Between the Rains

Spring is late in coming this year, in spite of the birds that flew north a month ago. After a few nice and sunny days, we're again sandwiched between low pressure systems and their various cold fronts, with showers of sleet, rain and slushy snow.

Between two showers, I took this picture from my kitchen window. I love that window. Many years ago, when I visited friends in Scotland, I was very impressed by the huge window just above their kitchen sink, overlooking a beautiful wide valley. I always had sinks and stoves where I had to face a boring wall when I was cooking. Now in my new kitchen, the sink has a window, too, so I can watch people and birds and clouds from there, enjoy the view of those century-old houses in the foreground, and the hills in the background.

I'm looking forward to a time when the trees and hills are green. Tenacious as this winter is, that might still take some weeks.

New View

The view from my new study window. My desk is in front of it, so I see those houses while I'm writing this.
The big one on the left (in the background) is an elementary school. I can watch the children play during breaks. Happy and peaceful scenes, mostly.

Blogging and Twittering

Two weeks ago, I signed up on Twitter. It's rather addictive to log in and stalk people there, especially since some of the guys I found here are on Twitter, and I don't give up hope to connect somehow (as unlikely as it is, across vast divides of oceans and insignificance).

It also has that appeal of accepting only 140 characters per message. It allows no rambling, no digression, no circumscription. A great training to be succinct and precise in a foreign language.

Still, I like to ramble and digress from time to time. So, this blog will continue.

Regarding my new home, there's little news. One by one, I tackle the many boxes and furniture parts; I drill, plug and bolt, fix lamps, mirrors and shelves, find new places for all those books and DVDs, but there's still an almost endless list of things to do.

Settling in

All week I spent unpacking boxes, drilling holes into walls, building shelves and wardrobes, cleaning drawers, putting away stuff, moving furniture around (and back again) because it still doesn't have the 'right' place, and cursing my squirrel nature that lets me keep too many things I don't really need. If anything, the chaos seemed to get worse.

And I caught a cold.

And another of my documentary film ideas just was rejected by the TV channel I offered it to.
All in all, this week was not very nice.

Enough whining. It will get better soon. My new home is going to be habitable in a few days, and beautiful in a few weeks. Spring is coming. Soon I will sit on my new terrace, sip latte (or white wine), chat with friends, or use my laptop to stalk people on twitter, and feel thoroughly decadent.

Can't wait.

New Shell

After three days of moving stuff around and down and up all those stairs (giving me the worst backache I ever had), and two nights spent in my mother's house (because neither kitchen nor bedroom were usable in my new home), this is the first night I spend here.
At home, in my new 'hermit crab shell'.

It still feels strange, as if I broke into someone else's house, or as if I am a visitor while the real owners are on holiday. It's not yet mine.

But it will be. Soon.

Hermit Crab

Three more nights in my old home, then I will be gone.

It is strange to leave a house after more than 12 years. It has grown on me like a second skin. I look out of the windows and know the neighbours and their habits. There is a Lutheran pastor living opposite of me, who often works at his computer till midnight. His son learns to play the trumpet since three years (without much success, as my tortured ears can testify to). In the next house, two women share a flat on the top floor. One of them always stays up until at least 3 o'clock every night, watching TV in a room that is painted a bright turquoise and stuffed with brightly coloured furniture, so that it looks like a fishbowl from the outside. In yet another house, an Italian woman lives on the ground floor. She always dyes her short, bristly hair in a curious coppery purple shade, and she likes to sit by the window and watch people in the street.

The inside of my old house is so familiar to me, I can (and do) navigate it blindly. Some nights I get up from my sofa or desk, switch the upstairs lights off, and walk down the stairs and into the bathroom or the bedroom in darkness.
I am like a hermit crab, comfortable in its old shell, even if it is slightly too small by now.

It will take years to get as comfortable in the new place. It will be a challenge, but like the hermit crab that has to find a bigger shell every couple of years, I now need the space to grow.

Boxing

After some weeks spent in lazy limbo, suddenly everything seems to be happening at once. My new home awaits me, all dressed up in a new coat of paint, the kitchen will be installed on Thursday, and on Saturday morning a lorry plus some strong men will arrive to move my furniture and stuff.

Last time I moved, 12 years ago, all the moving and carrying was done by friends. But this time I decided to get professional help. During the last decade, I have accumulated so many things (especially books), I will move from 3rd floor to 3rd floor (and both houses are old, so they don't have a lift) - and I would really like to keep my friends!

And now, I'll have to stop blogging for a week or two, and start packing all those boxes. Dozens of them. Why would anyone buy so many books?

Spring!

I took this picture half an hour ago from my window. It is a flock of common cranes flying north, just above my house. What I could not capture on a photo was their typical call, the bugle you can hear over a great distance - in fact, I heard them long before I saw them.

So the cranes are flying back north. This is pure joy! It is the first sign of spring. Winter is finally over. Yeah!

The Coolest Thing I Ever Did

I promised an adventure story for today, and here it is.

Almost five years ago, I had the opportunity to travel as far north as you can get in Europe: To Svalbard aka Spitsbergen, about 80° north, a group of arctic islands, as different from mainland Europe as another planet would be. We were filming some scenes and interviews for a documentary on climate change there, with a focus on the effects of global warming on arctic wildlife. Sounds boring? No, it wasn't!


The trip involved several days of speeding over frozen fjords with snowscooters, looking for the animals we were supposed to capture on video. Seals, walruses, reindeer, an amazing number and variety of seabirds, and - most importantly - polar bears. Since it can be really dangerous to encounter polar bears in the wild, we had a guard with us, a Norwegian ex-soldier who always carried a gun and never left us out of sight. He was tall, fair-haired and macho - the perfect cast for a Viking chieftain in any feature film. And it was good to have him there. One night, the bears came scouting right up to our camp. The tracks we found in the morning were proof of their presence.


Every day, we had to drive for hours to find the right spots and animals, and then had to wait patiently for even more hours to get good shots. So we used all the available daylight, worked almost around the clock, and only slept for three or four hours per night. Some of those nights we stayed on a ship that was frozen into the sea ice, to be used as basecamp for expeditions just like ours.


I will never forget that week. It was mad and frantic. We soon found out that we had to cover a vast area and didn't have nearly enough time for our film project, but there was no way to extend our stay. The trip had already cut a huge slice out of our production budget, so we had to make do. It was cold and uncomfortable at times, we were giddy from lack of sleep and the camera equipment didn't like the cold at all, so we had to be really careful not to use too much battery power - but in the end, none of that mattered. We were incredibly lucky with the weather and cooperative animals, and we managed to get breathtaking footage of arctic wildlife and landscape, plus the required interviews with resident scientists and environmentalists, of course.


Seeing those wild polar bears, seals and walruses was more amazing than I could ever describe with words. The landscape along the Svalbard coast is so beautiful that it almost physically hurt to leave the islands and fly back south. And driving that snowscooter over the snow of frozen valleys and vast stretches of sea ice, sometimes with over 100 kilometres per hour, was definitely the coolest thing I ever did.

First Aid

Okay, Jackie, here you go. A post today, just for you, my favourite (if probably only) reader!
Sorry it's short. Just wanted to tell you that every blog gives you the option to subscribe to its posts - scroll down to the very bottom of the page, and you'll find it. If you're using the German version, it's called "Abonnieren". Do that, and you don't have to click the page twice a day to see if I posted anything. That must have been hell during the weeks and months when I was AWOL.

I am sorry. To make up for it, I'll write another adventure story tomorrow.

And there is no reason for posting the following, it's just something I found in Berlin once. Love this notion.