White Stuff, aka Snow

[Photos from 16-19 December 2014, blogged on 4 March 2015.  Shhh…]

It’s been a stormy winter par excellence.  There’s a wacky Icelandic word for this type of weather: ‘umhleypingasamt’, which Google translate cutely translates as ‘unstable’, although a direct translation would be something like “prone to running around a lot, and switching directions”.

After yet another deluge of snow, I jumped outside and took a few photos. (7 images total)

16 December: The decorated house. The lights got to stay up for quite a while, the multicolored lights came down in early February, while the white lights came down on 28 February!

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Triple Birthday Celebration!

[Birthday party happened on 14 December 2014, but is being blogged on 22 February 2015.  Birthdays don’t expire!]

We cut down on the stress by combining three family late-year birthday-parties into one, with our Anna being one of the celebrated ones.  The other two slightly-older-ones were my brother Nökkvi’s girls. (20 images total)

Anna’s now so big that she decorated her own birthday cake.  I like this development!

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Snapped!

[Not that it matters, but this image was snapped on 11 Dec 2014.] hrefna77, that’s me. 🙂Read more

Biking to Work in Sub-optimal Weather

[This occurred on 10 Dec 2014, but is being blogged on 22 Feb 2015.  Iceland is still getting storms.]

Finnur still quietly grinds his teeth at these images.  I posted them on Facebook back in December, because I’d biked to work (on our motor-assist-bike) during a blizzard, and made it there in one piece.  It made me look like quite the biking hero, but in reality, it wiped out my biking-stamina, and I think I’ve only biked into work twice since that day until today.  It didn’t help that the trip took about half an hour, which is a bit much compared to the five minutes it takes to drive there. Also, the weather has been unpredictable and stormy all since December. Boo!

From Facebook:

So, I biked to work this morning in this lovely blizzard. It was part foolhardy, part fun, part nervewracking, but I made it in the end. Yes, Dear Husband offered to bike instead but it’s my week to bike, so I said no because I need to meet a quota of working hours, and chauffeuring the kids around shortens the work day significantly. Also, it turned out that if he had indeed biked, he probably would have gotten into trouble because the wind-direction would have been head-on for him, whereas it was all side-wind for me. Good times!

As much fun as this was, I’m still lobbying to buy a second car though. Half an hour of biking to work one way isn’t helping with the goal of accruing work hours!

So, on to my biker-hero images. (5 images and 1 video total)

Quick stop under the Smaralind parking lot.

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Christmas Photo Time

[Photos taken on 06 DECEMBER 2014, put online on 16 FEBRUARY 2015.  Mwahahaha!]

I stubbornly still take annual Christmas/Yuletide/Solstice/Holiday card photos.  At this point it seems pretty quaint, but I like it, so there!

This year I took about 250 photos, and below are a selection of them. It’s basically all Anna, Bjarki and some Emma, with me and Finnur thrown in for good measure here and there.

Emma was REALLY opposed to the whole exercise, and in the end, no one picture won out, so we sent out a collage this year.

Enjoy the mayhem. (29 images total)

Anna smiling.

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Weekend-Visitors from the UK

[This happened between Saturday 06 December to 08 December 2014.  Blogged on 20 February 2015. Yahoo!!]

Grandpa Gunnar and Shirley decided they needed a bit of snow and cold temps in their life, and popped on over from the UK to stay with us for a couple of days. (25 images total)

Saturday 06 Dec: Our visitors made it!

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Advent-time at Work

[Happened 02-13 December 2015, but is being blogged on 17 February 2015.  Insert comment here.]

The first weeks of December saw lots of yuletide going-ons at my workplace.  Older employees took this in stride, but for someone who last worked at a place where there was no such thing (just a lot of exhaustion and exam-time jitters), this was extremely novel and nice. (16 images total)

Tuesday 02 Dec: It’s customary to bring a cake if it’s your birthday, and as it happened a birthday collided with an ex-coworker also stopping by with a cake, which gave us this fantastic opportunity to recreated the famous Titanic scene. Yeah.

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Kiddos at Home

[These photos were TAKEN on Sunday 30 November 2014, but posted on 01 February 2015.  Time flies!]

It was about time to take the annual Yuletide Photo of the kids, so I started gathering the home-studio stuff into Emma’s room to prepare.  

Yet again I was trying a new setup, which I wasn’t sure would work so well (two umbrellas with flashes, and then a third flash on the camera itself), so I needed to try it out on some victims.

Finnur was out doing manly things, so I tried recruiting Anna to pose, but she escaped to her friend’s house.  That left me with Bjarki and Emma, both of whom weren’t really in a very cooperative mood.

But yeah, here are some photos of the kids, at the end of November. (26 images total)

Anna busy not looking at the camera.

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The Nutcracker and Unhappy Eating at Harpa

[This HAPPENED on 22 November 2014, but is being blogged on 01 February 2015.  Late never better?]

A portion of one of my two sewing clubs decided to go to see the St. Petersburg Festibal Ballet perform the Nutcracker at Harpa.  Since we’d somehow managed to never see the Nutcracker, I decided to bring the big kids just for them to experience something out of the ordinary.

The ballet was very ballet-y, and it really drove home how much ‘entertainment’ has changed over the course of the last century.  But it was cool to watch people do stuff I neither want to nor can do, and discover where certain musical pieces are from.  Anna stayed interested throughout the show, but Bjarki was getting pretty bored by the second half.  Oh well.  (4 images total)

Bjarki doing his best to feign interest at intermission.

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