Sadly, I am going to be cleaning up these kitchen shelves today, so I don’t have time for a post — you can see it’s nearly a quarter-to-one already:
I won’t be sad when it’s done, however. Then I’ll do a proper post.
I don’t know, I think you can kind of see a difference in the ‘After’:
The tea has more room, and for the next half-an-hour or so the spices will be in a line. Then everything will begin to revert to komplet kaos.
A Bad Guide 
The corckscrew being on the upmost shelf, one can think that wine isn’t drunk very often in the Crown family. Do aquavit bottles come with a screwed cap?
I drink virtually only red wine, nearly every day. We buy it in those 2-litre boxes. Apparently in other countries the box wine isn’t very good quality, but it’s okay here, I drink mostly a Chilean cabernet sauvignon. So that’s why we don’t use the bottle opener, which was a wedding present.
I think aquavit does come with a screw cap. On the top shelf in the green bottle was a quite nice Czechisch liquor, but on cleaning up I found it was empty, unfortunately. Next to it is an unopened 10-year-old (brown) bottle of Scottish beer.
On the top shelf in the green bottle was a quite nice Czechisch liquor, but on cleaning up I found it was empty, unfortunately.
If it wasn’t so high you could have suspected some foul play from the goats, but since it was on the top shelf…
Good thinking, but they’d rather eat paper.
Sadly, in my house that picture would be the “after” shot, not the “before” one. I’m impressed that you consider those shelves in need of tidying…
I have a similar problem with my bookshelves, except that my largest bookshelf wouldn’t fit up the stairs in my new place, and I had to give it up. So the majority of my books are still in boxes, and my living room is basically unusable. For the last two days I have been combing the Ikea, Target, and even Walmart websites to find something appropriate that matches our school’s latest round of budget cuts, but the best thing so far has been a $70 four-shelf item from Office Depot that I would need to buy at least three of.
I may just use planks and cinder blocks. But first I suppose I need to repair (why do movers always break things?) and level the bookshelves I already have (my new floor is like a roller coaster), and start filling them up.
Aven: in my house that picture would be the “after” shot, not the “before”
I don’t want you to get the impression that we’re obsessively tidy. The after shot here doesn’t look very different, it mostly had to do with removing greasy dust.
What about the horse manure? Did you leave it where it was?
Greasy dust. I am currently wondering if I have ever seen anything like that…
No, I didn’t touch any (of the) horse or goat manure. There’s nothing wrong with it, because they’re vegetarians, you see.
Greasy dust — or I think I really mean dusty grease — is very common in dirty kitchens. At least, in the Northern Hemisphere it is.
Cool — on the third shelf down from the top on the right, you have a feeder. (The duck shaped thing.) Is it modern or old?
It’s new(ish), we got it new about ten years ago for sauce, but it doesn’t hold very much or pour very well. Do you want it?
I have seen duck shaped drinking bowls carved from wood, I think at the Wisconsin stavechurch place. The Norwegian immigrants would have carved them. (for beer?) It has to be a pretty old theme.
If I had my books out of the boxes already, I would look it up.
Sorry, like so many things this duck-shaped thing takes me to somewhere in a book that I’ve read too many times. In this case, it’s not Austen but Wodehouse. Bertie Wooster on his uncle’s prized cream dispenser (18th century, not modern Dutch!):
It was a silver cow. But when I say “cow”, don’t go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, underworld sort of animal … The sight of it seemed to take me into a different and a dreadful world.
It’s probably a modern reproduction of an old feeder. I would take it — my mother collected them and other nursing/medical antiques. Her collection was deeded to a nursing foundation, and it turned out to be something like the second largest collection of nursing stuff after the Florence Nightingale Museum. So I’d send it to the collection as a Norwegian modern example of a feeder:) You could be famous: “Kindly donated by Mr Crown from his Norwegian farm.” (Well, famous in a nursing foundation museum in upstate NY. That’s NOTHING compared to your online fame.)
The corkscrew is, of course, going the way of the phonograph. Even the very best wines will eventually ditch corks, according to a friend who was NZ Sommelier of the Year 3 years running, so that will be a little more space on your shelf.
