November 2007

I’ve done d*ck all today as far as work goes and am feeling semi-guilty about it. In fact, I’ve done very little else than surf t’Internet like a zombie. My excuse is that I’ve got a cold. Sound plausible enough?

It’s AAH’s fault. She spent all of last week at home with a cold and low-grade fever. Triumphantly I used this as an excuse to drive home the points that I can never stress enough, namely: a) she doesn’t get enough sleep, b) she doesn’t eat well enough, c) she doesn’t dress warmly enough. Hence she’s sick. If only she did as her mother tells her to do she wouldn’t be in this mess, andsoonandsoforth.

I, on the other hand, follow my own advice in all of the above, virtually to a fault. So why am I sick? Does that mean my clever arguments don’t hold water?*

Meanwhile, EPI has just arrived home from work early on his bike, clad in his superduper neon cycling outfit that he bought in Brooklyn. He staggered in holding his head, complaining of severe chills and the worst headache in the world - so bad, in fact, that he managed to forget his keys and his cell phone on his desk at work [he’s just taken the car to go get them].

In other words, EPI and I are both sick, only EPI has a mancold so he’s automatically sicker.

EXCITING NEW UPDATE! - Ladies and Gents: I give you The Mancold Video. [Thanks Cat!]

THE WEATHER IS REALLY NICE, THOUGH
And despite having had the mutha of all sore throats last night I went out for a walk to the grocery store [because I only have a girliecold]. Plus I know I’d feel a helluva lot worse if I stayed inside. The riskiest thing about going out, though, was the ice on the streets - it’s been like that for two days now and apparently the ER at the National Hospital was overrun yesterday with people who had crashed and broken something or other. Without checking I’d say it’s hovering around the freezing mark at the moment ………………….. wrong, it’s actually a balmy 3°C [37F] and the sun came up at 10.36 am, and set a few minutes ago at 3.54 pm.

* Negative, because I don’t have a fever.

Ehm, we hope that last bit doesn’t materialize, but the fact is that the earth has been shaking a fair bit around here for the last couple of weeks. There’s been activity on the so-called ‘western volcanic belt’ which extends from the Reykjanes peninsula [approximately where we are] to the north of Langjökull glacier. We haven’t felt any tremors in the capital area but the good people of Selfoss have been shaking a lot, and yesterday there was a quake 4.4 on the Richter scale in the Hveravellir area.

Meanwhile, the Civil Protection Agency has sent out a warning that there may be further quakes, and some may occur in residential areas. Yowsa!

In other words, this might be a good time to nail that bookshelf to the wall, and review the What To Do If There Is an Earthquake pages in the phone book.

WEATHER!
Who cares about the weather these days - it’s the dark we’re concerned about. It gets light awwwfully late in the mornings now, and awwwfully early in the afternoons. And on days like today, when it is rainy and overcast, it just doesn’t feel like a proper day. Some people have already started putting Christmas lights in their windows - even though the Advent doesn’t start until next weekend, and that is the official start to the Christmas celebrations for us. And who can blame them? Anything to drive away the darkness. Went out a few minutes ago to drive AAH to work and there was this nasty damp cold - the kind that gets into your bones, with slushy rain coming down. Temps 1°C [34F], sunrise was at 10.33 and sunset at 3.57 pm.

Friends, it’s time to purge a few googlies from the cache. Over the past few weeks we had our collection of the usual suspects…

… the linguistically challenged:

big penis vs samll penis pics (Lewiston, NY)

wot is a advent (sum kind of hulliday, like? UK)

conquering a porographic habit (Too much porography is bad for your skin. – Santa Cruz, California)

… our besserwissers:

reykjavik porn is illegal (who knew? – France)

… those genuinely interested in adding to their knowledge:

looking for icelandic people (Hm, tough one. Maybe try looking in … Iceland? – Rome, Italy)

penis pictures and kinds (for my PhD dissertation, like. – Algeria)

the main weaknesses of iceland (that’s easy: a) bad service b) atrocious drivers. – London City, UK)

how to photograph your own penis (follow these instructions: Undo your fly. Take out penis. Pick up the camera. Point. Press the shutter. Bingo.– Fayetteville, Arkansas)

pre hatched penis pics (Friends: somewhere out there is a penis farm. With penis eggs. – London)

leaky penis (… and somewhere out there is a very worried individual. – Pennsylvania, Mifflinburg)

