Tag Archives: Ice

The Last Sunlight

Arctic Advent, Blog, Christmas, In Darkness and In Light, Life in Norway, Writing, , , , , , ,

Sunrise/sunset: 10:35/12:34 Daylength: 1hr58min

I took the picture at the top of the page on Thursday 17th November without really thinking much about it, and its sister photograph was in last weeks blog, but it didn’t cross my mind at the time that it would probably be the last I saw of direct sunlight in 2022. Although technically the sun will rise above the horizon for almost two hours today, there aren’t many places where the horizon is visible, surrounded by mountains as we are. The upper slopes of the snow covered peaks have still been lit up for parts of the day until very recently. They looked so beautiful when I arrived home from work, all glowing with a pink tinged light, but even that is now going. Polar night is one of my favourite times because it can be so beautiful. When the weather is clear, the southern sky becomes golden and it reflects on the frosty ground with the magical warm glow you sometimes see on Christmas cards. To the north, the horizon turns a dusky pink colour that I had never seen before I moved up here. Here’s a photo that looks so surreal, even to me, that it’s hard to believe the colours haven’t been enhanced, but I haven’t made any adjustments at all.

Trees and a snow capped mountain under the pink glow of the northern horizon when the sun is just below the horizon in the south.

I took a few photos as I was driving around this week. There is still no snow, but the world is white anyway, with thick frost and ice. The ice crystals have formed slowly. I have shown photos before of hoar frost, but seems a little different as the crystals are large and flat.

We had a celebratory lunch this week at the abattoir. Ernestas and Vaidotas will be going back to Lithuania at the end of next week, and Øivind was missing waffles and the party spirit, so we decided to have a meal together, where we would bring something from our homeland. I brought an apple crumble, which went down well. Vaidotas brought honey and garlic roasted chicken wings, Oivind brought some Thai style chicken (his wife is from Thailand and is a wonderful cook). Konstantin brought a traditional Latvian bread soup, which tasted of cinnamon and raisins and Trude brought some amazing wraps, some with smoked trout and goats cheese, the others with smoked grouse that she had hunted and smoked herself. Everything was delicious and it was really very cosy.

Thai chicken and wraps

If you look in the back of the photo above, there is a blue box containing Roses chocolates, which was Ernestas’ contribution. That was another treat for me. When I was young, we didn’t get a lot of chocolate at home, but an exception was made at Christmas, when there was always a large tin of Roses chocolates. Though the packaging has changed, many of the sweets were still the same, so although it wasn’t very Lithuanian (though for all I know, maybe they’re made there) I really enjoyed the nostalgic taste of Christmas past.

And with the mention of Christmas, I can’t ignore the fact that tomorrow will be the first Sunday in advent. I’ve already bought candles for my advent crown and the first candle will be lit tomorrow. Last year, I looked around on the internet for some kind of advent calendar app as I love advent and hoped for something that wasn’t chocolate based, as most advent calendars are nowadays. I didn’t manage to find anything particularly special, and it crossed my mind that perhaps I could make one myself. So from Thursday 1st December until Christmas, I will post an image each day. I can’t promise they’ll all be from this year. I may include some of my particular favourites from the past two winters, but hopefully I will be able to capture my Arctic Advent for you.

Roses chocolates – the packaging has changed since I was a child, but many of the fillings are the same

Blue is the Colour

In Darkness and In Light, Life in Norway, ,

Sunrise/sunset: 09:44/13:21 Daylength: 3hr24min

I’m not going to write much this week. I had migraine yesterday and through the night, so this morning I’m quite tired, though relieved that the headache seems to have passed. I bought a sofa bed a couple of weeks back – probably the last big bit of furniture for now – and it was delivered on Monday. There is still work to be done on the house, but it will probably have to wait now, until next year. The temperature has dropped below zero and I suspect it won’t climb much over it now until about May. The light is going too, and that which remains is already taking on the bluish tone that comes with the polar night. So this post will be made up of photos I’ve taken over the course of this week at different times of day and in different places. I hope you enjoy them.

This first picture is taken from the back of the abattoir. Part of my job is to inspect animals that arrive while I am at work (some arrive the day before, and I check them in the morning when I arrive). There are a lot of crows living around the abattoir and even a golden eagle. This picture was taken at ten to ten in the morning and as you can see, the sun is just peeking over the horizon. The plants are coated in heavy frost for now, but soon they will disappear under snow.

A large bird flies over a frozen landscape of frosted plants and distant mountains.

This was taken as I drove from the abattoir to Finnsnes at ten to eleven in the morning and the sun is still on the horizon. The river opens up here as it goes into a lake and the water is beginning to freeze at the edges. Soon it will be frozen and it too will be covered in a layer of snow.

Frosted plants and trees with the sun setting over still water.

I took a close up picture of one of the plants. They are covered in a dense layer of ice, which often forms when the temperature drops quickly, pushing moisture out of the air.

