heat wave

Yesterday was a temperature record – 76.5 degrees. That is the highest temperature ever recorded in Reykjavik. I was like, “yeah, this is a nice California day,” and smiled and enjoyed it. Meanwhile the Icelanders were closing their shops, inventing funerals, going to the lava sand beaches en masse, and wrapping it all up with evening news video montages to the tune of “Walking on Sunshine.”

Tonight I'm making dinner for the troops - it's gonna be pizza. Pizza, pizza.

I went and saw the new apartment last night - it's really nice with wooden floors and lots of nooks and crannies. It dates from the 1930s. It's on the second floor of a 3-flat house. The owners (current occupants) are a nice couple about the same age as me. We had some coffee and they showed me around the place.

Today I feel very happy, starting to feel like things are coming back to land after months of swirliness. It will still take me a few months to really feel settled, but I finally feel like the trend is going in the right direction.

I ran into a dude in the grocery store last night who works at my new place. He said, "Thordur has been trying to reach you! He wants you at a meeting on Friday!" My heart sank... I pictured a grilling, in Icelandic, on the finer points of securities repo in the Scandinavian markets. So I called Thordur (the managing director/ my boss) on my swanky new tiny Euro cell phone, and he was all friendly. Turns out it's their company's quarterly employee meeting on Friday at 6 pm, followed by a "grilling" of a different kind, and beers.