My computer screen is in a funny mood today. It has put on some yellow face, turning blue items into green ones and making my new brownish desktop background color (that matches perfectly with my new wallpaper, a beautiful India-style lichen from Helgafell) look more like baby pooh.

At least the change has made the computer silent. For the past two weeks or so it has emitted strange sounds that intermittently grow quite furious. Then I always fear the comp will explode and go out of the office, under the pretext of getting myself more coffee. My co-workers say it´s just the fan. An exploding fan is dangerous enough for me, I tell you.

Went to a wonderful fondue dinner party last night. The host was my Swiss-almost-turned-Icelandic friend Úrsúla. Her American boyfriend was there, then there were the Icelandic-Dutch couple Birna and Ino (I think I got his name right...) and their son Darri, three year old. He is a gorgeous kid. His name means "warrior" and he certainly lives up to his name, taking everything that remotely resembles a sword (gift wrappings rolled up etc.) into his hands and swinging it around. When he started attacking Úrsúla´s hanging plants we all cried with laughter. Well, they were almost dead anyway :)

Since it was such a multi-national party we couldn´t help discussing foreigners in Iceland. To our amazement we realized that foreigners living here have no means of keeping up-to-date on Icelandic news unless they speak good enough Icelandic. Sure, they can watch CNN and SKY and loads of other international news, but finding out what´s going on in Iceland is really a challenge. Úrsúla took an example of this guy working at deCODE genetics (where a load of foreigners work and the primary language spoken is English, as far as I know). A few weeks ago the company made more than a hundred employees redundant. Not being one of them, this guy barely knew why half of the people working next door to him had suddenly disappeared, but he would know exactly what the new regime in China was like or how often Arafat had been to the toilet in the last few days.

Now isn´t this strange? I would have thought that the ex-pat society here in Iceland was big enough to support at least a weekly resumé-newspaper in English about Icelandic internal matters. Correct me if I´m wrong...

What do I do at work? Well, I´m trying to decipher a volcano that was formed in eruption under the last ice age glacier here in Iceland. It´s complicated. Which is why I looked up a quote from one of my college books:

"...the late Frank Schairer, once remarked that, to understand igneous rocks, a geologist must first learn "to think like a molten silicate.""

Change 'igneous rocks' to 'subglacial volcanoes' and 'molten silicate' to 'molten ice quenching magma, explosions and chaos' - and you´ll know what this task feels like. Challenging.

Yesterday I spent digitizing maps. That included pushing the same mouse button 11310 times while moving it with utter precision over many twisted contour lines (ehemm... and pestering my pre Windows-generation colleagues for help. File names with no more than 8 letters?? MS-DOS? What?!?!) While doing so, I revisited a lot of dusty CD's found in my CD bag, f.ex. Suede´s Coming Up and the Cardigans´ Trampolene. Nick Cave´s latest proved too depressing for this work, I have to admit.

And now the map is all'a'digitized. Oooohhh, wonder what it will turn out like!!

This could be fun!

Finished Vargas Llosa´s book "The Storyteller" when waking up today. What a brilliant piece of litterature.

At last fixed the link to life in the freezer. Look at those seal pups, and those big eyes they sport!

Now I´m blogging under strict orders from Stína. I´m at her place, just entered looking like the abominable snowman from the sleet and driving snow outside. *sob*, this weather sucks from the geological perspective.

Went to bed at 10 p.m. last night, completely dead. My friend Linda Rós was very shocked. "Hey, Herdís, how can you complain about your boyfried status if you don´t ever go out?!?!" Well, my state last night wouldn´t have attracted much positive attention from any male anyway, I told her. "Ok," she replied and reluctantly allowed me to go to bed. And gee am I glad I did. Slept 12 hours straight, and as if that wasn´t enough I added four more. Beautiful.

Have been having crazy dreams lately. It´s all been about murders and perils and immoral people. Maybe I should start sleeping more and making movie scripts from my dreams. Hmmm... might make me a millionaire :)

Tuesday´s night´s dream was about this guy who was trying to kill me with a box of Cheerios. I was on my way to take the GRE stand-by and then he went for me. I narrowly escaped from him and made it to the test center. He´d made it there before me and taken the last space available, so I wasn´t to be admitted. I freaked, screaming at the people there that he was a crook and had tried to kill me etc. They just shrugged, asking what all the fuss was about; saying that since I still was alive I could just shut up. Although the dream was pretty coherent it occasionally was interrupted by scenes from winterland; snowcovered wilderness and frozen-over rivers I had to cross.

The long sleep last night was eventful as well. This time the story was about a guy who´d tried to kill his wife. She was very oppressed , so in the dream I wondered whether she´d been subject to domestic violence for long. Anyway, the bastard got a day off from prison and went for a visit to another bastard friend of his to watch some video. The prison guards just couldn´t care less about keeping an eye on him, so before you could count to ten the would-be-killer had put on a bullet-proof vest and ran for his freedom. The guards fired after him but the bullets had no effect, and being too lazy to chase him on their car they just resumed the movie-watching. Sick mofos!! Once again finding myself screaming at the injustice and corruption of this world, I demanded of them they´d go chasing him, but they just laughed at me, saying that reopening the case would cost 300 million kronur. "So what," I shouted at them, "is this woman´s life not worth more than that?? What if he kills her, simply because those 300 million kronur for reopening his case couldn´t be paid!!" Going on like this, the dream dissolved.

