Nik's Saga

Yes, I'm officially On Holiday.

I went down to the supermarket today, a trip which requires driving past the university, and was amazed and amused at the fact that I didn't feel guilty for not being in the office on a 'workday'. Instead I've done a bit of embroidery, watched a couple of documentaries, listened to a bit of news and generally unwound in a manner quite unlike that normally performed at weekends.

A lot of the news coverage today has been about Wimbledon, naturally enough. It seems to be bright and sunny there - just don't expect it to last, folks. It takes two or three days for weather from here to hit the UK, and for the last couple of days it's been raining pretty solidly. I must say I'm not exactly rooting for Murray - his comments last year on supporting anyone against England in the run-up to Euro 2008 saw to that. I'm happy to support British players in any sport, but he clearly doesn't see himself as British so therefore I don't have to support him.

The annual tennis-fest has led me to other sport-related thoughts, particularly in terms of the relationships between coaches and players. Three, possibly more, of my local fencers are planning to attend Champions of Lough Devnaree. This is excellent on many different fronts, not just the fencing ones. One of them is really looking forward to facing me in a tournament situation.

In a tournament? Erm... nowadays I fence occasionally, just to keep my authorisations up to date more than any sense of competition. Certainly I have more technical skill than the rest of the shire's fencers, but they have far more energy and stamina than I have. More and more I see myself as a coach rather than an actual fencer. Nevertheless, it's a bit of a blow to the ego to realise that eventually you're going to come up against your students in a tournament situation and they're going to win. It's one of those things that reminds me, from time to time, that I'm no longer twenty. Or even thirty. Or... well, enough of that.

In other news, I've decided to give up on FaceBook. It has no meaning, and I'd been getting increasingly annoyed by all of the other crap I had to put up with just to play Scabulous. So I send my apologies to anyone who's been waiting on me to play, but I will be available at www.scrabulous.com instead.
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It snowed last night.

Admittedly it was only heavy rain down here nearer sea level, but the mountains behind the town are dusted with snow again from about 650m upwards. It's not just here, either.

I've spent the afternoon visiting a potential (and now actual) site for Alfadans not far from the Aldeyjarfoss waterfall (the same river as Goðafoss but further inland) with and her mum. The site is a farmhouse owned by her family, with a barn that's crying out to be whitewashed and turned into a feasting hall. :) That, however, is a five year plan...

We also visited Aldeyjarfoss, so that's another one I can tick off my to-visit list, then went on to what is advertised as a cake buffet and exhibition on Icelandic outlaws, both facets of which were quite interesting.

Then tonight, for the first time in several months, I picked up one of my larger embroidery projects. This one was supposed to be completed in time for a birthday next month but there's no way that's going to happen. It'll just have to wait until Christmas instead.

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Who are you calling unbalanced? That's my highest score ever!

Or does the Wii have some way of measuring mental state? That could well be unbalanced, as in spite of doing more exercise this week than I've done in a long time, my weight is bouncing round at about +/-0.8kg over that period. Fitii even tried to console me that it takes a while for any effect to become visible...

After a week of getting with the programme (except on Thursday, when I was too sore and tired to do anything) I have noticed a couple of changes. My centre of gravity is much more centred than it was when I started. My WiiFit age is now running at least 10 years younger than my chronological age. I'm now doing the advanced aerobics sessions for a given task as well as the beginner ones (except for running, which I avoid like the plague). My yoga balance is pretty good, normally in excess of 90/100.

But it's not having any effect on my weight. Yes, I know I should have patience, but the daily variation is frustrating. It's enough to make me want a very large chocolate bar to cheer myself up.
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No, not Wii...

Weeee! because I'm not planning to go into the office for several weeks. I do have some work to do over the holidays, but I'm determined to do it at home rather than in the office. I came home this evening and stretched, cat-like, at the luxury of it all.
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I'm really tired again.

I'm hoping this is because the WiiFit is inspiring me to do far more exercise than before (I'm even doing the longer sessions of hula and rhythm boxing) but haven't upped my food intake to balance this (obviously). This evening I also realised that I'm going to have to make yet another Tudor corset because even if I lace the latest one up to its smallest possible size it's still on the large side.

