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Midnight Sun: A natural phenomenon occurring in the summer months north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle where the sun never fully sets and remains visible 24 hours a day.

This short time lapse film was shot during the Icelandic Midnight Sun in June of 2011.

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complete article:: Meteorologists Follow Fate of Snowdrift on Mt. Esja

Then the lights go out. Transformer outside gets knocked over by a truck. Crap, no more AC. Computers still up on UPS for a while but eventually that goes down too. Boss man freaks out, laptop still good but no internet. Hold on, I start up my WiFI Hotspot and boss man plus a few others get online. He’s amazed and thrilled. A few seconds later the lights go back on. He looks at me and asks, what did you do? I tell him not much but Android is so powerful it is powering your office. But not for long, the battery is rather small.

karma points for the day.

When all hell breaks loose

Snow delays the start of summer in Iceland.

The picture of fresh snow on the lovely Mt Esja looks a lot like the picture I took in November.  That mountain is amazing and almost mystical.  It never looks the same two days in a row.

And my own:

Supermoon2011

If you can walk to it, hop on, and be downtown quickly then it’s all good.

From “In a dim light: neither daylight”

December darkness is something that I once feared and that may seem like a terrifying thing to people from brighter places. Most Icelanders I’ve talked with find it to be something that one simply deals with, or in some cases, embraces.

On still days and nights when not a single branch twitches nor dead leaf rustles, it’s a time full of witching hours, these hours that stretch from black to sunup- the blueness of the pre-dawn that makes white blankets look aquatic, the white simplicity of light on cloudy winter days, the rich and magical navy of dusk, the purest black of nighttime. Even a clear full-day sky is deep glacial cobalt, and then the snowed mountains across the bay emanate the most perfect kind of frigidity I can imagine. Whenever I want to think of the coldest temperature imaginable, I am sure my mind will go to the black mountains to the north, etched with glowing snow and edged by Arctic sea waters.

Offsetting this chill is the delirium of lights that cover the city- every tree that can hold a bulb is draped, stores staple entire illuminated evergreens over the doors, and windows are festooned with candles. A Saturday stroll becomes a festivity of greetings, street caroling, pepper cookies and cocoa. It’s a tiny glowing oasis in the midst of the miles of darkness beyond, where one single car light over on Kjalarnes can be followed on its entire outbound journey around Esja, a dot of bright in deepest black.

Over here on the banks of Lake Ontario the late Spring finally gave way to a very hot and very dry summer. Too hot and too dry for my liking. But these extra hot days often end with a sudden and explosive thunderstorm. We get some big boomers over here. Iceland sees very few thunderstorms. The last few days here have been unusually hot and humid. But I’ve been watching the clouds grow all afternoon and the wind is now gusting to 70kph. Before dusk or just after we should be getting a big storm off the lake. Tonight should finally be cool and fresh. I hope.

The other night during my drive home a radio show had one of those conspiracy theory leaning alien visit guys on. Normally I would turn it off but I let it go for a while, to have a good laugh perhaps. This fellow and the host were dragging out a notion that a particular area of Canada experiences “about half” of the country’s UFO sightings. They managed to spend ten minutes repeating in different ways the suggestion that hmmm, this must mean something. From over “half” it became “around 50%” and finally “44 almost 45%”. OK, now tell me how big this area is. Oh, this area encompasses 43% of Canada.

So, considering that the prairies are so flat you can watch your dog as it runs away for a week, large parts of the country are uninhabited, and finally that urban areas are too bright to see much sky, I failed to see the significance of this juicy statistic. I wasted 10 minutes on something I would normally not give 10 seconds to and in the end I didn’t even get a good laugh.