[Photos taken 01 – 23 January 2022, posted online 17 June 2022. May disappeared into a whirlwind of activity! So far in June, Anna has been on a graduation trip to Mexico via NYC, and Finnur is off in the UK on a work-trip! Today marks 28 years of togetherness for Finnur and myself!]
My goodness how time has flown since 2022 began! Covid-19-Omicron put a bit of a damper on things in the beginning, but when the excellent vaccination rate was coupled with lowered hospitalization rates, authorities gave Covid free reign, almost everyone got it, and now the herd immunity is pretty good. (Buuut, it’s not gone, as the hospital system begun requiring masks again yesterday, as infections and hospitalizations are again on the rise.)
As a result, social activities exploded, and there has been precious little time for blogging. But here goes anyway…
January was spent recuperating after the annual Christmas stress. We ate the ginger-house, I went to the gym, Emma got her first shot, little tasks got worked on, and we visited house #2 twice with friends, because we’d all been vaccinated, and kind of didn’t care as much any more, but … then I had to cut visit #2 short as covid-19 came knocking…! (70-ish images total)
Saturday 01 January 2022
A relaxed start to the year, playing the Turing Complete game.
Emma played with a friend.
Anna decided to fix the lack of bagels in the freezer, and made two batches!
Yum!
Monday 03 January 2022
My company gave the Monday off, since 01 January was on a Saturday. I used the opportunity to hang out at a cafe, and noticed my laptop screen was having issues. A few days later, I took it into to be evaluated. The repair was estimated at $1800 (230 þús isk) so I just took it back to have a think on it. As the weeks passed, we used it by hooking it up to an external monitor, and then, somehow, my magic, it reverted back to being ok!
I went for a walk along the ocean. A lady was feeding some swans! It was cold out.
Sunset ongoing, this is at 4:25 pm.
Tuesday 04 January 2022
A free loaner car from the dealer, as our eGolf was still in the shop since mid-November, due to a big battery fault. Thankfully the big battery was/is still under warranty, and I just got a call yesterday that the battery is finally, finally, functional again. VW refused to send over a new battery, instead they insisted on replacing various components, where each component took about a month to get here, often via ship. Initially, the dealer didn’t want to let me have a free replacement car, but I got a tip to contact the consumer agency, which sent me some law text, which I used while being very angry on the phone. We got this car the day after. Sadly it runs on gas, and works nicely except in stop and go traffic. The engine turning on and off constantly is maddening!
Wednesday 05 January 2022
It’s hard to take a photo of the weather, but it was like the one on the cup. I worked home for a bit, as Omicron was feeling us out, and us it.
Bjarki decided to write a song for his music theory class. It was a lot more work than he’d anticipated, but at least the little recording gadget we got him for Christmas over a year ago came in really handy.
Emma enjoying a post-gymnastics-practice donut.
Quick trip to the mall to get some necessities.
Thursday 06 January 2022
I began to get cabin fever while working from home… so I skipped on to a cafe to start the day.
Sport practices for kids were still on, and so was music school, so I worked from a different cafe while waiting for Emma to be done. One of my brothers works in that building.
Back home, time was up for the gingerbread-house, as this was the last day of yule. I took photos for memories.
The other side.
Three kids and a doomed house.
Emma got first dibs, and made a hole in the roof.
Bjarki deciding where he should hit. You can see the hole left by Emma’s fist.
Anna delivered the fatal blow!
Soon, the house was in everyone’s tummy!
Friday 07 January 2022
Driving out of town to house #2, and passed this truck that had fallen on its side. Thankfully the driver was ok, but search and rescue was summoned to help ferry the frozen fish in the back to another lorry by hand. We decided to drive carefully onwards.
Saturday 08 January 2022
The view out the car window as we were driving to Borgarnes to go swimming.
Obligatory post-swimming stop at the Calm Cafe.
There was snow in the surrounding mountains.
Cozy time.
The view out the window.
Sun going down at 3:15 pm.
The rest of the crew in another area.
Emma cuddling the dog that lives there, his name is Álfur, or Elf.
Dinner was a scrumptious affair!
We somehow managed to convince the old Dungeon Master to resume his duties, and he led the kids in character creation.
I have turned into my parents, glasses on top of my head to read.
Sunday 09 January 2022
I managed to recruit a second pair of hand into changing out the ceiling lights in the master bedroom. They went from boobies to dildos… 😉
Furthermore I quickly hung up the grassy scene from up north that’s lived in our living room for way too long. Then we packed up and headed home.
Monday 10 January 2022
A big day, Emma was summoned to get her first covid-19 vaccine dose (Pfizer). We came prepared with stuff to do while waiting.
As luck would have it, a theater crew came right when we sat down post-shot to wait for 15 minutes and they sang fun songs for us!
