some photos off the iphone...

geothermal pool at lake myvatn - this is where we came at the end of our lava field day to soak. the water's a scrumptious 100 degrees-ish, plus or minus a few depending on where in the pool you are, and the little hut is a steam sauna you can go into. i sat on the edge of the pool and drank my orange Fanta and pretended I was an Icelandic mermaid.
ice chunks at jokusarlon (pic does not do it justice). This is where one of the glaciers ends and breaks up into water and icechunks, and it is truly a spooky spooky place. we climbed the little hill overlooking it, and listened to the Verdi Requiem on our travel ipod speakers, and it was quite magical.
BIG glacier with ice cap at the top.

godafoss waterfall. godafoss means "god waterfall" and supposedly it is the place that the icelandic viking chieftains came and chucked all their pagan images into when they decided to all convert to christianity.

so we are now in reykjavik, last day (i leave tomorrow morning early). we went for a spectacular dinner last night, and i am probably never going to need to eat ever again as a result. Here is a catalogue of everything we ate yesterday:

breakfast: porridge, rhubarb pastry thing, orange juice, toast with jam

lunch: salami cheese cucumber tomato sandwich, end of Penrith fudge, yoghurt drink

mid afternoon snack: carrot cake, haddock and roast potatoes (from reykjavik's lovely organic fish and chip shop. really yummy. no napkins or utensils, however :))

dinner: chef's tasting menu at sjavarkjallarinn ("seafood cellar restaurant"), which had so many courses that i would be hard pressed to remember everything BUT there was tuna, springbuck, foie gras, salmon done various different ways, monkfish, haddock, two different puddings, and we killed a bottle of gorgeous rose champagne (that J. had trekked all the way from SF) between us as well as predinner aperitif (kir cassis pour moi, campari & soda for J.). The whole thing took three and a half hours, and I was completely and totally sauced by the end of it. We went for a walk around Rekjavik (still mostly light at one a.m.) and watched all the trendy drunk people stumbling in and out of bars and then we were in bed by a relatively respectable responsible 2 am.

the plan this morning, so far as there is one, is to go to a recreation of a viking longhouse, possibly to go and look at some old medieval vellum manuscripts (guess who wants to do that one) and eat hotdogs at the number one hotdog joint in iceland (which is apparently the number one hotdog country in the world; guess who wants to do that one).

glaciers and mountains and rivers oh boy

An action-packed last few days, and I am definitely starting to have trouble keeping track of everything we've done (not helped by the place names, which are all impossible to remember, full of p's and d's and about sixteen syllables long, all ending in -fjordur.

Wednesday we got up and had our breakfast with the cows (see previous blog entry) and then went off to explore the nearby lava fields. Stop number one was a gigantic fissure in the ground which I think I am not wrong in saying is the place where the mid-Atlantic tectonic plate bits crunch together in Iceland. I have never seen an earthquake fault line up close, so that was pretty cool. There were a couple of cavey type things underneath the rocks at the top of the fissure with pools of near-boiling water - completely mindbending that there can be snow on the ground just a few feet away, and yet water hot enough to fill a cave with steam just bubbling up out of the earth. It is a little scary to think that all that underneath stuff (magma, hot water, everything else that we probably learned about in the geology segment of sixth grade science class that I have not retained) is RIGHT THERE UNDER THE SURFACE all the time, and it's only in places like Iceland and Hawaii that you are reminded of it. After the great big crack in the ground, we went on a hike up to a volcanic crater (way cool), and then to a vast lava field with all these weird rock formations, arches/towers/etc., and then after THAT we drove to Kafla, which is a totally, totally bizarre place that defies description. Big geothermal vents belching steam, on a mountain, with eerie bright blue mineral lakes; mudpots of bubbling brown boiling goo, black lava, snowfields - one of the most surreally varied landscapes I have ever seen. We made an abortive attempt to get to Detifoss - the waterfall with the largest volume of water in Europe - but were stymied by the shitty road (snow, gravel, mudsinks. not a good idea in a little 2WD Hyundai without chains). Never mind, next time. (The road was technically closed, but we were naughty and went down it anyway. So annoying when the Icelandic highway service proves to be right). Deprived of the biggest waterfall in Europe, we instead drove to a place called Seydisfjordur (except with more nifty Icelandic letters in the mix) on the east coast, whose claim to fame is that it has the most picturesque setting of any town in Iceland, right at the end of a very steep fjord with waterfalls coming down both sides. The sunshine fairy (who has otherwise been extraordinarily obliging this holiday) wasn't cooperating as we drove into Seydisfjordur, unfortunately, so we saw some of the waterfalls and a lot of fog, but it's still a cute little town. We left our mark there as well: the car got cleaned out after several days, and I am sure the room service people were horrified the next morning when they got to the rubbish bin in our room. "Oh my GOD" [except in Icelandic] "these people were only here ten hours and in that time they ate a sticky toffee pudding" (heated up for us by the hotel lady; I lied through my teeth and told her it was J.'s birthday), "several bars of chocolate, a slab of Penrith fudge, a packet of digestive biscuits, a ginger cake, [and probably several more high-calorie treats that I'm forgetting about now]".

