Spring got punched in the gut on leap-year-day with a good snow-punch from Winter.  It looked lovely!

Yule-tide-looking snow is weird when it's this bright out. But very lovely to look at nonetheless!

The view out through the living room window.

Our good friends, Kata and Jói, swung into town this week (they live up north by Akureyri) with their girls, and we invited them all over for a Sunday Brunch.  Being the lazy sods we are, brunch consisted of stuff from the bakery and various toppings, but it all seemed to go down well enough.  It was fun having them over, and we’re very optimistic that we’ll be seeing them again in the very near future!

Jói and Finnur became friends when they were doing their associates degree in computer science, way back when. They were also coworkers for a number years.

I'm not the only mother that takes a lot of pictures!! Note that there is no snow outside!

Kata and Jói with Þóra, their eldest.

Ash Wednesday is kinda like Halloween in the US these days (it didn’t use to be).  The kids dress up in costumes, and then visit shops during the day and sing for the staff to get candy.  Knocking on people’s doors is uncommon though, and we certainly didn’t buy any candy.

The day used to be a public holiday, and people would congregate downtown for some communal entertainment, but these days the schools stay open but the kids are allowed to show up in costumes, and do fun ‘non-academic’ things.

Anna and Bjarki in their costumes with the neighboring boy Anna walks to school with every morning.

I don’t follow a whole lot of tv shows, but the ones I do, I obsess over.  A lot.  But now, all of my favorite tv shows are either on hiatus, or just entering production for the next season, meaning I’ll have no new episodes to devour until sometime in the fall.  Which is a long way away.  :(

In the meantime though, I’ve fallen hard, very hard, for fanfics.  Yes, those are stories, posted online, written by random writers (‘people of the internet’), that use the characters from a tv show, but often in a context away from the tv show.

And some of them are shockingly good.  And long.  Ridiculously long.  But good.  And so I keep falling into rabbit holes.  Of goodness.  Delicious goodness.  Reading hasn’t been this fun in a long time.  :)

I’m not too familiar with this whole ‘leading up to lent’-thing, but I do know that there are three ‘special’ days that precede it: 1) Cream-Puff Monday (aka Bolludagur), 2) Boom-Day (aka Sprengidagur), and 3) Ash Wednesday (aka Öskudagur).

On Boom-Day (‘Explosion-Day’?, ‘Eat-Until-You-Burst-Day’?…) it is customary to eat salted meat in a bean-soup with veggies until you burst.  So that’s what we did.  Since it fell on a Tuesday, my mom and Bjarni came over for dinner which was good because Finnur made waaaay to much soup and we were happy to ship the leftovers away with our guests.  The soup was excellent though, among the best I’ve ever had.

Bjarni getting some food. Since it was Fish-Tuesday, we'd also gotten some fish for those that didn't want too much salt. Also, the images are bit weird because the white-balance was on a weird setting, and the zoom lens still on.

Mom working on the salted meat.

Bjarki eating his first bits of meat.

I was working from home on Cream-Puff Day and decided to venture out into the backyard with my camera for a little while.

A redwing (thrush/þröstur) by our patio-bread.

A stone nestled in snow.

Somewhere in the past we Icelanders picked up the tradition of the Cream-Puff Day (Bolludagur), aka eating yummy ‘buns’ with cream and jam on the Monday before the start of lent (the Monday before Ash Wednesday).  I’ve never made any buns myself, but this year I decided to give it a go, using a recipe from the local newspaper.  As it happened the recipe was low on flour (and not baking powder like I exclaimed on Facebook and G+ that day) so the buns never rose.  It took a second try to get the right, and boy were they yummy!!

Sad but yummy non-buns.

Take two - a success!

The finished product: Jam and cream inside, melted chocolate on top. Anna took three of those to school the next day.

The recipe I used was from here:

4 dl vatn/water
160 g smjörlíki/butter
250 g hveiti/flour
1/4 tsk lyftiduft/baking powder
5 egg ef mótaðar með skeið (6 ef notuð er rjómasprauta)

Setja vatn og smjörlíki í pott og láta suðuna koma upp.

Blanda saman hveiti og lyftidufti,bæta því síðan í pottinn og hrærið hraustlega í með sleif þar til myndast hefur slétt og samfellt deig sem sleppir pottinum. Takið af hitanum og kælið aðeins. Hrærið síðan eggjunum saman við einu í einu,hrærið vel á milli. Setjið með skeið á bökunarplötu,1 msk í hverja bollu. Bakið í ofni í 30-35 mín.við 210°c(200°c í blástursofni.) Varist að opna ofninn fyrr en vel er liðið á baksturstímann.

Every February the local universities open up their doors for a Saturday afternoon to entice the current crop of junior-college seniors to apply this summer introduce all the different departments and ‘educational opportunities’.  I was mildly involved in organizing the EE department’s involvement, as in I attended a meeting or two, and then asked the student organization to handle the rest – which they did with aplomb.

On the day itself I hiked on over with Anna, who’d just emerged from her weekly English school session.  Here be pictures.

My office is in the white-ish building behind the wooden house on the left (that's for sale).

Way back when, Holla and Óli invited us and some other good friends over to make confectionery (fancy chocolate bits) on 23 December, aka the Day Before Christmas, where tradition dictates that one should eat really really stinky fish for dinner.  This past Christmas, we were all set to return the favor, when a stomach bug stopped our plans.  Thankfully, the ingredients were all fairly non-perishable, so we waited until things had started to quiet down after the holidays, and summoned Holla & Óli and Adda & Halli over for some chocolate-fiddling in the beginning of February instead.

Melting white chocolate.