Now do I have a talent for dreams or what??

Just got an e-mail from my scooter-guide boss in Svalbard. They won´t hire me for next spring because some other company will be running their tours. Shit. What shall I do then? When not even filthy rich Norway can offer me a job?

Anyone got an idea about how to get positive replies to more job applications? All hints will be appreciated.

Am a great fan of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, especially after I figured my Spanish was quite good enough to read him in the original language (and after seeing how terribly handsome he is ;).

While I was travelling in S-America last winter I fought my way through ´Pantaleón y las visitadoras´ (available in Icelandic under the title "Pantaljón og sérþjónustan") and now I´m working my way through a book called ´El hablador´ (translates as ´The Storyteller´). It tells two stories at the same time; that of a Peruvian writer who stumbles across an exhibition of pictures of an Amazonian tribe in a gallery in Florence, and that of the same nomad tribe in the Amazon jungle, as told by their storyteller. I haven´t finished yet but it´s a fairly transparent plot; however the plot is really not the issue for me in this book but rather the magical descriptions of the Indians and their world view. Highly recommended!!

A turbo day!

Maður er manns gaman, says an old Icelandic proverb. I experienced a living proof of that today.

At work, I spend a lot of time outdoors, all alone, investigating my mountain just outside of town. I really like it and am starting to know every nook and cranny there. However, disciplined scientific work sometimes gives way, for a while, to musings about the ravens flying around, or a pretty flower in fading autumn colors, or the simple beauty of the rocks and the surroundings. When the wind is blowing really hard it´s also nice to bundle up on the leeside of a boulder somewhere and listen to the wailing concert of the high-voltage electricity lines running through the land. I´ve found weathered bones high up in the mountain, on a rock ledge so exposed that an alert and agile animal such as the mink or the arctic fox shouldn´t be there in the first place, let alone a significantly less agile creature such as me . Did they fall to their death? Or did they starve? (And how on Earth will I ever get away?!?) You see, when you look closely there are so many things to wonder at and about out there off the beaten, asphalted track.

Today was different, let me tell you. A girl from the U.S. accompanied me today; she´s here for a year studying Katla volcano and wanted to get out of town. She agreed to become my secretary for a day, taking care of the notebook. She also operated the altimeter, and understood all my ramblings and muttering and soliloquizing. Together we practically ran up the mountain, did one major log and two minor ones, took samples (so finally my office looks like there´s a geologist here, with rocks all over!) and, in general, just "rúlluðum þessu upp", as you say in good Icelandic. I´ve never done so much in just one day myself! I could use company like this every day.

Do I hear anyone volunteering??

You know I live alone, don´t you all?

A few weeks ago I bought a fern. I used to have parekeets (two different ones, at different times) but they both flew out the window. I´ve taken that as a hint that I shouldn´t get myself another one. Instead, I chose a plant that won´t go anywhere. It´s a beautiful fern, lush and big, and it´s surviving. That´s more than any fern I´ve had so far has done.

Every late afternoon/evening when I come home I greet my fern. "Hi, fernie, how´s it going?!" I ask. And my beautiful fern rests upon the livingroom table, not really knowing what to do about this attention.

I dread the day it eventually will answer me.

Hoho, life is beautiful again!!

Nr. 1: The terrible GRE is over, and I think I did quite ok. The analytical writing saw me in my element (in spite of the diarr?ea.. hoho, lucky me they didn´t check the spelling of this!!), the other parts were ok. At least I didn´t forget - FORGET for crying out loud - to mark the answer to ten - TEN - questions on the answer sheet as one girl did.

Nr. 2: I finally have a job. It´s a temporary one, and a very wet one for the time being, but it´s a job and I´m using my brain (well, trying to anyway, things are a bit mushy in there after years of vacation) and meeting other people on a daily basis - wonderful. Was beginning to feel myself sinking into the chasms of dark depressive moods, but am very sure it´ll be much better now.

Now the snow will just have to stay away for a while. Two more weeks, please. And I´ll put up with the rain if only the clouds promise to lift a bit. Went out for the first field day today; it started in this nice drizzling rain and good views of the mountain and ended with me fighting my way to the car in nearly horizontal rain, wet to the bone, cursing, hardly seeing the mountainside even as I was almost breaking my nose on it (some of my friends and acquaintances have noticed in me a slight tendency to exaggerate...). Fortunately saw a beautiful slump structure through the fog and driving rain and instantly got in a better mood. You know, nothing makes a geologist´s day like the sight of (to me, at least) pretty sedimentary structures and post-sedimentary deformation. And my absolute favorite? Anti-dunes. I just HAVE to find them somewhere!!

If you have problems understanding this jargon, try Erna´s site. Her´s will be further complicated for some of you by the fact that it´s all in Icelandic. I think it´s cute, even if I haven´t the faintest idea what she´s talking about.