a useful day off

I had been behind on sleep the first part of this week, so last night I went to bed at 21:15 and slept for 10 hours, since today is a public holiday in Sweden and I didn't have to go to work.

Yesterday I finished the intermediate level one on my phone fitness app, so this morning I started intermediate level two. Each level of this app is harder than the one before, but day one of one level is always easier than was day 30 of previous level. As a result I was able to do all of the reps of each exercise in one go, without having to pause and rest in the middle (which I have needed to do ever since getting that cold before Christmas).

Then I spent an hour and a half taking in a new cotton/wool blend sweater I found at a second hand store so that it would fit.

After that we took away the recycling from the shed (the city takes our trash and compost, but the recycling we need to take ourselves). This was the first time in 4 months, and the boxes into which we sort it in the shed had gotten full, and the second boxes we had added in addition to the full ones were full, so it is good to have it done.

The rest of the day was spent working out how we are going to fit C's stuff into the house when she moves here next month. We have a CorelDraw file with a scale drawing of the house and contents. So today we added drawings of her furniture and added it to the the image, and spend a fair bit of time moving stuff around on screen and deciding what to get rid of, what to keep, what needs to be created. It will take some effort to accomplish all of it, but we have a Plan.

Yoga has been done for today, so I should probably put down the computer and get some sleep, since tomorrow is a work day.

a winter day

I slept in this morning till nearly 07:00, because the plan had been to ride in to the office with lord_kjar when he went in to change the tapes for backup (other than that task he has the day off today), and then walk home. But by the time I did my morning workout and was dressed, lunch packed and ready to go he was still asleep. Since it was -33 C (-27.4 F) outside I didn't see any point in trying to ride my tricycle--if the breaks and gear shift both froze into position last week at -22 they certainly won't work today. So I decided to walk to work and woke him up enough to let him know, and suggested that once he went in to change the tapes he could call me and see if I were ready to come home. (The exact time they are changed isn't important, so he didn't have to get up that early, he had only thought to do so because getting it done first thing means he can't forget it.)

The walk in was lovely. Since we have (at long last!) had six days in a row of temperatures decently to well below freezing, and it was nice and cold today I decided it was probably safe to take the short cut--head across our field down the hill to the bottom of our property, then turn to the left and walk on the ice to the road and then take the bike path as normal (the total trip is at least half a km shorter than going around by the road).

Since I was getting such a late start (out the door at 08:14), the sky was mostly light with the impending sunrise, but there was a beautiful crescent moon still visible on the southern horizon, with a planet nearby, and the trees were all nicely frosted with ice crystals.

We haven't had much snow yet this winter, and it has rained on top of the snow, so the cover is thin and crunchy, and it was easy walking across the field. The neighbour's dog cuts across our yard right at the base of the hill at the top of the field often enough that it has worn a track into the snow there, and it has also occasionally gone down to the bottom of our field on the same path that I take. There are deer tracks down near our black currant bushes, and plenty of rabbit tracks.

So far no snow machines have been driving on the ice, but a dog has walked across it, going the same direction I wished to go, so I followed's its tracks to the road.

I can report that my down jacket, which I bought back in 1994 when first I moved to Fairbanks, is still plenty warm--by the time I got to the office (47 minutes after leaving the house) I was kind of sweaty, and needed to go rinse off in the bathroom sink before starting work. On the other hand, my cheeks and nose were rather cold. It was necessary to occasionally take my hands out of a mitten and hold my face as I walked to keep it comfortable.

It is so nice to have proper winter weather again, and to have a chance to get outside to enjoy it. I am also pleased to report that I had proper energy and motivation for work today, taking care of a fair bit of correspondence when first I got into the office, and then heading to the lab to play with my laser. I set up a new (practice) experiment, with slightly different settings than the last time I ran one (so I can see what sort of effect the change has on the results), and when it was a bit more than half way through I got a call from lord_kjar saying that he was done with the tapes and on his way to the grocery store by Uni. I let him know I was soon done, and closed all of the open windows on the computer not directly related to the experiment. After it finished I copied the data over to the Uni H drive (which I can access from any Uni computer if I am logged in), and when I was nearly done with that he called to say that he was done at the store.

