Month: August 2025

I am writing this from a hotel perched above Torshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. In almost any other place, it would be just a fishing village. Here, it holds just under half of the population. The Faroes are part of Denmark but are more-or-less autonomous. If you’re wondering where and what they are, the Faroe Islands are a striated archipelago of volcanic rock in the North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland. The economy is built on salmon farming with some wool production and a budding tourism industry thrown in. It never gets hot here, which is a big part of why I came, and the weather’s defining feature is the wind. Most people risk sunburn on their summer vacations; I’ve been windburned on mine.

Why would I come to a place like this? Several people have asked, so these were the and somewhere I hadn’t been before. There are other places that meet those criteria, but this is the place I chose for this summer. There was also a draw for me in the desolate, wind-swept landscapes that mark this place.

There are almost no trees here. There are also sheep that eat any little seedling they can reach, so it’s not easy to tell if that is entirely the result of weather and wind. There are no land predators on the islands as all mammals were introduced. Naturally, these islands are sanctuaries for seabirds. That is actually one of their main attractions in summer. On Saturday, I took a ferry out to the westernmost island in the archipelago specifically to see the puffins that nest there in a huge colony. The little birds look similar to penguins but can fly, fast if not exactly gracefully, and spend their days this time of year catching fish out at sea and bringing them back to feed their chicks. Watching them might end up being the highlight of the entire trip for me. It was on the way back from Mykines that I got windburned when I calculated that a little sting on my face later would be much preferable to throwing up now on the boat. Later today, I’ll be back on a boat taking in views of sea cliffs on another island. The weather looks calm this morning, so I hope that the seas will be smooth and that I will enjoy it as much as I have most of the other places I’ve seen.

Despite its size, Torshavn packs a culinary punch. I suppose that is to be expected as it is ultimately governed from Copenhagen. All of the restaurants definitely have Copenhagen prices. I’ve had really good food at a few places; I’ve also had to eat two dinners, but I’ll reflect on the food more once the trip is finished. Culturally, the place is more like Iceland than Denmark (I haven’t been to Norway to make that comparison) and the language isn’t Danish at all. According to what one of the guides said, the islands were given to Denmark by the king of Norway a few hundred years ago as a dowry for his daughter. That historical quirk explains those differences so I have little reason not to believe him.

Last weekend, we took advantage of one of the newer airlines offering underserved route pairs to have my brother and sister-in-law fly nonstop to come stay with me. My parents also had already planned to be in North Carolina around the same time, so they extended their stay and drove farther east to join us. I expect that there was some advance coordination, but those logistics did mean both that everyone would be together for a few days and that I’d be saved a trip to the airport on Thursday afternoon.

Since it was my brother and sister-in-law’s first visit to the Triangle, we crammed in a lot of local restaurants: Dim sum; Peruvian chicken; local smashburgers; Persian ice cream; and a fancy new American place that I hadn’t had a reason to visit previously. We visited the farmer’s market on Saturday morning for breakfast pastries and I scrambled to find a coffee shop where Dad could get another cup. As I don’t drink coffee, that was harder than planning all of the various restaurants. It was definitely more driving than I usually do in the course of a weekend and that may have led to a warped perspective and/or disorientation as to where different places are relative to each other in the Triangle, but such costs must be paid sometimes for culinary exploration.

I worked more than I’d hoped on Friday (there was a closing after all and Bill didn’t return until Monday), so they went off and explored some on their own since they had another vehicle. This followed them joining me for an early lunch after they had spent the morning walking along the forested paths through the neighborhood. No one complained to me about the trip, so I’ll take that as a positive.

This week also marked the official closing of a chapter as I handed in my apartment key fob and garage access card at the conclusion of my lease. I’ve now fully moved into my new accommodation and have survived having five people here for ~72 hours. I don’t expect to have any more visitors for a little while, though I do hope to have more on average here than I did while I lived downtown. One of the big differences is that now I have a guest bedroom that doesn’t also double as my office.

Last week I described the goal as minimum viability for my new living quarters. I’d transported some stuff over the weekend but the big moving day was Monday. That I’m covering for both of us with client work meant there wasn’t much time or energy left for unpacking and arranging things. I still worked to make slow, consistent progress, though, and made a bigger push on Saturday.

Now I’ve achieved closer to a normalized baseline. Of course as I sit in my recliner typing this I’m looking at two boxes of decorations that I’ve not yet placed on the shelves they will adorn nor have I put anything up on the walls and so pictures are spread across the dining room table, so the process isn’t exactly complete. There are a few things I still need to purchase to make the space work for me, but I should have those in place within another week or so. Then I should feel the space to be mine. I talked to someone this week about how that part—decorating and settling in—was his favorite part of the whole moving process. While it is certainly better than twisting screws and carrying furniture, I still don’t think I can say I enjoy it. At this point, I just want it to be finished. But maybe that’s just a lesser part of me talking.

All of this is going to be tested in the coming days. I’ll have several guests staying with me so if something isn’t in order they’ll surely point it out and hopefully fix it. I’m not as excited as I’d like to be about family coming here. I’ll mark that down to the volume of work right now. As I described it to a few people, work right now feels like a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie to eat. I know it’s just for a season and I’ll white knuckle my way through it. It’s certainly a better problem to have than the inverse problem of no work that we experienced at the start of last year.