A Roll in the Universe

This year I seem to be more aware of budding trees. At this point in the season, where nights are still cold, although days are warmer, growth is slow, careful. I woke up to frost this morning, but now, as we approach sunset, my balcony is baking at a whole 26C/78F in the sun! Won’t be long until leaves are bigger, blooms show better, branches are less naked. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the magic of the slow awakening. Beech The beech tree is next to my balcony. This is the first year I’ve noticed flowers on it. It was planted about 25 years ago and barely reached up to my balcony then. Now it’s reached up to my upstairs neighbor’s balcony. One of things that happens when I blog, is that I end up doing a little research on behalf of my reader(s). The pink flowers mean that this is a copper or purple beech, a native of Europe. I did not know I had a purple beech! Rosehip The rosehip bush is right below my living room window. I’ve watched its progress through the ...

Of all the seasonal transitions, the one between winter and spring seems to be the most violent. I’ve tried to predict weather using astrology (astrometeorology). The starting point are the seasonal ingress charts, i.e. the charts for the equinoxes and the solstices or the cardinal signs. For the spring equinox the chart is made for 0 degrees of Aries, which is ruled by Mars. For the summer solstice, it’s 0 degrees of Cancer and Moon ruling. For autumn, it’s 0 degrees of Libra and Venus ruling. And for winter solstice, the chart is for 0 degrees of Capricorn and Saturn ruling. These dates are approximately around the 21st of March, June, September and December, respectively. I live where we have four seasons and am used to how they flow into each other, and how it can vary from year to year exactly when one can say that one season is officially over and we are fully in the next season. Spring glides into summer by budding, one type of bush or tree at a time, and growing the leaves an...

A little musing and sharing via eleven questions thought up by Lisa and found via Paula . 1) Socks? Love them or hate them? Handknitted socks a co-worker made for Secret Santa. And I won them! They keep my feet toasty in rubber boots. — I have cold feet. Socks, please, and they have to cover my ankles. I've chosen to get different patterns and stuff, inspired by a co-worker wearing a pair of bright orange ones. That's when I realized that colorful socks are important. IMPORTANT. Nobody ever sees mine since I wear bootlets at work. 2) Is there a God? — Paula starts off with "I wonder why peeps are so obsessed with this question." Since I have constantly asked myself this question, I don't find the obsession weird. The answer is yes, by the way. The real question is: What is God? 3) Is a pizza a pizza without cheese? I like Paula's answer (must have cheese!), but since pizza is one of those incredibly flexible dishes, it can also lack chee...

Here's a blast from the past (September 13 2008). I love the play of shadows and the blue reflecting in the water. Somewhere-north-of-here fjord I actually did not recognize where the above was until I looked at some of the other photos from the same day: This was from an overnight trip with my then-department. We went to Flåm and Nærøyfjord. The latter is on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The former is the destination for the "Norway in a Nutshell" trip that combines bus, train and bus—not necessarily in that order. The photo above is as we sailed out the Aurlandsfjord from Flåm. Below the highway headed to Aurland, decoration made out of rocks and plants mimic Viking hieroglyphs. Or maybe it's just modern art deer. Where the deer and the antelope play? Nærøyfjord has tall mountains on either side, and in the winter only the midday sun manages to shed any light there. The rest of the time it is in deep shadow. In September the sun was making its way d...

I read about this very bright object being shot up into orbit around Earth earlier this year, just to twinkle in natural sunlight as an artificial star for a few months. And I noted that it would be visible from Norway on April 24-25 2018. I've had this date marked on my calendar since I read about the controversial launch of the Humanity Star . Although I understand the arguments against this bright object that the astronomers had, I thought I may as well take a look since it's up there. I read somewhere that it would be visible in my part of the world today or tomorrow. First of all, it's overcast now and it will continue to be overcast the next couple of days. Never fails. I guarantee that if they announce some awesome celestial phenomenon visible from Bergen, the skies will not be clear. I pretty much treat forecasts for southerly viewings of the Aurora Borealis as forecasts for rain now. (In case you're wondering, auroras are a polar phenomenon that weaken the fa...

Most folks think of migratory birds returning from their winter in Africa or some place as the sign of spring. For me it's the screeching gulls. Gulls and April arrive at the same time. The moment April's lawns are no longer covered in snow, the gulls return from whatever open water they've been hanging out at. Squawking, screeching and calling, they start their racket (courtship, it's called) at around 4 am in the morning and pretty much don't let up until their babies can fly. So basically all spring and summer. I know that for many people, this means interrupted sleep for a few months. For some reason, I can sleep through gulls crying at godforsaken predawn. Some magpie trying to chatter-warn a cat will wake me up and keep me up, but gulls yammering away at each other soothes me. Herring gulls are losing their coastal habitat so they come to the cities. Here, there are flat roofs, often with gravel, that mimic the lost nesting areas on the coast. So up on ou...

As a native Californian, I still feel a bit of worry when I let the water run, like I see so many Norwegians do. It's standard: They let it run to get it nice and cold. They well afford to: The one place that never seems to run out of fresh water is Norway. The never-ending supply of that most vital of fluids can lead to some bad habits and disappointments. Norwegians are always faced with culture shock when they leave their country, because the moment you set foot in Denmark, you get recycled water. Norwegians always complain about how tap water tastes elsewhere. They also complain about being told not to waste the water, especially when they want to shower every day just like they do at home. Norwegians are encouraged to take shorter showers at home, but this has nothing to do with water and everything to do with the price of electricity—used to heat up the water. During lunch at my first job in California, the discussion turned to personal hygiene. The showers-every-day woman ...

As healthy and as long-lived as Norwegians are, they are plagued by one baffling disease: Osteoporosis. As a woman who has lived here for part of her childhood and all of her adulthood, this is something to be concerned about. Is it genetic? Is it dietary? We may have the answer, finally. Good dietary habits when I was a child in Norway included a tablespoon of cod liver oil. As a child, I actually liked the stuff. Didn't like fish, but I didn't mind that spoonful of omega 3's and vitamin D, intended to compensate for the lack of sunshine. (The rule is to take cod liver oil or "tran" in all months with an R in it. There is also the rule not to fish in months without an R in it, so those two rules dovetail nicely.) As an adult I can't stand straight "tran" any more and get my fish oil in capsule form. In the years since, Norwegian researchers trying to understand the national epidemic of broken hips have proposed many theories: Sedentary lifestyle, n...

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...

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...

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

"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...

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...

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...

When I was a child, I hated autumn. I saw no colors, only leaden skies, naked ground and continuous rain. And the ugliest thing ever was to see the green fern leaves turning brown. Ferns are often called snake grass ("ormegras") here in Norway, and are seen as similar to seaweed: A creepy plant that hides in shadow, and hides things in shadow (supposedly), and wraps around your legs as you try to move between them. I never had the loathing my Norwegian friends had, but I liked ferns only when they were lush and green. I hated how they looked when they started to turn into a brown-spotted mess in fall. As an adult I have come to see and appreciate this time of year in a completely different way, and now autumn is my favorite season. I see the colors changing, I feel the air get crisper and easier to breathe, I enjoy seeing the stars return with the darker evenings, and I know now that the gray, soggy part is just November. Recently, I made a new discovery about fall. ...

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Looking north by northwest at 11:18 pm. We don't have midnight sun at 60 degrees north. We have midnight twilight. The pink blush moves from northwest to north to northeast. I love this time of year!

The photos don't come fresher than this, the view from my kitchen window right now. It's going to be an Indian Summer day!