chapter new

The past three months have been an abrupt shift in quite a lot of my life parameters, and although late November was a rather rough phase, the outcome so far has been far better than I could have imagined. I'm working for a new company now, with people I've known almost as long as my time in Iceland, and I'm pretty sure a better group of colleagues can't possibly exist. They're smart, reliable, funny, interesting people whom I've seen through many thrilling years are completely trustworthy as well. I feel extremely lucky to be part of this group and doing such interesting projects.

 New job also means new office, and also more frequent trips to Akureyri to sync with the team up there. The office in Akureyri was previously occupied by an investment firm, and although the entire building is now empty, it feels more like they're just out at lunch than they moved out. The company letterhead and official stamps are still in the supply closet, the firm's name is on the wall, and the ladies room is better stocked than at a fancy hotel. Perfume, makeup remover, hand cream, hair pins, and hairspray are all neatly lined up on a glass table beside a fancy lamp. I'm the only woman who occasions the place so it's a very luxurious experience.

The building is a lovely old one with thick walls, a huge brick chimney in the center, and an elegant pre-2008 renovation inside with frosted glass walls etched with the names of the now-disappeared banking divisions. From the windows the view is pure Akureyri- a vast sweep of fjord and in the darkness, the pulsing heart of lights someone put on the opposite side of the water. Mornings there have been my favorite, especially the day I arrived this week. The fjord was hung about with clouds, but as the sun rose, the undersides shown rosily, and a beatific light poured in the windows and shone on our development manager.

Lunch there is rather fun, since there are only a few frequented spots among the working crowd of the north. The daily menu at Strikið is usually good value, and I'm sure to run into a few of my former colleagues who've found work at other nearby places. After lunch we can stop by and visit some others who set up shop together and inherited the famous foosball table.

The post-work time's also as cozy as I've come to expect from visits to Akureyri. My new boss's wife works in tourism, so she recommended a guesthouse as a possible home-away-from-home, and she didn't steer me wrong. The place feels like being at home, with a dining room stocked with all the necessary crockery, free use of the kitchen, tea supplies, and even candles and a lighter so your room is properly home-like. With the wooden floors and furnishings typical of Icelandic homes, it's no hardship to spend a night or two here.

In the mornings I can just cross through the center of town to get to work, along a route where people leave their cars unlocked, idling, and empty while they pop into the bank, or dash into the bakery for their morning cinnamon bun. It's that kind of town, Akureyri is, and visiting it always reminds me of why it's so good to live in Iceland- the views, the air, the cozy feeling, the people I've been so fortunate to have in my life.

girly things, episode two

As I discussed some years ago, Icelanders are very prone to trend mania, and just like a few years ago, I decided I had to try out the latest craze and see what it was all about. Last time I went through duty free, I bought the smallest size of the #1 best seller in the cosmetics department, the EGF serum. This thing has been gushed over on the international press, and stories go that women in Iceland and abroad are using it with rave reviews.

This is my first foray into serums and I've never used a product with magical promises like this before, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but so far I've been underwhelmed. After a month of using it every night before bed, just like instructed, I haven't really seen any difference. It's just like with every other skin product I've ever tried. Some smell nice, some don't, some make my skin really unhappy, but none have really produced results impressive enough to make me buy again. So, I've got to say that unlike the last time I ventured into Icelandic woman-products, this one has failed. Maybe I'm just not in their target age group or something.

In other more positive news, I discovered that the Icelandair shop is selling a dress designed by a friend of a friend. The first time I spotted it in the catalog I wasn't particularly thrilled by it and didn't realize the few degrees of separation between me and the dress. In November I was on a Skype call with my longtime friend K, and as usual, we segued into discussions of Fabulous Dresses. She mentioned that a friend of hers is the head designer for a label in town, someone I've had sunny wine-soaked afternoons with, someone whose house has hosted several fabulous dinner parties, someone whose dog I've walked when I lived on the same street.

After our call I stopped by the store downtown, and to my surprise, many of the dresses and skirts in the store were indeed gorgeous and fit me superbly. I had a friend coming to Iceland buy the dress from the Icelandair duty free, and have been extremely happy I did ever since. It's the perfect weight of jersey with the perfect neckline, and I love that someone I know had a hand in its delightful craftsmanship. Such is life in Iceland, where the people you spent an evening dyeing your eyebrows with are the people designing beautiful things with international recognition. Also, K rarely steers wrong when it comes to gorgeous dresses.

