Sunrise/sunset: 06:57/18:17 Daylength: 11hr19min

Time is getting short and things are starting to move. Quite literally in John’s case. While all this has been going on, John has been searching for a job. He has a girlfriend in Tromsø now, so he looked for, and found, a job there. He has now handed in his notice and will leave at the same time as me. Everything happened very fast, and almost as soon as he was offered a job, he and Yoana found a flat. This weekend, he’s hoping to move some of the furniture out. We had agreed, a while back, to try to keep the house in reasonable order until as late before the move as possible, because living in chaos is never fun, but moving Johns’ things out early, where possible, makes a lot of sense. The removal company which will take my goods to the UK will be packing my stuff, so it would be ideal if there as only my stuff left, to avoid any mistakes.

I feel I’m mostly there with organising my trip. I still have to check about transport to and from the ferries in various places, and organise tickets from Newcastle to Settle, but that shouldn’t take much doing. Other than that, I have to sell my car and get the house cleared before it sells on 1st November. John has agreed to handle the car sale, up to a point. I think that he is likely to get a better price for it, though we are short of time, so might have to start to drop it quite quickly. It’s a juggling act though as I will need to hire a car if it sells while I still need it.

My planned tasks this weekend include taking the car to a friend of John’s to see if he can put a bit of a shine on it and to sort through my boxes of Christmas decorations. Over the years, we’ve accumulated a lot and up until now, I haven’t really tackled cutting it down, but with an international move coming up, I really need to weed out what’s important and what isn’t. I feel like I should probably be doing more. I know there will come a time when we are going to have to get everything out of the house, and some of it will need disposing of. The removal men are coming on a Thursday though, so the rubbish dump will be open until six. If necessary, we should be able to take anything left over there before it closes.

Of course I am trying to juggle all this with doing my job as well. This week, there weren’t quite as many animals coming into the abattoir as we would normally expect during the season and so I managed to fit in an inspection out on a farm. I had offered to do it months ago and was starting to worry that I wasn’t going to get a chance, but on Thursday, I took Ingrid out and we did the inspection together. I must say, it’s lovely to have a native Norwegian along with me. It makes for much easier communication and as she wrote the “receipt” with our observations at the end of the visit, it was reassuring to know the whole thing was written in competent Norwegian.

As you can see from the photographs, it’s wonderfully autumnal here right now, but as I looked at the weather forecast a couple of days ago, I saw we were in for a change. There is snow forecast this week, on Tuesday, then towards next weekend. That means that, in addition to starting John’s house move and the other things, we are also going to have to put the winter tyres on the cars this weekend. Still, this time last year, I had the feeling we were battening down the hatches for the long winter ahead. This year’s winter is going to be very different for me!

Anyway, I think that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed the autumn photographs and that I will see you next week! Thanks for reading.