A Roll in the Universe

We've had one of the wettest and coolest summers ever in Bergen in Norway this year—rainy enough to have us wondering if we will break a record. The current record for the most rain in one summer is from 1964. That's the record we're trying to break this year. Actually, we've been very against breaking the record, but once we got to mid-August after a wet and miserable "summer", we all thought "Oh, whatever, may as well go for broke". I know about the rain in 1964. In 1964, my grandpa ordered a Mercedes 190 D with a diesel engine direct from the factory in Stuttgart, painted in a shade of blue picked out by my grandma. He took my grandma with him to Europe to pick the car up and they drove it around in Germany and then up into Sweden, all the way up to Kiruna (I assume). There they put the car (and themselves) on a train and went to Narvik in Norway. (There is still no road between Kiruna and Narvik.) From Narvik they made their way down to Bergen ...

I've seen "visceral" used to describe something I perceive as instinctual or pathological from the context, but honestly, I don't know what the word means, so I looked it up. Oh, what do you know: It can mean instinctual. Visceral means "relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect" according to my dictionary, and it also means relating to the visceral nervous system. Now to look up what that is. Ah, it is another term for the autonomic nervous system. OK, so visceral is that stuff in us, literally or figuratively, that is beyond our conscious control, our conscious thought. It is that part of us that responds before we've had a chance to form a thought about what we are responding to. I realize that a lot of my reactions are visceral. I feel or sense things and cannot give a good intellectual reason for the sensation or description of it. That actually frustrates me because I understand my world best when I can put it into words. But ...

Wordless Wednesday MS Bruvik On Saturday, I took a tour with the MS Bruvik , the same boat that once ferried me to summer camp when I was about 10 years old. Back then it was just a boat ride. Now it was a historical adventure in several ways. I live close to the city center of Bergen now, just 10-15 minutes by bus. As a child, I lived a short hour's bus ride outside of town. Going into the city then was a project. The first village we lived in was Salhus, a place that exists because of a waterfall that gave power to a textile factory. The factory sat right on the waterfront, and a little ferry ran across the fjord to Frekhaug. A road leading from Salhus to Hordvik, the second village we lived in when I was a child, wasn't built until the war years, engineered by Germans and built by Russian prisoners of war. There was a road going the other way, south towards town, but boat was best. MS Bruvik was one of the passenger boats taking people, mail and goods up and down th...

I've never eaten at McDonald's as much I have in Norway. Ironically. You'd think I'd be a regular when I lived in California, but no. Meanwhile, in Norway, McDonald's has been vote Best Employer for 2016. If Burger King had moved into my local mall some 20 years ago, I'd be eating Whoppers. But it was a McDonald's, and Quarter Pounders. And I am now admitting my guilty pleasure: I do eat McDonald's stuff often—up to once a week. One reason is that the place itself fascinates me. There are five cash registers, but rarely are there lines in front of them. Because the registers move at different paces, and people don't remain at them to wait for their food, people don't line up in front of them. Instead, they hang back in a loose group and wait for an employee to call out "Next customer" (actually, they call "Available register"). Whoever was first (as defined by everyone else literally watching each others back) moves to that ...

Some words in the English language are a lot of fun to say or look at or both. Skedaddle, poppycock, aviation, jiffy, moron. Today's Daily Prompt (I'm obviously not doing them daily) is Jiffy . I am a person who walks fast and likes to get things done quickly, but I never say I'll get things done in a jiffy. I'm never too sure how long something will take me, and am absolutely certain that a jiffy is not long enough. As Wikipedia points out (I found that link in a jiffy): Jiffy is an informal term for any unspecified short period of time, as in "I will be back in a jiffy". From this it has acquired a number of more precise applications for short, very short, or extremely short periods of time. And there's the rub. Extremely short periods of time are wonderful at the dentist's. Who wants drilling to go on for more than a second or two? Or have a metal tool scraping plaque off your teeth for more than a moment? These things are wonderful when they ...