Update: Reading the morning news I discovered that yet again there's a mania for this EGF serum, this time in France. What am I missing here?

*since America cares about this, nobody has paid me or given me anything to write about either of these products

Icelandic new year flavor

A few months ago one of the members of my choir announced that she had a plan to make a disc of musical favorites related to New Year celebrations, and she wanted us to be part of the effort. The director whipped up a new arrangement of one of the Icelandic classics, and during our annual weekend retreat rehearsal, we performed it along with several other favorites to an attentive recording crew.

She was recently interviewed on the national radio program, and it included a snippet of the best one as the intro. This song's tune and lyrics make me think of Vikings stamping around a bonfire in the deepest dark of an Icelandic winter night, and even though this is only a clip, I hope you can feel it too.

The rest of the program is an interview with my choir member for anyone who wants to exercise their listening skills, and it closes out with another recording of another New Year favorite, as performed by a very enthusiastic choir comprised of several generations of Icelanders. I can't wait to get the CD and hear the rest of our contributions, and hear what else is included.

in the name of science

Yesterday was a perfect clear sunny spring day, so S decided it was time to see if he could collect samples of the volcanic ash for his research institute. We headed south along the ring road, passing the cars collected at Hellisheiði, and all along the road pass Selfoss who'd pulled over to gape at the plume that was so crisply visible on the horizon. From 70 km away it seemed surreal, beautiful and painted on the horizon, a clear plume etched above a perfectly white mountain. Hard to believe it's causing so much damage everywhere.

But, to collect samples we had to get closer, so at Hvolsvöllur, we stopped at the first road block on rte 1 where Björgunarsveit informed S he had to talk to the local police for permission to pass into the dust zone. S came out of the police station with a big grin and a hand-scrawled note on one of his business cards. Permission to enter, and a phone number if we had troubles. Then, we turned into Fljótshlíð along the same road where we'd gone to visit the first eruption. Flagged past the road block there, we entered a new kind of ghostly landscape, nearly devoid of humans, with only a sprinkling of horses munching below the menacing plume in front of us.

Second checkpoint came before the dubiously slouchy bridge that had survived the flood, the old single-lane bridge across Markarfljót. There, the license number was noted down and we were waved across the bridge into the territory where the floods had raged through. The land there was guttered with deep channels, embedded with ice chunks, and totally barren of human activity. We passed Seljalandsfoss, normally choked with tourists, now empty and oddly thin on water volume. A bit further, the picnic spot where families had gathered two weeks ago, now barren, with the picnic tables rucked up crazily against the hillside by the now-subsided flood.

When we came to the intersection with rte 1 again, the road to the right was totally missing, a channeled expanse of mud peppered with ice chunks in its place. To the left, an improvised track climbed over a levee and continued on the still-intact portion of the ring road. We passed a few people there- some camera men, some photographers, an occasional other vehicle emerging from the darkness ahead.

In front of us, the dust cloud rose like an evil tidal wave, pouring down brown from the glacier to our left and surging towards the sea and the Westman Islands. Spirals of dust rose up from the road, and the fields on both sides were monochromatically gray under the thick coating. We drove in only as far as needed to a place where the dust was scoopably thick along the roadside, then S turned so that he'd open the car door on the lee side. Out he went, while the rest of us waited in the closed car, breathing through masks and watching the gloom slide over the mountains.

Iceland is already a fairly sparsely populated place, but to be somewhere like this that would normally be full of tourists and traffic was creepy. The landscape was silent except for the ash blowing down the mountain, and the scrape of S's scoop on the pavement as he collected ash outside. After 15 minutes or so, he'd filled his bucket with a few kilos and we zipped out from under the ash cloud, pausing to examine the chunks of glacier that had washed out on the mud, to watch the repair work on the road, and then to watch the plumes of ash ejecting furiously from the eruption site. As we watched, lightning zapped from particles to the glacier, and sparks of red and white lit up spots within the cloud. This was no fluffy friendly cloud up closer- the density looked more like cauliflower than a cloud, and the sediment raining down from each new ejection was clearly visible in long sheets falling to the ground. At the edge of the crater, a thick carpet of ash was crisply delineated against the remaining portion of the glacier, still cleanly white.