Post-shot ice-cream-promise being fulfilled.
Demo-ing her bandage.
Wednesday 12 January 2022
At the eye-doctor’s. Bjarki’s eye-sigh remains ok, he should wear glasses when using the computer/reading, but he’s not a big fan.
The dark days of January and February lend themselves to long reading sessions. I scored a nice haul at the library!
Thursday 13 January 2022
5×200 m intervals, 2:07 per 500 m is ok, but not great.
Proof it was me!
Saturday 15 January 2022
Finnur and Emma took the better part of the scaffolding from Finnur’s brother up to his parents’ summer house, much to my relief.
Photo of a “cheer-up” box of stuff Google sent Finnur.
Proof my laptop was mostly fine, except for, eh, the laptop-screen itself.
Sunday 16 January 2022
The goal of the day was to get Bjarki to record the song he’d made. His guitar teacher had helped him by writing down the notes and chords, and also recorded a base-line. When we took a better look at the recording in Garage Band, we just couldn’t match up the tempo of the base-recording with the click, it kept being off by a fraction. I’d never quite even considered that this was an issue, so in the interest of just getting the assignment done, Bjarki recorded two tracks, joined them and submitted. Victory! The process was so cumbersome though that Bjarki was not very inspired to ever record anything ever again!
Monday 17 January 2022
We got mail! Actually, it’s been very interesting how holiday greetings have developed. We got about five this year, and I think all except maybe one was from the US. Facebook greetings have taken over! (Also, postage has become very expensive!)
With merch!
Tuesday 18 January 2022
That day our Jaguar had a hiccup, and Finnur got another car while the dealer investigated. The Jag was back the following day, which made Finnur happy, because in comparison, gas-cars are no fun to drive.
Wednesday 19 January 2022
A few photos from the lower floor of the library in Gerðuberg in Breiðholt (the neighborhood I lived in until I was about 8 years old). It took me a while to realize that this was actually a treasure-hunt type game setup!
The smell of old books was amazing.
I kept meaning to return there to sit in that chair and read. Such a fantasy-land!
Found some classics.
Thursday 20 January 2022
Another gym selfie, brother Bjarni in the background with clients (jokingly referred to as his adoptive family).
Friday 21 January 2022
I finally emerged from the fog-of-Christmas-energy-drainage with a determination to finally attack a bunch of little tasks that neither myself nor Finnur had been able to make any headway on for months and years. First up, the loose floorboard at the top of the stairs, that had come off during the bathroom renovation in October 2019!
The board had been nailed down, but that had longs since stopped being effective.
I went to the building store, and it took three guys to finally find a guy who could confidently answer how I should do this, and this was the answer: tack-glue the plastic to the concrete, and the board to the plastic. With Finnur up at house #2 with Emma, I recruited Anna to be my second pair of hands. So far the fix has held nicely!
Kettle-bells for the pressure-win!!
Saturday 22 January 2022
Our 10 year old tv-etc-amplifier had become unreliable, buttons behaved randomly etc. Talking to the guy at the store it became apparent that trying to fix it would be about as costly, if not more expensive, as buying a new unit on the January sale… so I grudgingly got a new one.
I then drove up to house #2 to join, arriving around 5 pm to the manly men moving a ceiling light to better light up the cooking area.
Emma is a big fan of playing Ticket to Ride.
At 9:30 pm Anna sent us this image from town: Bjarki was spiking a fever (38.1 C = 100.6 F), had a cold, and was shivering and groaning under the covers, indicating his fever was rising fast. Some three hours earlier we’d gotten a message that a sibling of Bjarki’s friend had covid-19, so although the his rapid-test was negative, I made an appointment for a PCR covid test for him the following day…
Sunday 23 January 2022
By 10:30 am the following day I was back on the road again. I was a little bit terrified to drive in these conditions because I’d discovered that the “whole year tires” the car came on were really really bad in snow and frost, but as the winter had been mild so far, I hadn’t taken any action.
Deep breaths! I drove super carefully, except I gunned it up one steep hill because I feared not making it all the way up. There was a bit of fishtailing involved but I made it to the salted and better maintained ring-road!
I stopped for a bit to charge a little as it was very windy and I wasn’t sure how bad it would be. Thankfully it all went well.
Bjarki, obviously quite sick, post-nasal-and-throat-swabbing at the main covid-test site in a snow storm.
Dinner was a simple affair. The rules had been changed so if you were vaccinated (like myself) and there was somebody covid-infected isolated in the home, you could still go out to the stores to get provisions if masked etc.
As we were eating the pizza, the phone pinged, and lo and behold, Bjarki had been diagnosed positive for covid-19, and registered for 7 days of quarantine! The games were afoot!