I’m with Aven: that would be my “after” picture as well. I have the same Alessi corkscrew btw, only in red, it works very well. Apparently it’s called Anna G.
Ours is called the green corkscrew.
This was a sinister, leering, underworld sort of animal …
Killer cows!
Also, that would be our “after” picture as well, though I’m not sure we’d dare have such knock-downable items on the lower shelves, what with the cats and the grandsons.
That’s a very funny killer cows article (as of course is the PGWode.). We’re surrounded by gangs of cows, but they prey on the weak just like the bad kids in New York do. When my daughter was young they used to chase us (because we were running away from them). Nowadays we look them in the eye and call them by name, and they’d just as soon mug their own mother.
Yes, the killer cow story is funny (sort of). I adore county fairs, and last year spent a happy day at one in Saratoga. There were some giant cows there. As a city slicker, you forget how big those babies are. There were also a couple of huge oxen who looked like they came from another planet.
The “after” picture intrigues me. With the “before” picture, everyone was remarking on the objects themselves and their functions. I admit I was looking at the shelving for a possible solution to my book problem and trying to figure out whether it would corral books and how it attached to the wall. (I would end up with destroyed plaster if I tried it.)
When I look at the “after” picture, I see shapes, colors, and balances, not objects. Round on one side mirrors round on the other; cylinders, rectangles, and corkscrews march in formations. If I look for just an impression of “dark” I see an hourglass shape from top to bottom. My kitchen shelves sure don’t do that. Yet.
It’s cd storage that came from IKEA (2 units). They would be good for paperbacks if they still sell it, they’re only about five or six inches deep. They screw to the wall. I love ’em. My wife rearranged a few items when she got home. Like all these things, it looks best when it’s not too jam-packed with stuff — space being the ultimate luxury.
I’m afraid I prefer the “before” state of affair. It looks too orderly now. The herbs and spice bottles for instance, they just look like a line of little North Korean soldiers.
But where did the pobans come from? Spontaneous generation?
Don’t worry, Sig it’s all messed up again now.
Not sure what pobans are, but the only thing that generates spontaneously in Scandinavia is Christmas trees.
it’s all messed up again now
Ouf, what a relief!
Compare the two pictures and you might understand what a poban is. Or look for it on a website dealing with Martianisms.
(Oh, that might as well be the next post’s subject.)
Do Christmas trees generate spontaneously at any time of the year, even if we need them at the beginning of summer only?
“Hog bananas”?
Hog bananas do not spontaneously generate in Norway (to my knowledge; maybe up north).
Christmas trees divide like cells all year round.
Yeah, I was wondering where the jars suddenly came from and what’s in them.
Aha! Now I know what they are, the pobans were on the floor in the ‘before’ picture. They contain parrot food, assorted seeds.
That’s rather odd. Apparently in Haitian Creole, according to Wikipedia, a poban is another word for a ‘hog banana’. That can’t be right. (It’s one-third of the way down, you’ll have to do a ‘find’: poban).
So Bruessel knew it too! It must be an ordinary French word, not Creole. Or perhaps Bruessel knows Creole.
That’s a shelf of pet food.
Oh, never mind. You have covered all this in your post, Sig, I see now I read it.
I don’t know Creole, but Google took me straight to Sig’s post, I’m surprised it didn’t do the same for you.
It didn’t for me because when I looked earlier today Sig’s post hadn’t yet been written.
Upthread, Sig says, “Ouf, what a relief!”
Ouf?
Is this Martian? Could it be a form of Martian “uffda”? I don’t even know if they have uffda in Norway. (I once heard my Danish relations say “oof”.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uff_da
“Ouf” is a French expression, and I’ve often wondered whether the Norwegian one comes from French (the reverse seems unlikely, to me).
In my experience, in Norway, (h)uff da is most often used with children who fall over or say something surprising. The English would be “Goodness!” or “Oops!”
Other meanings in the Wiki article are more usually expressed by “Huff a meg!” rather than “Huff da!” (in my experience).
I didn’t know ‘uff da’ was used in the United States.