Thursday morning we walked out along the south side of the fjord in the hopes of seeing some puffins; we didn't see any puffins (apparently they're all out at sea at the moment) but we did see lots of other birds, and lots of pretty wildflowers, and a waterfall, and Jonathan did some yoga out on the rocks where we had a picnic lunch which provided what I expect will be the iconic photo of the week (again, sadly, we are without a way for camera to talk to netbook). We then drove to Hofn, on the southeast coast (pronounced like a hiccup, for reals), where we had bacon burgers and red wine for dinner (I am on a special 10,000 calorie per day diet for my, um, complexion? it helps with recovery from sunburn. mm, yes, that sounds plausible) and then spent the night at the Hotel Skaftafell, which has to win the prize for the Least Foresight in Hotel Site Selection ever: it's basically right at the foot of a bloody great glacier which is one day (unless global warming comes to get the glacier first) going to squash Hotel Skaftafell flat.

Today (Friday) we did a loop hike through Skaftafell National Park, which I think is the most beautiful place we have been so far: pristine peaks, waterfalls, the first real vegetation we have seen (although it's fairly pathetic what passes for a forest here; joke of the day - Q. What should you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? A. Stand up.) and a really, really, really, really big glacier (several, in fact: Skaftafell is at the edge of the Vatnajokull icecap - the biggest icecap outside of the North and South poles - so all the valleys are filled with these massive tongues of glacier coming off the icecap. Everything here is five times bigger and weirder than everywhere else). Dinner at the Sisters' Cafe (named for nuns who were executed there for having sex with the devil - eesh) in Kirkjubaerjurklaustur (say that five times fast) and then through the Sandur, a great big nuclear winter wasteland where nothing grows and it's flat flat flat as far as the eye can see and where they have hidden traffic cameras to nab tourists from California driving 75 mph instead of the posted 55 (it's flat! there's no one out there! the road is completely straight for about 100 miles!... oh, never mind). There was a terrifying few minutes when the cop asked J. to get into the back of the cop car and I was having panicked visions of having to follow the cop car to whatever dungeon they were going to throw him into (ha! you all thought it was me driving, didn't you?) and figure out how to bail him out before his flight on Monday, but luckily they just gave him a ticket and that (hopefully) will be the end of it. Very exciting.

