weather, walkways, wellness

It has been nearly two years since I started keeping track of where/when I go for walks/cycling/skiing/etc using Runkeeper. During the 20 months for which I have records I have only exceeded 100 km in a month on seven different occasions. This month is only nine days old, and already I am over 75 km. What a difference it makes having a 8 km one way trip to get to class. When I first started the Swedish for Immigrants course I was driving in, since 8 km is really too far to walk for a class that starts at 08:15, especially when I already have too much to do and not enough time to do it. However, as soon as the spring was far enough along that the plows pushed back the snow berms from the edges of the road I have been taking my tricycle in, and I like that much better than driving. The down side is that, often, when I get home I just want a nap, instead of having energy to work straight away. Though that could be as much from my tendency to stay up rather later than I should as from the fact that I am not used to pedaling 8 km at a time twice a day. Imagine what the log would look like if I actually made it to class every day!

Somehow Tuesdays has turned out to not be a good day for making it to class. The first Tuesday in March class was canceled in favour of an open-air day when everyone was meant to gather in a park and try winter activities and eat semlor and/or sausages. However, I didn't bother to go, since I am not fond of driving and had never been to the park before and had no idea where I would have parked the car if I did. Ever since then something has come up to prevent me going on Tuesdays. Once I was sick, other times I had meetings or needed to work on my paper, or just plain needed to sleep in. It is starting to feel silly.

On the other hand, other than the week I had a cold and missed three days of classes I have been very good about attending the other days of the week. As a result my Swedish is improving, and I have been making good progress on various sewing projects. It will be interesting to see how long I stick with the program--if I wind up with a day job I will have to stop, but even if I don't, once the weather is warm enough to start working on the earth cellar again I expect my priorities will shift.

Those of you who have been paying attention will know that spring has come early to northern Sweden. However, it has also stayed spring for a very long time. Even now, after weeks of temperatures mostly above freezing (though rarely getting as high as 10 C), there is still a fair bit of residual snow/ice in our field and sections of our yard. I suspect that the pathetic attempt at winter this year is the reason the snow/ice is sticking despite the warmth--every time it snowed it was followed by warmth and rain, but only enough to melt part of it and then re-freeze it, until we were left with a very solid crystalline mass that kept getting denser and denser. Now that very density is permitting large areas to stay whiteish, so all of these bright sunny days we have been having are brighter and sunnier than one might expect.

Even so there has been a fair bit of melting/thawing (aided by some regular ice-chopping on my part) along our walkway, and the paving stones we put in last autumn are once again exposed, and I am wishing I had had time to finish the whole project, instead of getting the cobblestones set around only half of the walkway. Now I need to be patient until the ground along the rest of it thaws enough that I can finish the job.

The other day I saw a post to the Kingdom email list saying that no one had bid to host the Kingdom University in November, and asking some group to please step forward. So I posted a copy of the note to the Frostheim facebook group and asked if anyone knows of an appropriate site in this area, since I certainly don't. It has been four years since I moved to Drachenwald and I have yet to manage to travel to a Kingdom University event--perhaps we can get it to travel to me. However, if we want to make it happen we need to be quick--they need a bid by Monday, and I am told that at least a group in ID is also interested. A few people have suggested potential local sites and are calling them. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it.

mmm, smells nice

Some of the folk from our choir are planning on coming over here this evening to play musical instruments, just for the heck of it. Therefore I decided I wanted to make a coffee cake to feed them (to encourage them to do it again on another occasion). This time I decided that I would look for inspiring recipes on line first. The phrase "not too sweet coffee cake" is so common that google suggests it for you if you get as much as "not sweet coff". However, most of the first few hits called for a cup and a half or more of sugar. Not going there. This vintage coffee cake, on the other hand, only wants 1/2 cup sugar in the batter and another 1/4 for the topping, which sounded much more reasonable, so I gave it a try. I can report that the batter was yummy, the cake rose up nicely, and it smells great as it sits cooling on the counter. Sadly, by the time we get to eating it it will be too late in the evening for me to be hungry enough to taste it, but if I record the link here I can make it again on another occasion.

Aurora Band first meeting

The choir that lord_kjar and I sing, Studentenkör Aurora (Student Choir Aurora), has been talking about getting some of us together to do instrumental stuff for a while, and tonight it finally happened. Five of us gathered in our living room to play, and it was fun.

Keep in mind that I did not learn to play any instrument growing up. I decided in the early 1980's that I wanted a Hammer Dulcimer when Tania Opland returned in Alaska to play at the Renaissance Fair there, and I fell in love with the sound of the instrument, the fact that if one does not know what one is doing and strikes the strings randomly it will make pleasing sounds, and the fact that the strings are in order, so that if only looks at the dots on some sheet music and sees the pattern they make one need only repeat the exact same spatial pattern on the instrument to achieve the tune. This is in direct contrast to instruments like the violin, which my sister tried to learn as a child--on that instrument one can make some very unpleasant noises if one doesn't know what one is doing, and it is necessary to remember weird placement of one's fingers on a string to achieve notes, and while those placements make sense in terms of the laws of physics, they do not easily correlate with the dots on the page.

Sadly I couldn't afford to buy one until just a few years ago, and while I was putting forth effort to learn to play it when it first arrived, more recently life has been more busy than usual; the last time I played it at all was December, and the last time I tuned it was eight months ago.

Therefore, since the plan was to do instrumental stuff this evening I made time to turn the dulcimer (most strings had relaxed enough to show on the tuner as the next letter down from what it should be) and then check to see if I can remember how to play any of the few tunes I had learned. It turns out I can still play the second song I learned to sing in Swedish.

Therefore, when we gathered this evening and the guy organizing things asked "Is there any song one of you want to do?", I promptly mentioned that one. It turns out that not only do I recall which strings I need to hit, in what order, and in what rhythm, I can also do so accurately enough to play with other humans, and it is fun! I hadn't really gotten to play music with others before. Well, I did once play with mushroom_maiden back in Tasmania--she knew enough about chords that she was able to say "here, hit these two strings at the same time, then these two, then these two. Repeat that, in this rhythm, over and over. Then she played a melody on the guitar, and the two instruments sounded great together. But since then there has only been one or two short attempts to play with lord_kjar, until tonight. However, tonight was so much fun I would like to do it again.

We had fun playing with arrangements for Ridom, and finally settled on this pattern, which I am recording here so that I don't forget, so that the next time we meet and they say "what did we do?", ( I can look it up if I need to )