In school we learned that what makes a rain forest a huge and dense forest is, well, the rain. Alaska actually advertises its soggy and mossy pine forests as northern rain forests. I've wondered why Norway doesn't do the same. In the summer, this wet country is as lush as a tropical rain forest. Anywhere from 18 to 24 hours of daylight in the middle of summer and a lot of rain makes everything grow incredibly fast. We don't have the tall, dense canopies of the tropics; our denseness tends to be closer to the ground. But the huge number of trees, the millions of leaves, create a solid green along roads, up mountainsides, across vistas, and around my local pond. Summer where I live has been cool and wet. Nature seems not to care. The moment the ground thaws and temperatures stay somewhere above 10 C, stuff grows. Norwegians with lawns find themselves a bit frustrated: All the rain makes the lawns grow fast, but all the rain makes it impossible to mow said lawn. What we learn...

Gulls herald spring for me. They head for open sea during winter, and when the snow disappears from the land in April, they come back and start screeching at each other at 4 am in the morning. I'm one of the few people who can sleep through that racket, so I welcome the noise. Gulls, in spite of their seemingly huge numbers, have become a protected species in Norway. They've lost their habitat by the ocean, and come into cities to build nests on our office buildings which often have gray gravel on the flat roofs and provide perfect camouflage for baby birds. The roofs of my apartment buildings are black asphalt but the gulls build their bowls of sticks there, too. Since April, I've seen a gull perched on the corner of the neighboring building every morning, as I go to shut my bedroom window (yes, I have the Norwegian habit of sleeping with an open window). Often the gull starts calling in a voice meant to carry across the Atlantic. I have been aware of gulls on the roof a...

Ah, the lovely lazy days of summer vacation. All rested and feeling creative again, so I started blogging. And then summer vacation ended and I went back to work. And suddenly, I don't want to write. It's been interesting being back at work. Before the summer we were backlogged and stressed out. During the slow, relaxing main vacation month of July, nobody was doing anything to generate much work for us, the phones weren't ringing and the emails weren't coming in, so even with a skeleton crew we got caught up. I came back to an empty inbox, time to declutter and reorganize, do what work did come in, and still have an empty inbox. (That latter is a new goal, both at work and at home: The actual inbox is empty. The resulting to-do list isn't, but now I'm on top of incoming stuff.) As people came back to work here and elsewhere, and the pace picked up, I discovered I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to keep everything caught up. And that rather fascinates me...

Junior Gull has been spotted again, in good health and twice as big since last we saw the little one. An adolescent magpie was hanging out on the balcony outside my office window, and an adult gull was quite upset at the corvid's presence. A behavior the gull would have only if it had babies. Maybe Junior is fine after all? I assume so. A gull chick twice as big as Junior was when last seen (a week ago) was out on the mossy roof, oblivious to its parent's worry. So Junior's grown a mile or that's another gull chick. Whatever. There's a baby out there to watch! They do blend in with the gravel roofing

I'm now a Norwegian! I am no longer a documented alien or immigrant. I am a documented Norwegian citizen now. Check this out: The document with my mug shot is my Norwegian passport. My country of birth is a variable and in black type. In red type above it, it says I am a Norwegian citizen. Reading that (still) delights me no end! Once I had my passport, I realized I could do something with my new citizenship. So I sent in a request to the health care system in Norway, asking for the European health card, the so-called E-111 card. One of the rights/advantages to belonging to or having an agreement with the European Union is the right to use public health services in other member countries. This, however, extends only to actual citizens of the EU or the EEC countries. Even though I am a member of the Norwegian social security system, I was not eligible for the E-111 card—until I got Norwegian citizenship. I got the card in less than a week; that's the blue thing in the low...

