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.

ouch! my knee hurts!

i am feeling very pathetic and sorry for myself: i fell down running today and squashed (in order of most > least gruesome flesh wound) my left knee, my face, my left hand, and my left elbow. where was the right side of my body in all of this falling down? i don't know. staying well out of it. like the bush administration neatly staying out of the way now that the economy is in the toilet, and leaving the democrats to deal with cleaning up all the crap. okay, that metaphor is a little stretched. but the point is my knee hurts. sympathy currently being accepted. but i did get to go out for lovely lovely argentinean food afterwards (dripping blood all the while, so i matched the steak, yum yum) and also it was beautiful and sunny on the way home and i saw a rainbow. once i got home i fell asleep on the sofa (waking myself up for q 2 hour neuro checks, bien sur) and then worked a little bit on the baby quilt i am making for M. which is REALLY CUTE and has animals on it. we love animals.
here are pics of tahoe. we were missing some people, but it was an excellent time nonetheless. i particularly like the pic of freaky W.
ooh, and by the way i am starting a NEW blog, which will consist of yacking to the entire expanse of cyberspace about stuff i am reading (mostly so i can keep track of it, but partly because it might actually lead to my one day getting to be friends with nick hornby, which would be pretty cool). so if you don't have five thousand better things to do haha check it out...


W & B
M & S
P & B
T and booby

T and his mini-me
J & M
W looking extra freaky
T3 and dog

"fireworks in a tin"...

...is how I am feeling currently, in the picturesque phrase of Vita Sackville-West (I have been reading the letters of Virginia Woolf and VSW); the VW story never fails to make me sad, and I keep reading biographies/diaries/letters of hers to see if the ending ever changes, and it never does. Vita wrote in her diary years later that if she had only seen Virginia in the days before her suicide that she feels sure she could have turned her around and made her feel better, and the editors of the volume of letters put in a little comment at the end to the effect that the stupid thing was that she probably could have. Anyway. I think it's kind of funny that I find the whole pretentious/romantic ambience of the Bloomsbury crew (and attendant diaries/letters) so much more interesting that any of their actual published-in-their-lifetime writing (w/ the exception of T.S. Eliot).

The main thing I am fretting about (and the reason I am awake at 6 a.m. on my day off) is the trip to the UK in the month of May; I sent an email yesterday to choir director to let her know about missing several rehearsals and I am dreading, dreading, dreading, the shitstorm of a guilt-trip that is due to arrive in my email inbox after the requisite three days of ominous silence while she discusses it with every choir member behind my back. She self-sabotages a bit, in that her response to people missing rehearsals is completely hypocritical (one of the basses, for example, announced he would missing every Tuesday for the next three months for an evening course he had signed up for, and she was thrilled to pieces that he was "furthering his career" and promptly declared rehearsals to be on Monday nights during those three months; on the other end of the spectrum, one time in residency when I couldn't stay 5 minutes over and had to leave promptly at 9:15 to get back to the hospital to resume call duties, I got a lecture about how "this sort of attitude reflects poor commitment to the group" blah blah blah. So because the response is so out of proportion to the crime (or lack thereof) committed, I have given up completely trying to keep her happy with me, and when I do want to miss a rehearsal for any reason, I just do the minimum to make sure she doesn't actually chuck me out of the group and in fact am willing to do slightly dreadful things to get what I want (i.e. lie about what exactly I will be doing in May to make it sound more respectable) which I would never ever do with anyone else. She may chuck me out over it. On verra.

I am also wound up because of my ER shift yesterday - more than 10 hours in the ER tends to do funny things to me. I don't know how the fulltime people do it. My favourite case was a woman who had run out of tampons (so far, reasonable) and so had stuffed as much toilet paper as she could fit inside the pertinent orifice (slightly mad, but I can see her logic), and then forgotten about it for several days (going through passport control on the border of the Land of Total Nuttiness) until it started to smell bad and hurt to pee (I have doubts about our ability to survive as a species).

A trip to Tar-jay last night with H. to buy socks after work; I surprised myself by buying (in addition to the standard bulk black multipack that will have disappeared into the black hole down the side of the dryer within a week) a pair of footless tights, which sounds racy, sort of like crotchless chaps, except it isn't, just way trendier than my usual, and a pair of old fashioned thigh stockings, just in case I meet anyone born before 1900 that I need to seduce. The thing about thigh stockings (I didn't try them on, I decided optimistic faith was more enjoyable than reality) is that you have to have really really superlative baby-giraffe thighs in order that the bits that are above the stockings don't look ridiculous.

Despite my best intentions NOT to have New Year's resolutions, I have ended up with some anyway. Friend A's fault. Notice, however, that they are not open-ended, but specifically things to be achieved before the end of 2009:
- eight portraits in oil, excluding ongoing van eyck travesty
- two weeks of intensive classes in either cello or tango dancing
- exercise every single day of 2009, at least 30' run or equivalent thereof. (I am allowing myself to just do a bit extra in the rest of January to make up for days skipped prior to making the resolution)
- have at least two dinner parties with 3+ guests each.
- to be completed before the end of the month: attic insulation project (yucko, but must be done), organize and pay my taxes (ditto).

I re-read the beginning of Nick Hornby's "The Polysyllabic Spree" last night in bed; and was irrationally delighted to find that there had been some crossover in our reading lists since the last time I picked it up. In September 2003, for instance, he read Ian Hamilton's book, "In Search of Salinger," which I read in France, and it prompted the same urge to reread all of Salinger's oeuvre (which he was able to do, and I was not, since the Shopi in A-C was a little low on twentieth century English classics). He also read Tobias Wolff's "Old School," Charles Baxter's "Feast of Love", Zoe Heller's "Notes on a Scandal" and several others that either I read but am not mentioning because they were big bestsellery type books that a lot of people read or that I have had on my list intending to read but don't get to count as books-in-common-with-Nick-Hornby until I actually get around to reading them. But it did make me want to take his lists to the bookstore and buy some of the things that he recommends because at least so far we agree on what was good.

okay, sun coming up now. time to achieve greatness.