More Snow

Okay, I’m not feeling so sad that I missed the epic snow in Washington State at Christmas time. According to the locals, what we have been getting is far from record breaking, but it’s the most snow I’ve ever been around and it gets more and more exciting every day as it piles higher and higher in the yard. All our doors here open out, which makes me glad we live in The Sinking Houses. If the ground around our houses hadn’t sunk, the snow would have made it impossible to open the door by now. I was up to my knees in snow walking to the bus this morning. So fun! The sun was out this afternoon, but now a new snow storm has arrived and is dumping more. Kaleb, Tobias and Kory were outside until bedtime building snow forts as it packs nicely in a cooler for making building blocks.

As much fun as it is, I did have my first little fall today walking home from the bus stop, something I’ve been so careful to avoid. I landed on my knee first, then on my side, so I am not terribly injured but my knee is very stiff and a little swollen as it hit ice, not the nice fluffy white stuff. I’m hoping it gets me a little sympathy and out of a few household chores as I nurse myself back to health. We’ll see.

My Norsk class met back at our old school just for today (it sits behind the dark brown building on the left in the photo) because they are putting an elevator in our “new” school and it was rather noisy yesterday. (My new school sits at the bottom of the hill on the right behind all those other buildings). I took the photo today during my lunch break. The stairs up to the top of “Fjellstua” (mountain living room) are visible on the right side of the hill. I’m hoping to make it up and down all 418 steps during my lunch break as soon as all this snow is gone and my knee heals. It was nice to be back in the ol’ neighborhood as I love being close to the harbor when I’m walking to and from the bus. Everything was just so darn gorgeous today – every branch on every tree was sprayed with snow and all the world was white. I love it.

Kory took a side job today for Odd’s neighbor. I guess the guy got himself in over his head with his home improvement projects. He tried to save some money by buying a new door without the door frame attached (since he already has a door frame in his house), but it’s costing him about double the price to get the door installed in the frame because he can’t do it. (They put doors in the frame at the factory for a reason.) Kory didn’t really want to take the job but with our trip to Rome coming up, and not knowing how the dollar will fair against the Euro, he thought it wise to have a little cushion on our spending money, so that made me happy. At least he could walk to work, as getting our van out of our driveway is impossible since the snow plow has made such a huge snow berm we could never dig out. Kaleb and Tobias were able to make a long snow tunnel out of the berm in front of Tobias’ house. It’s so fun to have all this snow!

Kaleb had a good day at school, even if he did have to walk over a mile, through the snow to get home. He’s had a pretty good week and has been rather cooperative the last few days in doing his homework. He wrote his first report all in Norwegian this week on the planet Saturn. He is so proud he’s on the same level as the other kids now, but I’m still making him do Algebra so he doesn’t lose any ground in all he’s learned so far. I’m not as nice as his teacher.

The Good Teacher Inga was in Oslo today so we had a new substitute named Astrid. She is a good friend to cousin Turid, so it was fun to have her teach us. She is from Sogndal (about a five hour drive south of here) and she read to us in her dialect and we couldn’t understand a thing she said. She told us her sister was not understood in Oslo once so she’s had to learn to speak a little differently. We caught Astrid on a few spelling “errors” because she was writing Nynorsk, and we are learning Bokmål. Honestly, I just don’t get it with all these dialects and two official languages and all the variations on the theme, but I just do what I can. Astrid told us today an expression that is common to use in Norway if a person buys something they are sorry they bought, they say they, “kjøpte katta i sekken” which means they “bought a cat in a sack.” It has the same origins as our saying, “letting the cat out of the bag.” In mid-evil times (according to Kaleb), piglets were sold in cloth sacks tied up tight and dishonest sellers would put a cat in the bag instead, to cheat the buyer. So I’m wondering if there’s a saying for a country that might be sorry for a language they started.