Bottling

This morning while Brittan and Alora played with the frozen sea down by the dock and the beach I bottled my second beer here at the blue house on Kleiven.

It's nice to have something work out as planned. We didn't get the TV I bought for the kids until two weeks after Christmas. I'm still waiting on a replacement phone for the one I dipped in the fjord last month and Cara's phone also decided to tap out yesterday. On New Year's day a got a message from my bank saying my card had been compromised, and sure enough there was a good chunk of money missing from the account. Can I get a new card? No, no I cannot. So I'm left with the bank card for the other bank where the PIN only works sometimes. So I transfered a bunch of money to my daughter because Alora, Brittan and I fly to Tromsø for the weekend tomorrow. At least the two of them still have phones. I'm sure I'll feel better after the half marathon Saturday. Right now I feel rather out of sorts. It'll be my first long run wearing spikes. The girls are doing the 5K and I got them spikes as well.

As we watched the sun dip behind the mountains tonight, Brittan reminded me that we would not see it again until Tuesday. This will be the longest night of our lives as we travel above the Arctic Circle before dawn tomorrow and don't return until after sunset Monday. Of course, for those who live in Tromsø the polar night lasts much longer. They call it the Mørktid - the dark time. If Brittan succeeds on her quest to travel to Mars, it may not be her longest. I can't help but think about the book I read a few years back about Shackleton; Endurance it was called. I daresay our journey will be ridiculously easier, but it's still exciting to travel to a place where the laws of Nature are so different. It ever excites my intellect to not have an intuition learned in childhood about how to deal with the things the natural world presents me. Although in Norway I find that my choices regarding Nature are often the same that Norwegians make, which is both comforting and weird. I like to think that I'm using my mind, but really I may just have ancestors that evolved and developed their culture in this environment.