Imminent Writing on A Windy Day

The wind in Iceland (Or at least on in Reykjavík), if anyone reading this has not been informed, is rather brutal. As of yet I've kept in on the days when at the trees shake and the cracks beneath the closed windows whistle and the bathroom door taps arrhythmically against its frame, attacked by the gusts from the one window we never close (Five young men living in a single apartment, it's best never to close all the windows).

But today day we made a trip to the pool, and got the pleasure of being nearly blown off our feet. I've finally managed to get my kennitala, and thus get into the university gym, and thus have a proper day of squats for the first time in over a month. So, my hamstrings inflexible and my quads stinging, I was perhaps at greater risk of toppling than anyone else. But we made it.

And once we got into the pool, the wind was our friend. It's a pleasant feeling (and, I imagine, a very Icelandic one) to have your upper body get assault by wind and drizzling rain while the rest of you is basking in watery heat. The steam off the heitum pottum blew around like dry ice fog, and it was an epic task to run back and forth from the pool with your balls intact.

Now I'm home, and the first papers are due in october, and there's naught to be done but work on them. It's been a long time since I wrote a paper-and I have certainly never even tried to write one among this sort of crowd of fellow-students, preparing abstracts for the Saga-conference and whatnot. Unsettling. Further unsettlement to be a history student (never quite realized how much I leaned towards the historical side of things until I got here) among all these literary scholars and linguists. If I survive the term I'm sure I'll have things more or less figured out. But in the meantime it's a bit nerve-wracking.

If I haven't noted this yet, however, it must be noted how truly excellent our Introduction to Old Norse is-particularly for all those former German professors of mine who might be reading this. No introduction to grammatical concepts, no review-just paradigms upon paradigms until we've got them all then straight into the texts. Four weeks or thereabouts and we'll be through the vast majority of the basic grammar (if 'basic' can be used to describe anything in Old Norse). After a month on the concept of the dative case and another month on strong adjectives in second year German, it's more than a little relieving to begin and finish strong and weak adjectives, present and preterite subjunctives, and all the weak nouns in the same week.

So off to research. And hope my legs hurry up and heal. There's Old Norse, Viking Age archaeology, and more lifting on the morrow.