To nobody’s surprise, our flight experience was terrible, but it was (mostly) our own fault. We flew out of Dulles on an evening red-eye on KLM. Before flying, we had a day to burn. The morning was getting the house in a finished state while Annalise swam in a hotel pool, and then we drove […]

Deciding to make this move was a stark equation of pushes and pulls: balancing a mix of things that draw us to Norway (it’s a great place to grow up, we can spend a lot of time outside), and things that push us away from the US (even if our country can course-correct, it might […]

The Taylors are moving to Norway. I’m accepting a position at NTNU in Trondheim, and Allison has taken a remote job at a law firm specializing in regulatory law. My hope is to explain why we’re doing this and how I’m feeling about it (Allison’s got her own reasons, and this post will be long […]

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 […]