the past eight days

When last I left off posting I had put in a couple of long days at the lab so that I would be able to head out of town at a reasonable hour on Thursday. However, I did stay up after working till midnight on Wednesday that I didn't wake up Thursday till 10:00, and then I needed to do all of the event packing. As a result I didn't have the car loaded till 13:40 (stopping to cook lunch was a factor in that timing, of course). Luckily, Oulu isn't far away. Google tells me that if we didn't stop between here and there we could have done the drive in 3 hrs and 10 minutes. However, we did stop for petrol and let Oscar & Nina buy some dinner to go. This meant we were on site around 19:30 (Finnish time) on Thursday.

I managed to stay up visiting with people till nearly 23:00, but then decided that sleep was more important. Then I slept till 08:00 on Friday, nicely catching up on some of the sleep I had been behind on. The event had a very heavy archery focus (as one might guess from an event called "Frozen Arrow", but I chose not to participate in that, but instead brought projects to work on. Over the course of the weekend I made good progress on my nålbinding, a sprang project, and my Viking cloak.

Friday evening a bunch of us went Ice Swimming (an odd name for swimming in water that just happens to have ice bordering it), but I only managed to go in to the tops of my thighs, at which point I realized that I couldn't feel my feet, and went right back up that ladder! I think it would have been much easier to jump in than go in slowly, but the locals I was with insisted that it isn't safe to jump in and one must take it slow and easy. I am not 100% convinced, since "slow and easy" meant "not at all" in my case (everyone else actually went in deep enough to swim, though no one put their head in the water (we had all been advised not to).

While we were off site the others started on the Snow Shoe making workshop. They used cut branches and some twine to make snow shoes, which were to be used the next day for the archery contest that involved tramping through the forest to shoot at paintings of animals. That contest was done in small groups (one for each canton of the barony (all of Finland is one barony), and another group for each SCA branch outside of Finland that had people at the event. (There were three of us who had come over from northern Sweden, three who flew over from Ireland, and one that came up from Belgium.) I thought about trying to make myself snowshoes, as I could actually use a pair at home, but when I heard that part of the contest was "whose snowshoes survive their first use?" I decided that it would be easier to just work on my nålbinding project.

Friday I managed to stay up till midnight before heading to bed, but then woke at 06:00 on Saturday, for another delightful day of working on projects and visiting with people. So many delightful people in the SCA in Finland, and the Irish folk were also delightful. Oddly enough, a couple of them had also been at the event I went to in Ireland last week, but I didn't meet them there!. Both events were around 40 people attending, yet somehow I didn't managed to meet and talk with everyone at the event in Ireland. Therefore I tried harder at the Finnish event (which was a longer event, which made it easier to manage).

Saturday night I was having so much fun I stayed up till nearly 03:00 (so much for having caught up on sleep...). Sunday morning they did yet more archery outside, and so I worked a bit more on my sprang project before finally switching to packing and cleaning up. We got back on the road a bit for 13:00 and went straight to a grocery store, where I stocked up on Leipäjuusto and Oscar & Nina stocked up on Finnish sausages. Then we went to Haparanda, where they sat down for burgers and I went for a short walk. I might have walked a bit longer, but the neighbourhood streets were a little on the icy side, it having been so sunny and warm over the weekend (by warm I mean "it went a little above freezing"), so instead I joined them in the restaurant, but not before a lady in the street asked me if I was the Easter Witch (I was wearing my witch's hat, it being such a sunny day, and hadn't changed out of my costume, either) and wished me a happy Easter (in Swedish, of course).

The rest of the journey home was full of pleasant conversation, clear, mostly dry roads, and went quickly, getting us home by about 17:00. This gave me time to unpack before my houseguests arrived. Henrik, who used to live in Luleå (and mom might remember meeting, he certainly remembers her fondly), and his girlfriend Sapphire, who I hadn't met before, but rather liked. They stayed with me Sunday and Monday night, which was nice. Tuesday morning they went with me to the lab to see the laser in action (Henrik has used ICP-MS before, but never with the laser-ablation, too, so he was curious to see it), after which I came home (and worked from home the rest of the day and into the night, thus missing both Phire practice and Choir) and they went off to visit Henrik's family before returning to southern Sweden.

Wednesday I also worked from and didn't go in for Parkour training, but I did make it to the Herrskapsdanskurs (since it happens only once a month I am loath to miss it), which was much fun, as it always is.