This was discovered as I went through the these are some of types of big frocks you get to wear demonstration for a couple of new folks. One person was completely new, but even before she arrived I'd been thinking that the Shire had outgrown my living room, which is a good thing. Come to think of it, it probably outgrew my living room some time ago, as we're now getting 10-12 people for general A&S sessions. I'm clearly going to have to start thinking about what we're going to do in future as few apartments can comfortably handle that number of people on a weekly basis.

One more day to go, then I'm officially On Holiday. I'm not counting the hours, oh no, not me...
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So the average British adult has read only 6 of the top 100 books printed by The Big Read?

That's a horrifying statistic. Alright, so maybe not all of the books will be to everyone's taste, but 6 out of 100 is a depressingly low number. When I read that, I wondered just how many of them I'd actually read? After all, there are a number of 'classics' that I really wouldn't touch with a bargepole.

Here, then, is my version of the list. The books I've actually read are in bold text, those I have no intention to read are in italics, those I hated are struck out and those I loved are underlined

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullmam
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So I've read 43 out of 100 and only hated 3 of them (with one exception I've never liked Dickens, and the whole Austen/Brontë set leave me quite cold). There are certainly books within that list that I plan to read but just haven't got around to yet - Catch 22 and Catcher In The Rye, for instance. Others... well, I wouldn't object to reading them if there was nothing more interesting lying around.

I do not consider myself particularly well-read. I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction and a fair few thrillers (Dan Brown is on the list but Le Carré, Clancy and Forsyth are not?) rather than the 'classics', but I despair if the average is only 6. What are they all reading? Hello magazine, I suppose. :(
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Tonight's fencing practice morphed into a WIi party.

Given that summer has arrived here in Akureyri we're now having fencing practices outdoors whenever possible, and as my apartment block has a nice large garden surrounded by a head-high hedge, this is as good a place as any to hold practises. The ground is a little hilly, but not rough, so as long as we avoid the trees (and the lawn sprinkler tonight) it's quite good. Naturally enough I saw several of the neighbours (and some local kids) peering curiously out of windows.

Normally after fencing we'd go to a local cafe for coffee and ciabatta or cake, but tonight (given the lure of the Wii) I just got some rather nice fresh bread, ham, and broke open the delicious large waxed farmhouse cheddar brought by Penny on her recent visit. Mmm... real cheddar... I'm glad to say that people were appropriately appreciative of a good hard cheese, sufficiently so that I might see about picking one up on the way back from the UK this time and keeping it for Alfadans in October.

The lure of the Wii proved irresistible, but fortunately I had prepared for this and had pre-generated Miis for almost everyone. Most people even recognised themselves, which was nice. My preparation was deeper than this, and earlier in the day I'd invested in WiiPlay to get the second controller and the games pack, which proved very useful. :)

This meant that my own workout was somewhat later than normal but I still managed to get my half hour into FitPiggy. Not only this, but I managed to complete the tilting ball game - although I put this down to the astounding stability enhancement provided by a couple of glasses of Bushmills Malt.
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But not necessarily an island.

I've now unlocked balance game 9 on the WiiFit, which is the Zen focus-on-a-candle-and-sit-perfectly-still exercise. It's an excellent one to do as the final 'game' of a session. I was feeling positively serene by the time I'd done (and maxed) that one. I'm quite good at being a rock. :)

I could have done with some of the calmness and serenity earlier in the day. At least I now know basically what resources I've got to play with next year, and I'm down to two possible plans rather than eleven, which has to be a step forward. Tomorrow can now be spent writing up a white paper putting forward several possible strategic plans to hand out in conjunction with a meeting later in the week. Ah well, only four days left until the holidays. Four and counting...
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I'm trying to remember what I've done today.

It's been a day of lots of little things to cross off the to-do list, like the washing up, or making phone calls, or creating DVDs and labels, that sort of thing. I have managed to get my fencing photos from Revel online, and created a DVD of other photos for Penny, but it does feel as if I've been very busy but have little to show for it.

In the later evening I did manage to get 45 minutes on the WiiFit, so I'm feeling a little bit virtuous about that. Having done yoga for years has clearly been well worth it from the posture point of view.
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Where did those leg muscles come from?