… and where would we be without our perverts:

women having sex with sharks (Deep Throat meets Jaws. – Columbia, South Carolina)

public sluts iceland (You know, the ones they have in the town square. – Bourgogne, France)

pictures of naked girl on a plate (Served with a side order of fries. – Sheffield, UK)

big bare asses (they have to be big and they have to be bare and they have to be plural. – US)

… and finally the total fricking wackos:

i was shaking like a leaf this afternoon i found weather quite cold i was dressed up warm and again i was cold (Longueuil, Quebec)

OKAY!
It’s really windy out there right now, actually it’s probably a storm. Went out for a run just as it was starting and you know what makes me Very Happy? My MEC hoodie [in coal]. I look like a total alien, but my poor whiplashed neck thanks me profusely. How I ever survived without one of those is a complete mystery to me. 1°C [34F] right now, the sun came up at 10.27 and set at 4.01 pm.

It was such a gorgeous day today - sunny, cold, crisp, and totally calm. I went out at lunchtime and for once remembered to take my camera with me. Everything was covered in a fine veneer of frost - the stones, the seaweed down on the shore, the vegetation, even the footprints in the sand.

There were lots of swans on the sea looking a bit lost, probably wandered off from the nearby pond which was pretty much frozen over. As soon as I passed they came swimming towards me, looking for handouts, no doubt [alas, had I known they’d be there I’d have stuffed some bread into my pockets as well]. These guys virtually accosted me, swimming right up to the shore and even walking up towards me as I pointed the camera. They’re spoiled - accustomed to being fed by the locals. Surprised they haven’t migrated to Scotland for the winter - I guess with global warming they find it just as easy to stay here.

Right now 1°C [39F] and the sun came up at 10.17 am, set at 4.09 pm.

Over in Australia, Santa Claus is being discouraged from saying “Ho ho ho!” because it may be offensive to women.*

Instead they’re recommending “Ha ha ha!”, but won’t that be offensive to paranoid schizophrenics who think everyone’s laughing at them?

Maybe he could say, “Hey hey hey!” but won’t that be offensive to women who think he’s hustling them?

Or he could say, um, “La la la!” but then won’t that be offensive to crazy people?

And if he says, “Heh heh heh!” everyone will be offended because they’ll think he’s being smug.

Meanwhile, if he uses sign language, it may be offensive to deaf-dumb people.

Sigh. It’s a hopeless situation. Clearly it’s just a matter of time before he’s done away with altogether.

WE HAVE SUNSHINE!
It’s been a clear day today, with lots of sunlight. Went out for a run, and was in shade for most of the way because the sun rises so low in the sky now that it doesn’t even get up above the condominiums that line the seashore. But no matter - this sort of day really boosts the old morale. It’s been a bit windy though, which brings our current temps of 2°C [36F] down to what feels like -2°C [28F]. Sunrise was at 10.14 am and sunset due for 4.12 pm.

* I wonder if it’s still offensive if he goes to a brothel.

Ohboy. Some of us are really feelings the effects of SAD season around here. This is the toughest time of the year, if you ask me, and if I were still prone to the sort of depression I used to get, I’d probably be pulling a Virginia Woolf right about now. Either that or getting ready to leave the country.

When I was in my early 20s [back in the mid-80s] I packed up all my stuff in Canada one year and moved back to Niceland to live. It wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped it would be, for various reasons, and I have to say that this time of year almost did me in.

The clincher was that, right around this time, as the winter darkness closed in with all its claustrophobia and gloom, the civil workers decided to go on strike. Can you envision just what that means in a country so geographically isolated? Bad enough was the no garbage pick-up, no buses running [I had no car so I was kinda screwed], no radio, no television [both were state-run at the time], and no newspapers [by some fluke the newspaper workers chose that time to strike as well]. It also meant no customs officers working, so no products could be delivered into the country, and bit by bit the stores started running out of stuff [keep in mind that virtually everything is imported around here]. Bananas were the first to go, then cigarettes. I remember sitting at work, sharing a cigarette with my co-worker at regular intervals, and smoking it absolutely down to the filter while panicking at the realization that soon there would be no tobacco left in the entire country. As the strike wore on, gasoline supplies dwindled fast, and the day after it officially ended – about four weeks after it started – the petrol stations were due to shut down for lack of supplies. Suffice it to say that this was probably the most depressing and demoralizing time I’ve ever lived, not to mention the darkest. And by the end of November, I’d packed all my things into boxes again and moved back to Canada.

