Hi y’all! All is well here with me. I’ve been back in Norway for several weeks now and life has slid into a comfortable, comforting routine, which is nice. I talk to my brother as often as the nine-hour time difference and busy schedules allow. He’s doing daily radiation and weekly chemotherapy treatments and we’re all in wait-and-hope mode.

I’ve been thinking about all of the stuff I’ve missed blogging about because, uh, I haven’t been blogging, so I’m going to be doing a little catch-up in the next few weeks. Today’s post is dedicated to my home city, Sandefjord, or as it has become known to the locals, “Our Little Deathtrap.”

Last month, three people were shot and seriously wounded in a park near the library.




While certainly not the crime of the century or even a typical weekend in any city in America, it was HUGE news here, where things like that just do not happen. Police helicopters filled the sky as the manhunt for the culprit began. (Okay, that’s an exaggeration. There was maybe one helicopter but it circled the city for hours.) Traffic was stopped in town as police searched vehicles and questioned drivers. (Again, perhaps an exaggeration but there were roadblocks set up near the park and some people saw police talking to other drivers.) Schools went into lockdown and residents barricaded themselves in their homes. It was crazy, man!

The shooter was arrested later that night (our police are pretty good detectives!) and turned out to be a 63-year-old man who got into an argument with drug addicts (or are they ex-addicts? Don’t quote me there.) in the park, went home, got his gun, went back to the park, and shot three of them at point-blank range. He’s now in jail awaiting trail while protesting his innocence, although the coppers did find the gun in his house. Oops.

Husband and I walked our Doberman, Rufus (may he RIP), twice a day every day in a public park near our house in San Francisco and I must say that while I understand the impulse to shoot people you feel are ruining your enjoyment of any open space, it’s a bad thing to do and clearly very wrong. I mean, if everyone did that, half the dogwalkers in San Francisco would be dead.

So we all now know it’s very dangerous to get into arguments in Badeparken with grumpy older dudes walking their dogs. But, it’s now deathly dangerous to walk just about anywhere in Sandefjord because our streets are covered in ice. Our Arctic winter was interrupted two weeks ago by a freakishly warm (+2C) couple of days that melted just enough ice to coat every square inch around here in amazingly slippery ice. For example, here’s our driveway:



Simply going out the front door these days means taking one’s life in one’s hands. I’ve armed myself with these inconvenient spiky things I pull onto my shoes but I’ve still managed to fall many times in addition to falling off my bike and giving myself what I feared was a cracked rib. The pain has subsided now, in just over two weeks, so it probably wasn’t a cracked rib at all even though it hurt to breathe or laugh for ten days. I count myself lucky and now drive instead of walk or cycle whenever possible.

It’s back to being freezing cold these days (that ice isn't going anywhere any time soon), although not the -20C we regularly saw in December. Husband and I even went for a bit of a hike along the coast last weekend and found it to be nothing but peaceful and beautiful. Happily, we did not notice anyone with a gun.