Last-Minute House #2 Trips & Vaccination #1

2021-04-06Friends, Us Standard

[Photos taken 06 – 20 April 2021, posted online 27 July 2021. Finally, finally, there is sunshine and/or no rain predicted for five consecutive days in the capital area. Lets go stain some woodwork!]

House #2 kept playing a big part as multiple friends were desperate for human contact and two last-minute weekend trips happened. Aside from that, life chugged along as usual, with the kids returning to school, gyms etc opening up (but not the locker rooms), and winter and spring kept fighting for dominance.

Then, somewhat surprisingly, it was my turn to get the first covid-19 vaccine shot! (55-ish images total)

Tuesday 06 April 2021

The weather was gorgeous, and I made it out for a walk. Soon, the hilltop this is taken from will be fully built with houses.
With the sun higher and longer in the sky, dust in places usually only visited in darkness (aka bedrooms) became glaringly obvious. This is shortly before 8pm…

Wednesday 07 April 2021

With all the trips to house #2, the small “beginner sized” battery in “my” 6-year-old (!!?!) fully electric eGolf was beginning to cause a lot of delays due to charging needs, which had begun grating on my nerves. (It remains an incredibly fun car to drive, as it’s super light and zippy, mostly due to the small battery!). I’d had my eye on the evolutions in the electric vehicle world, and on a snowy day finally went and tried the new Golf-successor, VW ID.3, to see just how it would handle in the snow as it has a rear-wheel drive. It did pretty well, so I went home to think and plot and plan…
Kept thinking on the piano-class walk…
HomeEc classes have the kids decorate the bags they bring the stuff home in and…
… sometimes the recipes are even written on the back!

Friday 09 April 2021

Some of Anna’s seedlings poking their heads out.
Doomed spinach, and somewhat happy beans.
A couple of days earlier, one of the sewing club members asked when the next meeting should be (there are 8 of us, so we fit in under the 10 people max rule). It was technically my turn to host, so I flippantly suggested just going to house #2 over the weekend. To my surprise, enough members said yes that the trip was ON! Three of us drove up on Friday, and ate dinner in Englendingavík in Borgarnes. Few restaurants can match the view from their dining room!
So pretty!
The food was good too!
We had to shovel a path to the hot tub, totally normal for early April.

Saturday 10 April 2021

Another gorgeous chilly day.
Reading time in between copious chatting.
We ended up being five total, which was a pretty good showing considering the short lead up.
Icelandic sunbathing before going on a walk.
We drove to the north side of the lake, and further inland. There lies (unbeknownst to me a the time) a fairly large and old-for-Iceland forest-growing area.
The view above the tree-line is quite wonderful.
These trees count as ridiculously tall by Icelandic standards.
It wasn’t the easiest walk, as the snow hid the potholes and rocks on the road.
Dinner was scrumptious! We drove home the next day.

Monday 12 April 2021

I win all the magnificent hips competitions! Thankfully they’ve mostly been quite functional lately.
Suuuuun!

Tuesday 13 April 2021

The weather was so pretty it was hard to sit still and work.
Managed to talk a sewing club member into going out for a walk after work.

Wednesday 14 April 2021

The sweet view from the look out point not so far from our house. I got there with another sewing club member, but paid the price for being so active with my shins threatening to go splint-y for a few weeks afterwards.
Then I went to pick up our (my) new fully electric ID.3. Yes, the thinking had culminated in me buying one of the cars they had on stock.
All of a sudden we were a three-car-household. We decided to hang on to the old eGolf because Anna’s 10-week-long summer job required her to show up at 07:30 in the morning, and neither myself nor her dad were terribly interested in driving her to work that early. Hurrah for offspring with a driver’s license!

Thursday 15 April 2021

While waiting outside the music school while Bjarki completed his final spring exam, I noticed a block of text above my head…
It was a personal-information-gathering (including location) announcement. “Please only use the car if you agree with how the information is gathered and used.” Brave new world.

Friday 16 April 2021

I play the Icelandic scrabble game at netskrafl.is . I thought this was pretty funny considering R.E.M. used to be my favorite band way back when.
Finnur was meeting up with some friends, so I took the kids to the Sushi train place. I really don’t like cooking.
Emma with her dessert. After loosing out on many of the best bits to people closer to the conveyor loading point, we resolved to try and avoid being at the far end in the future.
The ritualistic sorting and stacking of the plates completed.

Saturday 17 April 2021

The battery indicator on the new car before setting out for house #2. This is what I refer to as the “adult” type of battery.
Back at house #2 to check on some things I wondered about the weekend before. The new car had enough juice left to easily make it all the way back home again, even through high winds.
We thank this (these?) lamb(s) for their service.
It was muggy out. Usually the trampoline gets assembled in April, but it wasn’t looking very trampoline-y.
Finnur won the patience awards.
More people we hadn’t seen in a long while.
So industrious!

Sunday 18 April 2021

We put some apples out for the birds, and one came to snack in the snow.
After a late lunch at the usual cafe, we took off from Borgarnes.
Hafnarfjall mountain imposing as usual.
A bridge to a small island. It’s all very country.

Monday 19 April 2021

The locker rooms at the gym remained closed. Only these cubbies by the entrance were open, and because I don’t trust my memory, I took to taking a photo to remember the number…

Tuesday 20 April 2021

I tried throwing some cantaloupe out for the birdies to snack on. They didn’t think it was interesting, perhaps because a cat got there first?
Trying to cut down on coffee, I took to drinking tea to get my brain into working order. I was still working from home.
As I was micro-dosing an immuno-suppressant drug, I was in a priority group for covid-19 vaccinations. I was summoned/invited, along with a few thousand others, to the vaccinations hall in the Laugardalshöll sports hall around 2 pm.
Some people coming, others going.
Police and ambulance cars in case of emergency. The vaccinations were administered on the far right of the new building, and then you walked into the old building to sit in time-sorted chair-waiting areas in the large walkways by the windows. When more doses began arriving to the country at a time, the vaccinations were moved to the main hall in the old building, and you just remained sitting after getting your shot before leaving.
As I walked up a line formed, but it went very quickly.
The process: 1) Have your barcode ready on your phone, 2) barcode scanned, 3) take jacket/sweater off, 4) shoulder exposed, 5) get a shot, 6) walk to a seating area, wait for 12 minutes, then leave.
Bingo. The organization was super smooth. They had chairs laid out in lines, and as people entered, a guide told people which line to sit down in. There were as many nurses with trolleys as there were chairs in each line. The head nurse called “go” and the whole line of nurses moved one line up, administered a shot. This repeated until they got to the back, and then they wheeled all the way to the front for a refill of the trolleys.
Sooo… I didn’t see the “no photography” sign, so I was taking plenty of photos/videos. I was so obvious about it that a nurse spotted me and none-too-pleased stood over my shoulder while I deleted the photos and video from my phone. As I was fumbling with my phone, the line of people I’d sat with got up and walked away, and new people kept coming in. It was quite stressful, but entirely my own fault.
My nerves were so frayed that I ended up at the ice-cream store by our house for a blood sugar kick. It was great to get the first shot, but I know that research indicates that people taking the medication I was on were not making a great deal of defense against the virus. But hopefully this was better than nothing.