how to explode

Today is Sprengidagur, the Icelandic Mardi Gras, which translates as "exploding day". Here's how to do it yourself:

• Take equal parts salted lamb meat, boiled carrots, and boiled turnips.
• Cut into bite-sized pieces
• Make yourself a nice thick split-pea soup
• Mix that stuff all together so you get a pea soup with all the chunks of meat and veggies
• Repeat (and repeat and repeat if you're like some of these guys)
• Explode

Apparently that's the way to do it, although the explosion hasn't happened yet. One note: Only foreigners eat salad. Monochromatic meals are cool today, so leave those healthy greens for tomorrow! If you can't manage to find salted lamb, a New England boiled dinner will give you a pretty similar experience, although that's got the great advantage of horseradish, one of my favorite condiments ever.

This day is hot on the heels of Bun Day, in which children swap spanks for buns. We didn't have to spank for our buns that were delivered to the office kitchen yesterday afternoon, but the general idea is that the kids spank their parents and receive buns in exchange. Of course everyone had a jolly time talking about at work ("I actually got spanked last night instead of this morning" *raised eyebrow*). That one seems much more a candidate for explosion that this salt-lamb contraption, but what do I know, being the foreigner here.

And now, would anyone like a wafer-thin mint?

Ship sighting: The big dry-dock where Magni is hasn't got any other action currently, but the small boats part further down the street has a new one. This drydock has usually had a population of small, fairly threadbare boats so I haven't commented on it before, but now there's a tidy little ship Sóley in for repairs. It's not the same Sóley as the sand dredger which was on a mission somewhere else yesterday- I saw it come in from the west yesterday afternoon to take up the usual place late in the day.