flavors of everyday

It's the scent of dish soap when mixed with the sulphur-hot smell of the water here, the keening of the wind that howls in the vent somewhere in the bathroom. It's how I know that the ferocity of the weather by the pattern of raindrops on my windows. A storm's really exciting if both kitchen and living room are spattered with wet, and the wind makes the shade pull in my bedroom clack restlessly on the pane.

It's the smell of air-dried linens and duvet, forcibly infused with Outdoor after an afternoon snapping on the line, and the green taste of a crisp hothouse cucumber grown just across the mountain pass.

It's the color of the tomatoes that squat on the folding Swiss trivet and ripen in morning sun, the taste of local potatoes roasted with plaice from the fish market near work- the one where they're impossibly jolly and pleasant, even just before closing and the store's full. It's the scratch of Icelandic wool on my arms from my lopapeysa, the color snippet of a tea towel that steams gently dry on the radiator in the kitchen. It's the red glow reflected off the sheds outside that glosses the ceilings on the north side.

Sure, Iceland's all about grand vistas for many people, but I suspect that these everydaynesses are the ones I'm going to remember again someday, triggered by ripening tomatoes, the smell of outside in the blanket fibers, or the swish of a dishcloth on yet another dirty dish.

Hardware specifications

One of the perennial signs of not-in-Kansas-anymore (literally!) is the little widgets you deal with on a daily basis. I've already discussed the marvels of the bathroom some time ago, although I failed to mention the mini- or maxiflush option the toilets here offer, something that delighted my younger brother when he visited.

There's also all manner of house and office hardware that make for subtle shifts in all those little habits in life. The outlets here, for example, are large, round and deep set, with the grounding on the side instead of the little sad-faced third hole like American plugs. They're often slightly diagonally set on power strips, which is kind of clever if you have all those massive cell-phone-charger plugs that never line up well, but means I'm often fumbling madly trying to line everything up just so.

Switches too are all kinds of different. First of all, the love of dimmers has hit hard here, and many of the switches are a push-on-then-twist-for-romantic-dimness. Those that aren't are opposite style to me, where pressing down means on and up means off. Figure that one out in the dark when you're tired and forgot where you live, whydontcha?

And then we have doors and windows, two bastions of interesting hardware. I'm from doorknob-land and I have landed directly in a handle territory, which has created all kinds of hilarity when I'm walking around my house with a wide-sleeved bathrobe. I keep getting stuck on the handles, especially, for some reason, in the kitchen. In the most complex permutations, there are some doors that have a lock that can only be operated if you rotate the handle upwards and then turn the lock. This still is a confounder for me. The windows are also new, since I grew up with windows that slide up and down, sometimes with rope-suspended weights you could hear rattling in the frames to keep the lower part up in the summer. The closest I got to hardwared windows was in college when the leaded glass panes of my senior dorm room opened outwards like a proper Romeo-wherefore-art-thou-Romeo window should. Then I get here and it's a majestic trio of locks and a latch that also holds the window ajar or fully open even in a 60mph breeze (like last night's non-stop wailing wind). Cool stuff once you figure out how to work it.

Of course these days I am not thinking about this stuff so much anymore, but every now and then I'll be absent-mindedly washing the dishes or something, and I'll look over to the right at the outlet on the kitchen counter and think "oh yeah, I'm living in Iceland. Weird stuff, this is". And then I go back to swabbing the soup pot in the sulphurous hot water.