#tumblogging

Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

I'm doing a badge. I'm often doing a badge. This is a Pawprints badge which is something I generally reserve for doing with my kids rather than doing on my own but there's no real reason not to. Mostly it's because you have to do a Game, a Craft, a Food and an Other plus a certain number of extra activities depending on age and I find doing a Game on my own quite difficult.

This time the Game was "complete a quiz about volcanoes" so I did all the volcano quizzes I could find!

But the reason we're here today is that I need to find out some fun facts about volcanoes and share them with people. They were in the first draft of my post about the Icelandic volcano on my real blog but then it got way too long and I removed them for the real thing. Didn't keep them, did I! Got to start again.

So, let's get into the fun facts. We're starting with Fagradalsfjall.

Fun fact number 1, it's on private land and the landowners have decided to charge for parking. That's very un-Icelandic. It used to be sheep farming land and I guess the sheep can't graze on lava.

#2 Geologists think the Fagradalsfjall eruption heralds about 150 years of volcanic activity on the Reykjanes peninsula which has been dormant for about 8000 years.

#3 This eruption is similar to the Holuhraun eruption of 2014/15 in that it's a fissure eruption with lots of fire fountains and rivers of lava and baby craters born rather than the re-awakening of a cone-shaped pre-existing volcano. Fairly thin lava, no ash, no dirty lightning. And yet I have a tiny sample of the lava for each and they're very different. Holuhraun had "stale" lava which was rich in heavy metals and so the sample is very heavy and very prickly. Fagradalsfjall's sample is much more solid, slightly shiny, with little pieces of gold and white embedded in it and a few air holes.

#4 Although the eruption is a good hour's drive from Reykjavik, you could see it from most of the south-west and Reykjanes as if it was just the next street over.

#5 The Holuhraun eruption created a lava field the size of Manhattan.

#6 The Laki lava field, from the 1783 eruption (also fissure, thin lava, fire fountains, baby craters) is the second largest created in human history. The largest is its neighbour, Eldhraun.

#7 Although the Laki eruption happened in the middle of nowhere and stopped short of the village church by the power of prayer, it's Iceland's most deadly volcano because of the volume of toxic gases it produced. It killed crops and animals, animals and people starved through lack of crops and then lack of animals, it blotted out the sun for about half the world, caused crop failure and famines as far away as Egypt and affected the weather as far away as south-east Asia and Iceland takes credit for the French Revolution via the famine Laki caused in France that decade.

#8 The reason Eyjafjallajokull caused such havoc with planes in 2010 was that it was an eruption under a thick ice cap. Ice + fresh lava = ash and lots of it. It caused no actual damage in Iceland. The nearby farm spent months digging itself out of ash drifts and a small glacial lagoon got buried but there was no structural damage, no death, etc.

#9 Next to Eyjafjallajokull is a larger glacier called Myrdalsjokull which has a large ice cap and a larger volcano underneath. This volcano is called Katla and it erupts about every 100 years. It last erupted in 1918. By the standards of our primitive volcano-understanding, it's overdue. It's ten times the size of Eyjafjallajokull and its ash cloud will cause absolute chaos.

#10 Good news: there are theories that the reason Katla hasn't erupted is that she's had some mini-eruptions, like little leaks under the ice, which have relieved the pressure. She's the same system as Eyjafjallajokull and historically, an eruption in one has been rapidly followed by an eruption in the other. Twelve years is stretching the volcanic definition of "rapidly" so we might get away with it this lifetime.

#11 On the end of the Snaefellsnes peninsula, visible on a clear day from Reykjavik, is a volcano called Snaefellsjokull. It's the entrance to the underworld in Jules Verne's Voyage to the Centre of the Earth. Until the last couple of years, it's been marked grey in Iceland's volcano monitoring system, meaning that it's so inactive they don't monitor it. I don't think it's going to erupt any time soon (it's been dormant for about 1700 years) but it's now added to the monitoring list and is green, which is the lowest level of monitoring - normal, non-eruptive.

#12 Two volcanoes are yellow - the Fagradalsfjall system and the Askja system. Askja is in the middle of nowhere and the only people likely to be injured are the few adventurers who are either visiting it when/if it erupts or anyone staying at the nearby mountain huts. It has a huge flooded caldera, a crater lake on a giant scale, and I think that'll overflow first and then the lava will come along.

#13 However, part of the reason the Askja region is so barren is that Askja has a tendency to throw out pumice. Pumice is fun because it's light and floats but it also poisons the land.