Yesterday's aerobic exertions meant that I woke up this morning with the Calf Muscles From Hell. I've staggered around a bit and introduced E to the WiiFit, which meant that I've ended up doing another half hour on Fitii plus some other games... so I expect to be practically immobile tomorrow.

I've also realised I'm going to have to buy a second controller/nunchuck so that we can do more than just play ten-pin bowling. This thing is officially addictive. Even as I type I"m contemplating a game of tennis...
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Do not take WiiFit Body Test after doing a half hour workout. Basic balance may improve, but everything else goes to pot.

On the up side, I actually did the running on the spot thing. I have insufficient upper digits to count the years since I've done any running on the spot. So what if I'm only running at 65%? Completing the damned thing is the victory in this case. I should also make a point of doing it last so that I can collapse afterwards.

I like the hula thing, but the I'm sufficiently unused to step aerobics that I get lost on level 2. In the past I've always been put off step by the size of the steps, so the shallowness of Fittii (as I've decided to call him) is quite a relief.

My aim is to do half an hour of this a day, working my way around each of the sections. Right now, though, I need a shower.

Labels: Wii

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I've just started off a bottle of bramble gin.

No, not drinking it, making it. My friends F&D, with whom P and I had dinner the other week, have a delicious liqueur made by F's mother with gin and local berries - basically the Icelandic equivalent of sloe gin. It improves with age, and made me think that I could do something similar with other fruit. My first thought was to use raspberries, but that might be a bit too sweet, so I moved on to blackberries or blackcurrants.

Unfortunately neither of these are commonly available here, so when I saw blackberries in Netto this afternoon I realised that I'd have to move quickly. I happened to have a spare bottle of gin on the shelf (two, in fact, both gifts, which shows how often I drink) and just about enough white sugar in the cupboard to put it all together. Sadly gin dates from the 1630s so I can't designate this as an A&S project, but I probably ought to do more modern things from time to time. :) If I see the blackcurrants in any of the supermarkets I'll put a second batch on and pick up a new bottle of gin on the way through duty free next time.
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In New Scientist, to boot!

D pointed me at this, because I hadn't got around to reading last week's New Scientist yet.

Scroll down to 'Waiting backwards'.

Okay, so they've got my genetic complement wrong - a natural hazard with a name like mine - but woo-hoo all the same!
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Looks pretty ordinary, doesn't it?



Don't you believe it.

This morning T & I were taken on a quick tour of some of the local scenery and historic sites in and around Hämeenlinna. The forests and lakes are certainly balm for the soul, and we got a very good view of both from the tower in the nearby Aulanko Park. My knee prevented my from climbing right to the top but I did get to the mid-way viewing gallery.

From there we went to Hämeen Linna, the local castle. This confused me a little at first as it is described as a mediaeval castle but is clearly made of red bricks. This is because it's made of mediaeval red bricks, one of only three such buildings in the country. It has been, in its time, a border garrison, a fortified bakery (and grain store), a local seat of power and a women's prison but part of it has recently been restored to its mediaeval form. As I walked through some of the upper rooms I kept thinking this would be a fantastic place to hold an SCA event.

Not only was it an interesting castle, but in the gift shop it had a number of garb pattern booklets - published by Sophias Ateljés Förlag - full of excellent simple patterns for male, female and children's clothing, including hats and shoes. Okay, so the instructions are all in Finnish but the diagrams are very clear. Needless to say I bought one or two... or six. :) I decided that the glass winebottle was perhaps a little fragile to take back with me so instead I treated myself to a bracelet that will work well with early mediaeval garb.

During this I was, I admit, a little bit more enthusiastic than I tend to be about computer science. The upshot of this was that we made an unplanned detour to the Church of the Holy Cross at Hattula. On the outside it's an unassuming little place whose red brick construction makes it look much later than its true construction date (it's one of the other two mediaeval red brick structures). Inside, however...



It's amazing. The inside of the church is covered with the original 15th century paintings. I was positively gobsmacked by this one. At school we learned that before the reformation in England churches were decorated all over the inside with paintings depicting bible stories as the people could not read the bible for themselves, but then these were painted over or ripped out as idolatrous and papist. I suppose I'd had mental images of the Sistine chapel, or maybe some delicate renaissance frescos, but nothing like this. The walls and ceiling are completely covered with bright bold images. It is absolutely stunning.

