Day 22-snow day

   January 26-Around 8 pm the previous evening it began to snow and the winds picked up dramatically.  They proceeded to blow furiously through the entire night.  We woke up the kids at 7 am and got them around for school, even through we could only barely see the lights from apartments that are less than 200 feet away from us.  Since our apartment looks out over the entrance to the university, we watched for the bus driver’s arrival, but we saw no cars arrive or leave the campus.  We kept checking the elementary school’s website and finally an announcement was made that the start of the school day was delayed 30 minutes.  A little after 8:30, the girls and I suited up against the blizzard and headed out to the bus, which is always left at Bifröst overrnight.  We saw neither kids nor bus driver, so we went back to the apartment, where Sally informed us that a second announcement of the school’s closure had arrived seconds after we walked out the door.  The girls got yet another day off from school!

The car had to be dug out, yet again.

   This analogy will only strike a chord with a few of you, but this winter reminds me a great deal of the spring of 1982 on the eastern plains of Colorado, when a seemingly endless string of blizzards blew through.  It was so bad that my folks lost half of their calves that year.  That is not a concern over here, because nearly all of the farm animals are housed inside throughout the winter.  We had noticed that the only animals we saw outside were the gorgeous Icelandic ponies and had begun to speculate that horses, dog, and cats were the only farm animals in Iceland.  Now, we know better.  According to the locals, it is quite a spectacle when the animals are let out of the barns for the first time in the spring.  Apparently, they go crazy, running around madly.  One of the girls in Alex’s class is from a local farm that has sheep.  Alex hopes to gets to visit sometime and see the sheep, so maybe she will also get to chase down an errant lamb in the spring!

   Ironically, within a half hour of the school closure announcement, the winds relented and the snow quit falling.  Sally and I took Spencer to kindergarten and stopped in at the faculty/staff lounge for coffee.  The parents were grousing about the school closure, saying the principal should have delayed its opening until 10:00 instead.  Hindsight is 20/20, you know.


Hinrik Noí and Spencer share the computer during free time.

                                                                                                                                         This picture comes from the weekly kindergarten updates.  Spencer’s teachers, Ingibjörg and Tara, wrote (in Icelandic and translated by Google Translate) that “it goes very well with Spencer, the English boy with us.  We are constantly practicing our English to speak to him and he is learning new Icelandic words.”  I think that Spencer is starting to pick up some Icelandic words.  It will take some time for his brain to figure out the speech patterns, so he can begin to parse the sentences correctly and determine the words that are being spoken.  At least he is getting the opportunity to hear Icelandic.  People rarely make it beyond an Icelandic greeting (if that) with us adults, before they start speaking in English.  I can’t really blame them, though, because if they do keep speaking in Icelandic, all they get are blank stares from us since our vocabularies are so limited.   

   Alex used her free time at home today to get caught up on blogging, so her experiences and pictures from Reykir are now available for your perusal at her blog.  She and Joslyn also did some on-line math homework to keep up with classmates in Gunnison.  As the skies continued to clear, all three kids spent some time outside, sprucing up the snowpeople they had made a few days ago, digging a snow cave in the lava rocks that surround campus, and sledding on the piles of snow that now surround the parking lots.  By the time they came in at sunset, the sky was almost cloud-free.