Been a rough couple of weeks, folks

Thus the paucity of updates for you, my adoring public.

Now, by way of elaboration, it's not been as terrible as it could have been, but I was quite ill and - much to my chagrin and the delight of my flatmates - by this past Wednesday, I was functionally mute.  Fortunately for me - and much to the lament of Ryder - I have regained the use of my vocal faculties and have resumed haranguing and insulting my friends here.  Because that's what friends do.

Anyway, not a whole lot has been going on, academically.  OK, that's not entirely true - I've had one quiz in Old Icelandic (should have had two, but I was half-dead on Friday and missed it; that'll be fixed this week) and a test in the Old Nordic Religions course.  How I did on them isn't terrifically surprising, given my general inability to perform when it comes to class-based testing, but still, it rankles.

Paleography and Codicology is shaping up to be awesome, despite it's 9am start-time.  Fortunately, I managed to move myself from the Monday class to the Tuesday class; this means several things:  First, and most importantly, I can sleep later than Paul and Ryder tomorrow, those schmucks.  Second, it means that, on Tuesdays, I will be awake and thinking, which means I will have precious little in way of excuses to not complete my glossing and studying for Old Norse.

Course work is going apace, with a lot of reading in Religions, a lot of translation in Old Norse, and lots of playing around with manuscripts in Paleography.  Or, rather, soon to be playing with manuscripts.  We've had the opportunity to handle a bunch already, and it was awesome and impressive and all that good stuff, but it was just handling.  Soon, we'll be actually cataloguing and describing the manuscripts, which is going to be awesome.  It also means that we're going to need to learn how to read a bunch of different scripts, which will be fun.

Insofar as Iceland is concerned, apparently the country took umbrage with my prior assertion that Spring had Sprung.  We had snow literally up to my knees on Wednesday afternoon.  It was pretty damned impressive.  However, despite it's beauty and it's all melted.  Take that, Iceland!  Your 'winter' is nothing!  I scoff at it!*

On sober second thought, I should be more careful with who - or what - I insult; it appears as though I have offended a kitchen-elf or, more specifically, a baking-elf.  How do I surmise this?  Well, allow me to explain for you:  Before the Two Week Break, we went to Torfi's for a party.  I baked a Shortbread Monstrosity** and all seemed good - the top two-thirds of it was sweet, and buttery, and generally everything you want in a Shortbread Monstrosity.  So we get to the party, display the thing, everyone cuts in, and the bottom third of it is basically a buttery, salty mess.  I have no idea what happened to it, but there you go; terrible.

Flash forward to today, and I baked a loaf of bread.  It looked damn good.  It looked so good, in fact, that I took a picture of it:

Beware!  Doughy horror lurks within!

Looks amazing, yes?  Well, upon cutting it open, it turned out that two-thirds of the interior was still doughy.  So I threw it back in the oven for another 20 minutes.  Now only a third of it was doughy.  Unfortunately, the crust was beginning to carbonize.  Bread disaster.

This has led me to what is possibly the only rational explanation for my consistent failure at creating baked goods - or success at making baked bads, depending on your point of view - and that is this:  I have angered one of the huldufólk.***  I need to figure out a way to appease them.

What else have I been doing, apart from being wretchedly ill and failing at producing bread?  Well, I took pictures!  Some of which are under the jump, and the rest of which you can find at my deviantArt account - that way I spare those of you who don't want to look at my ham-fisted attempts at photography.****

Anyway, that about sums it up, save for the photos I took, which are all under the jump

*I'm only doing this in the hopes that there will be another mighty snowfall
**Basically a single, massive shortbread cookie
***The coolest thing about this article?  It references my professor for Old Nordic Religions

****I've been doing most of my shooting at night; it's turned out kind of terrible, as the camera needs a long enough exposure to ensure that my natural hand tremors ruin whatever I was hoping to get, but there are some that worked out not too badly.

 

Finally, an update!

Well, it HAS been an exciting couple of weeks, hasn't it?

Oh?  You don't know?  Well, allow me to explain, if you will.

First off, we have a new flatmate!  Johanna is a half-Finnish, half-Icelandic student and she's also the reason why the ManZone/Man Cave is no longer quite so terribly unliveable.  And it's not like she's actually being all 'girly-girly' and cleaning our place.  No.  All she's done has, essentially, been present and we've essentially stopped living in our own filth.  Hell, I even vacuumed my room yesterday!*

Next, I've been sick the last week or so, thus the delay in getting a blag posted for you people.  Fortunately, a judicious application of the McMullen Cure-All** yesterday fixed that.  By basically putting me into a coma for nine hours or so.

Third, spring has sprung, the grass is riz, but for the love of whatever transcendental ideological concept you hold dear, Reykjavik, could you please salt or sand the sidewalks? The fact that we're a coastal city certainly does wonders to keep things relatively warm, but by virtue of being in the middle of the North Atlantic, Iceland does get some seriously cold weather, which turns the rivers of melt-water atop layers of compacted ice into chutes of embarrassment and pain. But I do have to admit, there's something nice about walking past Tjörnin and getting the simultaneous scents of old and compacted ice, fresh-rotted vegetation, and cool lake-air. It smells like life, and that's pretty awesome. Of course, I miss the long, cold, and bitter winters of my youth, but such is life, and the vagaries of anthropogenic climate change.

