The State of Things

I’m doing such a poor job posting to the blog these days.  Booo!!  I’m sooo far behind on photos that it’s not even funny.  The only light in the dark is that I’ve hardly taken any photos anyway since I started working, so maybe I’ll catch up before the new year.  Haha.

But, I figured I should at least attempt a ‘State of Things’ post, on how the family is doing.  We’ll start by the youngest and work our way up in age.

Emma: She’s a few days shy of 21 months old, and developing in leaps and bounds.  She’s getting bigger and stronger, and her vocabulary is constantly growing, or it may be that we’re just getting better at parsing what she’s saying.  She’s enjoys going to daycare, and they often describe her as being a bit of a Pippi Longstocking (Lína langsokkur).  She’s cheerful, loves playing outside, knows what she wants, and screeches loudly when she doesn’t get it.  We look forward to her getting more words.

Bjarki: He’s also getting bigger and stronger.  He’s reading above grade level, he’s picking up guitar at a quick pace with weekly lessons, and he’s in love with the computer.  Lets just say that if he misses out on computer-time (from 6 pm to dinner), all hell breaks loose.  He’s a charmer, but can be a handful.

Anna: She’s almost as tall as I am.  Recently she’s become an avid music and manga fan, and she spends all her afternoons listening to music and reading.

Hrefna: Hey, that’s me!  I’m enjoying my job at Marel, although I’m having a slightly hard time filling in the required number of hours because Emma has to be picked up from daycare relatively early.  It’s a great place to work.  For example, they have trainers who come in to direct fitness classes multiple times a week, so I’ve been getting my thrice weekly boot camp hour in at lunch time (which isn’t helping with my required hours, but does contribute to keeping my sanity).  The food is good (not free though, tsk, tsk!), and I really like my coworkers.  (This being Iceland, my closest coworker lived a street away from Finnur when they were kids, so they know each other.)  Happily, I’m doing research all day now, matlabbing away, in between doing actual experiments.  It’s ironic that I’ve done more coding in the few weeks I’ve been there than I did for two years at the university.  So far so good though!  In my spare time, I’m attempting to attack my mountain of photos, and uh, I’ve started watching a new tv show.  Yay?

Finnur:  He’s currently in California for two weeks, doing his “Hey, remember me!!”-thing with his coworkers.  He managed to break his left hand in October, when he decided to bike to work on a frosty morning without having studded tires.  He got lucky though, because he only broke the nub of a bone-end, so he could still use his hand quite a bit, and only needed a splint (although he did spend a week in a cast).  We outfitted three bikes with studded tires that same evening.

Finnur showing off his splint while packing for the US on Halloween morning.