From there we returned to Hvolsvöllur to wash up and eat at the N1 there. Unlike the previous volcano trip when we stopped there, there were no tour busses, no crowds jamming the grill line. Just a few photographers had taken the tables facing towards the eruption, where with telephoto lenses and wireless they were broadcasting photos to the world. We had a nice chat with the guy at the counter who told us all that our Icelandic was so nice, the coffee was free, and then from there back to Vegamót were D&J picked up their car to head home.

Compared to the last eruption, this one is spooky, unpredictable and not tourist friendly, so the opportunity to get this close was extremely fascinating. I took plenty of photos which are here.

hot views

By now I'm sure everyone's heard of the latest excitement to reach us here on the island. The volcano at Fimmvörduháls has even been covered by the revered news service at Fox to the delight and amuseument of most people here.

So yesterday when the weather was clear and spring-like, S and I skipped out of the office early to see what we could see. At Hvolsvöllur we turned on to route 216, following a string of Jeeps making their way into the river valley. Blithely ignoring the several "road closed" signs, we followed the road through two river crossings and through increasingly bumpy and muddy terrain until we found friends J & D who'd come earlier to hike.

On the way in, our first indication of excitement ahead was a massive plume of smoke drifting gently seawards. The closer we got, the more clearly we could see the individual belches of smoke that dissolved as the expanded skyward and floated over the glacier. Even closer, the lava spurts became clearly visible, the tongues leaping high in the air from the left side of the newly-forming mountain.

We'd hoped to cross the mighty Markarfljót but in its springtime fury and with a rather light vehicle that might have floated in the fast water, we stayed on the far side and just walked across the tundra until we reached the river's edge. We settled on a bluff above the river, about 7km away from the explosion's center, and unpacked the goodies. J & D, experienced and efficient nature travellers, had come with crispbread, cream cheese, avocado, and tabasco, so we layered up some sandwiches and picnicked as we watched.

The location is already known for being tremendously beautiful, a long river valley edged by mountains and topped with glaciers, opening south-westward towards the sea and the setting sun. With only a gentle breeze and the full sun on our sides, the addition of these fireworks was almost too much to handle. We passed the binoculars along our line, watching the lava as it shot skyward, then solidified and tumbled down to the newly forming mountain. We watched the dozens of small planes, the helicopters as they circled. We inspected the tires and size of the vehicles that did make it across the river, and counted the people who'd hiked to the top of a nearer mountain for a close view. We tried to describe the effect of the lava- was it more like a blow torch, a snowgun at a mountain resort shooting off something quite the opposite temperature?

Mostly we just stared and tried to take at least some photos that would capture how remarkable the sight was, grateful to be here to bear witness to such a phenomenon. As dusk began to fall and the sunset lit up the smoke plume pinkly, we decided we simply had to stay long enough to experience the colours in the dark, so we waited and watched, observing that the plumes of lava seemed to be spreading. When we first arrived, only the left side had been visibly active, but in the dark the whole ridge was alight, burning above us like a Lord of the Rings signal fire.

Finally, just before total darkness, we trekked back across the jumbled landscape and to the cars again, wary of crossing rivers in total darkness. We shouldn't have worried though- the entire route back was well illuminated by the hundreds of people who'd come out to see the scene. The crowds and vehicles were reminiscent of some fourth of july fireworks spectacle, except in puffy coats and hats instead of light summer dresses. After we crossed back over the first river crossing, the crowds became even deeper- tour busses with little footstools set out for the comfort of the tourists, dozens of cars not river-worthy, and hordes of people marching through the tundra. Mania of such a proportion I have never witnessed in such a relatively remote area.

And then, the 2 hour drive back in the dark, during which I kept looking back to see just how long the eruption would be visible. Past Hella, I could still see back for kilometers, the bright orange plume rising high above the low, flat lights of the few farms we passed. At Selfoss it was finally swallowed by the dark night and all seemed finished. But then, as we passed through the snow-striped heath at Hellisheiði, a pale arc of northern lights swept through the sky. Perfectly ended.

not done yet

Over the past few months there's been some serious Iceland-or-not debate going on here, and for a while I thought I might be leaving the country. And yet, I'm still here and plan to stay for a while. Based on the world media and the currency and the dirty politicianing it might seem like the last place someone would choose to stay, particularly since I arrived here by following someone else's dream of living here.