#14 A lot of houses on Heimaey collapsed because of volcanic debris thrown out. It was just too heavy. The massive lava flow ate up part of the town but part of it just collapsed under the weight of the debris.

#15 Heimaey is an island off the south coast of Iceland. One night, about 1am, on a stormy winter night, a fissure opened up. By the time the eruption finished, there was a new volcano behind the town nearly as tall as the quiet old volcano that stood and watched the events.

#16 The Heimaey residents fought the volcano because it threatened to eat up their harbour and they couldn't have the fishing industry devastated by that. So they sprayed the lava with seawater to try and cool it which meant that at the very least, it might move more slowly and they might be able to redirect the flow or even stop it.

#17 They won.

#18 Volcanoes erupt every four to five years in Iceland. I missed Fagradalsfjall because of the plague but I'll have plenty more opportunities to catch a live eruption in the future.

#19 However, Fagradalsfjall was the first one in the last twenty years that was practical to visit. Holuhraun was in the middle of nowhere and happened during the winter - even in summer it's a good three to four hour drive across the Desert of Misdeeds to the lava flow. We all know what Eyjafjallajokull did in 2010 and then in 2000, Hekla erupted. That was quite good.

Hello!

I'm an outdoors, adventure & travel blogger over at iamapolarbear.com and this is my "second channel". This is the place where I'll sporadically post other stuff, stuff that's either irrelevant to my main blog or too personal or doesn't fit or just stuff I want to rant and rave about. It'll be under the tag "polar bear plus" if you want to block or mute it but if you do, this blog is nothing but reposts of my usual main blog posts and there's very little point in following it.

But yeah, I just wanted to clarify the purpose of this Tumblr. It's Polar Bear Plus, it's More Polar Bear, it's Polar Bear Vlogs (Except in Written Form but I Can't Call It Blogs Because I Already Have That), it's Polar Bear Behind the Scenes. Actually, I like Polar Bear Plus. I'm not renaming it because I want it to be nice and obvious what "brand" this belongs to but yeah, think of it as Polar Bear Plus.

If you haven't used the plague to pick up a language, Duolingo is the world's favourite and also least-favourite language learning app, the one where you get nagged by the green owl. When you start doing lessons on it, you earn points and when you earn points, you're put in the Bronze league. At the end of the week, the people with the most points get moved up into the Silver league. At the end of the next week, the people with the most points get moved up into the Gold league and the people with the fewest points get moved back down into Bronze to make way for the new people coming up. You work your way up through ten or twelve or twenty leagues until you reach the top level, the Diamond league.

I've long suspected there are multiples of all these leagues. There are about 30 spaces in each league and if you take my top guess of 20 leagues, that's only 600 users. It only counts people who are active during a given week, so that's going to be a relatively small fraction of Duolingo's total users but even so, there's no way that all the learnings are fitting in these leagues.

A friend of mine is also using Duolingo. She was a couple of leagues ahead of me and then she reached the Diamond league and then she fell out of it the week I got into it. Two or three weeks later she was back - it says on her profile that she's in the Diamond league and it says on my profile that I'm in the Diamond league. But she's not there so now at last I know for absolute certain that there are multiple leagues!

Finishing the week at number one in the Diamond league is a bit of an accomplishment. There's a digital badge on your profile called Legendary for people who achieve it. Turns out it's more than one person a week achieving it so I'm probably not actually Duolingo's single legendary winner this week. But it's something I was quite happy to know I'd never achieve. I'd look at how many points I got in a week and as long as it was enough that I didn't get demoted, I was happy because I looked at the points of the people in the top three and I knew I'd never get there.

But.

Last week I reached a 50-day streak. I'd done my Duolingo lessons faithfully every day for fifty days. Actually, I missed two in that period but I'd spent some of my gems (you win them for lessons) on streak freezes which meant Duolingo let me get away with it. And 48 days out of 50 is pretty respectable. Anyway, because I'd reached this nice big number, Duolingo gave me a free three-day sample of Duolingo Plus, which I'm not going to ever be paying for. I've had a free sample before and I like it, especially the fact that you don't have to sit through Plus ads after every other lesson.

