Resolution Time Again? Really?

We interrupt this regularly scheduled vacation for a dose of reality otherwise known as resolutions for the new year. I do this every year and every July 1 birthday in between. Some resolutions I keep better than others. The first real "this is a resolution I am making" resolution I made as an adult was to get the laundry put away every night. I've kept this up for at least two decades now. Oh, if they were all so easy to keep.

Back in 2014, before my first torn rotator cuff flared up, I was in better physical condition than I had ever been. I was doing okay working my way back into decent shape when 2016's second torn rotator cuff appeared. Damn! Okay, I can come back from that one and, silly me!, the pain in my right knee got so intense that only a replacement would help. Approaching nine months later, and I'm still in close to the worst physical condition I've been in as an adult. I start to work on coming back, and my too competitive nature bites me in the ass and things other than the knee start to hurt. Resolution Number One (the biggie) then is to get back into some sort of reasonable shape and to do so without hurting myself further. I haven't worked out all the details yet, but I'll get there.

Next, I find myself bumbling from one art thing to another to a third and so on. I'd like to do or finish one project each month. This could be start from scratch and finish it, or it could be finish something I started whenever. I already know what the first two are going to be. I have two quilts to get ready for the guild's show in April, and I have someone emailing me monthly about a needle felted possum I'm supposedly working on to replace the one my cat tore to shreds. If I can get one similar to the original made, this person would like to buy one.

Each year I score some extra money by completing challenges in one of the university's wellness programs. I already know what my goals for 2019 will be, so the resolution is to keep them going and get the monetary reward at the end of the year. This year's goals include an exercise program of cardio and strength training balanced by meditating 20 minutes once each day. The way the goals are set, I won't necessarily be doing those every day but would instead do them at least a certain number of times each month.

Tying back into the whole physical stuff, injuries, etc. I want to work on going at my own pace. I'm the kind of person who feels she needs to speed up if the person behind her wants to walk faster. My problem with walking faster is of course, that the knee tightens up, or I don't pick up one foot or the other and trip, or otherwise suffer negative consequences. So this year I want to work on being comfortable with how slow or fast I should be doing things, and not let myself get caught trying to keep up with anyone else.

Finally (I had to end this list sooner or later after all), I want to waste less time. This has relevance because wasting time helped me, a few years ago, talk to my doc and finally get on some anti-depressants. Playing spider solitaire or another computer game for most of each day (seriously, hours) was not what I needed to be doing, and it took a while to admit that. I now have no games on my computer or phone other than the NY Times crossword on my phone and an Australian cryptic crossword on my laptop. Still, I find myself doing old crosswords or, possibly worse, spending too much time on social media. If all the people I want to stay in touch with were on one social media outlet or another, I could just quit all the rest. But some friends are on Facebook while others are on Instagram, and even others, well, you get the idea. I feel the need to visit each outlet to keep up with one friend or another. I may let myself look at a particular social media site once daily or for some total minutes each day. As with getting into better physical shape, I'm still working on the details.

So, lots of things to work on. Some will be easy; some won't. Some will get done; some may not get started if I want to be honest with myself. Writing them down helps, and making them public helps a little bit more. I'll check in with myself on July 1, and see how I'm doing.

And so Happy New Year! May 2019 be a good one for all of us.

Hunting the Light

"Hunting the Light" is Hurtigruten's catch-phrase for traveling to see the Northern Lights. Given that it has been cloudy every day so far, we may or may not see that particular light. Hunting the polar night, on the other hand, is quite doable.

Our first day out, at noon, I shot this photo from the upper deck with my camera set on automatic.

The next day, at the same time, from the same place, shooting manually with the same settings as the above gave this photo.

I wish I had thought to take a shot on automatic, but I didn't, and I think the cloud cover made this shot somewhat darker than it really was.

Today, I took this photo from the upper deck at noon, in automatic mode.

The same shot, using the same settings as the first day's automatic shot gave this.

I think I might end this experiment now, since I don't think the shots will lighten up again until we're on our way south.

We crossed the Arctic Circle just before 7:00 this morning, There is a marker in the water, but either it was not lit or we got on deck just a hair too late to see it. The activity leader forgot, in the weather excitement of last evening, to announce the contest of guessing the time the ship would cross the Circle. The winner, chosen at random since there were no entries to compare, received the Hurtigruten flag that had been flying above the ship when she crossed the Circle; the captain had added his signature to the flag. The flag was awarded in mid-morning, by which time it was light enough to see, right before King Neptune made his entrance.

