It’s pouring here. It’s been looking ominous for hours: grey clouds among the puffy white ones with plenty of patches of blue. The forecast this morning called for scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon. That vague prediction could have meant, say, a storm quickly passing by at 3pm, but I feared all along that it was going to mean an extended downpour around 5:30-6:30, because I was intending to cook some things outdoors over a charcoal fire around then.
It has happened exactly that way. The weather is sneaky: it waited until I had committed myself: lit the fire and prepared the ingredients.
I think it will work out all right. I can do this without letting the fire go out; I’ll be very wet, but I’ll change my T-shirt before dinner. No problem.
Boy, good luck. Don’t catch cold. Is this at your hytte (your house by the sea) or back at your winter residence? When I was younger I would never have dreamt (sic) that in a few years’ time everyone all over the world would be excitedly discussing… the weather, but I have electric friends in Bangkok, Zanzibar, Vienna and now the US (and me) all doing just that today.
They use hytte in Norway to mean any sort of second home, but they nearly always translate it as “cottage”, which I find absurd, you might as well use hut. It usually means cabin, as in log cabin in the mountains, but it would also be your place.
And the last two nights, despite VERY hot days, it has poured down – bucketed down – at 4am here. Yesterday it was all dry underfoot by dogwalking time; but this morning it’s still slickly wet outside.
I can hear those combine harvesters…
Norwegian slugs are really something!
(something I did not like to have an encounter with…)
It makes me feel guilty about nature, but they really creep me out very much
Julia, it looks just like ours. Maybe it’s a standard European slug. Maybe it’s been standardised by the EU and the EEA. Maybe Barroso and van Rumpey-Pumpey have insisted that we all sweep away our old-fashioned national slugs and accept a Euroslug. Maybe they’ve been bred in a secret slug hatchery in France before release. Or maybe not.
We don’t call ours a cottage, but in my dialect that’s the best single-word way of saying “second home that’s out in the countryside”. Of course, that sometimes means that a very wealthy family calls their humongous second mansion a cottage, which strikes the rest of the world as absurd.To me the word suggests a small place covered with honeysuckle, like Wee Nooke in one of the Bertie and Jeeves stories.
One could also say “beach house”, since it’s just a few miles from a sandy seaside spot. But that fits better if the primary function of the place is conceived of as “place to stay when you go to the beach”, which is not the case here.
To me “hut” suggests something rougher and even smaller (although on the other hand when you hike in the White Mountains of New Hampshire there are “huts” where dozens of visitors can be given a bed and a warm meal — I think these are in a lineage that can be traced back to some true huts).
What is a bungalow, exactly? I get some sort of mental image when I heard the word, but I don’t use it myself. If I tried, I might well misuse it through not knowing some technical distinction.
Crown will, I hope, explain to you the subtleties of “bungalow”. In NZ (the South Island) we discovered that a beach shack was called a “bach”, which people assumed was because a man who invites girls to a bach always claims to be a bachelor.
I once had a cottage that was seven or eight minutes from the beach, by bicycle. We miss it; we both loved it. Sigh!
Rain and scattered thunderstorms, rain and scattered thunderstorms — I’m sick of that forecast! I (and the local farmers) are dying for some sunny, non-muggy days.
In Canada many people have a family “cottage” or “cabin” by the sea or lake, depending on the region. Usually these are only used during the summer, but some of them are “winterized” and rented cheaply to people willing to live in them during the winter. But they are often far from places where one could work at typical jobs, so they sometimes appeal to writers and artists, among other potential hermits.
Once while travelling in the US I had the opportunity to go through Newport and see (from a distance) some of the “Newport cottages” built by New York millionaires 100 years or so ago to send their families to spend the summer by the sea, during the “Gilded Age”. The earliest ones (often still owned and used by the same families) were largish houses but not extravagantly so, but as time went on and social competition between the nouveaux riches became stiffer, the “cottages” were built bigger and bigger, more and more palatial (not necessarily more beautiful), and are now “white elephants” nobody knows what to do with. The heirs (if any are left) often cannot afford to maintain them, even if they were interested, nobody wants to buy them, and the local society which tries to preserve them as historical treasures finds it hard to raise sufficient funds from organizing guided tours for visitors. Converting these buildings for useful purposes such as hotels or whatever would also be prohibitively expensive.
The word “bach” (pronounced “batch”) also exists in Canada, as a verb: for a man “to bach” is to manage living alone like a bachelor (often after separating from a wife, girlfriend or even mother), having to look after his own food, laundry, etc.
I’ve heard of that NZ “bach” before. I don’t know the etymology (i.e. why it’s not spelled batch).
I think of a bungalow as the British equivalent of a (smallish) US ranch house, a one storey house with a gabled or hipped (pitched) roof. They often have prefabricated parts, they’re often red brick, in the suburbs, with a winding concrete path from the gate to the front door, and pretty damn ugly (in my opinion). That’s the image I see when I hear the Beatles’ Bungalow Bill. I’m sure wooden Indian & Australian Victorian-era bungalows, raised on stilts to allow some air to flow underneath and with decorative cast-iron railings are much prettier.
..although if I look for google images of “Indian bungalows” the second one that comes up is this four-storey chunk of international flat-roofed concrete. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.
A Bad Guide
It’s pouring here. It’s been looking ominous for hours: grey clouds among the puffy white ones with plenty of patches of blue. The forecast this morning called for scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon. That vague prediction could have meant, say, a storm quickly passing by at 3pm, but I feared all along that it was going to mean an extended downpour around 5:30-6:30, because I was intending to cook some things outdoors over a charcoal fire around then.
