Music by Kevin MacLeod. Photos by Aasulv Wolf Austad. Fun started by Mari who blew a big bubble…

Photographed at Maihaugen museum, Lillehammer, Norway.

I have yet to encounter a culture so obsessed with breakfast. Okay, it’s arguably the most important meal of the day, but Norwegians take it to a new level. Unless you have gotten up early, set out an array of breads, spreads, jams, meats, eggs, juices, fruits, yogurts, and other foods at your breakfast table, something is wrong with you.

Since marrying my Wolf, I’ve adopted the breakfast practice. In California we don’t cover our table with all of the aforementioned foods, but we make a point of sitting down, eating more than a bowl of cereal, and having a nice chat before getting our day started. It gives us a short pause before the chaos of the day starts, and it gives us a chance to talk about the day ahead. There’s something almost meditative about it. Somehow, it makes a difference.

Bread and cheese or bread and jam are the real staples of a good Norwegian breakfast, coupled with a good cup of coffee. Anything left over is usually wrapped up and taken to work as lunch. On this day, we wrapped our leftovers and packed them in our knapsacks before taking a nice walk in the hills of Lillehammer. Where it rained! Rain…I almost never see it in southern California. While everyone else was whipping out jackets and rain pants, I stood in the rain, enjoying every drop.

It was a very last-minute decision. To get on a plane and take the long journey to the land of Vikings. Actually, we contemplated coming here in June, but for a multitude of reasons, decided to stay in California. By the time we decided to go, the price of the trip nearly doubled. Sheesh. But here we are. I haven’t been to Norway in the summertime in ten years - before we got married!

There are berries everywhere: currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries. So many it’s about impossible to pick them all. Maybe that’s why there’s a peculiar law in this country called “alle manns retten” that allows complete strangers to pick berries on uncultivated land, including private property, as long as the land on which the berry trees grow isn’t farmed. In Norway, the law defines cultivated land as “farmyards, plots around houses and cabins, tilled fields, hay meadows, cultivated pasture, young plantations and similar areas where public access would unduly hinder the owner or user.” Pretty much anything else is considered to be uncultivated land. Interestingly, the law states that people who do meander onto uncultivated land for whatever reason - to pick berries or just to take a walk - must behave themselves. Land owners reserve the right to tell naughty or unruly visitors to leave.

At this time of the year, it’s not unusual to see visitors from Germany and Italy hunched over patches of berry bushes, picking, picking, picking. They fill their RVs with the berries and leave. I realize what they’re doing is perfectly within the law, but personally, if I woke up and found an army of German tourists picking the berries on my property, I’d feel kind of odd…

We’ll be here for a couple of weeks, so I don’t think there will be any new mischief mari cookies for a while. However, there are some serious bakers among my in-laws and I’ll try to snap a few shots, maybe even steal a few recipes to post here. Much depends on whether there will even be a bite to see after a pie or tart comes out of the oven. And much more will depend on how successfully I can charm one of my in-laws into giving me a recipe…

Have a berry nice weekend.

Hello, again. If I don’t look familar to you, I’ll remind you: the name’s Patch. The last time I was here, Mari stuffed me into some multicolor jacket that made me look more like Liberace’s son than the class act cat that I truly am. Well, that was tame compared to what she did to me this time: those glasses. I’m not sure Elton John would wear those. And a shirt and tie? Is it just me or is Mari on crack? In addition to being classy, I’m cool. I mean, look at that hot pink tie. Shudder.

But I must say, Mari did make my lovely sister, whom I affectionately call Lady L. look lovely. Trust me, my claws would be out if she made Lady L. look any less dignified than she deserves. After all, Lady L. puts up with moi, and that’s a lot.

Have a cat’s meow of a week my friends.

This past week has brought some really pleasant weather our way. Just when I thought I was going to wilt and die, the mercury dropped. Made me want to get out of the house and enjoy the cool breeze, walk a little more slowly and enjoy the milder weather. It’s amazing how much more I notice in my surroundings when the weather is more tolerant.

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (last week’s weekend read) was superb. I felt a bit devastated by the ending, and I’m not going to tell you more than that. Just read the book. Let me know what you think.

This weekend, I’m jumping into Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of the Them, a collection of short stories. “An Ex-mas Feast,” one of the stories in this collection, first appeared in The New Yorker in 2005 in the magazine’s Debut Fiction issue that year. It made me want to read more of his work. Here’s just a bit from that story:

“Now that my eldest sister, Maisha, was twelcve, none of us knew how to relate to her anymore. She had never forgiven our parents for not being rich enough to send her to school. She had been behaving like a cat that was going feral: she came home less and less frequently, staying only to change her clothes and give me some money to pass on to our parents. When home, she avoided them as best she could, as if their presence reminded her of too many things in our lives that needed money…”

What are you reading?