And yet, over the past nearly-five years, it's somehow become my own place. Living in a foreign country with a fairly obscure language and sometimes a mysteriously different culture can be frustrating at times but there's just so much here that's impossible to find in one place anywhere else. Most of these are the sorts of things that don't cost money. For example, during my time here I've worked in three different offices, and each one has had sweeping views of mountains and bay. It's not possible to gawk at the view constantly during the work day but whenever I'm eating lunch on the Fridays when the rescue squads are practicing in the harbor, or look up while I'm on the phone to the cloud-spotted Esja, it's a spark of wonderful in my day.

At home, I can open the window on clear winter nights and take photos of the Northern Lights directly from my kitchen, resting the camera on the windowsill. Whenever it's stuffy, an open window brings a swirl of that only-in-Iceland air that's the first signal that I'm back when I arrive at the airport. It's that tap water I always miss when I'm in places like Paris, some of the most grungy-tasting water I've ever had in a major city.

On my way to work I often take the "long way", a 10 minute trip instead of 8 to my office. I wait at a stop light opposite a dry dock where I can watch the comings and goings of boat needing maintenance, then continue along a seaside road with the same huge view I enjoy all day at work. When I run, it's along similar paths where the wind is a near-constant training partner, but where the music of my run is the surf, accompanied by what might be some of the best sunrises and sunsets in the world.

A few Saturdays ago, I joined a sixsome on a trip whose goal was to hunt for hot pots and soak in as many of them as possible. Our first stop was a place I'd visited back in the autumn of 06 and hadn't been able to find again afterwards. A small shed offers basic changing room comforts, including a heated floor. From there, two different pots offer soaking options, or you can lie in a shallow pool where the water spills over and admire the view of the protected valley. It was a day when the sun finally felt like it had returned after the long darkness, so I lay for as long as possible in the gravelly pool with my toes turned to the sky. This is a good way to spend the weekend.

Then, let's not forget the people I've gotten to know here and who enrich the experience immeasurably. I've gotten lucky with a work environment that provides freedom, inspiration, and a trustworthy group of people who've been great companions on so many trips to Norway, Holland, and the UK. There are the Icelandic friends who've included me into their local traditions, festivities, and families, the cheerful choristers who've given so much Icelandic practice and companionship on trips all over the world. Then, there are the friends from other lands I've made here that can commiserate on how odd it can be as a foreigner here. Many of them have moved away but the connections continue as they revisit Iceland or I visit their new homelands.

The future here is definitely a bit unknown and the situation may require reassessment as the battles over IceSave and EU membership resolve, but for the time being I'm soaking up the returning sun and the dazzling view over the turquoise ocean to the snowed mountains. Simple things like that are what make life worthwhile to me.

everyone's laughing

about this recent report from the Daily Show on Iceland's troop in Iraq. Unlike some skits I've seen about the one Icelandic soldier, this one was actually filmed here.

Part one was from the 22nd, part two from yesterday.

brainspace

This week I've been thinking of things that now fill my brain that I wasted not a care on before, and realized that it has replaced some stuff that was front-and-center in my head in the old days. I started making a mental list of the remembering/forgetting items, and in the interest of freeing up that brainspace, it's going down on this site.

Things I don't have to think about anymore now that I live in Iceland:

• Clothes dryers. I'm air-dry all the time, baby. Only problem is when I am finishing my chenille scarves I need to borrow a dryer, and I know a total of two people who actually have them.
  
• Furnaces, and therefore waiting for the heat to be turned on in the fall. Makes the basements of apartment buildings look really weird and empty without the Great Beast lurking down there. Also, I've never been to someone's house that is just not quite warm enough, unlike the time when I visited my aunt in Paris in her lovely-yet-frigid Beaux Arts-era apartment building.
  
• Hot water heaters. Consistent shower temperatures all the time, and no need to get up super early to beat out the guy downstairs for the hot water!
• Antiperspirant/air conditioners. It's never warm enough to need either.
  
• How to get OUT of the city. Unlike 5 hours of traffic to get to a bit of empty on a popular weekend, it's 20 minutes.
• Will the tap water be drinkable at a restaurant or hotel? Whenever I am not in Iceland, I am very preoccupied with water quality and end up drinking far less water than when home.
• Ants, cockroaches, mosquitoes and other creepy-crawlies. Yes, we have some up here (like silverfish) but for the most part it's but a memory. Means you can forget to wash a plate for a lot longer here. Nice!
  