The "ceremony" was the baptism of all of Neptune's new citizens, those who had crossed the Circle for the first time. Knowing that ice water and cubes poured down one's back is endurable, especially given the shot of cloudberry liqueur one gets after, I took the empty seat no one else wanted on the first time through. The activity director took my camera and captured the occasion.

I tried getting a shot of the husband's baptism by ice, but found myself behind several other people obviously not shooting the husband.

The fun is when some of the cubes go down between your inner and outer layers of clothing. I had a hoodie on under my coat with a shirt under that. Even close to a half hour later, I was still having ice cubes drop out from the hoodie.

Just after lunch we docked in Bodo (there is supposed to be a line through the second o). We walked into town where just about everything was closed due to its being Sunday. The husband had hoped to find a coffeeshop that sold bagels so as to be holding one while standing next to a Bodo city sign. Alas, while we found one or two open coffeeshops, bagels were nonexistent. Bodo was still a nice-looking small city (or would a population of 50,000 make it a large town?).

I always find the murals put on the sides of buildings interesting. I have no real idea what sort of creature this is supposed to be, but it reminded me of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings.

The husband found the angles of this building to be quite interesting, saying they added more visible interest than might have been done in the States.

The sign below caught my eye. It was outside a "golf center" that sold golf equipment and possibly contained a video sort of driving range, but there was definitely no golf course nor any golf carts in there.

And on the interesting playground equipment front, we found this.

I might have bcen tempted to try it, but the pavement's being wet and occasionally icy coupled with a serious desire not to need to seek medical treatment made it easier for me to give it a pass.

Finally, here is our home away from home for another eight days. I must admit that I'm getting spoiled. No cooking, no bed-making, and laundry only if I really want or need to do it.

First Full Day Afloat

It turns out that our cabin, small though it may be,

does have a porthole. The view out said porthole is not too scenic, but the water can be mesmerizing.

It does not let in enough light to make it useful for awakening, though a big portion of that is that the sun does not rise here until close to 10:00 a.m.

Neither of us slept particularly well, it being the fist night in a strange bed and one that rocked a bit at that. We were up, dressed, and going into breakfast just about the time the ship entered the first “open stretch of sea.” There was a quite noticeable change in terms of balance. I was quite happy to have one of the servers pour my coffee rather than carrying it myself from a pot across the room. While my balance walking was definitely impaired, my stomach handled breakfast and after just fine. Perhaps the anti-seasickness wrist bands and doing the trick, though I’m certainly not going to take them off as a test.  

There are a couple of ways to tell how rough the sea might get. For one, the furniture is chained to the floor.

The dining room tables have frames that can be removed, flipped over, and put back on with a lip to keep things from sliding off. It is interesting to watch crew members walk as if everything is stock still. Even carrying bowls of cereal or cups of coffee, they walk as if the floor is totally stable. 

At noon, I took several photos from the upper deck using the automatic setting of my camera (a Canon EOS 60D). Here's one of them.

I looked up the settings that the automatic function used. Tomorrow, I will go to the same deck at the same time and take a photo using the same settings. I plan to do that every day with the exception of the day will be on the "Into the Ice" excursion at noon. I'm hoping to get a nice sequence of shots getting darker and darker then lighter and lighter. We'll see how that turns out.

When it's light enough to see, the scenery is pretty incredible.

The towns themselves are quite photogenic as well. The ship docked in Alesund for three hours. We did the walk-around-town excursion here in 2015, so we just went on our own little walk. 

  

In Southeast Asia, we got accustomed to seeing beggars. It's a bit more out-of-place here.

One way to know you're not in the States any longer is playground equipment that kids big and little would love but that could possibly be deemed "unsafe." My kids would have loved this one as children and would even go crazy with it as adults.

Some shots I just have to take for inspiration. Both of these could make pretty nice quilts.

The ship's program director has told us that New Year's Eve can get quite raucous and that Tromso, where we will be that night, has quite the fireworks display. In the meantime, though it's still Christmas and will be until January 6.

Set an Alarm? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Alarm!