So I closed the last of the programs, turned off the gas supply to the laser and ICP-MS, turned off the vacuum cooling pump and the air conditioning unit, and hurried up to my office to put back my office computer and get my coat and boots. By then it was nearly 12:30, and there was a lovely orange sunset beginning in the southern sky.

He was in a bit of a hurry to get home, since C had called him to say that the power upstairs was off, and the UPS attached to his computer was beeping, but there was still power in the basement. She couldn't see any fuses in the basement fuse box that needed replacing, so he wanted to hurry home and check the outside fuse box--we have had those fuses blow before, and when they are out there is no power to the heater, and while I love winter, we also love the part where the house is warm.

However, once we got home and checked, none of those fuses looked like they needed changing, either. He then double checked the basement fuse box, and C was correct, non of them needed changing. So he went back outside and tried changing each of the fuses on the line into the house in turn to see if it helped. It didn't. So then he called the power company.

They said that our neighbours in #65 had already called with the same complaint, and that they had a team on the way to deal with it. Sure enough, about an hour after he called first the rest of our power went out for about two minutes, then it all came back at once. Yay for easily solvable power issues.

Now it is mid afternoon, and I need to decide which of the many items on the to-do list are something I want to do today and tomorrow. I don't expect to get much done on Saturday, since it is his 40th birthday, and we have invited people over to help him eat smörgåstårta and birthday cake.

tonight's accomplishments

Tonight lord_kjar finally completed a project that has been on the wish list since we moved into this house: installing the light over the stairway. We have no idea why the people who built the house didn't install a light over the stairs to the basement, but they didn't. Someone did, however, put in a light switch at the top of the stairs which turns on the light in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs, which was better than no light on the stairs at all, but not as much light as we wanted.

Yesterday he and I went shopping to pick up a few supplies needed for the project, including a motion sensor, and today he did the work. Now we have a lamp over the stairs that turns on if you enter the stairway. We still have the light switch at the top of the stairs to turn on the light in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs (there is also another next to the garage door that turns on and off that light, so one doesn't need to go upstairs to turn it on if one is already downstairs), but having the motion sensor for the stairs itself is going to make life much easier, especially when carrying something.

While he did that I accomplished another long-needed project. I have a nice, warm, reasonably long down coat that I bought when I moved to Fairbanks in 1994. I left it in Alaska when I moved to California, knowing I wouldn't need it there, and I didn't bother to get it before moving to Australia, as it doesn't really get cold enough there to need it, either. The coat stayed in Alaska till my visit in 2010 while I was living in Italy. I knew then that I was going to do my level best to move somewhere with winter again, so I picked the coat up. It was still in pretty good shape, but the zipper had taken some damage, and didn't work very well. However, it also had snaps, which worked great, so I didn't worry about it.

For the most part I don't need to wear that one--it is warmer than one needs on normal Luleå winter days (really I don't want it for anything warmer than say -15 C, which is +14 F, if I am doing anything as active as walking). But occasionally, like this week, it actually gets cold enough to want it. Last winter I used it a few times for sledding, and and found the broken zipper annoying, because snow can come in the gap between the snaps. Therefore when C mentioned last summer that there was a store in Göteborg that sells good zippers I asked her to pick one up for me (we also got a replacement zipper for the soft Nyckelharpa case, and installed that promptly after it arrived).

But in the middle of the summer fixing the zipper of a cold-weather coat didn't seem very high on the priority list, so I put it off for later. This morning, when I walked to the office, when I first went outside with the coat snapped shut I was aware of the temperature difference between the part with the snaps and the part between the snaps, and I resolved to fix the zipper as soon as possible.

So tonight I did. I normally don't like sewing with a sewing machine, but for good zippers, which have very sturdy plasticy fabric to sew through, I am happy to make an exception--it was hard enough forcing the pins through that stuff to hold it all in place before sewing, I wouldn't have wanted to do the stitching by hand. It will be interesting to see how many more times this winter (if at all) it is cold enough to warrant using that coat...

And it is still nice and early. I think I will do yoga next, and then decide if I will accomplish something else, or just relax.