I have lots more photos, both of the landscape and the mediaeval sites, which I'll upload at the weekend (being in a hotel I have rather limited internet access) together with the Revel and beyond photos.

The afternoon was spent focussing on eLearning and collaboration possibilities, which have left my mind nearly reeling with the possibilities. It's going to take a lot of work and we're not going to be able to do it overnight, but we could do wonderful things with this. If, that is, there is the political will in Akureyri.

Labels: finland

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On the other university's campus.

Quite literally in this case, as the HAMK campus is full of lush verdant grass and tall slender silver birch trees.

It's been a very interesting day. There are huge opportunities for collaboration on teaching, and we've learned a lot about their distance learning system. It'll take a bit of work and some new software but I think that we could teach computer science as a distance learning degree in Akureyri using this model. It's very different to the mainly-social sciences model that's in use at present, but the Powers That Be know that we can't use the current distance learning methods to teach computing.

After last night's reindeer steak in the hotel restaurant tonight was a meal with a lot of the CS staff here in O'Maggies, an Irish pub here in town. Not only did they do great cheese on toast but also, joy of joys, Strongbow and Magners ciders. Woo-hoo! And, of course, a decent selection of Irish whiskeys, but as I have several of those at home while ciders are rather more difficult to acquire I opted for the apple rather than the grain.

Right now, though, I have this craving for chocolate. But I'm being strong and not going down to the chocolate machine in reception. :)
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It's almost midnight in Finland, but my body doesn't know what time it is.

The whole time thing is rather confusing. I got up at 04:30 GMT this morning. I then got onto flights at 05:50 and 07:20. The second flight was three hours long and landed at 14:20. Confusion the first. On the television news right now Ban Ki-Moon has just unveiled the new journalists' memorial, which means it's almost 22:00 in the UK and 21:00 in Iceland. And it's dark outside. My body is temporally confused.

But I'm here. Finland is green. Possibly even more green than England, hard though that is to admit. It has real trees, not the overgrown bushes that pass for trees in most of Iceland. I had reindeer steak for dinner, which was far less gamey than I expected. It's rather good.

Tomorrow's start is at about the same GMT time, so I'm off to bed to try to fall asleep in time to get a bit of sleep. I suspect I'm just going to have time to get over the transition eastwards in time to be confused by the transition westwards. Ah well.
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I can confirm that half an hour of WiiFitting is enough for me to work up a bit of a sweat.

After a complete failure in my search to find a decent set of scales, and as several members of (and even my sister) have said that they're great, I caved in and bought a Wii and accompanying WiiFit. It was always going to happen eventually - as soon as they brought out the lightsabre duelling game - but I got inspired. Of course, I'm now not going to be able to use it for the next four days as I leave for Hämeenlinna in Finland at 05:50 tomorrow. Ah well.

The cheerful WiiFit avatar tells me that my balance and posture are great, even if I put a bit too much weight on my heels compared to my toes, and on my left leg compared to my right. I've only done the yoga exercises and the balance games as yet, as the idea of muscle workouts and aerobic exercises is quite scary. It amuses me that one reason my balance is good for the yoga is that several of the exercises are fencing postures so I'm reasonably experienced in maintaining my balance in these already.

As well as the massively energetic wii-ing, I also did a bit of tree planting. Not quite as energetic, but at least it was in the great outdoors. We'd got 30 trees to plant last weekend at Revel but they didn't come with an appropriate spade. We borrowed one from the site which turned out to be far too fragile to handle the ground and bent almost immediately. In the end we just about managed to plant four royal and two viceregal trees plus P's tree before giving up due to lack of tools. Three of us went back today to finish the job. It's likely that only half of them will survive, but even so that's a reasonable start. The trees are silver birch and 50-70cm tall, unlike last year's trees which were considerably smaller and firs of some sort.

Time for a shower, I think, then time to pack and get an early night.

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Tonight I should be out at a dinner given by the 'Good Friends' society of the university, but I've no idea where dinner is being held.

