⛈️ Weather Report / July
- June happened at full speed and never filed its paperwork. Consider this a double issue.
The bugs arrived, exactly as February-me prophesied. I wrote that I'd long for the frozen hellscape again and I am typing this with antihistamines in my blood, because Norwegian biting midges treat my skin as an all-you-can-eat buffet with no reservation required. We got one arrogant week of 25°C and then summer remembered where it lives: 17°C, rain with intent, thunder scheduled for tonight like a licensed public service. The sun refuses to set at a reasonable hour, so the sky dims politely around midnight and calls it a day. The town, meanwhile, has been seized by seagulls in mating season. One of them built her nest on the ground, photo below, which in this economy is either a bold real estate decision or a warning.
📖 Reading
- Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence. A reread. My horoscope said "Don't: Scandal" so I picked up the book that got dragged into an obscenity trial. Balance.
🎮 Playing
- Stardew Valley. The farm doesn't care about model releases, export controls, or discourse. The parsnips grow. This is the whole review.
🖼️ Looking at
- Salvador Dalí, Apotheosis (1961). A watercolor he painted as a set design for an opera so chaotic that Dalí ended up throwing paint at the audience dressed as a gondolier, and then sued the producer. Melting clocks, of course. It was one of five. Four hang in a museum in Indianapolis. The fifth is missing, and nobody knows where it went. I think about the fifth one a lot.
🗞️ Blogroll
🌤️ Weather Report / May
- Spring finally stopped lying. It's real this time — 15°C, actual sun, actual warmth, actual reason to leave the house. The terrace is back in commission and the Weber Q has reclaimed its throne in the grill shelter like a small charcoal pope. The days are getting obscenely long. The sun sets at like 22:00 and rises before you've finished regretting last night's screen time. Norwegians are outside in shorts the moment it hits 12°C like recently thawed mammals who forgot how legs work. The geese are still here. Still loud.
📖 Reading
- Eleven Minutes / Paulo Coelho I went from a brutally honest fairytale about war and magic to a brutally honest story about a woman navigating desire, loneliness, and self-discovery through experiences most people are too polite to talk about at dinner. My reading list is basically emotional whiplash as a hobby.
🎮 Playing
- Blue Prince
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🎨 Looking at
- Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1910. Munch Museum, Oslo. The most Norwegian painting in existence and it's just a person on a bridge having the exact reaction I have when my calendar sends me a Monday morning notification. Everyone talks about the scream but nobody talks about the two figures in the background who kept walking. Sometimes you're the scream. Sometimes you're the people who didn't stop. Munch painted this four different times because apparently once wasn't enough to get the existential dread out of his system. I respect the commitment.
🌧️ Weather Report / April
- The days wake up colorful and end in rain and misery. Norwegian April is a con artist in a sundress, she shows up at 7 AM with blue skies and birdsong and by 2 PM she's throwing horizontal rain at you like a personal grudge. The snow is mostly gone, replaced by mud and a kind of aggressive optimism from people who should know better by now. Everything is technically growing. Nothing is warm. The jackets come off and go back on four times a day. I have trust issues and they are all weather-related.
📖 Reading
- Freud and Beyond I went from reading romantasy under peer pressure to reading psychoanalytic theory voluntarily. I don't know what that says about me but Freud probably would.
🎮 Playing
- Blue Prince
🗞️ Blogroll
🎨 Looking at
Stanislav Sidorov, Rain in the City. All that chaos, all that color, everyone just pushing through it. I don't live in a city. I live in a tiny coastal town where April mornings lie to your face and afternoons drown you. But this painting gets it. The umbrella is not optimism. It's stubbornness.
🌤️ Weather Report / March
- The sun is back but it's a liar. Norway enters its annual "fake spring" arc where the light says April but the wind says February and the snow melts into sad, muddy sorbet that nobody ordered. You can see the sun now. You can also get frostbite if you stand still for four minutes. The geese are back, thousands of them, honking with the confidence of creatures who didn't spend three months questioning their vitamin D levels. Days are longer. Morale is cautiously, suspiciously higher. I don't trust it. Neither should you.
📖 Reading
- A Court of Thorns and Roses Yes, THAT one. I was bullied into this by someone whose literary judgment I otherwise respect. The jury is still out and currently leaning toward a mistrial. But I said I'd give it a chance, so here I am. Giving it a chance. Aggressively.
🎮 Playing
- Clair Obscure: Expedition 33
🗞️ Blogroll
🎨 Looking at
Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 1831. Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. I've seen this image a thousand times and it still makes my chest tight. The mountain sits there, small and still, while everything around it loses its mind. I relate to both the mountain and the wave depending on the hour.
❄️ Weather Report / February
- There is never enough coffee and always too much snow. Winter is beautiful if you're watching it from behind glass with a hot cup. Step outside and it's just frozen suffering with aesthetics. But I won't complain too loudly because in five months the bugs arrive and I'll be longing for this frozen hellscape again. Thermodynamics says energy can't be created or destroyed and yet every Norwegian winter seems to destroy mine entirely. Send caffeine.*
📖 Reading
- The Elegant Universe
🎮 Playing
- Clair Obscure: Expedition 33
🗞️ Blogroll
🎨 Looking at
I sat in front of this for six hours and forgot I had legs. Claude Monet, Reflets d'arbres, 1920–1926. Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris.