One year on...

Hi everyone.

As has probably been obvious for some while, we're not blogging anymore. This isn't really a philosophical decision, just other priorities have come into play. There's nothing to say that we might not start posting again from time to time, particularly if some other major period of change happens in our lives, but for the moment, I feel that the only things we could talk about would be the day-to-day parts of our lives that are not really all that different from life anywhere else on earth. While many other people blog about exactly that, it wasn't really what we intended with this.

A year (more than 13 months, actually) has passed since we got here, and it's interesting to begin to see things for the second time. I spent the 17th of May in Oslo this year (which was an enormous party, but in many ways not different, at its core, from the 17th of May in Ulsteinvik - except with royalty). Our rugby club is going shockingly well, with about 25 players playing in the last tournament we hosted. Kes is back in Canada at this instant, just finished with an academic conference, but will be back here on Thursday. The language continues to be a struggle for both of us, but I'm finding that I can manage on the phone a little better now (I find the phone particularly tough, because there's no context to be taken from body language.) The boat is coming along well - on schedule, though frantic at times. The bottom of the hull will be towed here from the Polish shipyard that built it in June. Meanwhile, we're already assembling and outfitting many of the upper sections, to be put together like an enormous 3-D jigsaw puzzle over the course of the fall and winter. We have not yet seen another contract, but rumours are flying like crazy (as they always do at large companies), and there's no particular sense of panic yet - our order book is still full until mid-2011.

If you're interested in other stuff from the area, I'll leave you with a few websites:

www.rugby.no/Sunnmøre Our rugby team's website - in a mixture of English and some poorly-written Norwegian)
www.ulsteinlab.com (Where my company puts up videos of our ships and animations of new concepts we pull together)
www.vikebladet.no (The local newspaper)
www.ecoevo.ca (The Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution - to whose Council Kes just managed to be elected...)

Bye for now!