The cold weather is back again -25F this morning, which is quite a few degrees warmer than “downtown” and by the river. It really makes a difference to live a little bit higher, and we can often see the icefog as a grey blanket covering the lower areas. The icefog forms when the moist in the air freezes at cold temperatures, and is quite common here. Last summer it was the smoke from all the forest fires that covered the town instead. I heard from a Norwegian researcher who’s lived here for many years, that when he arrived, he could hardly see to the other side of the street due to all the smoke – I hope it’s not gonna be that bad this summer…
Well, we’ll have to let the skiis rest for a few days now, until the temperatures get more comfortable. We can see on the web that it’s just as cold back in Sweden, and it probably feels colder there than here, since we almost always have clear skies, no wind, and very low moisture in the air here, which makes it feel much warmer than what you can read off the thermometer.
We’ve had a nice and relaxing weekend, with visits to the gym and dinner with our friends Scott and Julia, who has lived in Scandinavia for many years. Last Friday we also got a nice surprice from Ann, a Swedish PhD-student – real Swedish cinnamonbuns!! Yummy! They came from IKEA in Seattle, flown in by the husband of another Swedish girl who lives here. Hopefully we get to meet them too.
Overall, life is moving on quite fast. There’s been many late nights at work for a while now (I’ll try to blame that for not blogging for a while…), so the only thing we’ve done apart from that have been skiing, going to the gym, and sometimes meeting friends during the weekends. We have now booked a long weekend in Anchorage in the beginning of March, to attend the “Fur Rendevouz”, and see the start of the Iditarod race, the sleddog-race between Anchorage och Nome. Right now, I’m re-reading the book “The cruelest miles” about the background of the race, when Nome had an outbreak of diptheria during winter. The people were in desperate need of serum, which could only reach Nome by sled-dogs. A fantastic book that I can highly recommend.
Later this week, Peter will start to help a Norwegian researcher with a hare- and lynx project. He’ll be out on skiis and snowmobile – a fantastic and exciting job! Now he’ll surely have good use of the superwarm beaver-mittens that I finished last weekend…. Me, I get to sit here in my office, an ex-lab without windows, but I’ll definitely join him during the weekends. Peter is also taking an evening-class in fly-tying (he started doing that when we lived in Abisko, northernmost Sweden), so he’s making new friends and getting nice recommendations of where to go fishing. That sounds very promising for the summer – in more than one way . He’s also practicing bowling one afternoon a week, so now they’ll have to watch out when he returns to the tournaments in Rena, Norway.
