Wordless Wednesday - Wild raspberries
Wordless Wednesday
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Flu proof?
My grandma, who was born in 1910, told me how she, her sister and her father all lay sick - so weak they were often unconscious - for two weeks with the Spanish flu in 1918. Grandma's mother didn't get sick at all. Not even so much as a sniffle. The Norwegian newspapers announced yesterday that they no longer believe the current swine flu (H1N1 influenza A) can be contained. The message is that there's no way to avoid it in this country any more; it's being spread from Norwegian to Norwegian here at home. Keep washing your hands, avoid sneezing or coughing without a hankie and throw the hankie away immediately is still good advice, though. But I wonder: Should I resign myself to this fate, this virus? Or: Should I assume that great-grandma's genes are still alive and kicking in me? She was a tough Irishwoman - real tough. I'm choosing to believe the latter. And maybe there's also a bit of the luck of the Irish, too.
Asleep
It has bugged me for quite some time that I couldn't remember where I was when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon exactly 40 years ago today . I knew I was in Norway, on Grandpa's family farm in Mundal (in Lindås , not the Mundal in Sogn that former vice-president Mondale came from) and that they had a TV. I can still see my granduncle's living room and the TV in the corner. So where was I? I'd forgotten something, but a Norwegian radio commentator reminded me today: With the time difference it was actually a few minutes past midnight on July 21 in Norway when man first walked landed on the moon. And at that time of night, an eight year old is in bed. Asleep. But I remember all the grown-ups talking about it the next day. They had stayed up and watched. I wish humanity could get behind something as equally awesome as going to the moon. All the can-do spirit, all the sharing of hopes and dreams, all the willingness to accept risk. Millions of individual
Keys
They were tucked behind a little notepad, in the tiny envelope they were handed to me in by the attorney handling my grandma's estate. Nearly exactly four years after her death, I finally got around to handing them over to whoever had taken over her apartment. I hadn't been by there in all this time. I realized that in four years, some habits have faded and I had to actually think for a moment where my most effective route was. I was fine until I caught sight of her balcony - the only one in her building that was glassed in. A familiar tightness arrived in my chest. I couldn't remember if her downstairs call button was the second one up from the bottom. I couldn't remember which mailbox was hers, though I suspected it was the third from the left, but the names on the mailboxes did not help. I went up the one flight of stairs, so familiar and yet oddly unfamiliar, to the door that had not changed. But it had no name, so there was no help there. I decided to ring th
Where my weather forecast really comes from
Here I was, thinking that the data the Norwegian meteorological institute ( NMI ) uses to forecast the weather for the 70,000 places it brags about forecasting via the website yr.no was collected by charming geezers in wayward places, who empty little cups marked in tenths of millimeters to say how much rain has fallen and observe the wind sock next to the chicken coop to say which way and how hard the wind is blowing. But it's not cups and wind socks. It's more like fishing nets. I got curious about the weather, that is, the weather forecasting, after reading in today's local paper that areas that rely on cabin rentals as a source of income are complaining about yr.no's forecasts. The complaint is that the forecasts are so pessimistic that tourists cancel their cabin stays. Rain or cool weather is often forecasted by yr.no but the reality is sunshine or milder temperatures. Yr.no had an explanation: They don't actually measure the weather in all areas on their l