I'm now tucked up in bed in Vik, a little dot on the map on the south coast, having had a shower and a cup of tea; tomorrow we will make a last ditch attempt to see a puffin before heading to Reykjavik for urban delights, but until then, delicious sleep.

horses and lavafields and waterfalls and geothermal pools

A lovely lovely day yesterday – we went for a horse ride on shaggy Icelandic horses along a river valley, a drive through mountains and lava fields with a quick excursion to a waterfall, and then a soak in a geothermal pool (sorry for the lack of place names: I will use as my excuse that my keyboard can’t cope with all the Icelandic letters (I had a quick look in Symbol font just now, and nothing: Icelandic retains several of the old letters that disappeared from English around AD 800, which gives written Icelandic a particularly medieval rugged look. I read in the guidebook today that so few foreigners learn Icelandic that most native speakers have never heard Icelandic spoken with a foreign accent, which is kind of trippy, no?). We have been unbelievably lucky with the weather – it’s cold, but it has been gorgeously sunny and completely dry all the time (apparently the week before we came it snowed most of the week, so it really is luck rather than good travel planning. Hooray!). In other good news, Iceland Air thinks they may have tracked down J’s errant suitcase, and there is a reunion planned for 4 p.m. today. I’ll believe it when I see it, but Iceland Air sound pretty confident, which is good, since two days ago, the official word was “suitcase? What suitcase?”

We arrived at Lake Myvatn last night (translation: “midge lake”, which sounds horrifically unappetizing, but so far a misnomer, as there are about three gajillion birds and no bugs (related? perhaps) and it is really lovely. We are staying at the Vogar farmhouse, which is a working farm on the shore of the lake, and when you are sitting eating your breakfast there are cows and BABY COWS so cute in the room right next to you getting milked with a big glass window so you can watch them and they can watch you (and you can drink the milk that is coming out of them). I had a spastic moment of watch-dyslexia this morning, and made Jonathan get out of bed at 7:20, thinking it was an hour later, so we spent an hour down by the lake shore watching the birds, sun on distant snowy peaks, blue lake, blue sky, etc etc until it was actually time for breakfast; so much excitement so early in the morning proved too much and we have now come back to our room for a quick snozzle before setting off for the day (there are big fluffy white duvets and lots of pillows: difficult to resist). But we don’t really need to resist because, hey, it’s going to be light until 1 a.m., so we’ll have plenty of time to do everything we want to do today.

We went last night to the geothermal baths, sort of like reykjavik’s Blue Lagoon except way way fewer people; imagine a vast expanse of lava rocks, and then a natural pool (Olympic sized, except shallow and lumpy/irregularly shaped) with water so pale blue it’s almost white, with steam coming off the surface; it’s rumoured that 70% of Icelanders believe in trolls, and it definitely has the Tolkien Middle Earth look. All the water smells faintly sulfurous (and my silver bracelet turned a lovely eggplanty purple colour in the water, which was exciting – a little chemistry lesson in action) so it’s either going to give us cancer or we’ll live until we’re 110, one of the two. I was imagining that the baths would be packed with young backpackery types of all nationalities, but a) they weren’t packed at all and b) the majority of people who were there were middle-aged and elderly locals, for whom the soak in the mineral springs is clearly the social highlight of their week; it was nice. Much better than wheeling your oxygen tank around the mall, preferred activity of California seniors, and all the Icelandic oldies looked pretty well padded, so I don’t think the water’s given any of them cancer yet. I found myself a little place in the shallows where the water was hot enough to peel your skin off and lay like a crocodile, half in,half out with my feet up in the air, drinking my orange Fanta what J. had brought me in a blatant bid to win Best Person in the Universe award, and feeling that life did not get much better.

Today the plan is a series of mini-hikes – we’re going to climb up an inactive volcanic crater, go and look at some “pseudocraters” (formed by subglacial explosions. Cool.), another big waterfall, and then head out to the east coast tonight, swinging by airport for suitcase reunion. No pictures to upload – I forgot to bring extra batteries for my camera (oops) so we’re taking all the pics on J’s camera (which is a much nicer camera anyway, but which doesn’t have a cable to talk to my computer). It’s completely weird how technology has changed travelling: the other day we needed to make a phone call, so zip! pull out computer, find nearest unsecured local network, yump on Skype, dial number and Thor or Olav is your uncle. (J. actually got chatting up a dude called Thor at the pools yesterday. I love it. I also have to note that I now (if I ever doubted them) am a true believer in J.’s superpowers. He is having ACTUAL CONVERSATIONS with people in Icelandic. I do not shit. When I call him on it, he looks sheepish, and says, “well, you know, the grammar is very similar to German, and a lot of the vocabulary shares word roots with Swedish, so…” and I’m like, yes, and…? Also he doesn’t get jetlag. Hunh.