Plants encased in a thick layer of frost

And this photo was taken when I arrived home from work at three twenty five in the afternoon. It was earlier in the week, already dark, as you can see, and the frost here is not so intense, but I was struck by the beauty of the frozen foliage in my headlights against the deep blue of the night sky.

Frosted plants in the headlights’ beam

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Wet, Wet, Wet

Blog, In Darkness and In Light, Life in Norway, , , , , ,

Sunrise/sunset: Down all day.

I was sure we were going to have a white Christmas this year. There has been snow on the ground for weeks and the temperatures were securely in double minus figures, or so I thought. And then a day of rain appeared on my weather forecast app. The temperature was to bounce right up, round about the date that Anna was due to come home on Wednesday the 15th. When the first day appeared, I hoped they’d got it wrong. And the temperature wasn’t to go that high. Wholly possible they’d be out by a couple of degrees and we’d have snow instead.

But then another day of forecasted rain appeared and another. The temperature was higher too. This was the screenshot I sent to Anna last Sunday.

They don’t use much grit on the pavements and roads round here. Mostly they concentrate on keeping them relatively clear of snow. So when I went out on Wednesday morning and saw that the pavements, roads and carparks were densely strewn with the small stones they use in place of salt and grit, I knew that they thought that a major thaw was on the way. This was the carpark at work. They may not grit often, but when they do, they do a proper job!

Still, life had to go on. Monday and Tuesday this week were a little hair-raising. On the Friday of the week before, I felt like everything was well on track. I’d done three visits and written two reports. We have to send them past a colleague first for quality control and then an official quality control team checks them. After that, they go to my boss, who sends them out. These two reports were past the checks and I’d sent them to Hilde, so all I had left was one report to write. It was complicated and I would need help, but I had four days to do it. So when Line sent a shout out to see if someone could translate an official document from Norwegian to English, I said that I would be happy to do so. Kristen, my colleague in Storslett had got in first, but I indicated that if anything cropped up, I would be more than willing to step in.

My peace was slightly disturbed late on Friday afternoon when, for the first time ever, Hilde sent back my two reports for amendment. It didn’t sound like anything too major, but I had to include a short summary of what Gry had observed. Still, hopefully Thomas would help me with that.

So I wasn’t too worried when I opened up my case inbox on Monday morning. I had two reports to amend and the complicated case to write up, but I had until Thursday. But when I looked through the list, I saw another case had come in. Some cases you can leave for a few days. For example, if someone isn’t walking their dog often enough, it’ll probably be okay if you leave it a week or two. But if someone is leaving their animals outside in all kinds of weather, without food or water, then “It’ll be fine, I’ll leave it until after my holiday,” really isn’t an option. And of course, it was one of those cases.

To make matters worse, Kristen had bowed out of the translation. So now I had three reports, a new case, and a complicated document to wade through.

Thomas came to the rescue. He could fit in my new case on Tuesday, if I wanted. Hilde was on holiday by now and he was having to sort out all the paperwork around an outbreak of strangles in a horse in our region, but he could fit me in between that, a bunch of reindeer rampaging around a housing estate over Tromsø way, and a case of his own that he was tackling on Wednesday. He also found the time to help me sort out my two returned reports.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. I stayed late on Monday evening to get the translation done. I asked Line to help me with my complicated case report and she made everything so wonderfully clear that by the time I sent it off for the first check with another colleague, there were almost no errors. Hooray for that! And to my relief, the case on Tuesday turned out to be much less complicated than I had feared. So I was able to collect Anna from the airport on Wednesday afternoon.

And all this was going on against the backdrop of increasing rumblings about locking down again due to Omicron. From next week, Andrew will be homeschooling. Working from home is now the norm again. And when I went to the gym, I was surprised to see notices on some of the running machines that said not to use them. For a bizarre moment, I wondered whether they had been contaminated somehow. Had someone with Covid used them? Should I leave quickly and rush home? And then I remembered that it was nothing to do with that. It was just a return to the stricter distancing rules. The machines were too close together. Similar notices will have reappeared on pub and restaurant seats and in the waiting room at the doctors. Life can continue for now… but don’t get too close.

So there are no lovely pictures of pink and blue skies this week. The garden is a muddy mess. There is a tiny ray of hope on the weather forecast. It’s to turn cold again from Monday and there might be a little snow on Wednesday. I live in hope! Even if it doesn’t snow, Anna got here safely from the UK. And I’m on holiday for a week and there are presents to wrap and cakes to make.

I’ll leave you with a picture I took on Thursday evening when I was out walking Triar. It had been raining, but the ground has had weeks to become very chilly and huge chunks of ice take a long time to disperse. The sky cleared briefly and the moon was shining through. I loved the way the blue moonlight gleamed on the frozen waterfall. Whatever the weather, there is always beauty to be found somewhere.

