunch break over and back to packing...sigh...