My wife has decided that she wants to lose her prefix. The prefix is "house-".

I don't blame her. After two years of struggling with (or against) two babies, she deserves a change. The trouble is, full-time employment would mean  turning over most of her paycheck to whoever is hired to look after the offspring. Plus, the possibilities aren't so great just now for someone with a BS in physics and limited professional experience. That leaves option B: graduate school. And the best programs for her happen to be abroad.

Not that I have a problem with that. After all, I've dragged her to some pretty dodgy places for my work, and it's only fair that she get her turn. But it happens that the best program for her preferred area of study is here:

 Very picturesque--from a distance

That's Tromsø, Norway, home of the most northerly university on the planet, well above the Arctic Circle. A few winters ago, they had 94.5 inches of snow. Inches, not centimeters. It's the real deal: midnight sun, reindeer, musk oxen.  And long, dark winters. Plenty of time for brooding. Depression. Thoughts of suicide, or murder. These are the people who settled Minnesota and gave us Garrison Keillor.

And I cannot enphasize this enough: round-the-clock darkness for months.  It's well documented what happens to living things in the absence of light.

My sons' future

That's a Texas blind salamander. I know, they live in caves, not the Arctic, but if there were an Arctic salamander, it would probably look like that, only with a long, wooly coat. The point is, I don't want my sons to suffer from ocular atrophy and end up wandering the fjords, cane in one hand, guide husky in the other.

I suppose eveyone knows the term "cabin fever." The short of it is that being confined indoors by cold, snow and darkness makes people act in weird ways and sometimes do very bad things. Like murder. And dismemberment. And cannibalism.

She says it would be a great opportunity for me to write.

In any case, nothing's happening soon, with the complexities of international applications, financial considerations, visas, and such. (Arranging your family's demise takes time.) Till then, I've got months and months to think about wooly salamanders and watch The Shining.