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.