Fourth, the Reykjavik Volunteer Air Defence Corps has been maintaining a desultory bombardment of the Capital Region airspace since New Year's Eve.  I mean it.  This morning, I was awakened by barrages going off to the west and northeast of our apartment.  And then I got a call from Johanna and went to Bakkus and Glaumbar with her and some other folk.  This was at 1:30 in the morning, mind you.  Reykjavik, for those of you unsure of it still, is essentially the Las Vegas of Scandinavia, except instead of showgirls and casinos, they have bars and clubs that generally play terrible, terrible music. To wit, the only songs I recognized were House of Pain's Jump Around, and Basshunter's DOTA.  And that last one only by virtue of Liv having introduced me to the horrors of Basshunter during NaNoWriMo in 2008.

Finally, classes; I've now had two weeks worth of class, and apparently the Two Week Break was enough time to get me out of academic practice.  This is uncool.  Fortunately, I think that I'm getting back into the swing of things.  Terry Gunnell's Old Nordic Religion course is pretty awesome thusfar, despite the fact that I'm fairly sure we're not going to be watching The 13th Warrior, and Haraldur's Old Icelandic II is all translation, all the time, which means that I'm not doing as terribly as I could be.  Of course, we're still going to have morphology and grammar tests every Friday, and they'll still make up about half of our exam marks, but there's hope, right?

Anyway, I've got music to download translations to do, so I'll wrap this up here.


*In my defence, it needed to be done; the floor made a fairly convincing dust-based topographical map of the Saraha.

**The McMullen Cure-All is actually something my Nonna suggests to all of us when we're sick, albeit taken to a suitably McMullen-esque extreme.  Nonna's cure is to take a Tylenol and a shot, then lay down.  The McMullen Cure-All is to take 2-8 Tylenol (depending on their strength; 8 regular, 6 Extra Strength, 4 T2s, 2 T3s), and 1-4 ounces of whisky (1 ounce for every two Tylenols), and then collapse into bed for eight to twelve hours.  This, by the way, is not recommended for most people; in fact, for those not possessed of as remarkable a constitution as your humble narrator, the McMullen Cure-All is virtually indistinguishable from a suicide attempt.  Fortunately for all of you, your humble narrator is too stubborn to die that way and, as such, my body has learned to not get sick; it fears the cure more than the illness itself.

New Day, New Year, New Start, New Post!

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have returned from the Great White North to the Land of the Ice and Snow. The Two Week Break* was not too bad at all - many good times were had, many friends were seen, a new blend of tobacco was discovered, and much liquor was consumed - and despite some stresses due to the hectic schedule of the holiday, a good time was had by most.

I got my last mark back during the Break and I'm pleased to note that I didn't fail! My average went from a 9.0/10 to an 8.0/10, but that's still pretty damned good. I should also hear from Cambridge shortly about whether or not I'm going there next academic year, which would be simultaneously awesome and surreal.

When I returned to Iceland on the morning of the 31st, I unwittingly re-enacted my arrival in August; landed during the wee hours of the morning, arrived in town ahead of schedule, caught a ride to my place, woke up my housemates, ate something, then slept for approximately five hours. After that, I greeted Ryder and David properly, saluted Jonas' departure (he moved out two days after I returned to Canada), and then we went out and partied until the wee hours of the morning.

A bit of a digression is in order here: I love fireworks. Absolutely adore them. There's something impressively majestic about tiny amounts of potassium nitrate, sulphur, charcoal, and a mix of metals combining to make a spectacle that lasts only for a few brief seconds before fading into blackness, never to be seen again, even if the next projectile in sequence has the exact same chemical composition. That fleeting glimpse of technical mastery is just...Well, it's impressive.  Anyway, back to the post.

Why the digression above? Well, allow me to explain; Icelanders apparently love their fireworks. In fact, they appear to love them to the point where the entire day sounded like the Reykjavik Capital Region Air Defence Grid was desperately fending off an airborne invasion. Seriously. The constant popping, howling, and bursting of fireworks was simultaneously unnerving and comforting, almost like a tidal rhythm that could lull you to sleep or wash up over the shore and leave your home utterly devastated.

As it was, we returned home around 3am after consuming beer, champagne, and a bottle of Kazakh vodka. Despite a valiant attempt to stay up to wish my friends and family in Canada a Happy Happy, I was unconscious by 4:45. Curse this body, with it's susceptibility to exhaustion!

Sunday was filled with reading and playing Fallout, as was Monday.   Today was the first of four lectures by Neil Price on The Viking Mind, and it was awesome.  I'm still hurting from the lack of coherent sleeping schedule, so I had a couple of moments when I nearly nodded off, which would have been awkward - I once fell asleep in a Poli Sci lecture during my first second year** and I still remember the unpleasantness that followed.

Anyway, the rest of the week promises to be full of awesome Viking-related learning, Fallout, and planning a Pathfinder game I'm going to be running for people come February. Hope you all had a Happy Happy, and I'll be updating again soon!

*The seemingly unnecessary capitalization was explained in my previous post.
**That's not a typo - I changed majors midway through my third year of Poli Sci and, as such, I needed to restart from scratch, so I had two first years, two second years, two first semesters of third year, one second semester of third year, and one fourth year.  Which explains my advanced age compared to my classmates, and my relative lack of academic success.