Duolingo is divided into topics and each topic is divided into levels. Five levels to a topic and each level is divided into approximately 3-6 lessons. When you reach level 5, the topic turns gold. But you can spend gems on the bonus legendary level where it turns purple. And if you have Duolingo Plus, you can access these bonus levels for free. So that's what I did. A lesson generally earns you 10XP plus bonuses for good work. A legendary lesson earns 40XP and for a reason I don't know, I was getting mine doubled on Monday and Tuesday. That meant that where I'd been earning 10-15XP for a single lesson last week, I was now earning 80-90XP for exactly the same amount of work.

By Monday night, I'd shot to the top of the Diamond league. Everyone else was left in my dust. I did the same on Tuesday and I realised that #1 finish was within my grasp. I did the same on Wednesday, which was when my Plus trial expired and already I'd lost those double points. But still, I was earning 40-50XP per lesson instead of 10-15, so that was still a win.

For the rest of the week, I sat at #1, head and shoulders above my nearest competitor. I was going to win. I was going to get that badge that I'd never believed possible.

On Sunday, numbers two and three came to play. I was still ahead of #2 but at one point, only by 400XP. The finish comes in the middle of the night. To make sure he couldn't overtake me while I slept, I went for it. I learned Finnish until my eyeballs were falling out, at which point I returned to French. I have a degree in French so I'd entered the lessons at my level rather than at beginner level and the app has updated since I last opened the French course - and it presented me with Stories. It reads a very short story out to you, asks you some questions, gets you to put phrases together in the right order and then checks you've understood the gist at the end. I admit that I wasn't learning much because these are at the sort of level I should have been able to manage by the time I took my GCSEs but they were fun and I wish Norwegian and Finnish had them.

I pulled ahead. #2 kept going. Still a long way behind but that could change quite quickly. Two hours before the deadline, I was 1300XP ahead. There are only three of us in the Diamond league who'd hit 1300XP in the entire week. Surely he couldn't overtake with that many points in two hours? That's half again what he'd done in the previous six and three-quarter days.

But I don't want to.

Our hall is small, with no windows that open. It's long been part of our risk assessment that the front door onto the car park remains bolted for security, so we can't have that open for ventilation. We're not allowed to use the garden because "the playgroup have that". Our girls won't wear masks and they go to three or four different schools, so we'd have the combined contamination of several hundred kids bearing down on us, plus our oldest girl will come and stand right in my face, even when we're outside, even when I'm shouting "go away, there's a plague!!!" (which the little darling always counters with "It'S nOt A pLaGuE, iT's A cOrOnaViRus").

I know everyone else and everything else has gone back to normal. I know everyone else in the district is back inside and face to face. Our closest Guides wear masks but they protest because they don't have to anywhere else, and indeed they don't bother bringing them and then get a disposable one shoved on them when they arrive. I watch festivals and concerts and parties and it's like the plague has ceased to exist - but it hasn't. New cases in the UK are higher now than they've been any time during the entire plague except at the beginning of January and an odd spike in late July. It's not time to go back to Brownies yet.

But I do want to go back. I'm the only leader in the unit with the correct qualifications to run the unit - if I leave or if I take a break, the unit closes. No one wants to go back to Zoom at this late stage. We met on the local rec in the summer but it didn't work very well and by now it's getting a bit cold and dark by the time we're ready to go home.

My other leader is... really sweet and really nice but also really shy. You have to push her to get anything out of her and she doesn't do or say anything of her own initiative. She only had a term and a half as a brand new leader before all this started and she needs time to work as a leader before she'll start to feel confident. She also hates Zoom, which I sympathise with because I hated Zoom so much I put it off for ten months. The previous leader, who quit at Christmas right before the plague, had lost interest and stepped down to Unit Helper. She's picked up a lot since then - she's far more a second leader now than the actual second leader but she is a unit helper and she takes her lead from me. Which means I've spent the last month or so feeling very alone with the weight of this entire unit on my head.

So last night I went to consult my own old Guide leader. She used to be my district commissioner and I knew she'd had some thoughts and ideas. And the actual district commissioner turned up and the leader did indeed have an idea.

It's fine to want to stay outside. But if the evenings are too cold and dark, we'll have to do daytime. Well, daytime will have to be a weekend. No one wants to give up every weekend for Brownies, least of all the leadership team so why don't we do a longer session less regularly? A whole morning, maybe once a month?

Yes, that's an idea. I want our first session to be at a local Scout campsite where we can do some bushcraft/camping stuff we wouldn't otherwise get to do. Some archery, some shelter-building, firelighting and cook lunch over the fire before going home feeling like we'd really done some Brownie stuff. Then we can go to the park and do some orienteering. Maybe get our first aid skills builder done. I know it'll get chilly in November and December (which is as far ahead as I'm thinking) but I'm really liking the idea of forest/bushcraft Brownies, it'll be outside and therefore much safer and because we're the only Saturday Brownies in the division, we might suddenly find we have a bigger audience.