Being away from email and work for the last week has meant that the locational information didn't reach me, and although I asked someone this morning where the thing was being held I suspect she thought that I was asking about something else. So when I turned up to that location and found it empty I gave up and came back home. Ah well. I'm not too worried, as I have a flat that that's currently in a state of post-event chaos and will be flying out to Helsinki at 05:50 on Monday morning, so these extra free hours will come in useful in clearing things.

The dinner is part of the day of celebrations accompanying the university's graduation ceremony. I had to turn up at this, as it was my job to hand out the degree certificates to all of the science graduates.

To keep myself amused during the speeches I can't follow I've taken to noting the changes in fashions worn by the graduands. Last year it was big bold prints in bright colours; this year it's black and white (possibly with more restrained prints) or plain bright colours. Dresses are commonly either shoestring, strapless or even backless, with puffball or asymmetric hems. Boleros, even over dresses with sleeves, were also common. One or two that didn't conform to this pattern did look a bit like costumes from a seventies SF movie, although there was also a rather nice red belted t-tunic. Only four of the graduands wore traditional dress - a long black kirtle with embroidered bodice seams and front panels and a long apron (often patterned) over a plain white blouse, plus a black skullcap hat with a very long dangling tassle. The overall standard was higher than last year, although the number in traditional wear has halved.

The guys (and there were very few of them) opted for suit and tie, although there were a number who went for open-necked shirt and loose tie. I suspect that these were the ones who thought themselves terribly stylish. The ratio of female to male graduands was about 5:1, the same as last year. This is mainly because the largest two faculties, health and education, produced almost entirely female graduands. In the other two the ratio is about 2:1.

I'm now off to defrost and reheat some lasagne while I try to remember where I put my passport when I got back from Spain. I remember putting it somewhere safe so that I'd be able to find it easily after Revel. I just don't remember where...
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As you might have guessed, it's been a very busy week. It's also been a week during which I haven't had internet access, so instead of posting seven separate entries, here they all are in one.

Friday 6th - Is that your Minke, Monsieur?
The day before the event is traditionally the day to take any visitors on a whistle-stop tour of northern Iceland. I'd rearranged the normal schedule to take into account an afternoon of whale-watching and the fact that the event site was close to Húsavík, the whale-watching centre.

What I hadn't realised was that both of my two guests were sporty, outdoors, climbing mountains-types, which meant that the stops at local beauty spots were a little longer than intended. This meant that we ended up on the tea-time whale-watching trip rather than the afternoon one, but that wasn't too bad. Unlike last year the weather was quite pleasant and spring-like, and not only did we see two minke whales but our boat was also accompanied for a while by a pod of white-nosed dolphins. The dolphins, who included at least two mother and calf pairs, were quite athletic in their leaping around.

Saturday 7th - Introducing Milady Firmboobs
Revel in the Midnight Sun III was, to all intents and purposes, a fencing event. We spent most of the day doing seven authorisations (I am officially impressed by Cernac's energy and staying power) before rain stopped play and we had to run the fencing tournament and the melée indoors.

Everyone who was due to authorise did so successfully, so we had all seven in a 'unbraided' tournament - one which was only open to fencers who were not members of the Academy of Defence... which sounds much better than a we're going to hold a tournament but Cernac and I aren't going to enter it so that one of you can win tournament. :) This was a round robin to select the best two fencers for the final, which turned out to be Hrafngunnur (whose wearing of proper fencing breast protection has gained for her the nickname Milady Firmboobs) and Enrique, with the final victory going to Enrique (who was justifiably pleased with himself for the rest of the weekend).

There was then a melée (involving a Spanish treasure ship and a bunch of cut-throat (literally) and treacherous (literally) pirates. All seemed to enjoy this immensely and could have gone on for some time had we not had to set up the hall for Hrafngunnur's magnificent feast. Mnom mnom mnom.

Post-feast we were all in definite need of a dip in the hot tub and, as the site not only had two hot tubs but also a swimming pool, the bransle in the hot tub became a bransle in the pool with some impressive high kicks just to make the splashes visible. Sadly we didn't have too long in the pool before it closed (it was after midnight by now) so to round off the evening I introduced the Shire to Tablero. Mwah ha hah!