It has happened exactly that way. The weather is sneaky: it waited until I had committed myself: lit the fire and prepared the ingredients.
I think it will work out all right. I can do this without letting the fire go out; I’ll be very wet, but I’ll change my T-shirt before dinner. No problem.
Boy, good luck. Don’t catch cold. Is this at your hytte (your house by the sea) or back at your winter residence? When I was younger I would never have dreamt (sic) that in a few years’ time everyone all over the world would be excitedly discussing… the weather, but I have electric friends in Bangkok, Zanzibar, Vienna and now the US (and me) all doing just that today.
In the end it was not a big deal. I did change my damp shirt before dinner, but I almost didn’t bother.
hytte = cottage?
No, this was at home.
They use hytte in Norway to mean any sort of second home, but they nearly always translate it as “cottage”, which I find absurd, you might as well use hut. It usually means cabin, as in log cabin in the mountains, but it would also be your place.
And the last two nights, despite VERY hot days, it has poured down – bucketed down – at 4am here. Yesterday it was all dry underfoot by dogwalking time; but this morning it’s still slickly wet outside.
I can hear those combine harvesters…
When we lived in S. Australia we were invited to a friend’s “beach shack”. It turned out to be a very well appointed bungalow.
Norwegian slugs are really something!
(something I did not like to have an encounter with…)
It makes me feel guilty about nature, but they really creep me out very much
Julia, it looks just like ours. Maybe it’s a standard European slug. Maybe it’s been standardised by the EU and the EEA. Maybe Barroso and van Rumpey-Pumpey have insisted that we all sweep away our old-fashioned national slugs and accept a Euroslug. Maybe they’ve been bred in a secret slug hatchery in France before release. Or maybe not.
“Accept an Euroslug!”
Embrace the Euroslug!
Tell Merkel & Co. about this very compelling unity force (?)
Nadie va a querer quedar afuera…
Enviado desde mi BlackBerry de Movistar (http://www.movistar.com.ar)
We don’t call ours a cottage, but in my dialect that’s the best single-word way of saying “second home that’s out in the countryside”. Of course, that sometimes means that a very wealthy family calls their humongous second mansion a cottage, which strikes the rest of the world as absurd.To me the word suggests a small place covered with honeysuckle, like Wee Nooke in one of the Bertie and Jeeves stories.
One could also say “beach house”, since it’s just a few miles from a sandy seaside spot. But that fits better if the primary function of the place is conceived of as “place to stay when you go to the beach”, which is not the case here.
To me “hut” suggests something rougher and even smaller (although on the other hand when you hike in the White Mountains of New Hampshire there are “huts” where dozens of visitors can be given a bed and a warm meal — I think these are in a lineage that can be traced back to some true huts).
What is a bungalow, exactly? I get some sort of mental image when I heard the word, but I don’t use it myself. If I tried, I might well misuse it through not knowing some technical distinction.
To me, “hut” and “cabin” are nearly synonyms. What is a dacha exactly?
Crown will, I hope, explain to you the subtleties of “bungalow”. In NZ (the South Island) we discovered that a beach shack was called a “bach”, which people assumed was because a man who invites girls to a bach always claims to be a bachelor.
I once had a cottage that was seven or eight minutes from the beach, by bicycle. We miss it; we both loved it. Sigh!
Rain and scattered thunderstorms, rain and scattered thunderstorms — I’m sick of that forecast! I (and the local farmers) are dying for some sunny, non-muggy days.
Wikipedia does a pretty good job on dachas.
“Bach” pronounced “batch”? Give me a break. That’s like “mic” pronounced “mike”>
In Canada many people have a family “cottage” or “cabin” by the sea or lake, depending on the region. Usually these are only used during the summer, but some of them are “winterized” and rented cheaply to people willing to live in them during the winter. But they are often far from places where one could work at typical jobs, so they sometimes appeal to writers and artists, among other potential hermits.
Once while travelling in the US I had the opportunity to go through Newport and see (from a distance) some of the “Newport cottages” built by New York millionaires 100 years or so ago to send their families to spend the summer by the sea, during the “Gilded Age”. The earliest ones (often still owned and used by the same families) were largish houses but not extravagantly so, but as time went on and social competition between the nouveaux riches became stiffer, the “cottages” were built bigger and bigger, more and more palatial (not necessarily more beautiful), and are now “white elephants” nobody knows what to do with. The heirs (if any are left) often cannot afford to maintain them, even if they were interested, nobody wants to buy them, and the local society which tries to preserve them as historical treasures finds it hard to raise sufficient funds from organizing guided tours for visitors. Converting these buildings for useful purposes such as hotels or whatever would also be prohibitively expensive.
The word “bach” (pronounced “batch”) also exists in Canada, as a verb: for a man “to bach” is to manage living alone like a bachelor (often after separating from a wife, girlfriend or even mother), having to look after his own food, laundry, etc.
I’ve heard of that NZ “bach” before. I don’t know the etymology (i.e. why it’s not spelled batch).
I think of a bungalow as the British equivalent of a (smallish) US ranch house, a one storey house with a gabled or hipped (pitched) roof. They often have prefabricated parts, they’re often red brick, in the suburbs, with a winding concrete path from the gate to the front door, and pretty damn ugly (in my opinion). That’s the image I see when I hear the Beatles’ Bungalow Bill. I’m sure wooden Indian & Australian Victorian-era bungalows, raised on stilts to allow some air to flow underneath and with decorative cast-iron railings are much prettier.
..although if I look for google images of “Indian bungalows” the second one that comes up is this four-storey chunk of international flat-roofed concrete. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.
Surely they have top have a verandah to qualify, Crown?