Ooh, another fun fact: Iceland did not have currency (as in money. At all.) until 1936!!! It was all bartering cows and bags of silver until then.

OK, time to wake up sleeping beauty so we can go achieve greatness…

alors le blog

this whole midnight sun thing is spooky - it's eleven minutes to midnight and it's still pretty much broad daylight outside. so far i have yet to experience iceland in the dark, and chances are good i may not, at least not this trip.

busy busy day today: we went shopping for bare necessities for jonathan (some stylish velcro-strap tennis-shoes, kmart late 1980's style, to substitute for the trainers and hiking boots in the missing suitcase; contact lens solution; extra pairs of undies, etc) in akureyri, which is a weird, weird place; it felt like a movie set, like the Truman Show or something, exacerbated by the fact that we were (like at dinner last night) the only people staying in our hotel, and the only people walking around on the streets this morning. after shopping, however, we hopped in the trusty rental car and drove to the river-rafting place, where we piled into a bus with about twenty icelandic teenagers and two kiwi (!) guides, pulled on drysuits, and did a three-plus hour river-rafting expedition down a river whose name i am embarrassed to admit i did not find out. it was 1) beautifully sunny 2) quite fun and 3) arse cold. we swam at one point, and i had to duct tape my neck rubber thing closed because it was too loose (otherwise water would have gotten in, which it kind of did anyway); i do not recommend the subsequent pulling hair out with duct tape as a good time. several icelandic teenagers fell out of boats, flipped boats, etc., and it was actually a little bit scary during those bits because i kept imagining horrible drowning accidents when of course the only thing that happened was that they shrieked and splashed about a bit and then climbed back in and were fine, if a little bit more wet than they had been before).

After the river rafting we went for a horse ride which was GLORIOUS - our guide for that was a cute little finnish chiquita with blonde hair and pink cheeks who can't have been more than about seventeen but was completely professional and self-possessed and gave us lessons in tolting (the fifth gait of the icelandic horse; it is like trotting, except instead of being joggled up and down banging your bum every other step, it's like riding a large squashy sofa that goes a comfy 15 mph). The sun was coming down over the mountains, and the light was quite magical (the photos do not do it justice at all) and we got to do a little gallopy bit along next to the river (before fording the river. people who are 6'6" should not try to ford rivers while riding horses that stand about 4'6" i think is the moral of that particular episode. then to the local petrol station for hot dogs for dinner (bit of a contrast from last night, but it was the only place open by then at 10 pm. they were actually pretty good, and the hotdog is after all an icelandic specialty, so as good culinary tourists, we were going to have to have one at some point.)

then back to the hotel for a soak in the outdoor mineral hot tub (all the water here smells faintly sulphuric, which is exciting. is cleanliness still next to godliness if there are fumes of sulphur involved?) and then to bed, where i am a gnat's fart away from conking out completely. time to uploadear las fotos - jonathan took some gorgeous ones today, but unfortunately we don't have the right connector cable thingywhosit for his camera. too bad, eh.

j. as navy seal
on horseback
gorgeous view

godan daginn from island!

(sorry, don't know how to say "from" in icelandic yet :))

So just a quickie to say hurray! we've arrived! everyone in one piece, except for J's suitcase, which has yet to join the party, unfortunately - it's still lost in Iceland Air limbo, possibly in Minnesota somewhere, possibly not. We are going out to look for size 20 shoes today in Akureyri (population about 20,000) - hopefully expedition will be successful.

