This is Lily's favorite sign. It means everyday when I walk to the store she gets to go too. And it means she gets a treat for sitting. And another one when I come back for waiting. I will run into someone at the store and they will say, "I knew you were here, I saw Lily." There are no secrets on this island.......
About a month before Easter the Norwegians seem to go bonkers for the color yellow. In all the stores you will find displays of yellow candles,yellow napkins,and of course,the yellow daffodils. It's not a wimpy pastel yellow either. It's a bold,solid,deep yellow. The kind of yellow that makes you smile even after months of grey sunless days. Van Gogh would love this yellow. Apparently Mother Nature likes to decorate with yellow in the Spring also. All the wildflowers are yellow at this time of year.
Buttercups or Smørblomst.
Our first flowers of Spring,the Coltsfoot,or Hestehov.
Escaped Daffodils or Påskelilje.
Often slandered and maligned, the Dandelion,or Løvetann,is one of my personal favorites.
We went to the mainland just for a few hours to drop off a rocking chair at it's new home. It's funny to think of this chair traveling all the way from New Orleans,Louisiana to a cabin in Norway.
Along the way we saw.......grassy roofs
And this beautiful church and graveyard.
We crossed that bridge to go home, but to get back to the islands we took a tunnel under the ocean. And yes, I held my breath the whole way.
Husband mulching beds and trimming up my currant and gooseberry bushes.
My rhubarb is sprouting up. This is the first time I have grown rhubarb and I'm looking forward to playing around with some new recipes.
The seagulls are back. I don't know where they go in the winter. Florida?
Yellow flowers in all the stores.
Daffodils are in my opinion the most cheerful of blooms.
I hope the Easter Bunny brings me one of these eggs.
The good citizens of beautiful Kristiansund do not wait for "good" weather. The weather just is. They have a saying "there is no bad weather,just bad preparation". My iPad camera however feels differently and only wants to function on blue sky sunny days. So I apologize in advance for all the grainy pics I will be posting over the next ten days of forecasted rain. But hey, I'm not complaining. I have a raincoat.
So here are some before and after haircut pics of Lilly. Notice how she is bigger than my kitchen. And why is she wearing a t-shirt?
"Tell me the truth,does this shirt make my head look huge?"
Here she is with her Audrey Hepburn "ROMAN HOLIDAY" haircut.
And here she is in a preliminary sketch for her coloring book about Kristiansund. That's Sildegutten (Herring Boy Statue) she's admiring.
It's finished! Now I can start some seedlings indoors while I wait for the soil to warm up a bit.
The finished garden with it's builder taking a well earned soak. Those loose boards are holding the chicken wire cover in place so our cat doesn't interpret MY garden as being her own specially built cat box . I saw her looking at it with delighted anticipation......
Now that's a hot tub with a great view.
Friday in Kristiansund was another blue sky windless day. Rare,incredible and not to be wasted. So I went down to the harbor. We are very proud of our harbor ferry, the Sundbåten, or the sound boat in English. Here she is just coming in.
Sundbåten carries passengers to the four islands of Kirklandet,Innlandet,Nordlandet, and Gomalandet. Nowadays there are bridges and you can drive to the different islands or "lands" as the locals call them, but many still prefer to use the Sundbåten. The ferry was begun in 1876 and is listed as the world's oldest continuously operating ferry system. Today was an extra special day as the first woman is working on the Sundbåten. And here she is....
The only downside to all that sunshine was I couldn't get a better photo of the Klippfiskkjerringa's(Klipfish wife's) companion, Sildegutten (herring boy). Both statues were created by the very talented Tore Bjørn Skjølsvik.
Behind him you can see the Sunbåten they have built for children to play on. There are several around town.
On my daily ten minute walk to the grocery store I always take a short pause on the bridge to admire this old building. It was a rope factory but now it stands empty.
I especially like the way it rambles under the bridge.......
and out the other side.
It's a looooooong building.
Posted with Blogsy