• Restrictive work hours/sick time. I have to be present for meetings and get my work done, but how and where that happens is my business. This was a big stress factor in the US that is totally gone.

things I do think about a lot now that I don't live in Boston/USA:

• Sleeping with the window open, whatever the temperature or wind conditions may be outside
  
• My passport. I have to carry it much more often now, and thanks to all the visas and stamps, have to get extra pages now.
  
• How true or incorrect stereotypes about people from different countries are, since I meet so many people from so many places now.
  
• Laundry planning. Euro machines seem to heat their own water and take their own sweet time washing your clothes ever so gently. A load can take up to 2 hours to complete, so it's a big planning session to make it happen. Add in the drying negotiations (see "no clothes dryers" above) which involve either picking a non-rainy day and hanging in the morning for sun exposure, or beating the other building residents to the inside lines, and laundry day gets exciting.
  
• Bathing suits. I have about 8 of them and it's just never enough with all the pool and hot tub opportunities here. Must have variety.
• Suitcases. Somewhere on some life-abroad list I read a comment that said being an expat means learning how to pack a suitcase really well and get all kinds of odd things packed together in a tiny space without breaking anything. I still hate packing to go on trips though, in spite of all my recent experience with it.
  
• Food spoilage. Everything has a much shorter shelf life here. Bread & milk are only good for a couple of days before they get fuzzy or funny smelling. Therefore, I think more about my grocery shopping plans. I've gone all old-lady and bought a fold-up grocery trolley (like this only a more stylin stripes and mod flowers pattern), which is fun when trundling eggs home over the cobbled sidewalks.
  
• Raincoats that don't look foreign-tourist or straight-from-the-mountain for all-the-time wear. Umbrellas just don't cut it, and the weather the past month has called for almost constant raincoat use.
  
• Boots with low/no heels, for staying stylishly warm and being walkable on cobblestones and icy sidewalks. I realized just how much of a new thing this is when I tried to find footwear in Boston and found that only the Super Sensible (=really not fun to wear and rather ugly) boots had flat/low heels.
  
• Apartments and housing. It's over 3 months until I have to move out but I am already planning where I will live in January. Gotta work the inside route if possible.
• How to escape the darkness of December/January here for a bit of light somewhere else.
• Running into people who are all "HEY!! How've you BEEN?? SO GREAT TO SEE YOU!!!" that I don't remember at all. This happened to me at a party a few weekends ago with a very bubbly Spanish lady that I thought was someone else. Turns out I met her two years ago at my first-weekend-in-Iceland party and have basically not seen her since. She has a new job with some people I sort of know and ended up at the party, where she recognized me and I didn't. That's how it goes in Iceland.
  

get to work!

Well, it's summer in Iceland again, which means that we've got a few months where things actually bloom, grass grows for real, and utilities that huddled through the soggy, windy winter needs to be tidied up. Reykjavík's got a handy solution for this, involving all those high school kids for whom the emptiness of summertime stretches long. They're grouped into work teams, and are out planting flowers at the roundabouts, trimming grass, weeding gardens, wheelbarrowing sod hither and thither, and a few days ago there was a line of them painting telephone poles along the highway. It's a pretty sweet arrangement- the parents have something to keep the kids busy, the kids learn The Value of Money and make some friends, and the city gets landscaping.

party of one

Yesterday I had to call my Icelandic credit card company to sort out an incorrect charge, only to find that the person who deals with this type of issue was not there. I started the make-a-mental-note process so I'd remember to call the next day when the lady on the other end of the line said, "I'll just tell her to give you a call when she gets in, shall I? Your number is xxx-xxxx, right?"

This morning, just as promised, the woman I needed gave me a ring, so early that I was still asleep. She apologised and said she'd just call me later, not to worry. After my experiences in the US with these kinds of things requiring endless hours of crappy on-hold music, "oh, you're talking to the wrong department, let me transfer you" meanderings, and more recorded voices and press-a-button menus that never have the option you want, it's almost fun to call a bank here, even when involving a matter that will result in the company losing money. Yesterday it was no voicemail jail, just a cheery morning call from just the person I need to talk to. The small size of this place does have its advantages!

that girl he knows

I decided to take an evening stroll tonight to connect with The Town after the nice fat 5-day Easter weekend we all enjoyed up here. With my forgot-it-behind-the-flour-jar slices of stale bread, I headed down to Tjörnin for a bit of bread-flinging for the birds. On the way home I took the Laugavegur route to enjoy the full effect of sprintime mid-week evenings in Reykjavík. Ladies and gentlemen, it's rúntur time. This special Iceland-and-other-small-towns experience was once mis-defined in some guidebook as a pub-crawl, but really it's just driving around town so you can see who else is driving around town. I've watched the procession in Ísafjörður with all the kids that were suspended from school driving around on a Friday morning, the Akureyri Easter rúntur last year, and so very many trips here in my hometown.