I arrived in Reykjavik yesterday afternoon and was so so so pleased to see J. waiting for me at the arrivals gate - I never quite believe that an arrangement to meet on another continent will quite work out (see previous episode with my mother in Euston Station) - and we yumped straight on a bus to go to the domestic airport, from there on a plane to Akureyri, and rental car from there to the hotel. The view from the plane over Iceland was nothing short of spectacular - clear blue skies, and snow-capped flat rock formations with massive scraped-out glacier valleys between. (Tragically no camera...)

We got ourselves turned around at the hotel (shower, much needed) and then headed off for dinner at Halastjarna, which wins the prize for surreal dining experience of the year. Twenty minute drive through bleak countryside, low mountains either side of the road, nothing but the occasional slightly depressing red or white painted 1930's era farmhouse every few miles, and then you turn off the road onto a gravel track leading to a similarly bleak depressing-looking 1930's era farmhouse. We were welcomed by a scruffy dude in a waiter outfit who may or may not have been slightly retarded, and ushered through the lobby (glass cabinet containing lace doilies and collection of plastic flamenco-dancer dolls) into the lounge for pre-dinner drink (large plush velvet sofa, velvet mass-produced tapestry of peacocks), and from there into the dining room (table cloth with holes in it, random packet of cards with more flamenco dancing dolls, old family photos, brightly coloured velour version of the Last Supper on the wall) and then dinner started (oh, and we were also the only people in the place, apart from the Icelandic Deliverance waiter and the lady doing the cooking in the miniscule kitchen; how she ended up at the end of a gravel track outside of Akureyri is difficult to fathom). It was quite, quite delicious, and the presentation of the food (on slightly chipped plates) was of the style that I definitely don't associate with velour tapestries of the Last Supper: small elegant towers of food with drizzles of sauces was the general aesthetic. We had five courses: salted cod, lumpfish roe blini, smoked Icelandic pony steak with fig, lamb with gnocchi and mushroom for main course, and rhubarb thingy for pudding and it was quite elegant and yummo (to borrow a phrase from Vijay) and completely surreal and weird.

We drove home at 11 pm (J. was UNBELIEVABLY cute in the car: he was very jetlagged by that stage, and he was actually falling asleep mid-sentence, and then he would snap up and say "Right! I'm awake! I'm here!" and then literally two seconds later the head would go down and he'd be out for the count again.) To bed (very comfy, slept like a log) and then up this morning for breakfast (fish eggs in a toothpaste tube on sesame rolls... mmm....) and then we will set out to look for shoes and try and discover the fate of the missing suitcase and possibly go whitewater rafting.

last day in Cumbria

So, last day in Cumbria today – I am heading down to London tomorrow morning on the train. The weather has been grotty the last few days, and today was no exception, wet, grey, drizzly, cold, etc. etc. I have been very Californian about the weather so far, however, and not actually gone outside when it gets like this except when I absolutely have to; today we ventured as far as Windermere, with the ostensible purpose of going to a shop that sells woodstoves.

The road to Windermere was quite exciting: it’s over Kirkstone Pass, between the bottom end of Lake Ullswater and Lake Windermere, and it’s a very bleak, desolate, windy, one-and-a-half lane road that would really really not be a good place to break down on, car-wise. We noticed just as we had left civilization (a.k.a. Patterdale, which is a post-office, an icecream shop, and three B&Bs) that we had pretty much no gas (nearest gas: 45 minutes behind us in Penrith or 45 minutes ahead of us in Windermere over bleak/desolate/etc Kirkstone Pass.) It was also one of those situations where if we did run out of gas, there would be absolutely no question about which one of us would be the one to stay with the car and which one would be the one to get out and start walking. (My price for walking over Kirkstone Pass in the rain and back with a can of gas was to be dinner at Sharrow so actually it would have been OK either way).