Thankfully Iceland has undergone a remarkable transformation in the two decades that have passed … but this time of year is always a struggle, simply because the lack of daylight causes certain physical symptoms that are hard to avoid. Concentration problems, inertia, fatigue, slight nausea, and a proneness to picking up whatever virus seems to be making the rounds are just some of them. I don’t tend to get psychologically depressed anymore, just kind of psychologically wasted, lose my train of thought a lot, that kind of thing. [Did I already say that?]

Lately I’ve heard a lot of people saying they try to make a point of going outside at least once a day to help them with SAD. Try to make a point? To me, that’s like saying, ‘Oh I try to make a point of eating some food every day to help with the starvation.’ If I didn’t got outside once a day for some fresh air and exercise, not to mention daylight, I’d be fit for the looney bin, that much I know. So yeah – daily runs during lunch hour or strolls along the seashore, preferably with my eyes open as wide as possible to allow the daylight in. Yet another perk of being self-employed.

AND DARK OVERCAST DAYS LIKE TODAY DON’T HELP
Actually, back in the days when we used to have snow in the winter, SAD wasn’t as much of an issue. Snow can be a pain, but it certainly helps light up the winter darkness. As do the Christmas lights, which is why in December the Greater Reykjavík Area probably looks like a huge, bright, multicoloured Christmas ornament from space. It started off all drizzly and mild, but it cooled down as the day wore on and right now it’s 3°C [39F], and sunrise was at 10:11 am [Gah! It’ll be more than an hour later before we’re done], with sunset at 4.14 pm.

Last year when EPI and I got married, our four exceptionally wonderful daughters gave us a fabulous wedding present: a night at the Hotel Saga plus dinner at Grillið, their in-house restaurant that happens to be one of the best in Reykjavík. It’s taken us almost a year to fit this little outing into our busy schedules [a scandal, really], but last night we finally managed it.

EPI’s main concern was that we’d get bored. I mean, we planned to check in at 2 pm and dinner wasn’t until 9.30 – what would we do in the interim? However, he comforted himself with the thought that, if push came to shove, we could always go home, seeing as how we live only five minutes away by car.

Personally I had no such worries, because as I pointed out to EPI, the hotel actually has a spa at which we could hang out for the duration of the afternoon. This generated even more anxiety for EPI, because by his own admission he didn’t know what to do in a spa. [I was going to mention Brazilian waxing, but decided against it.] Plus we could take a book and actually lie in bed and read, or – you know – whatever. It was supposed to be a romantic getaway after all.

So we checked in around three. The first half an hour was a bit weird; we unpacked our bags and examined the slippers and bathrobes folded neatly on the bed, stared out the window a bit, and then for lack of a better activity sat in the armchairs provided and read the newspapers. That took us up to about 4 pm, when it was time to take a deep breath and venture out to the spa.

After a bit of humming-and-hawing about what to take with us [bathrobe? towel? slippers?] we finally made it down there, only to discover that three Nicelandic couples had staked their claim to the Jacuzzi and were drinking beer and generally having a rowdy time. Great. So we alternated between the steam bath and the sauna and eventually shuffled over to the Jacuzzi after the ladies had retired to the changing room, only to discover that this Jacuzzi has salty sea water in it and the bubbles have this rhythm that is just so soothing, and OMG it’s fricking amazing. So we basically we just flaked out there completely inert until the woman who worked there came and told us the spa was closing and we had to get out now, otherwise she’d have to pull the plug.

Anyway, cut to a few hours later, and we were sitting on the eighth floor up in Grillið being served the meal of a lifetime. Seriously. The food was to die for. This was my second time eating at this particular restaurant and both times it’s been out of this world. [Meanwhile, the service was merely adequate, but that’s hardly news around here.] We picked the ‘Discovery Menu’ and the discoveries consisted of the following: an appetizer of king crab with buttery sauce; seared tuna steaks with a little croquette ball with a tiny zuccini slice inside and some other delectable accompaniments; pan-fried plaice with scallops and mango foam; melt-in-your-mouth beef with mashed potato all artistically carved and arranged plus vegetables and oxtail something wrapped up in like a pastry type thingy set on top … see? Words fail me.* I can’t even begin to describe what it was like. – Oh, and not forgetting dessert, which consisted of something called a ‘banana club’ [as in ‘sandwich’], crème brulee, sorbet and a fourth something that escapes me at the moment.