It snowed Wednesday evening, a good 10 to 15 cm of wet snow, so I spent 45 minutes this morning shoveling one of the driveways so I could drive to work without driving on the snow (not wanting it to later freeze with ridges from the tire tracks). I worked all day (some on each job), and then went to the Frostheim social night (only on campus once a month this term). (The link to my cloak above, if it works and isn't behind privacy walls) is a photo from tonight's social night.) Then I did some grocery shopping before coming home, to discover that we'd had a mini avalanche: one of the shed roofs finally tossed its snow. When it did that last spring the total was about 1 to 1.5 meter wide pile, not quite a meter deep. This year we have had a much better snow-year, so the pile extends to about 5 meters from the shed wall, and is more than one meter deep throughout. I am so glad that I wasn't walking next to it when that snow came down, or it might have been the last thing I ever did.

Now it is 01:20, and I should go to my yoga and get to bed, unless mom and my sisters have a moment to do a quick video call first--mom is finally out of the hospital! She has recovered from the pneumonia and infection, and from the heart attack and being resuscitated, had her veins cleaned out, stents put in, and a defibrillator installed. She also lost about 15 pounds in the 10 days she was in the hospital, which, given all the trauma she managed to overcome, is not surprising. With luck she is now good to go for years to come.

I almost made it to Phrie practice today

However, as I walked out the door to head over there I saw a thing that was much higher on the priority list...

I mentioned in yesterday's post that one of our sheds had a mini avalanche yesterday while I was at work, but the debris pile hadn't yet frozen when I got home, and it only barley covered the path to the hot tub, so I dug it out promptly after I got home (eyeing the other shed roof, which isn't as steep, carefully as I did, since it would be embarrassing, not to mention painful and potentially fatal to get caught by snow coming off of one roof while cleaning away snow from the first).

I wound up staying up much too late last night, mostly goofing off on the computer after I finished shoveling, but also having a nice video call with my mother, who is looking great, despite having had ten very exciting days medically speaking. But she is now home at Amber's house in San Francisco and they plan on taking her back to Seattle on Saturday, and she is very happy to be out of the hospital. Not surprisingly, today was a rather slow day. I didn't sleep in as late as I expected (I woke after only 5.5 hours), but I did take it easy after getting up. During "business hours", I only did a couple of loads of laundry, did some reading in Swedish while listening to an audio book, mixed up a new batch of muesli (it has been nearly 4 months since last I needed to do that), checked email and FB, and replied to one work message.

Then I noticed that it was nearly 17:00, and Phire practice starts then, so I decided that I needed the exercise and ought to go. When I stepped out the door I realized that the little bit of snow that had fallen last night had melted on the previously exposed paving stones at the base of our steps, and, having no where to drain, created a small puddle. So, of course, I delayed leaving long enough to chop the ice at the edge of the paving stone to break a channel to the grass, and then used the push broom to encourage the water to drain.

As I was doing that I heard a sound from the second shed, and looked over on time to see it lose a small portion of its snow (only about 2 x 1 x 0.4 meters), and realized that the side of the roof that faces the morning sun had lost all of its snow over the course of today, and the side that faces the evening sun was in the process of losing it, a bit at a time. So I walked over an looked, and, sure enough, while most of the slabs of snow that had come down so far had landed well away from the path, a bit of it had fallen right into the path. Of course, there was still a fair bit of snow poised and ready to come down over the path. So I got a long stick and tried poking at the snow from a safe vantage point on the side of the shed, but nothing I did made a difference. Therefore I decided that it wasn't ready to come down, and I could start digging out the path again.

By "digging out the path" I mean "use the shovel to break a slab into smaller chunks, then use my hands to pick up the chunks and toss them aside". I was able to remove a fair bit by standing off to the side, where, if anything more came down, it wouldn't land on me, but, by the time it would have been necessary to stand in harm's way, the snow on that corner of the roof had glided partway down the roof. Where it had been flush with the roof edge when I started clearing, now it was hanging a good 40 cm past the roof edge. Not liking the look of that, I stepped well back, and started throwing snowballs at it, till it finally broke off, and I could resume clearing the path. Of course, that still left one final chunk of snow still attached, so I kept an eye on it, and when it had finally shifted in its turn till part of it was unsupported I once again retreated and tossed snow balls (well, more often small slabs of roof snow, since it didn't need any packing, but was already quite coherent and solid), till it finally gave way. Then I was able to get in and dig the path out properly:


(the view from the front)


(the view from behind)

Why do I even care about keeping that path open? It isn't like we are making frequent use of the Frostheim Hot Tub, which lives behind the sheds. However, having done all of the landscaping last summer to flatten the area behind the sheds and create drainage so that we don't get a lake between and in front of the sheds when it melts I was very glad that I noticed when the snow came down, and that I could do something about it promptly. If that had been allowed to sit overnight it would have frozen at the base, creating an ice damn that would have let a lake form anyway, since the water wouldn't be able to flow over it to drain down hill.