Pest. Another " false friend ". A pest in English can be a bug or a rat, or a very annoying person. But "pest" as used in Norwegian changed the destiny of Bergen. "Pest" in Norwegian means the plague. The plague or Black Death (in Norwegian, Svartedauden) was first registered in Norway in Oslo 1348, and the eastern part of Norway was hit the hardest. A ship from England carrying the plague docked in Bergen in 1349. At that time, Bergen was the political center of Norway, the seat of both the church and the king. Bergen was not officially Norway's capital, but certainly had had that role since the middle of the thirteenth century. (Oslo was established as Norway's official capital in 1313.) In only two years, half of Norway's population was wiped out. In Bergen, the loss of half the population included the educated, and those representing the church, politics, finances and culture. The aftermath of the plague in Bergen opened the door to the Ha...

"Somebody needs to go check." "Janitor?" "He's on vacation. I'll do it." I learned that one of my co-workers gets into take-charge mode when it's about someone's life; in this case, a gull chick. I took a picture of Junior just the other day from my side of the building. This afternoon, one of the girls next to the window noticed an adult gull gave Junior a vicious peck. It looked like Junior may be hurt. The cause of drama at the office Curiosity and compassion got the better of the co-worker who saw the peck and the take-charge co-worker sitting next to her. They went out the emergency exit, onto the balcony surrounding our building. We happen to have the roof of the shopping center flush with our second floor balcony, a roof covered in gray gravel and perfect for nesting gulls. And right on the other side of our balcony, on the roof, next to a plank a roof worker had left, was where Junior was last seen. At one point, ei...

Living in Norway means living with all kinds of traditions, some ancient, like bonfires on Midsummer's Eve, and some much newer, like Valentine's Day. Here in Bergen, the joke is that if you do something twice, you've created a tradition. Celebrating Halloween is becoming a tradition, one for the 21st century, and has been supplanting Norway's original trick-or-treating done on Christmas Eve. At Christmas, many Norwegians decorate their trees with tiny Norwegian flags. I thought the flag tradition was as old as the flag, but it started right after WWII. After being denied anything that looked like the flag colors of red, white and blue, Norwegians got a little carried away their first Christmas after the liberation. It's a tradition that's dying out, though. I haven't seen the tiny flags on trees in recent years. I think that when we think of traditions, we think of something that has survived the generations and is still appreciated. We don't always re...

Of all the life advice I've ever been given or heard, the only one I've ever faithfully followed is the admonishment to stop and smell the roses. I did that last when I was visiting the museum garden at the university of Bergen earlier this month, even thinking to myself, "Roses. Stop and smell." When I was a very little girl and still living in Los Angeles, my maternal grandparents had a rose garden at their house in San Pedro. Dark earth covered a triangle bed bordered by fence, garage wall and garden pathway. Several large rose bushes with different colors and levels of scent filled the space. I loved my grandparents' rose garden. Many years later I saw that it had been replaced by swingsets and seesaws; the owners had children. I remember feeling sad that the children would not get to enjoy the beautiful sight and scent of roses. The parents were perhaps afraid the children would hurt themselves on the thorns. I thought that that would be an excellent thing t...

I just have to leave this somewhere, so here it is: I was dreaming something last night (what, I never remember). The dream/something woke me up. I opened my eyes in the dark and a woman was standing next to my bed, looking at my nightstand (or the lamp on it?). She was 40-ish, slender, had dark hair and brown eyes, and the same sort of face as actress Melissa Gilbert. I have no idea who she is or why I saw her. What really got me was that my reaction was to say, "Oh, hi!" In Norwegian. And she looked at me, startled, and disappeared. And no, this has never happened to me before and now I'm wondering if somebody was astral projecting and happened to end up in my bedroom.

It's 10 AM and I'm watching a memorial ceremony on TV from Oslo, reading the names of the 77 who lost their lives 6 years ago in what has been called Norway's 9/11: The bombing of a government building, and the shooting of young people attending a political camp on the island Utøya on July 22 2011. I'm crying again. On July 22 2011 my TV was on for 6 hours, broadcasting everything that was happening, starting with an explosion in downtown Oslo at 3:25 pm. There was complete confusion: Nobody knew what had broken windows in many buildings. By 5 pm it was confirmed that a bomb had gone off. We would learn later that 8 people were killed. The offices of the national newspaper VG were also hit. Rereading their report —before anyone knew what was going to happen next—the caption on the link to a video stands out: "Hallo!? Er det noen som trenger hjelp?" Some of the strongest images I first saw on that day were of people filming the rubble and smoke and confusion, ...