Colour

Blog, In Darkness and In Light, Life in Norway, Vet, , ,

Sunrise/sunset: 09:30/ 14:33. Daylength: 5hr 02min

There is so much colour in the world. The changing sky continues to amaze me. I suppose one advantage of living so far north is just how long the sun lurks just below the horizon. And now it has finally risen, there are wonderful shadows and reflected light everywhere. The photo at the top is of the view from our garden, and though I see it every day, it never grows old. This was the first day I’d really seen the brand new sunshine on the snow-covered mountains. How wonderfully pink they are under the arching blue sky.

I was struck by the pink and powder-blue backdrop as I drove home from Bardufoss on Tuesday as well. So wonderful to drive home in the light. Of course, I stopped to take a photograph.

I had hoped to be travelling up to Storslett next week to the northernmost office in our region. I was waiting until the last minute, as the upper echelons of Mattilsynet had a meeting on Friday, but in the absence of any government lifting of the regulations, I will wait a few weeks longer. John tells me that two abattoirs further south in Norway are currently closed, one because a member of staff tested positive and the other because it’s in the area where the biggest outbreak of the English variant has taken hold. They are right to be cautious, but like others everywhere, I am champing at the bit to have a bit more freedom of movement.

Still, there are things to look forward to. I have booked a weekend away in a log cabin on a husky farm near the end of February. It’s only an hour and a half away, so hopefully there should be no travel disruption! And we have designated this weekend as 1980s party-food weekend. Last night there were sausage rolls, ham and crisp sandwiches and chocolate tiffin. Today I will be making pastry cases filled with creamy chicken, scones with jam and cream and it will be followed by ice-cream and jelly.

I don’t have a lot to write this week, so I will leave you with this video that Konstantin sent me. It features overhead footage of reindeer herding. I mentioned a while back that they hadn’t been able to bring the reindeer in before Christmas because of the lack of snow, and this gives an idea of why that would be a problem. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It’s truly a beautiful spectacle.

Thank you Konstantin. I hear you are coming back in May, which makes me happy. It’s good in the depths of winter to have things to look forward to.

New Day Dawning

Blog, In Darkness and In Light, , , ,

Sunrise/sunset: 10:53/ 13:03. Daylength: 2hr 10min

This week has seen the return of the sun. I had hoped to take a photograph, but with the surrounding mountains and varying cloud cover, I haven’t actually seen it. The increasing daylight is cheering though. Anna and I made the most of the light that we had last weekend, taking Triar out for some wonderful walks on Senja.

This was also the second week of working from home. While there are some advantages to it, there are also frustrations. A large part of my job will be carrying out visits to farms and animal holdings, but for now all non-essential trips are cancelled. The best way for me to learn a new job is getting out there and doing it. I have a jigsaw puzzle brain. Individual facts or pieces have little meaning and are hard to remember. Understand how they fit together and I can build a comprehensive picture. Much easier to remember laws when I can apply them to cases, rather than trying to learn about them in isolation.

That said, I have spent each day this week reading around a different topic. The animal health day was probably the most interesting. I looked through the visits and checks we have been set for this year as part of the OK program and read around the different topics. As regular readers will know, the OK program is set up by Mattilsynet to monitor animal health and food safety in Norway and on my trawl through this years tasks, I discovered we have a few visits scheduled to herds of camelids (llama and alpacas) to check for mite infestations. I have never been to a llama farm before, so that is something to look forward to.

I will leave you with some aurora borealis pictures. We drove to Bardufoss on Monday evening to drop John off for work and on the way, we noticed that the sky was streaked with green. We pulled off the road and for the first time watched the northern lights from a place where there was very little light pollution. It was a show worth watching and we stood for a long time in the darkness, faces lifted to the sky, oblivious to the snow underfoot and the chill in the air.

Icy New Year

Blog, In Darkness and In Light, , , , , ,

Sunrise/sunset: Down all day.

We had a quiet start to 2021. Anna and Andrew flew off very early on the morning of the 31st to visit Charlie, so John and I saw in the new year with Triar and the guinea pigs. New year in Norway is celebrated with fireworks, so as midnight approached, John and I donned our hats and gloves and took our celebration outside. There was a satisfying throwback to summer and our trip to the north. We bought a folding gas ring back then: one of those neat purchases that are small enough to throw in the car. Now we found a new use for it as a table-top cooker to heat our gløg.

The fireworks over Senja were spectacular. Ten minutes of intense light and sound punctuating the winter darkness.

Other than the fireworks, the last week has been quiet. Though there is still no snow, there is plenty of ice. Though it has been above zero quite frequently, the pond in the middle of Finnsnes is frozen enough for the local children to use it as a skating rink.

Unfortunately, the same thing is true of some of our usual walks.

And so there has been a tendency to huddle indoors. I hope the snow returns soon. When it is so dark outside, having snow on the ground makes everything much brighter.

I will leave you with a couple of pictures of the moon over Senja. Though I haven’t been out much, my life is still filled with beauty.

Happy New Year to you all!