oops

at 21:40 this evening I was feeling tired, but decided to look at the Swedish Historical Museum's database entry for the one province which had only one steatite listing for that province. As expected, that didn't take long, even with stopping to ask on FB how plausible the entry was, since it both claims to be soapstone, and a whetstone for knife sharpening. So I decided to do one of the provinces with only two listing for steatite in the database. The first of those went very quickly. The second turns out to have been a group of 26 spindle whorls. The main database entry had neither photos nor descriptions of these, but the photo of the catalog showed photos of hand-written descriptions for all 26 of them, so I couldn't resist typing up the list so that I could then count how many of them were described as täljsten. Meanwhile, as I worked an interesting conversation developed in the comments under my post (which served to make me more skeptical on the likelihood of that first one actually being made of soapstone if it really is a whetstone).

The next thing I knew my "one quick entry" had turned into around 3.5 hours of work, and it is now 01:25 in the morning. In 25 hours I will need to start driving from Kalix to the airport in Kemi for my trip to Ireland for the SCA event this weekend. In 7.5 hours I have a meeting with colleagues. Perhaps I had better do my yoga and get some sleep...