"Gate" is one of those words that linguists call "false friends". The word looks alike in two different languages but does not have the same meaning. So a movable barrier in a fence in English is a street in Norwegian (pronounced as GAH-teh).  I'm bilingual, equally comfortable with my mother tongue English, and with Norwegian. I learned Norwegian at age 8 so I speak it without an accent. Being bilingual does not mean translating stuff on the fly. Both languages exist with their respective glossaries, grammar, idioms and sentence structure. On occasion my brain will glitch and try to speak Norwegian using English sentence structures, which leads to some awkward phrasing and some fumbling around as I try to correct myself. The reverse only happens if I'm trying to translate Norwegian into English on the fly. Somewhat more frequently, my brain will toss in an English word while I'm speaking Norwegian or vice-versa. I have yet to refer to a street as a ...

Disastrous: Causing great damage. Fortunately (heh, see what I did there?), I have never experienced a disaster. Neither of the natural kind, nor the personal kind. And that leads me to the word's origin: From " disaster " which means "ill-starred" or to be ill-fated because of the stars. Modern astrology is more psychological and less about fate, more about choice and less about destiny. If I really want to scare myself all I have to do is read an old book and my own birth chart will horrify me. I should be in prison or a psychiatric hospital, or perhaps married to a violent man whom I stay with because he's stinking rich. Here's where I like the modern stuff better: Understanding that a birth chart is exactly that: A chart, a map, not a reality. You can experience your map in many different ways, and how you do will be colored by the people in your life and your circumstances. We all share a birthday with many people and none of us are having the e...

My own egg cups The thing about growing up with a Norwegian grandfather is that you assume everybody has a cheese slicer and egg cups. Turns out that one of the things American immigrants left behind in Europe were egg cups. I was reading an article on Lifehacker about how Americans eat soft-boiled eggs, seeing as how there is no such thing as an egg cup in the US. It was only then that I realized why a British friend who lives in Hawaii asked if I could get egg cups for him. In every hotel I've been in in Europe, they serve soft-boiled eggs for breakfast. That is to say, they serve a hot egg that is still nearly raw, or a hot egg that is nearly hard. I therefore rarely eat soft-boiled eggs in hotels. But they do have egg cups (and teaspoons) for the eggs. And I have egg cups at home. Any complete set of dishes also includes egg cups here in Europe. 60's fashion: Coffee cup and egg cup from my childhood Now for some etiquette on eating a soft-boiled egg: I learned b...

I sometimes wonder if I'm able to savor. I seem not to have passions, things or feelings or beliefs that grab me with all my being and all my fiber and that I cannot and will not let go of. So I let go, perhaps a little too fast, denying myself the opportunity to savor. Except, that's what my blog lets me do. I revisit, I remind myself, I remember by sharing here and that gives me a chance to savor the experience I just had, to look at my pictures again and enjoy the view, the moment once more. But as I write this, I realize there are other things that qualify as savoring. For example, the wash cloth that just left my knitting needles. Knitting is an activity that gives me great satisfaction and calms my mind while also keeping me creative and engaged. With this particular project I was also enjoying the yarn color itself. I think any activity that lets you lose yourself for a bit while also rewarding you in some way is a form of savoring. Savoring the moment, savoring the ac...

