A bit in my own world

Since coming home from the ski trip with students, I’ve had some time on my own. Students have been taking part in a Red Cross first aid course, followed by a Model United Nations simulation. I’m alone at home too because my husband is traveling, and so I’ve had a different kind of week–away from teaching, with the work time I’ve had I’ve made good headway on grading essays and planning upcoming units. That’s important. But most of the time I’ve been taking good time for myself.

*A few more photos from skiing. On the last day, the sky opened up and we got some beautiful sun.*

*Below the mountains, you can see light reflecting off the frozen surface of the Nordfjord.*

*On the bus home from Stryn where we had been skiing, back to home. The fjord was beginning to melt, and the ice and water made this beautiful lacy pattern.*

*Because of road closures, the bus took a ferry as part of the journey.*

I’ve been doing cooking experiments–I nixtamalized some corn to make hominy for the first time in a couple years, and I discovered how good it is to fry the hominy up in a little oil and throw on a little cheese–it’s like hash browns. Tomorrow the plan is to make some potato-leek soup. At the start of the week, just before my husband departed for his trip, I made some experimental ricotta-pistachio tarts. I tried to be elegant with them. They were great, although maybe a little dry.

*Back home, most of the snow was gone. I went out for a hike on a sunny day up to Storåsen, on the right of this picture, what I call a mountain and what people around here I’m sure would not.*

*From the summit, looking back towards home, which in this image is in the lower left bay of the fjord.*

A Christmas gift this past December from my parents was a beautiful set of binoculars, which I have never had before. Wow–things are just transformed when looking through these. I am continually captivated.

I’ve also, during this week, found myself immersed in several fictional worlds. My bedtime reading book right now is The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe. I am only reading maybe twenty minutes a night or so because I end up falling asleep, so I’m moving through the book slowly, but it is weird and hilarious and unexpectedly existential. Well, I’m not sure what I expected, really. It’s an adventure.

At the same time, the audiobook I’ve been listening to is also about sand. It’s Frank Herbert’s Dune, which I’d been wanting to read for a while, since I think a year and a half ago when I saw Part 1 of the recent film adaptation. Dune has been captivating, a “page-turner” although in an audiobook there are no pages. That said, I enjoyed it less as it went along, mostly because of the ultimate sadness of its Machiavellian politics. I’m glad I read it, but I was ready to be finished. And because it was such a page-turner for me, now I am!

The third standout is Twelfth Night, the Shakespeare comedy. I’ll be teaching this to my English Literature students coming up in the next two weeks. I’ve actually been working through material about the play for a couple of months–I read Keir Elam’s lengthy but wonderful introduction in this edition. Over this last week, I’ve been watching one act per evening this really quite wonderfully performed production on YouTube by Shanty Productions. I’ll be using clips of it in class with students. I have found Twelfth Night surprisingly difficult. I consider myself fairly competent with Shakespeare, but this play has so many obscure jokes that I have really been relying on footnotes. Watching this production, however, has been instrumental in helping me get my head around it.

And then, I’ve been taking good time for my own writing too. I’m making progress. At first slowly. Then some things clicked into place, and I was able to put together a few scenes for the novel, which I’m finally feeling pretty good about.