Sunday 8th - To Hell and back
Sunday morning saw a lot of pick-up fencing and the archery tournament (won by Cernac), after which we managed an around-the-table lunch before doing the site clean-up. Once we had everything clear it was back into tourist mode again for our guests, who went off to walk around one of the local volcanoes - Viti, which means 'Hell' - and then off around the blue mud zone before a relaxing soak in the pool at the Nature Baths at Mývatn. This was our planned evening rendezvous location, as a couple of us who hadn't gone walking had done the trip back to Akureyri to return carloads of stuff before coming out again.

Finally we went to the main rift area to do the photographs with the split pipe that shows how one of the crevices is widening. That and the pool under the lava flow, which Cernac promptly decided to climb out of up to the top of the lava flow rather than back through the main entrance. Not bad for after midnight.

Monday 9th - Must be away by 11
The plan for the day was to get Cernac to his 09:40 flight and then be on the road towards Egilsstaðir by 11. After a weekend of very late nights this didn't happen, as there was post-flight-delivery snoozing which meant that we didn't get on the road until 3. Oops! Even after cutting over Öxi rather than going around the coast (a plan much approved by P, even though she couldn't really see the best of the scenery due to the low-lying cloud).

We finally arrived at the YHI hostel just after 1am to find that there was no bedding available, which meant sleeping under cloaks and the like. Frustrating, but by that point any bed was welcome.

Tuesday 10th - Hot and cold running water
Having made it onto the south coast, today was the run across doing lots of impressive scenery things. Things like the amphibious boat trip around the iceberg lake Jökulsárlón, the tip of the Svinajökul, the field of cairns and, finally, Geysir. Oh yes, and reindeer - two of them by the roadside, both rather shy, who ran away when we slowed down to photograph them. Ah well, next time.

We stayed at Hotel Geysir, where we had quite a good (if rather expensive) meal in a dining room overlooking the geyser field. The hotel itself has a set of cabins down by the lake, so we fell asleep to the sound of running water - very pleasant.

Wednesday 11th - Nature overload
Another day of natural beauty. After breakfast we headed out to the waterfall at Gulfoss, where P went wandering up and down the local paths while I drank coffee and read Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. Then down to Kerið, a tiny crater surrounding a lake, where P went wandering around the crater's edge and down to the water's edge while I read my newly acquired book on Icelandic birds. Finally we went over to Þingvellir, where P went wandering along the ridge and down into the valley while I sat at the visitor centre eating ice cream and writing the first draft of the Red Book of Klakavirki on my laptop.

You may have noticed a pattern in all of this. No, I do not do the walking thing, especially after being persuaded yesterday to climb the hillside to look at the glacier and then falling onto my knee, which is quite badly bruised and sore today. P seemed to enjoy it though.

Thursday 12th - Vikings!
Having spent the last few days doing the beauties of nature, today was the designated museum and exhibition day. Naturally we started off at the Saga Museum - the only place I know of in Iceland where you can buy SCA-friendly viking stuff - and then stayed at Perlan for lunch. Which went on for some time, with the result that we only had time for a quick dash around the National Museum. Oops!

We had originally planned to go to the Viking restaurant for dinner, but decided instead to relax at the Blue Lagoon and have a stress-free evening... which worked until I ended up spending over an hour trying to arrange my trip to Finland next week over an internet connection that seemed to work at dial-up speeds. Ah well.

Friday 13th - Final leg
Today P caught her flight back to the UK and I drove the final leg of the ring road back to Akureyri. Since Monday lunchtime I've done over a thousand miles of driving, mainly in the first two and the final day. The two in the middle were much lighter, thank goodness - I'm tired enough after a thousand miles, so I hate to think what I'd be like after sixteen hundred. :)

We did a final little bit of sightseeing this morning - Njarðvík, where we were staying, is home to Íslendingur, a replica viking longship which was sailed from Norway to New York. I'm afraid I spoiled the whole thing for P when I realised that the two boxes in the middle of the deck were the engine housings, and yes there were two propeller shafts coming out of the bottom of the hull... Really, you'd think that they'd do these things properly, wouldn't you?

