Happy Birthday Lee!

It's 6am here and I've been up an hour. In Atlanta my brother Lee is just turning 33 at this very instant, and I wish him many happy returns.

I've been up an hour because of all the light. It gets mostly dark here around 12pm and gets light again around 4am (we're in Southern Norway a long ways south of the Arctic Circle), and when the light really started streaming through our curtainless windows around 5am, I was up for good, despite the fact that Christine and Torstein's party last night went until well after midnight. I used to have this problem in Iceland the summer I was studying at the university in Reykjavik; the sun would never go down, and since my dorm room had just the slightest hint of a lace curtain I would wake up with a start in full daylight in a panic that I had missed my 9am class until I looked at my watch and saw it was a quarter to three in the morning.

Yesterday was an eventful first day here. Still no word from the luggage people at SAS, who weren't answering their phones all day, and the foreigner registration office was closed on Tuesday so I couldn't get my work permit, but we managed to get Inki's residency established at the registry office, talk to her bank about mortgage financing, visit three open houses, and make a bid on a very nice place not far from the center of town. (Bridget will be happy know that it's the one with the built-in aquarium.) We'll hear something today by noon.

If we do get that place, we're thinking of going with mechanical fish in the tank. Besides the opportunity to cultivate a reputation as eccentrics (i.e. crazy people with money), that will spare us some guilt since our previous fish tank in Raleigh was where cute little fishies went to die. It was as if the Exxon Valdez had steamed through on its way to Prince William Sound. After observing all the various ways in which fish can die -- the most original was the one who stopped being able to control its buoyancy and started rocketing up and down and up and down in the tank before finally going belly up -- we don't have the stomach for it. Of course, I could always try baiting a hook and putting it in the tank with the fish. That seems to be the only thing I do that ensures that all fish in the vicinity live to a ripe and happy old age.

The cats wouldn't know the difference, but they'd love to watch those guys swim back and forth in the tank all day. Maybe it would occupy them long enough to get them to give up their other hobby: reenacting WWII parachute jumps down onto our stomachs from up on the bookshelf when we're asleep.