Happy weekend.

It continues to remain super hot here in Southern California. I’m not heat tolerant. Never have been. So why do I live in Southern California, where summer usually starts in June and goes on through the end of October? Sometimes I ask myself how this all happened. Sometimes, on days like this, when the mercury can top 100 degrees inland, I think, “Did I get on the wrong plane twelve years ago?” Since moving to the LA area in ‘97, I’ve never acclimated fully to this weird, dry, heavy, constant, white heat. But I can never think of where I should move to escape it. I guess I like being here. Minus these long summers.

Stay cool this week, wherever you are.

It’s so hot here in southern California that I’m certain I could cook my dinner on the pavement. I was thinking of making a steak dinner, and I doubt I’d have problems getting that slab of meat well-done. Yes, it’s that hot. After some really cool and occasionally rainy weather in June, I just knew that the white hot heat of July was about to clobber us. It arrived. I’ve been knocked out a few times. It’s summer. I can’t expect anything different.

I like to escape the heat by reading indoors, where the air conditioning keeps me from murderous thoughts. After pulling out my “Books I Want to Read” list, I came across Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name which I’ve been wanting to read for quite a while. The book had been on request for so long in my library system, I nearly gave up on expecting a copy to become available until last week when I got notice that it was sitting at my local branch waiting for me. The story, about a woman who discovers the identity of her biological father, takes place in the lapland region of Finland. Well, on top of being in a cool room, what better way to feel even cooler than to read a story that takes place in one of the coldest regions of the world?  From the start, I’ve been hooked:

“It was three in the afternoon when my plane landed at the Helsinki airport, but outside my window, dusk was already settling in like a bruise. I retrieved my suitcase, its handle cold, and stumbled to the tourist information desk, where a woman with good teeth and bad English helped me find a hotel near the train station. My plan was to take the first train north, to Lapland, after a night of sleep…”

What are you reading?

Happy weekend.

I was saddened to hear of Walter Cronkite’s death. Though I never saw live the broadcasts he anchored following the Kennedy assassination, or the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s historic walk on the moon, I eventually studied his work and grew to admire him. He clearly loved being a journalist, and for him the news always came first. By that I mean, I don’t think he appeared on air because he saw it as a way to become famous. He just happened to be in front of the camera, and took his job as a reporter - literally, someone telling the news to the public - very seriously.

Many seasoned journalists say that there was nothing that excited Mr. Cronkite more than reporting on the U.S. Space program, and if you watch any of the footage of him reporting on space flights, he looked more like a kid in a candy store than the man many called “the most trusted man in America.” The New York Times assembled a few snippets (from YouTube) of Cronkite’s most famous broadcasts, and it’s true: when he was doing the commentary on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, he was exuberant. When I first saw those broadcasts years ago as a budding reporter, I thought, “That’s what it’s like to cover a story that excites you to your core.” And I hoped that I would someday have a similar experience. I did. A few times. And it’s a rush. In those moments, I felt like I was walking on the moon.

Monday, July 20th, 2009, marks the 40th anniversary of man walking on the moon. And did you know that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy? Perfect reasons to come up with a space-themed design.

Have a moonwalk of a week.

After two weeks in Beijing, where he worked on the final color correction for his feature film “GASP,” Wolf returned around midday Wednesday to the sunshine of Los Angeles. Originally, I was going to post a shot or two of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to show you just how ugly a place it is - in my opinion, it is the crappiest and ugliest airport in the country, possibly the world - but then I thought, why would anyone want to see that? Besides, sometimes just thinking of LAX and its dysfunctionality makes me wanna hurl. Skip that.

If we have the time, we like to go to the beach after getting off a lengthy plane ride. There’s something about the fresh sea breeze, the sunshine, the quiet of the ocean that is very calming, very restorative. After a nice little lunch at Le Pain Quotidien, I took my slightly coherent husband to Manhattan Beach, a few miles south of the icky airport. A very beautiful and calming site, indeed.

It’s July 14 - le quatorze Juillet - Bastille Day in France! France’s national holiday commemorates the storming of the Bastille at the start of the French Revolution. When I was a kid growing up in France, I thought this was the most awesome event of the ever. Years later, after covering the G7 Summit in Italy (back then it was the G7 plus one, Russia), I met my mother in Paris in time to catch the July 14 festivities. The parade that year was unusual; a group of German military personnel and their tanks were marching with the French down the Champs Elysees. I remember waking up, opening the shutters of our hotel window, popping my head out and hearing German, not French from down below. Later on, we tried to make our way to the Champ-de-Mars to watch the fireworks at the Trocadéro, but the metro system was clogged! We got off the train and watched the show from a distance. It was still beautiful.