My mother (a second-generation Norwegian-American) said it constantly; of course, I always thought it was “ufta” and only learned the conventional spelling as an adult. She also made potato dumplings called komla, which must be a dialectal name because the Norwegians I’ve met have never heard of it.
Where in Norway was her family was from?
Komla
We’re entering a dangerous zone now. Hadn’t Norway out of sheer luck been ruled from Denmark and Sweden for the first centuries after the introduction of the potato, ferocious wars would have been fought over the name of this dish.
This is an important question. The dish is more common along the western coast, broadly defined as everywhere but in the central, eastern region. The name changes regionally but, I think, also locally. Clearly, such vital information should have been available in a map, but it seems not, so I’ll speak from idiosyncratic impression. Broadly speaking it’s ‘kumpe’ or ‘kumle’ in the southern and southwestern parts (up past Bergen), ‘klubb’ until somewhere around Molde, and ‘ball’ further north. The ending -a, showing that the vowel quality in unstressed final syllables is retained, seems to suggest that the Hat family was from the western (around Stavanger) rather than from the southern (around Kristiansand) part of Kumleland. In Bergen, and also by those who knows it in the eastern region, it’s ‘raspeball’.
The dish consists of a dough of mashed potatoes and flour, shaped to balls, usually around a piece of salty meat, and boiled in meat juice. The meat can be salty flesh, morrpølse, or, nowadays, bacon.
As we all know boiled lumps of flour and/or mashed potatoes extend far beyond the borders of Norway. In Germany they can be called ‘Knull’ or ‘Knödeln’, and gradually through the Alps they become ‘Gnocchi’ and different sorts of pasta. I suspect ‘Knödel’ and ‘noodle’ (<- *knoodel?) to be the same word.
Morrpølse is in any good grocery store, and most of the bad ones, but, like geitost and rømme (sour cream) it’s really to be bought directly from dairy farms along the mountain passes in the western region. And the more obscure dialectal and archaic Nynorsk spelling on the wooden signpost, the better the food. Or that’s how it was a generation ago when my family used to go there by car in the summers.
My mother’s family was from Sauda, at the end of the Sauda fjorden about fifty miles to the northeast of Stavanger, so Trond Engen is spot on in his dialectal analysis. I believe the family name in the old country was Gunnarsrød, though they changed it on arrival in the Land of Altered Surnames.
Trond Engen is also spot on in his description of the dish, which makes me miss my mother and gives me an appetite even though I’ve just had a fine Sunday breakfast (bacon, eggs fried in bacon grease, English muffins, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and hot strong black coffee).
Oh, drat, I was all ready for a healthy breakfast of tea and pita, but now I am compelled to have breakfast in the high cholesterol zone. Even now I have on the stove Italian sausage, eggs, plantain, and hot coffee with cardamom….if you fry it in olive oil that makes it all okay, right?
Nijma: Bedouin coffee with one-quarter cardamom, boiled for 24 hours, I hope.
Gunnarsrød
It’s a small country. I happened to look at this name just a few weeks ago. You’ll probably know much of this, but I’ll start with some background for the benefit of the international audience:
It’s transparent as a toponym, the name of a ‘gard’, a family farm or a group of farms stemming from the same original settlement and usually sharing some functions. It used to occur in personal names essentially as the address added when needed. After inherited surnames became obligatory some 100 years ago many families, especially those who owned farms, made these names their inherited surnames. Others, especially in towns, used patronymics. Hence all the -sens.
Turning to the name at hand, the first part is the male name Gunnar, the Norwegian cognate of Günther and Gundaharius. The ending -rød (more common -rud, Sw. -ryd) meant “(pioneer’s) clearing”, a cognate of Eng. -royd and related to the verb rid. Thus it means “Gunnar’s clearing”.
Names of the type [personal name or byname] + -ru/ød are usual for small farms in the outskirts of the main settlements, and these farms were generally settled in High Medieval times. It’s generally supposed that the first part is the name of the original settler. They are omnipresent in the eastern parts of the country.