It's thoughts, plans and ideas of post-plague international travel. I'm quite happy staying within two/three hour drives of home for the foreseeable future. I don't miss international travel yet. Yes, I'd like to be watching the Icelandic volcano and luxuriating in outdoors hot tubs that I haven't had to light myself three hours in advance but I don't miss getting to the airport, getting through the airport, sitting on a plane, finding my accommodation, trying to get food in before the shops shut for the night - or even just packing, come to that. I knew international travel wasn't going to last forever for me so I did what I could while I could and while I'd like to get back to it eventually, I'm pretty satisfied with what I've done and feel no great urge for more right now.

But when it is safe to travel again, these are some places I'd like to go:

Iceland

As I said, there's a volcano currently going off. There are several new spas I want to try out. I want someone to dump a ton of money on me so I can try out the exclusive expensive end of the Blue Lagoon. I want to go to the local pools.

Svalbard

I went to Svalbard in November 2015 and I know I did all the things but I've been feeling a craving to go back. In winter. I would like to go to Pyramiden and/or Barentsburg, I want to swim in the big pool that they don't tell tourists about and I want to grab a copy of Harry Potter while I'm there - I've been learning Norwegian and reading in your target language is really useful. I own it on Kindle but it's hard to read properly and I can't stick notes and a bookmark with the names on. You'd think you can get anything on the internet but I just can't find a Norwegian paperback edition.

Finland

I've been learning Finnish lately and I'd like to go and try it out. I was also reading a magazine yesterday that proclaimed Finland the ultimate wellness destination, what with all the forest for bathing and the whole sauna culture and although I'm so not a wellness person, that did sound kind of nice. I adore Helsinki but I'd also like to get out in the wilds a bit. Take a sketchbook, write some poetry, be the wild gremlin of the woods for a week.

Croatia

I keep coming back to the idea of Croatia. I'd like to do MedSailors, apart from that everything about a sailing holiday is not for me. Maybe I'd just like to charter a boat for a day, several days. Maybe I should practice my sailing next summer and hire a boat all by myself. I want to see medieval cities on the edge of perfect blue seas.

The Baltics

I went to Vilnius in 2011 and I think I'd like to go back, stay somewhere that isn't the "best to avoid this area" and really appreciate the Old Town like I did in Tallinn and Riga. I'd like to go back to both of those. I'd also like to spend more time outside the capitals.

What I’ve learnt from struggling over this since about 3pm yesterday (it’s nearly 11am today) is that 1) this is a monumental waste of time and money, four hours so far to produce 259 words 2) I write enthusiastically or not at all.

Well, no. I have two modes. My sentences are either stilted and three words long or they’re flowery and overdone and drag on for several pages. I don’t have a middle ground and I definitely don’t have a lower middle ground. I need to be excited about my subject and small pieces about unknown startups raising $10m in funding just doesn’t get me excited. Come to that, I’ve been trying to write my book about Iceland for nearly four years and that’s not working either because I’m not excited enough about it and that’s something that I know inside out, understand inside out - I was there! - and am excited to write, except that I’m not.

Sometimes I think I’d like to quit my job and become a full-time blogger. But full-time blogger actually means being a whole load of other things. Advertisers. Instagram influencer. Freelance travel writer. I’m terrible at Instagram and as I’m demonstrating right now, I’d be a terrible freelance writer if I don’t really love the subject.

My ex-brother-in-law wanted to be a journalist. He won a prize for it at uni. Then he had an interview with the local paper and they called him the day before the interview and asked him to write a couple of short stories. He declined to do so, declined the interview and continued stacking shelves at the supermarket where he must have been for ten years at that point. I don’t want to be a journalist and I’m discovering right now just how terrible I’d be at it because I couldn’t write those stories under that time pressure but if he’d got that job, that’s exactly what he’d have had to do. No, I will remain a spreadsheet person, when my boss lets me have spreadsheets, I’ll write my blog for fun, I’ll continue to agonise over the lifestyle/personal blog (see, I’m not enthusiastic enough about my subject!) and when I’m in the right mood, I’ll carry on with the Iceland book. I want it to go to publishers so it has to be good and that means I have to be in the right mood.