Luckily or unluckily, not sure which, we made it to a gas station in Windermere and from there to the stove shop, which was completely useless – a deserted room with about five electric pseudo fires with pseudo coals in ticky tacky shiny brass grates being sold for 1500 quid a pop, and several stacks of catalogs from which you could select your Fireplace Surround – I was tempted by the Mucha-esque “Evening Reverie” droopy lady tiles, or possibly the massive Art Nouveau wrought-iron lilies sprouting up the flue – but alas, no, we left without either a stove or even a catalog. Lunch at the Lazy Daisy (hello, doodle!) steak and Guinness pie mmmmm with fruit crumble mmmmm, then errandy bits and pieces (the last of the charity shop donations, including Mrs. Moore’s 1959 sewing machine which unbelievably was still semi-functional; post office; train station to reserve my ticket for tomorrow) and then home.

The builders have made truly astonishing progress this week: they have knocked out the old staircase and the wall next to the mudroom; they have taken out all the flagstones and dug out the entire floor of the old sitting room; they have knocked out the bricked-up window in the pantry and replaced the old window; they have knocked out the inner stones of the horrible fireplace in the old sitting room, and they have knocked out doorways between the old sitting room/pantry and the old sitting room/barn. The biggest job by far has been digging out the old sitting room floor; the floor level is now a good foot lower than it was before; it was a little bit of a shock to find out that the flagstones were sitting on nothing but cold wet mud (no wonder the carpets in that room were so full of bugs/mold/water/revoltingness and no wonder that room was so freezing cold all the time). There are a couple of enormous boulders that they still need to get out before they can pour the new concrete floor, so they are digging around them, and there is a mini moat of water around each of them. Standing water in the living room: good or bad? Discuss.

My dilemma at this point is how much of my clobber to take or leave; I was (surprise!) overly ambitious as to how much painting I was actually going to get done. I brought 4.7 blank canvases with every good intention of filling them (after all, what else is there to do in the rain in Cumbria?) but but but but but the light wasn’t right, or I was too annoyed with my mother, or I needed to pee, or there was only an hour before it would be time to go to bed anyway and so it wasn’t worth laying out my palette, cleaning brushes etc. etc. They had a program on the BBC on procrastination in the workplace today, and they were trying to argue that, while a lot of procrastination is obviously bad, a little bit is good, because some flash of genius that would help your work might actually come from spending two minutes watching a video on youtube (or whatever). I don’t think that’s quite accurate – procrastination is different from pissing time away, which is how I would classify my use of youtube etc. Procrastination is when I am sitting at the table with a cup of tea, going, hunh, I really need to do xyz and I am feeling cross with myself for not just getting up and doing it, which is a little bit different from thinking, yeah, I’m OK with wasting two minutes of my life looking at this youtube clip (although I have cut myself off facebook, and I now do delete most everything that people send me in the “cute hey check this out” category without looking at it (sorry if that offends anyone…)

There was another program on TV tonight (much as I disapprove of having bought the TV in the first place, it’s impossible not to watch if it’s on, I have to admit) on the disappearance of all the honeybees; it was really quite profoundly disturbing, and made me want to rush out and do my bit by keeping a hive in my garden, although I am such a lousy garden mother that I can’t imagine I’d be any better as a bee mother. I definitely like the idea of keeping bees, but I like the idea of lots of things and am not so good at follow-through, so perhaps I will stick to tango-dancing as my extra-curricular ambition for now and leave it at that.

new pantry window
new doorway through to barn
boulder with moat in middle of living room floor
la mama reacting to the idea that she might get out of her chair

view from barton fell
sleepy sheepies
southwest end of living room, flagstones lifted up to reveal dirt subfloor, with beginning of new door hole started between barn and house
view into living room from pantry through what used to be a bookcase and is now a big fat hole.