In the western parts, however, they are almost non-existent. Out of Norway’s more than 2600 ru/ød names, only 13 are in the region from Grimstad to Molde, and yours is the only western one with a personal name in front. That is what made me look at it.
So what did I see? Well, according to Oluf Rygh: Norske Gaardnavne the locals simply called it /rø/ or /stóra rø/ (note the -a in the adjective). I would attribute this to one of two: Either the Gunnar part is a ghost element, attributed by an official to an owner or a farmer at the time of registration, the ghost form being kept in the registries but hardly coming into popular use, or it suggests that the type was in use in western Norway, too, but that the first element was dropped elsewhere because the scarcity made the specification redundant. Either way, it’s significant that Sauda is the only parish in western Norway with two -rød farms.
Absolutely fascinating — I’m glad I brought it up! And no, I hadn’t known any of that; I wonder if the remaining members of my mother’s family in Iowa do.
Oh, by the way. One of Norway’s most prominent authors is the witty and fabulating marxist Kjartan Fløgstad from Sauda. Since his name is local, Gunnarsrød is in the valley and Fløgstad is a few km away by the fjord, I’ll bet the two of you are related as 3rd, 4th or 5th cousins or something.
His 1977 breakthrough novel ‘Dalen Portland’ explores the early-and-mid 20th century transformation of the small agricultural community of Lovra (a barely disguised Sauda) into an industrial town depending on the global markets. He returns to Lovra in several of his later novels, but I think Dalen Portland is the only one that’s been translated into English.
I’ve only read one of his lesser books, where internal left-wing quibbles became something of a turnoff, but I’ve been planning to pick up his Lovra novels. His major works are said to transcend politics like, say, those of a García Marques. (A friend of mine from university, himself from Sauda and far from being a Marxist, considers Fløgstad almost a deity.)
Wow, I’ll have to look for that — thanks a million!
I see it’s called Dollar Road in English.
…And I just ordered it!
Hey, where is everybody?
They might all be busy dusting their shelves. Have you finished doing it already?
Uh-oh — brb…
Still here. I sort of came to the end of what I had to say about Sauda.
I might add that a singer/songwriter from Sauda, Bjørn Eidsvåg (here and here ), is one of our biggest names nationally.
Reidar Brendeland and his band Vestlandsfanden has cooperated with Kjartan Fløgstad, but his/their fame is more regional.
(h)uff da
I got stuck in Sauda and almost forgot that this reminded me of something.
In Norwegian (and, i think, the other Scandinavian languages) it’s normal to add ‘da’ or ‘då’ “then” to interjections or similar utterings. In some cases it adds emphasis, in others mild surprise. The iconic Norwegian American ‘uffda’ is but one example. Another is ‘auda’ “ouch”. Based on “real” words are ‘såda’ “now, now” (lit. “so, then”), ‘nåda’ “what now?” (lit. “now, then”) and possibly the first element of ‘gudameg’ “oh my God! (or rather a euphemistic swearword of similar connotations as “oh my gosh”) (lit. “God, then, to me”?).
It’s also used with the answer words: ‘jada’ “oh, yes” (affirmative), ‘joda’ “oh yes” (countering a negation” and ‘neida’ “oh no” . Each of these may be doubled and tripled for emphasis. E.g., if bored by my wife’s reminding me of things I have to do but don’t really care about (and won’t admit that I’ve forgot all about, again), I’ll reply Jaddajaddajadda’.
Does this lead to anything? Jada. The famous Seinfeld Yada Yada episode uses this answer just like I would do. If it’s not based in Yiddisch, and at least Wikipedia doesn’t say it is, it has to be from Scandinavian.
Paul:
Is that how you do it? When I first came back I kept boiled cardamom seeds in the teapot until I found a shop that could grind the gawa beduweeya with hale for me just like they do in Amman. Or is this how they used to make coffee over on Duwar Thelatha?
Language Hat: In the Wikipedia article about the American Nobel Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug that I just happened to read in a totally unrelated errand it’s mentioned that his grandfather was “integral in the establishment of the Immanuel Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Congregation in the small Norwegian-American community of Saude, near Cresco, Iowa in 1889.