Yesterday afternoon it rained and blew just about the fiercest I’ve experienced. Then typically it stopped as soon as it had started somewhere in the middle of the night.

In England there’s some kind of football (soccer) playoff going on which has captured the attention of a lot of people here. I think it includes larger areas, something in the news about such-and-such a team playing in Israel. Earlier I had noted that English football is huge in Iceland, something that came as a surprise to me. Until recently I never heard of these teams which actually have their own Icelandic fan clubs. When a certain match comes up, as many as 50 to 80 Icelanders travel en masse to places like Liverpool.

At work there’s a large loading dock area for trucks, some of which are tandems which bring mail around the country during the night. People aren’t allowed to smoke there but do, only out of view of the two security cameras. They do this by ducking into certain corners and smoke away. Those in charge don’t like to find cigarette butts on the ground, but there’s a way to avoid this: stuff the butts into stanchions used by the trucks. Each stanchion has a tiny cigarette-but size hole used as an ashtray. I can imagine that when these moveable stanchions are removed or hit by a truck, thousands of butts will fly all over the place.

Although I write this from Iceland, barely a day goes by without someone saying something negative about President Bush. Even here there’s a sense of gloom as a backdrop to life because of what he has done and is continuing to do.