Ole Bull, violinist and considered Norway's first "rock star", had quite the flare for the dramatic and the mysterious. This last was why he was drawn to the island of Lysøen, where he built his last home. Portrait of a more mature Ole Bull next to flag gift from USA How famous was Ole Bull in his day? Well, the hotel manager in Bergen would save Bull's bath water, bottle it and sell it to Bull's female fans, and Bull didn't mind, as he absolutely loved any attention. He was constantly touring internationally, and knew how to promote himself before and during shows. He had a bottle of smelling salts, and when women would swoon at his concerts, he'd go to the prettiest ones and revived them, something considered a great honor among the female fans. Ole Bull also composed some amazing music, incorporating Norwegian folk music into his melodies. He started Norway's first Norwegian-language theater in Bergen in 1850, since Norwegian theater was ...

I mentioned a new sign (piece of art, actually) that will greet travelers when they exit our new airport terminal that's opening in August: Art at Bergen Airport I also promised the view from Landås . I deliver thusly: Different angle: Bergen as seen from Landås And a bonus because you're here: A child having fun skipping on stones while Ole Bull seems to be playing for her. Ole Bull statue and fountain. Children like to play around the fountain.

Lygra As Eddie and I carefully set our feet down between sheep droppings, we caught a whiff of fresh manure. Instantly, I was transported back to my childhood in Norway, spent in the country with a potato field in front of the house, a couple of steers grazing in a pasture next to the carport, and my uncle's sheep passing by our house on their way to and from their barn. With nice weather, there’s customers and house painting at Feste My friend and co-worker Eddie decided to take a drive out to Seim and Lygra and wanted to know if I'd like to join him. Our goal was to deliver a life preserver our company hands out for free. For both of us this was a nostalgic trip. Eddie family name comes from a tiny island on the fjord that passes by Feste, and the way there was the way my family drive through to get to the family farm in Mundal (not the one off an arm of the Sognefjorden but an unnamed valley in the municipality of Lindås north of Bergen). We drove on narrow, win...

I'm one of those people who covers her refrigerator in magnets, as seen on part of my fridge door: Typical me: An empty to-do list because I forget I have it Some are functional, meaning they actually hold something in place, like temperatures and times for a couple of favorite dishes. Quite a few are vacation memories; Alaska's state flag tells me the temperature. A timer and a to-do list are held in place by magnets. A couple of magnets are gifts, like the one from Chattanooga. Some are there because they are pretty or whimsical or were meant to be a gift from me but I never gave them away. I have to admit, I think the bottom three in the photograph are ugly (definitely not my taste), and I want to throw them out. I'm not sure why I haven't done that yet. There's a part of me that finds it hard to throw away magnets for some reason. Perhaps it's because I do buy them just as much for personal reasons, and not just practical ones. The Daily Prompt

Bergen just broke a weather record from 1952: The number of consecutive days with precipitation in June. In 1952 it was 24. This year it was 26; we had rain every day from June 1 through June 26. I pity those who will go through breaking this year's record because clouds and wet every single day gets really dreary and old. So, the record-breaking weather wrapped up with heavy squalls during the night. I woke up early on the 27th, certain it was morning (as in, time to get up). It wasn't. It was only 4 am. Granted, we have very short nights this time of year, but we hadn't noticed because it was  cloudy  all the time. Clouds are like curtains and when they finally disappeared, the night was suddenly too bright to sleep in. I couldn't go back to sleep and read in bed until it was the "correct" time to get up. Outside my kitchen window was a rare sight: Bright spots of sunlight on the lawn, created by the morning sun reflecting off the uppermost windows of...

I was asked by a foreign-looking gentleman today, who spoke broken Norwegian, if I knew the area. And I do. He wondered if any of the buses at the bus stop we were at went to the bus station. Perhaps oddly, they don't. It used to be that all buses eventually ended up at the bus station, but that hasn't been the case in decades. The priority is for most buses to go through the central downtown area, which the bus station is not a part of, being across the city pond from the main shopping streets. I pointed to what used to be the main road into town, back when farmers would ride a horse and wagon in on a Saturday to sell their weekly produce, and get enticed into spending their money on their way home later in one of the many bars that lined up just past the old city gate. "Go straight down that street, keep going straight, till you see a gray, stone building. That's the train station. The bus station is to the right of that." And off he went. I didn't ...