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