After Christmas, I would say that Norway’s most celebrated holiday is their national day, normally just known as “the 17th of May.” This holiday celebrates both the creation of their constitution in 1814 (on May 17 exactly) and the ending of World War II in Norway (May 8, 1945, which has been judged to be […]

The semester is almost over, and my experience as a student is almost complete. As expected, I have learned quite a lot, and I’ve been humbled. Learning another language at the age of 41 is really hard! In my class, we had to write five 300-word essays in the course of the semester. In my […]

One of my core memories of early fatherhood was when I realized that dropping Annalise off at day care meant that she was living most of her day without us, we would never really know what she did with that time, and the village was raising my child, whether I liked it or not. Most […]

It’s obvious that one of the difficulties of learning a language is that there are a lot of words to know, and until you know enough, you can’t really say anything. Our Norwegian class gets around this by teaching vocabulary in clumps about specific topics. Naturally, these topics are chosen on the basis of what […]

I wrote previously about the fun things I get to do in the mornings while my colleagues are all sleeping. The flip side is that I do have some late nights, especially during my busy season, which runs from January to mid-April. The central organizing feature of my work is the annual 90-day legislative session […]

If you had any doubt about the cultural role of skiing in Norway, the promotional video for the recently-concluded Nordic Skiing World Championships sums it up nicely: “You wouldn’t build a house with two planks, yet somehow we’ve built an entire nation.” Gavin and I like to ski, and one goal for this year was […]

To answer some immediate questions, the title is completely true in that on paper, for a week, I am part of the US ski jumping team. It’s also not at all true, in that I do not jump, coach jumpers, provide any support to any jumpers, do anything to contribute in any way to the […]

We’ll go ahead and dispel any suspense from our last post about the championship: the professionals were a lot faster. The world championships (in Norwegian, verdenmesterskap, usually shortened to VM) began this week. On Wednesday night, there was an opening ceremony in downtown Trondheim. Annalise was asleep so we didn’t go, but we could hear […]

I (Allison) went into the back end of our blog to edit our last post about the World Championships and came upon a draft Gavin had started, entitled “I hate this pillow.” The post was left unpublished, so perhaps he decided this wasn’t newsworthy. Perhaps he thought it was an overshare. Nevertheless, he must really […]