When we visited Iceland last year, we thought we'd set the room alarm to a time that would let us eat the hotel's free breakfast and the get ready for our excursion to a lava cave at noon. We screwed up on how to set the alarm and slept until 10:00, at which time the hotel breakfast was over. We got dressed (no showers if I remember correctly), found a coffeehouse that wasn't too far away, and actually were waiting for the excursion bus without being out of breath.

We had no set plans for today save for visiting a museum or two. Still, we both wanted to shower not to mention get a free breakfast, so we set Blaine's phone alarm to the chosen time. Should I also set my phone, I wondered. We decided that one alarm was enough given that we knew we were setting it correctly. Old Man Time got the best of us. We slept through the alarm we know went off. We did make it down in time for breakfast, though showers waited until after. We ended up only making it to one museum, the Norwegian Maritime Museum, but it was a good one.

Photos, at least with my camera, were few given the on-again-off-again rain. I finally just packed my large camera into my rucksack and let Blaine use his pocket-sized one. As it turned out, cameras were not permitted in the museum, so we have nothing to show from there unless I now take a photo of the book we bought on the rune alphabet.

We've been to our share of maritime museums including the ones in Newport News, Virginia, and Reykjavik, Iceland. The one here was small compared to those two, but still very interesting. The section on the Vikings was especially interesting given that last night I finished reading The Book Of Viking Myths that younger son  gave me for Christmas. The fact that we'd visited the Viking ship Museum in Oslo twice also helped fill in any gaps there were here.

We spent a fair amount of time there and, upon leaving, decided one museum was enough so we'd stop for coffee and a snack and then get back to the hotel in plenty of time for the 5:15 bus to the ship. It was too dark and rainy to adequately photograph the triangle of coffee shops at one intersection. We skipped the first as it looked fairly crowded and two people were entering ahead of when we would. We skipped the second because it was Starbucks, and went to the third, the Camel Coffeeshop. Besides Starbucks, other establishments we chose not to enter were Burger King, McDonalds, Seven Eleven, and Subway.

It was impossible to get a photo showing both together, but it caught us by pleasant surprise to see two bookstores within spitting distance of each other. There used to be a couple that close together on Charlottesville's Downtown Mall, but I don't think there are today.

While killing time in the hotel lobby, I took this photo already up on Facebook.

It was just a hair before 4:30 in the afternoon, giving us a taste of the days to come. It was even darker when the bus picked us up at 5:15.

So we're now aboard, having attended the mandatory safety presentation and eaten dinner. For dinner, I invited a couple to join us at our table for four. He works in South Africa; she works in Khartoum. Because it had been raining, I was not wearing Della, my confidential hearing assistant, what I heard was that he worked in cartoons. Fortunately, the husband asked an appropriate follow-up question before I asked an inappropriate one. As might be expected, they had questions about the current happenings in the States. We told them we hoped that the air traffic controllers or TSA personnel did not all call in sick by then due to mandatory work and nonexistent pay.

We are now sitting in a presentation on the various excursions possible. We know a bit about these having already registered for the one we want, Into the Ice, on polar exploration. We had also registered for a trip to a brewery but for some unknown reason that one was cancelled. My principal goal here is to ask if I really can fish off the deck of the ship. The reservation agent with whom I booked told me that because of the small size of the ship, it was possible to fish from the deck. I do intend to ask if that about deck fishing if it does not come up as part of this presentation.

They just announced that the weather for the next few days is forecast to be good. Up north, the forecasts are more uncertain. In rough weather, we are supposed to always hold onto one thing and, above all, not go out on deck. They do have "stormy weather bags" available at various points around the ship. Interestingly (or not), they're identical to the airsickness bags one finds on commercial planes.

The Christmas that Wasn't

Leaving for our trip on Christmas Day, a Tuesday, meant we celebrated Christmas with dinner and presents on Sunday. Saturday did not feel like Christmas Eve, and neither did Monday, Christmas Eve proper. Christmas proper feels very much like Easter Sunday. The gym and pretty much all businesses are closed, and there are fewer cars out on the roads. The air has a deep stillness, much like a warm blanket pulled around everything.

The dog and I go for a walk in the stillness. Our next-door neighbor, who remembers our first dog’s name and its source even eight years after we said good-bye to the beast, has not gone away for the holiday; the car is still in the parking area by the garage. I know the family in the other house on our lane is at least in town because if they’re going to be away even for one night he sends a y’all call email to the entire subdivision so that others might keep an eye on his place.

