Sunrise/sunset: 07:02/18:11 Daylength: 11hr09min

I am getting a lot of pleasure from small things at the moment. For example, I enjoy getting up in the morning. Triar wakes, greets me and stretches and I take him outside and see how the weather is looking as he rushes around the garden. This morning it’s frosty and the sky is clear. I love the freshness of the air as I breath it in, and the glow of the sunrise along the horizon. Then I come back inside, give Triar some breakfast and make myself a cup of coffee. I go back and drink it in bed with some gifflar: small cinnamon flavoured buns. My new bed is a great addition, with its tilting mattress so I can sit up effortlessly and in comfort.

The house is bringing me joy as well. We’ve bought various floor and table lamps and we’re using Philips Hue bulbs which turn different colours, so the living room feels very warm. Better still, last week we lit the wood stove for the first time. I feel that even when we’re in the darkest winter months, we’re going to be wonderfully cosy.

The whole family have been enjoying wildlife spotting from the kitchen window. At the beginning of the week, we watched a weasel playing in a pile of planks in the back garden and yesterday there was a family of moose in the woodland. I couldn’t get a good picture. I will need to buy a camera with a good zoom lens if I want to do that better. In the meantime, this was the best I could manage.

I have more or less finished my evidence report for the Rent Disputes Tribunal. It was so long that I asked Trude to read the first half and Marit to check the second. I still have Marit’s corrections to make (though there aren’t too many) and John’s witness statement to add. After that, I’ll need to work out how to send it off. Writing it has eased my mind at least. Until I had it down, I kept having flashes of thought where I remembered things I wanted to add, or thought about how I wanted to express things. Now that’s all gone and I’m sleeping better again and back to enjoying life.

Trude’s dog has had puppies and it’s been wonderful to hear about them over the past couple of weeks. They’re just starting to walk – she showed me a video – and are already showing markedly different personality traits. She has invited me round to see them this weekend, so I’m really looking forward to that.

Tomorrow, John and I will drive to Narvik and (hopefully) buy a snow clearing machine. My colleague Ronny, who lives across the road, has warned us that there is a lot of snow here in the valley we’ve moved to, so when it’s four in the morning and there’s a snowstorm, I will need something better than a shovel. Once all the leaves are gone from the trees, I’m going to have to send John up a ladder to clear out the gutters as well. That sounds like I’m pushing him into it, but when I discussed it with him, he said I could hold the ladder for him, but there’s no way he’s letting me go up it. It’s fair enough (and I’m very grateful) as my balance is terrible.

Anyway, I’m back to enjoying life again and there’s still lots to be done as we prepare for our first winter in our new home. The equinox has passed and we’re heading into the darkness. And I, for one, am looking forward to it.