This evening was a decent showing, offering up the following tasty sightings:

• 2 girls with emo hair in a minivan, the passenger trailing a cigarette out the open windows, cruising to Britney Spears "baby one more time". Don't you adore all the irony? So clever.
• Crappy 80s sedan with a flashing multicolor neon display on the front bumper. Don't run into anything, boys!
• 4x4 with a loudspeaker broadcasting sound effects of farting and barn animals. I bet the ladies go hottt for this one.
• Someone who missed their turn down towards Hverfisgata and ended up backing up an entire block. Main Street Reykjavík is that unpopulated on a Tuesday that you can just change your mind mid-cruise.
  
• And finally, someone in a car I didn't recognize who gave me the honk-n-wave. I didn't recognize the driver but counted on a possible second pass to give me another chance to figure out the deal. A few blocks of walking later, the car went by again and this time I waved them down (see previous entry... this is acceptable behavior during the rúntur on Laugavegur. Nobody is in a hurry). The guy was all "hey, weren't you at Dubliners last weekend?". I assured him I hadn't been and he said that I must have an Icelandic twin out there, so identical was this Dubliners attender. He then said, "well, you're pretty all the same. Want to join us?" I'm happy my Icelandic is at a level that I can have bizarre conversations like this but I had to refuse the offer, tempting though it was.
  

And so goes romance in Reykjavík on a Tuesday evening.

All hail

Last weekend was the perfect weekend to do Not Much with proper style. We had a lovely storm on Saturday night, which I spent as it should be spent- candlelit dinner with friends followed by lying on a windowseat with a wooly blanket, 80's movies and a purry tabby cat, while the wind blustered and the rain and hail clattered outside.

Of course, one must not stay inside all weekend, and the grand thing about Iceland is that the pools are always open, even when hail threatens. So, K and I went to Árbær, where I remembered again how much I love swimming. It's odd how many things have become part of my life in the past year that I can now not imagine being without. Crunchy onions on my hot dog, red currants, quick access to the freshest of air, and swimming. I love the smooth feeling of the water, the way a slight change to the angle of your head or hips creates a totally new streamlined effect, that rewarding zoom when you kick up the pressure against the pool. Then there's the frisson of movement at the end of the pool that results in a quick change of direction, the constant evaluation and reassessment of the timing so that the breathing and strokes come out just right at the end of the lane. I love the rhythm of the breathing, and how I can feel the difference in my singing control when I've just been swimming before. Yesterday, there were leaves on the bottom of the pool, so every sweep of my arm sent them swirling in a subaquatic tornado across the blue tiles, and the snatches of view when I turned my head above the surface were tree-filled and swiftly moving.

But I digress. I had that can-swim-all-day feeling yesterday, but as my arms just started to go leaden, the mushroom-gray clouds that had swept in started to shed prickly hail. I ducked under the water and rolled on my back so I could watch it fall on the surface. If I was close enough, I could feel the moments of cold as each ice-pebble dissolved on the warm water. When I nudged under the lane dividers and made my way to the nuddpottur, the kids were all ecstatically scooping up handfuls of hail from a corner where it had collected, and watching it melt in the hot water, delighting in the frigid/hot contrasts.

Weather here is certainly a participator sport when you know you can be almost naked out in almost every variation there is to offer. A bit different from the pool of my youth, where a sniff of rain was enough for the lifeguards to sound the everybody-out for fear of lightning. It's rather a non-issue here, so you're welcome to swim at any time- high winds, snow, rain, or hail. I already liked to be aware of the cycles of nature around me, and my childhood lesson on how to survive winter (do stuff outside regularly) still applies here.

As I type this now, the wind has kicked in once again after a relatively calm day, and I can see that snow has begun to spiral and hover in the streetlights. Perfect weather for a swim!