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I just wrote a bunch of postcards home and made the joke in every single one about how nice it is that everyone here is making such a big deal about Dude’s birthday. There’s fireworks everywhere, there’s going to be a bonfire later, it’s just a lot of fuss and it’s terribly kind of them all.
Ha I slay me. My jokes are great.
I have made zero fuss over Dude but I tried, in my defense, and he didn’t want anything, so. But you only turn 40 once. So.
Iceland is lovely, I’m posting near-constant updates on Instagram Stories, and i’m not sure if that’s a good way to do vacation or not, but. It’s been misting fairly steadily and I haven’t wanted to take my good camera out just to get droplets all over the lens, and yesterday I was actually too sore and jacked-up from flying to even want to lug the camera around so I didn’t. So… but we’re going to scenic places later this week, I’ll make up for it then probably.
Except that it turns out Dude forgot his driver’s license somewhere– it’s not in his wallet?– so I’ll have to be doing the driving in the Westfjords, and I’m going to tell him he’s got to take constant photos but I don’t know how much he’ll really do. If it were me, I’d take short video clips near-constantly, but I think he’ll probably just take one and then not do any more, and I’ll have to make do. Oh well. No point worrying.
Oh I explained a lot of this in Stories but we went to a museum today that was built around an excavation two meters below a busy street, and it’s basically in the basement of a hotel, but what it is, is a big room surrounding the surviving foundations of a Viking-era longhouse, and it’s just a big explanation of what the area was like around the time of settlement, and how people lived, what they ate, what the longhouse was likely used for and for how long, who maybe lived there and what they did with their lives, what we know and what we can guess and what we don’t know. There was also a surviving little bit of wall– possibly a pasture enclosure, something like that– in the corner of the room, that they know for one hundred percent certain was built before 871 (+- 2 years margin of error), because an eruption happened then that deposited something everywhere, and it’s under the wall but built into the turf of the longhouse, so the wall existed already and the longhouse was built not super long afterward, but definitely afterward. So that was neat to find out.
It’s got me ruminating a lot on what life was like in the Viking era, though I’ve researched that before– I think it was 2004 or 5 when I wrote an entire romance novel set in about 1000 for NaNoWriMo, and it’s notable as the most definitely complete novel I ever wrote but also it’s not very good and I don’t think I’d publish any of it. It did have some good sex in it but I don’t think it would survive being extracted. So. Actually, bits of it are surely preserved in my Dreamwidth archives too because I was hellbent on polishing and publishing it, and just never did, so I could pin down the date if I really wanted to. I don’t though.
Anyhow. Off to dress for dinner. We’re going out for tapas because we could get a reservation there; everybody else was full up tonight, lol. Tomorrow we’re going someplace Expensive And Exquisite because apparently nobody goes out on New Year’s Day here.
Which is good, because my idea of Dressing for Dinner tonight is to wear the only pair of jeans I brought, with two pairs of leggings under, and two sweaters over two shirts, because most of tonight will consist of wandering around in cold drizzle because that’s how one New Years’es in Iceland. Tomorrow I can wear my nice velvet dress and new lovely amber jewelry and not be quite so cold, methinks.
Happy New Year, everybody!
Ah, I’ll leave you with an uncaptioned version of The Photo Everyone Takes Of Reykjavik From The Top Of That Crazy Church Tower:
[image description: a photo from high up straight down a street of a downtown full of two- and three-storey buildings, mostly with peaked roofs, looking toward a seashore and a lead-gray sea. everything is a blue-grayish color because it is sunset on a cloudy day, and about half of the streetlights are on. for the record it was like 2pm.]
I just wrote a bunch of postcards home and made the joke in every single one about how nice it is that everyone here is making such a big deal about Dude’s birthday. There’s fireworks everywhere, there’s going to be a bonfire later, it’s just a lot of fuss and it’s terribly kind of them all.
Ha I slay me. My jokes are great.
I have made zero fuss over Dude but I tried, in my defense, and he didn’t want anything, so. But you only turn 40 once. So.
Iceland is lovely, I’m posting near-constant updates on Instagram Stories, and i’m not sure if that’s a good way to do vacation or not, but. It’s been misting fairly steadily and I haven’t wanted to take my good camera out just to get droplets all over the lens, and yesterday I was actually too sore and jacked-up from flying to even want to lug the camera around so I didn’t. So… but we’re going to scenic places later this week, I’ll make up for it then probably.
Except that it turns out Dude forgot his driver’s license somewhere– it’s not in his wallet?– so I’ll have to be doing the driving in the Westfjords, and I’m going to tell him he’s got to take constant photos but I don’t know how much he’ll really do. If it were me, I’d take short video clips near-constantly, but I think he’ll probably just take one and then not do any more, and I’ll have to make do. Oh well. No point worrying.
Oh I explained a lot of this in Stories but we went to a museum today that was built around an excavation two meters below a busy street, and it’s basically in the basement of a hotel, but what it is, is a big room surrounding the surviving foundations of a Viking-era longhouse, and it’s just a big explanation of what the area was like around the time of settlement, and how people lived, what they ate, what the longhouse was likely used for and for how long, who maybe lived there and what they did with their lives, what we know and what we can guess and what we don’t know. There was also a surviving little bit of wall– possibly a pasture enclosure, something like that– in the corner of the room, that they know for one hundred percent certain was built before 871 (+- 2 years margin of error), because an eruption happened then that deposited something everywhere, and it’s under the wall but built into the turf of the longhouse, so the wall existed already and the longhouse was built not super long afterward, but definitely afterward. So that was neat to find out.
It’s got me ruminating a lot on what life was like in the Viking era, though I’ve researched that before– I think it was 2004 or 5 when I wrote an entire romance novel set in about 1000 for NaNoWriMo, and it’s notable as the most definitely complete novel I ever wrote but also it’s not very good and I don’t think I’d publish any of it. It did have some good sex in it but I don’t think it would survive being extracted. So. Actually, bits of it are surely preserved in my Dreamwidth archives too because I was hellbent on polishing and publishing it, and just never did, so I could pin down the date if I really wanted to. I don’t though.
Anyhow. Off to dress for dinner. We’re going out for tapas because we could get a reservation there; everybody else was full up tonight, lol. Tomorrow we’re going someplace Expensive And Exquisite because apparently nobody goes out on New Year’s Day here.
Which is good, because my idea of Dressing for Dinner tonight is to wear the only pair of jeans I brought, with two pairs of leggings under, and two sweaters over two shirts, because most of tonight will consist of wandering around in cold drizzle because that’s how one New Years’es in Iceland. Tomorrow I can wear my nice velvet dress and new lovely amber jewelry and not be quite so cold, methinks.
Happy New Year, everybody!
Ah, I’ll leave you with an uncaptioned version of The Photo Everyone Takes Of Reykjavik From The Top Of That Crazy Church Tower:
[image description: a photo from high up straight down a street of a downtown full of two- and three-storey buildings, mostly with peaked roofs, looking toward a seashore and a lead-gray sea. everything is a blue-grayish color because it is sunset on a cloudy day, and about half of the streetlights are on. for the record it was like 2pm.]