Along with these mouthwatering treats we were poured three different kinds of wine – Riesling with the fish, Shiraz with the beef, and a Hungarian dessert wine with dessert. Yowsa!**

AND THEN WE WOKE UP TO A BEAUTIFUL DAY
And despite still being stuffed, went down to a lavish hotel breakfast before packing our things for home. I’ve decided that staying in a hotel that’s right near your house is the only way to travel – you’re not stressed out about forgetting something, and you don’t care how you pack before you leave the hotel because you know you’re going to unpack ten minutes later. But I digress: the weather was exceptional today, brilliant sunshine and temps hovering around the freezing mark. As soon as we got home [and unpacked] we went out for a long walk and tanked up on some daylight, which was clear and bright enough to take us through to the end of next week, I should think. Currently –2°C [28F] and the sun came up at 10.05 am and set at 4.20 pm.

* PS I reserve the right to be wrong about the food descriptions. It was all so exceptionally artistic and complex that I can’t remember what everything was called.

** I should probably mention, for anyone intending to follow our example, that delightful as this dinner was, it didn’t exactly come cheap. Two four-course ‘Discovery Menus’ accompanied with ‘a glass’ of wine with each course [it was actually only about half a glass] came to ISK 25.500 [USD 418 / GBP 204]. In my opinion the wine was the least value for money - it was fun to try different wines, but we could have easily ordered two bottles for the price they charged. Just FYI.

As regular readers will know, the Nicelanders are exceptionally devoted to their language, Icelandic. In fact, many people consider the language to be the factor that defines Iceland as a nation. We are joined together by one language - a language that no other nation speaks.

It should come as no surprise, then, that there is an entire day every year devoted to the Icelandic language, and that day is today. It’s called Dagur íslenskrar tungu - “Day of the Icelandic Language”. This particular date was chosen because it is the birthday of one of Iceland’s foremost poets, Jónas Hallgrímsson, with whom most people here seem to have a deep affinity and affection for, sort of like the Icelandic Shakespeare but without the cryptic language. And here we have another glaring exposure of YT’s pseudo-Icelander status, because in contrast to most of my countrymen who have learned all about old Jónas in school, that’s about as much as I know about him. Except that he died young, his death has been romanticized, some people are saying it wasn’t very romantic, and today is the 200th anniversary of his birth. And this last part I only know because the media keeps banging on about it and there are festivals being held all over the country.

But anyway, as I was saying, Icelandic is very precious to the Icelanders, and I’ve documented the various efforts to preserve the language in this space before, including the Nicelanders’ obsessive need to make up Icelandic words for all manner of foreign objects and concepts, rather than just calling a computer, say, komputer. And true to form, today Morgunblaðið had a little blurb in which they’re calling for translations of some common English words and phrases that have stubbornly worked their way into Icelandic and which nobody seems to have come up with a good, solid, Icelandicism for. These words and phrases [some of which have been bastardized to fit into the sentence structure] are:

shortcut
takeaway
brunch
to blog [að blogga]
to google [að gúggla]
iPod
to date [someone - að deita]
wannabe
grandparents [this is the only one I take exception to, I just don’t see what’s wrong with using afi og amma]
outlet
gig [gigg]

Okay then! Anyone with suggestions for good and proper Nicelandic translations may send them to menning@mbl.is or leave them in the comments, whichever is easier. Although if you do choose the second option, I can’t guarantee they will make it into the next official Icelandic dictionary.

MILD WEATHER TODAY, OVERCAST WITH DRIZZLE
Yep, that about sums it up. Currently 3°C [39F], sunrise was at 9.58 am [yow!] and sunset at 4.25 pm.

Here in Niceland, when someone’s making money, we have an idiom: “They’re getting hairy palms”.

Meanwhile, Fréttablaðið has a daily feature called “Question of the Day” in which they ask someone - often someone who has been in the news - a question.

No prizes, then, for guessing what they asked the beautician from yesterday’s post.

Heheh.

MEANWHILE, MEC HAS BEEN VINDICATED
Very logically they have come to believe that the mitts they sent me the other day were wrongly labelled. After all, the ’small’ I received is a foot long - a full 12 inches - from top to bottom … which just doesn’t compute. So they’ve offered to reimburse me for the postage to send the mitts back to them, and to send me a new pair for free. Icelandic vendors: watch and learn.

AS FOR OUR DELIGHTFUL NOVEMBER WEATHER
Gloomy - overcast, wet, breezy [8-15 m/s]. But mild: 9°C [48F] here in the capital; the sun came up at 9.55 and will go down at 4.28 pm.