too knackered to write, since i walked to howtown, up barton fell, back to howtown, and back home again today, which really shouldn't have left me too knackered, but it was really cold and windy on top of the fell (despite the gorgeous sunshine) so it was actually quite hard work walking. i saw a big mud puddle absolutely chock-a-block with tadpoles just about to turn into frogs, all at the exact same developmental stage with little froggy faces and the beginning nubbins of little froggy legs and tails.

going to go to bed with my BOOK. kristin lavransdatter by sigrid undset. not what i was expecting, but kind of fun nonetheless (at least 20 pages into it).

sleepy sleepy

We are definitely getting less productive as we go along; I can't think of a single thing I actually achieved today of any note, besides 1) not getting caught peeing under the bridge in Pooley Bridge (I didn't think I could wait the fortyfive minutes it would take me to walk home) 2) half a teddybear baby present sewed on Mrs. M's ancient sewing machine (it's a Singer from 1963, and the case alone weighs about a hundred pounds).

Ennyway. Um.

Day 3 was, in contrast to today, massively productive; I got up really early and moved all the furniture I could lift by myself up into the bedroom where all the furniture is getting stored (for a while we had mostly chairs in there, and it looked as if we were hosting a convention up there or something, and all that was missing was the little table with nametags and donuts). Then (this is the gross part) I rolled up the ancient brown carpet that has been there more or less since the house was built, peeled the hairy sticky carpet backing off the flagstones (giving myself cancer in the process; that shit is gross), and then vacuumed up as many of the dead earwigs, live earwigs, dust, fur (fur growing on flagstones just doesn't seem right. but I'm not making it up) as I could before the only vacuum cleaner bag we had decided it had had enough.

Day 4 we spent sorting out the kitchen cabinets and consolidating all food and china into one cabinet. We have (again, not making this up) an entire box full of small jugs. I would estimate there are about twentyfive in there. That was, I have to point out, _after_ I made my mother winnow the collection down to the ones she really couldn't live without. We also discovered a stash of silver flatware in the secret compartment of the little wooden portable writing desk that I bought at the PFK country auction last year, which was kind of exciting.

Day 5 was spent cleaning out the mudroom; we moved the table and cabinets into the barn, and I organized the bike barn into a state of gleaming perfection (at least relative to what it had been). Several fun treasures - an old wooden car dashboard that turned out to belong to the M's son Undrell (he was saving it for a reproduction of the first car he owned), a complete ram's skull, and the old stone animal feeding troughs, buried under a LOT of old crap. A few slightly scary items as well - industrial quantities of weed killer from the 60's, a petrified rat carcass, and an estimated 200 lbs of dust. (I actually calculated this: I had a bucket that I was filling as I swept, and full it weighed about as much as a one-year-old child (i.e. 20 lbs) and I did ten trips out to the compost with it, so... wow. 200 lbs of dust.

Day 6 I think was the day the builders and RP came out to go over the plans etc etc. which was kind of fun, because it was like, HEY! it's actually going to happen. It's sort of mesmerizing; these guys stand around and talk about things like architraves and outflow tracts and where we want the combi boiler to go, and you nod enthusiastically and knowledgeably and then realize, wait, wtf, i have no idea what an architrave is but at that point you're too deep into the conversation to admit it at that point.

OK, time for photos and bed...

mud room cleared out
middle bedroom; convention chairs lined up
new amazingly organized bike barn

lambs have officially entered adolescence

sub-blog for hein: operation soggy sheep

So, back by popular demand, le blog! although this time we are in the UK, where my mother and I have come to spend the month of May inhaling chemical fumes, complaining about the cold, and generally getting in the way of the builders who are trying to carry out a renovation of Thwaitehill (for those not In The Know, this is the name of the house where the family gathers annually to sit in the rain, look at sheep, and occasionally sally forth for cold, wet hiking expeditions). We are now a week into our stay, and have achieved a tremendous amount, the most astonishing thing being that we have not yet doused each other in gasoline and set each other alight.