The next house has been empty since June or July but is now under contract. In two houses facing each other across the road live a widower marking his first Christmas without his wife and a couple who were supposed to become first-time grandparents earlier in December. That their newspaper is in the driveway tells me that the retired couple who follow the sun on cruises and in resorts is at home; they’re religious about stopping the paper and mail while they are gone.

Going in the opposite direction, we run into another dog walking its Upright. There is life besides us out in the fresh air! Approaching the other cul-de-sac we see that the monster minion inflatable has been deflated. I guess it looks better after dark. The couple renting the house across the way will be leaving before New Year’s Day; they’re emigrating to Lund, Sweden. Turning around to head home, some of the stillness seems to have lifted. The air feels lighter around us. The warm blanket has been kicked off leaving just the sheet around us.

It still didn’t feel like Christmas.

... Two if by Sea ...

I must admit that I married well, to someone nearly as offbeat as I am and who indulges my desire to travel and see the moon shine on the other side of the world. Only this trip, we're thinking more about the sun than the moon.

In February 2015, we flew to Oslo, Norway, took a scenic train ride to Bergen, boarded one of the ships in the coastal ferry/mailboat fleet, and sailed over the Arctic Circle to Tromso, where we got off and flew back to Oslo. spending only four nights on board the ship. There were some people who were taking the full 12 days and 11 nights to sail from Bergen to Kirkenes and back to Bergen. The husband and I wondered how they could do it; wouldn't they get bored? Here we are, approaching four  years later, and we're quite looking forward to the full sail. When I saw that there were discounts to mark the 125th anniversary of the coastal fleet, well, it seemed like time for another adventure.

Did I mention "offbeat" above? After doing some research, we decided that we wanted to take one particular ship. In 2015, we sailed on the MS Midnatsol (I'm pretty sure that means Midnight Sun). If you read to the bottom of the linked web page, you'll see that she can carry up to 900 passengers, though she was far from full when we sailed. We decided that for just for the heck of it we would this time sail on the MS Lofoten, the oldest and smallest ship in the fleet. She can take up to 400 passengers. As a better measure of the size, the woman with whom I spoke to make reservations told me that MS Lofoten was so small you could fish from the deck. (Guess who now wants to fish from the deck.)

One other distinguishing mark about the MS Lofoten is that you will not see it listed on any of the websites through which you can book lower-priced, unsold cabins on relatively short notice. All the other ships in the fleet will be listed, so why not the MS Lofoten? It has no stabilizers. We will be sailing in the North Atlantic in December and January on a ship with no stabilizers. I will admit I have no idea just how much rougher that will make things. I am planning ahead and have purchased and packed enough seasickness preventative for the whole trip plus the wrist bands plus ginger gum and candy. I'm so well prepared that I may have no problems at all and will have wasted some cash. But what do other people's mothers say? Better to have it and not need it ...

Besides taking a particular ship, we decided to make the trip as low-cost as possible, meaning that we are sailing in one of the cheapest cabins on the ship. We did get a cabin at the center of the ship which will be a bit more stable. It's not a large cabin. No porthole, but then as the husband and I discussed, we did not spend much time in our cabin last time. Bunk beds, but then our cabin last time had two separate twin beds, one of which became a couch during the day. Just a sink, no bathroom, but then the toilets are just right across the hall from our cabin. The showers are a bit further along. This was the thing that the reservation agent had trouble with. She kept trying to book us into a more expensive cabin, with en-suite facilities. She had trouble with the idea that this was an adventure and we really did want the cheapest cabin.

This will be our fifth trip north in winter, and on which we hope to see the aurora or Northern Lights. We've been to Iceland three times and Norway once before. I fully expect that we will see them on this trip, at least once and likely more often. What I am even more excited about, though, is that for about six days we will be north of the Arctic Circle, and in the polar night. Some people go north to see the Midnight Sun; I've never had the desire to do so. The polar night on the other hand, I really want to see.

As for our thought four years ago that the people going the whole way got bored, perhaps they did. Perhaps we will, though right now we're actually quite looking forward to some down time. Walking the deck for exercise, reading while watching the coast go by, continuing the cribbage contest we began on our honeymoon and continue whenever we're on vacation. At our stop in Trondheim, we hope to have coffee with some of the husband's Norwegian cousins. And, travel gods willing, come back refreshed and ready to start the new year.