Brrrrrrr

It is 16 degrees fahrenheit outside - that's about minus 9 for you celsius folk. I slept well but Craig was plagued by the furnace clicking on as the gusting wind through cracks in the front door would tell the thermostat that we were about to be frozen in our beds. Then Zoe did one of her early morning vomits -- part of being an elderly dog. Oh and apparently I snored but I'm sure that part isn't true.

I drove Catherine to school wearing my Norwegian wool hat which she finds so embarrassing that she kept asking me to duck down incase any of her friends spotted me.

Eating my words and my xmas baking

Sam and I embarked on the Christmas baking - six mini bundt cakes which we planned to drizzle with a chocolate granache. The cake batter looked suspiciously wrong and the cakes emerged from the oven, flat and cookie-like, that is, delicious but wholly unsuitable for gifting to the neighbors. They could only be removed from the pan with a spoon. So none of us are hungry for dinner now.

A winter query

Snow! So it finally really feels like December. So I am polling my readers - who uses an electric blanket?

Just wondering.

counting down

Only one more week of term - yay. I gave my last real lecture in Language in Society class on Wednesday and it sucked big time. Nothing like going out strong...

This weekend we will do some Christmas baking. My goal this year is to gift to the neighbors before they gift to us - hah - take that Mormon housewives. We may even do Christmas cards this year.

Picture from the Holberg Prize Ceremony

Here is my father and Crown Princess Mette-Marit in Hakons Hall at the Holberg Prize Ceremony.

Two pictures

We loved the signage.

Us on the train from Flom to Myrdal.

Off season in the fjords

Much updating needed after a gorgeous day and a half on a fjord trip. We still aren't really over the jet lag and this became a problem when we crashed in Flam for 4 hours late afternoon and woke up to find that there was nowhere to eat that was still open apart from the brewery which was serving a $100 per person fixed menu dinner that included trout and cured meats which didn't appeal to either of us. We ended up with a beer sampler and talked them into serving us the dessert from the fixed menu. Surprisingly satisfying.