God tur!

Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day in Oslo. I wore my spring jacket, and a friend and I sat on a park bench and declared it the first day of spring.

When I woke up this morning, there were big, fat snowflakes drifting past my window.

Weather-be-damned, I still say it's spring. And I'm going to continue to laugh mockingly at the skiers trying to maneuver their way across the slush. Give it up, people! You're fighting a losing battle!

PS It's raining right now.

This is sort of becoming one of those silly blogs where someone who has some geeky hobby (like, well, knitting) spends all their time writing about said geeky hobby, and then people post comments like "Wow!" and "Can I get the pattern for that?" and "Did you use a circular needle?, because I have trouble keeping that type of yarn from falling off my double-pointed ones ..."

So, just as a warning, I may knit, but that won't stop me from making fun of you if you do post something like that.

In the fall, Lisa and I were wandering the mall (yes, they have one in Oslo, too), and she spotted this children's sweater that had a big skull on it. She thought this was hilarious, because, of course, since grandmothers are usually the people we think of sitting in their rocking chairs and knitting socks out of worn-out sweaters, a knitted skull, there's some irony there. So, I told her I was perfectly capable of making something with a skull on it for her if she'd like.

And five months later, there you go. (It didn't take 5 months to knit them, I'm just a procrastinator.)


She doesn't usually go around flipping people off like that, but I think when you have arm-warmers with skulls on them, it's required.

If you haven’t seen the Oscar-winning animated short The Danish Poet, I really recommend you check it out. I first saw it a few days ago and am completely charmed. I realize now that I saw another film by this same person, My Grandfather Ironed the King’s Shirts, which was also pretty adorable and fun, because it’s about Norway also.

My friends and I couldn’t help but wonder if the Academy actually got some of the jokes … For example, whenever they show someone taking the ferry from Oslo to Copenhagen, there is a crowd of very funny drunk people getting on and off. This is absolutely typical of these ferries. For some reason, big groups of Norwegians or big groups of Danes like to travel back and forth between these two cities and get totally smashed on a big boat in the middle of the water. I can’t say that I understand what the fun is in this exactly, but, for those who take the ferry, stories about drunk Scandinavians are always part of a recounting of their adventures (or, I guess, their own drunken stories, if they choose to participate).

Anyway, here are my favorite quotes from the film:

“--Where do you go on holiday if you don’t have any money, and you don’t speak French?

--What about Norway? It’s cheap, and they’re practically Danish.”

“Casper was offered food and shelter, until the rain stopped. But, as often happens in Norway, the rain never really stopped.”

“-You must go to the funeral!

-Why?

-Because she was your relative!

-But she was Danish.

-When a relative dies, you go to the funeral, whether she was Danish or not.”

“Casper quickly became living proof that some poets are better off happy than sad.”