Our last stop was the bridge between the continents, built over a rift that's part of the active fault system. We'd tried to find this on Wednesday evening but the signposting left a lot to be desired. Even today it took three attempts to find the track through the lava fields.

Once P was at the airport I headed back up north. I did it in one session of about five hours, which was bad of me, I know, but I was trying to avoid the traffic that had started building up. It's going to be a long weekend, given that it's Independence Day on Tuesday, so people are clogging up the roads heading out to summerhouses and the like. In the meantime I just wanted to get home and relax.

Now I'm here I've just discovered that my internet connection (and the related TV link) is playing up. No rest for the wicked. Or the technophile. Ah, it was a fuse. All fixed now.

Labels: revel 3

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Because life is just too hectic right now.

Today's plan was to get up, have breakfast, take Penny over to E's so that they could go walking (strange people), then go into work until they returned and Penny and I went out to F&D's for a barbecue. Large chunks of this actually happened.

Everything that didn't involve going into work happened. The going into work was cancelled - I'd forewarned them that this was a possibility this week, so it's only really a problem for me to try to catch up later. Instead I went shopping, spent several hours baking a Death By Chocolate and doing a pile of Revel-related stuff... although not a big enough pile; my Revel-related to-do list is still horrifyingly long. Some prioritising may have to occur tomorrow when I ask myself why am I doing this, not someone else?

I have a feeling that I'm not going to get much sleep tomorrow night either...
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Penny finally arrived last night.

There were a number of minutes of panic when I tried to meet her at the airport. because I arrived at the right time to see no planes on the tarmac. And no-one waiting for a plane either. Not only that, but when I spoke to the chap at check-in he told me that Penny wasn't on either of the evening's flights. In spite of this I returned at the time of the next arrival to find that Penny had arrived half an hour previously on a delayed plane from Keflavík rather than Reykjavík.

This morning, then, we had an early start with E&O coming over for breakfast (of waffles with various things) before Penny, E and I drove west to the white water rafting centre at Varmahlíð. On the way E got a very strange - and exciting - phone call; a polar bear had been spotted near Sauðurkrókur, only about 30km from where we were. There was, I admit, a temptation to head up that way on the offchance of seeing it, but the idea of being classified as lunch by a very hungry polar bear dissuaded us. This was terribly exciting as it's thirty years since a polar bear landed here. Further messages later in the day confirmed that the police had shot and killed it, thus freeing the sheep of Skagafjörður from the prospect of a sleepless night hiding in the dark hoping not to become the ice-bear's breakfast.

The rafting was as much fun the second time around as the first, and still involved hot chocolate made with hot spring water half way down. It also still has the unpleasant and slightly tricky climb at the end to get back up to the bus... now if only they'd get a bigger winch so that they can haul people as well as rafts up that sixty degree slope...
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My, it's warm today!

I realised this when I took the car for its (slightly late) MOT this morning. The MOT process involved going to the testing centre, paying the appropriate fee and then joining the appropriate queue for the testing bay. In fact there was no external queue for bay 2 (small vehicles) so I just had to wait for the tester to finish the car in the bay and then it was full steam ahead. During this wait - about ten minutes - I realised that a) I needed the car window open and b) that it might have been wise to put sun tan cream on the arm nearest the window...

Ah well, never mind, it was only ten minutes. Then I drove in, parked the car where instructed, then got out to avail myself of the free cup of coffee while I watched the tester Do Things to my car. Then I put the keys back into the car, having automatically removed them when I got out. D'oh! The test was about fifteen minutes, after which the report said (effectively) change the windscreen wipers (new ones were sitting in the boot but I hadn't got around to changing them) and replace passenger side brake light (something I'll need to pick up from the local spares shop). With these minor caveats my number plates were then plastered with their new yellow 2009 stickers to show that the car is roadworthy for another year. Hurrah!

I'm always terribly nervous taking my car for these tests (whether here or in the UK) as I'm always convinced that it's going to fail horribly and cost huge amounts of money to make it legal again. The Carina, though, even at 15 years old is proving to be a very robust vehicle. This is definitely a Good Thing, particularly as I'm planning to drive right the way around Iceland next week.
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