Day 1 I am going to count as Thursday of last week; I arrived at Heathrow after a red-eye flight from San Francisco, and am very proud to announce that I calibrated the necessary eyelash-batting just right, convincing the passport control officer to let me into the country despite a just-expired UK passport without actually being arrested for bribery or indecent solicitation. A seamless train-tube-walk to Euston station, where I actually met up with my mother (and Anita - hello Anita! Anita will pop up again in this story very shortly, so remember her name...) as planned. The fun part was when we were unable to get our pre-booked train tickets from the ticket machine due to the mysteries of Virgin Trains and U.S. Visa cards, and Anita (hello again, Anita!) had to rescue us by buying another round of train tickets with two minutes to spare to get ourselves and our six, yes, six enormous suitcases onto the train. On arrival at Penrith, I got tipped out with all six said suitcases while my mother went on to Carlisle to pick up the rental car; Paul from the B&B in Penrith luckily came to my rescue, a puffing overweight knight in shining armour, who insisted on carrying five of the six suitcases out to the car; he was still breathing hard fifteen minutes later when we got back to the hotel and I don't think it was my gorgeous rumpled post-aeroplane/train look that was doing it to him, either. I think there was a high ratio of herniation to suitcase-age, but that's what he gets for being chivalrous. After checking in, I spent the afternoon wandering around Penrith desperately trying to keep myself awake by doing the bare minimum of absolutely essential shopping: the fudge shop (two large bricks) and the art store (permanent rose oil paint) before collapsing into a tea shop.

There are currently two categories of tea shop in Penrith: those with aspirations to Euro-greatness, that sell espresso in tiny cups and fresh-squeezed panini with coulis of raspberry on a bed of baby yak cud, and those that are more true to their working-class roots, where the menu is eerily close to the Monty Python spam skit. (I ended up in one of the latter; you can tell them because the tables are formica and individual menu items are printed up in dot-matrix and sello-taped to the walls). Everything on the menu was a variation of toast, beans, fried eggs, and tea; if you wanted to go extra fancy you can add mushy peas, fried mushrooms, or fried tomatoes, but other than that it was all about whether you wanted one vs two fried eggs, one vs two slices of toast, whether you wanted the fried eggs _on_ the toast or off to the side, sugar or just milk in your tea. Spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans and spam. I can't drink bog-standard tea anymore, ever since Dr. Dhar told friend T. about the machines on the tea plantations in India that come along, after the good tea leaves have been harvested by hand, that apparently scoop up everything (small animals, field-worker shit, twigs, etc.) to be ground into PG Tips. Eeeuuuw. I will stick to hot water.

Day 2 I woke up in the middle of the night (blech, jetlag) but hooray! better living through pharmaceuticals, as they say, so I took a magic pill and day 2 didn't actually start until I woke up for the second time feeling relatively well rested at 7 a.m. We spent the morning doing the nonessential shopping (groceries, yawn) at the Penrith Coop. We signed up to be Coop members; this means we are eligible for their insane system whereby you cut out the bottom of your receipt every time you shop there and glue it onto a piece of card and then every ten years they have a day when you bring in your card and redeem it for fifty pence.

At lunch time, we drove out to Thwaite, where Mrs. M. was waiting to let us in (Mr. and Mrs. M, the previous tenants, are now in their late eighties/early nineties; after renting the house for the last 30 years or so, they are now too old to enjoy striding up the fells in the hail while slipping on sheepshit and getting eaten by midges. I say you're NEVER too old to enjoy that). We drove her into Penrith and put her on the train, which was quite sad, as she is terrifyingly frail, and then went back to the house to start Operation Soggy Sheep for reals.

I'm going to stop for tonight because my sister doesn't like it if my blog entries get too long and rambly, and besides it'll leave me something to say for tomorrow night. Let's see if I can add some fun pics...

rhodendron. pretty!
sharrow from the lake. pretty! also out of focus!
sheep and lake.
baa. will look for good photo op of lambs for the meeps, i promise.