[Photo taken on 21 November 2014, bloggen on 01 February 2015. Argh.] Iceland has many pros and cons. One of the bigger cons is the ridiculous price of clothes. Case in point: I was browsing through Debenhams, and found a top I liked. The price: ISK 6990 or GBP 36.2 or USD 56.8. The reasonRead more
[This HAPPENED on Tuesday 18 November 2014, but is being blogged on 01 February 2015. Yeah! ]
Bjarki’s classroom coordinators organized a bingo one late afternoon after school. Everybody brought something edible to share, and one small present.
The bingo was organized in such a way that all the kids got a present, and those who won multiple times got a clementine for each subsequent win.
It took a while for Bjarki to win, but once he did, the event became a lot more fun. (6 images total)
Kiddos eating from the shared food table.
[This HAPPENED on 16 November 2014, but is being blogged on 01 February 2015. Because I can.]
Bjarki’s still attending twice weekly gymnastics practice, and their ‘advent’ meet was in the middle of November. There’s a video below of Bjarki doing the exercises. (3 images and 1 video playlist)
Getting their ‘report cards’ and medals at the end of the day.
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 figuredRead more
[This happened between 04 and 15 November 2014, but is being put into blogform on 16 January 2015.]
Finnur was away in California from Friday 31 October to Sunday 16 November. Meanwhile, I kept the kids and myself fed and clean-clothed, and mostly got everybody where they needed to be on time.
Not a lot of photos got taken, but here are the few that I snapped, mostly on my phone. (20 images total)
Tuesday 4 November 2014
Emma playing on the playground after I picked her up from daycare. Going inside right away was not popular with little Ms. I Like Playing Outside , so this saved energy. Editing courtesy of Googlebots.
[Drop-by occurred on 02 November 2014, written up on 31 December with fireworks going off all around.]
Anna requested yet another trip to the main city library for another dose of manga books. Since Emma was with us, and she gets easily bored in the library since she can’t tear All The Books, I decided to visit the next door Reykjavik art museum instead. Anna followed us there a little while later, and suffered loudly through some art. (13 images total)
From the show Flatland by Sirra Sigrún Sigurðardóttir.
[Photos from 01 November 2014, written up on 31 December 2014. Hah! Only TWO months behind now…]
When Finnur travels, it’s become customary for Bjarki to stay overnight at his grandparents’ place for a night or two. This means it was just us girls at home this Saturday, which lead to various shenanigans. (7 images total)
Emma on her Anna-horse.
[Photos acquired on 31 OCTOBER 2014, wondrous text added on 30 DECEMBER of the same year.]
Emma, along with pretty much all the youngest kids in her class, came down with a nasty case of hand-foot-and-mouth disease this fall (gin-og klaufaveiki fyrir fólk, kallast handa-, fóta- og munnveiki).
She had to stay home for five days, and we were rescued by Finnur’s parents who took her in so that we could go to work. (6 images total)
The poor munchkin.
[This happened on Saturday 25 October 2014, but was written on 26 October 2014. Indeed!]
This past spring I received a gift certificate to visit a Fishspa that is located downtown. It is a place where you dip your feet into a tub full of fish for at least 20 minutes, and the fish eat all the dead skin away, leaving you with very clean smooth skin.
The experience was a little weird, the fish really liked my feet, and didn’t seem to be quite done when my 20 minutes were up! The sensation was somewhat ticklish, but not so ticklish that I needed to move my feet around. The fish don’t have teeth so there was no biting and no pain. I’m thinking this might be a nice fun thing to do annually…?
I hadn’t planned what to do after getting my feet eaten, but since it was nearby, I decided on Kjarvalsstaðir, the art museum where they display the works of legendary Icelandic painter Jóhannes S. Kjarval alongside other exhibitions. I last visited Kjarvalsstaðir on my very first FFF outing, and since this was an unplanned visit, I had no idea what was in store for me.
Both showrooms where hosting a mixed exhibition of the works of Kjarval (Top Soil) and Swedish artist Andreas Eriksson (Roundabouts). The Swede supposedly took some inspiration from the works of the much older Kjarval, which is why their works were being shown somewhat side by side.
My take on the Swede was that he was a) not my cup of tea, but that b) he was very internally consistent in showing the murky colors of the woods surrounding his home. Also shown were bronze castings of birds that had died after flying onto his windows, as well as molehill mounds. Yes, very woodsy. It wasn’t all brownish green to black though, two spray-painted images in bright colors were a little odd, and then there were white 3D things. Yeah.
Anyway, enough wordage, on to the photos! (51 images total!)
Hello there Fishspa, almost hiding on the first floor. Up the hill is Laugarvegur, the downtown shopping street, and …
[The momentary magic happened on 24 October, but is being blogged about on 30 December 2014.]
We have taken to occasionally playing the card came Pinochle with Adda and Halli. (Our old sparring partners were Sarah and Augusto, but they live too far away now, boohoo!) (2 images total)
One evening, while Halli and I were losing spectacularly to Adda and Finnur, I got dealt a “double pinochle”, i.e. two jacks of diamond and two queens of spade, which basically means you win that round. But to my amazement, during the card-swap before the trick-taking began, Halli handed me what I needed for a “run” too, meaning this is what I put down as my “meld”:
That’s 40 points for the double pinochle, 15 points for the run in trump, 6 points for the four different queens, and 2 more for the marriage in spade. This meant just my meld was a whopping 63 points!! Sadly, this uber-round just made us positive for a bit, before yet another bad call plunged us into red waters. But it was fun while it lasted!!