creating atmosphere

We moved in on Saturday to our new place, the sterile-but-great-view apartment. As soon as we’d started setting furniture up, the place took on a new charm we hadn’t expected possible. The only major problem though, is that the view is so distracting we’ve oriented all our activities toward the window. Sunday we started our first morning there with breakfast on the couch, using two cloth-covered boxes as our table. After a morning of sorting and organizing, we did the standard Sunday pool visit, and then for dinner we took advantage of our new balcony with barbecued lamb steaks. Of course, the joys of the new place are not only restricted to food consumption- the sound from the stereo works wonderfully in the open space, and concrete floors and solid walls make it easier to appreciate without worrying about disturbing the neighbors.

Speaking of neighbors, we have run into a few of them, most notably an older woman who came in when we were moving on Saturday. Her clothing and appearance was the tidy, well-groomed look of one who is a Patron of the Arts or at least on some kind of committee. She gave us a long tale of how she couldn’t keep straight who was moving in and who was moving out and she had thought a different unit was for sale and now here we were moving in to a different one. She also said it looked like she would have to walk to her fourth floor apartment since we were tying up the elevator. Moments later when J and I got to the fifth floor with the elevator load and were moving it in the door, J caught a glimpse of her face peeking from the stairwell window. She had walked up the extra floor just to see the same boxes she’d already seen downstairs on their way in our door.

The move itself was remarkably easy, thanks to the expertise of J’s friend and co-worker Þ and the moving truck guy. They managed to manouver the enormous couch out of the old place with the grace of dancers, and when S joined us at the new joint we completed in record time (thanks to both of you!) We passed beer around and stood amid the upended couch and the towers of boxes, listening to S recite poems about the people from the various points of our new view, Seltjarnarnes and Akranes.

We are still trying to drag the last bits out of the old place and into the new one, but we are getting used to sleeping with the wind from the harbor whistling through the open window, and waking to something new in the view every day. I am going to try to take a picture of Our Mountain every day this year, although the winter months will be challenging. I wonder how memorable 4 months of dark pictures will be.

I’ve also decided to introduce a new feature to this blog, the daily boat sighting. Today I have two: Helga Maria, a robust fishing boat, has joined Magni in the shipyard next to the hamburger joint, and yesterday’s sighting is still there. This one is a Chinese fishing boat, and it was riding much lower in the water today so I couldn’t read the translation of the name. It was something that sounded like you could order it in a restaurant though, like Chung Mai No 5.