finally looking something like winter

 So far this "winter" we have had a record of 15 days in a row below freezing before it warms up enough to melt. Often the melt days have come directly after each snow fall, so the total snow accumulation isn't much more than knee deep at most (not that one could tell by walking on the snow, of course, since there are too many layers of ice in that to permit sinking in.  However, yesterday and today really do look like winter. As I type it is -21 C, and my phone thinks that we should hat at least through Thursday with lows of -14 or colder, and even next weekend shouldn't be warmer than -3. Too soon to say if we have a chance of beating those 15 days this time, but it might be nice.  I always love winter, and always fell like it ends much too soon, but since it has had such a hard time starting at all this year I really hope that it manages.

I don't recall if I mentioned it here or not, but last December I met with my boss and a lady from HR about the fact that we are going to outsource the lab, and thus my job will be ending. We discussed my options, and the fact that as a long time university employee with a permanent contract, if something else happens to open up on campus for which I am qualified, I have a right to preferential hire, so I gave her a comprehensive CV, including the non-academic jobs I have had over the years.  She also suggested that I consider looking off campus, and showed me a job ad for Norrbottens Museum, which was looking for a librarian and suggested that with my interest in Archaeology I should send them an application. I did, and promptly forgot about it, since I don't have direct experience working for a library, though, of course, as an academic, I have used them.

Last week, much to my surprise, they called me, and explained that while they hired someone else for that job, they do sometimes have archive work come up, and since I had mentioned in my application that I would welcome part time work, they wondered if  would be interested?  I was, and I met with her on Tuesday to discuss the job.  Apparently the archives keep copies of paperwork from a variety of clubs and organisations in the region--meeting minutes and other records. They need someone to go through them, determine what each document is, and get them entered into the record and filed appropriately.  This sounds potentially interesting, and a good challenge for my Swedish reading (we did the whole interview in Swedish, so I really have gotten better). This job is a one-month contract at half-time, starting in mid March. 

I checked in with my thesis supervisor at Durham, and she agrees that it will be good experience to accept, and to start expanding my network to include the museum and archive people who work there, and thus is ok with my taking a one-month pause in my research so that I have only two half time jobs on my plate for that month (If one doesn't count the hobbies).  While this job doesn't pay as much as the university pays me to be responsible for the lab, it is still a decent rate, and my saving account will really appreciate the boost.

This weekend Frostheim had its annual general meeting, after which I had three new responsibilities:  I am a reserve member of the governing body, I am one of the people responsible for this summers <i>Medeltidsdagarna</i> (<small>(Medieval Days)</small> that we will host for the public, and I put my hand up to run Norrskensfesten in the autumn.

That last will be challenging if I get any job offers far away, since most of the academic stuff I have applied for, including the stipend to be a full time student at Durham instead of long-distance half-time, would start in October.  But if I do have to move I will find a way to make it work. Mostly I hope that I get to stay here. I love living in the north, even if this has been a pretty pathetic winter as far as weather goes, still it is better than what the rest of the Kingdom has gotten, and I love my home and all of the wonderful groups I do stuff with each week.

a note for my future self: Report on laser maps

Since I will be taking a month off to work a short-term museum archive job, I decided that it would be wise to devote a little time to creating a summary of the laser accessory composition maps I have been making, so that when I pick this back up I will be able to see at a glance what has and has not been done.

 

As of today I have run the laser to produce a total of 23 maps, from ten quarries. Nine of these have had sufficient data processing as to be able to look at the results as a map, but I have not yet sat down to interpret the results or decide on a consistent way to present the results.

 

The below image presents this information graphically, with each quarry marked on a map of Norway and Sweden, and photos of either the pre-ablation crystal (if the data hasn’t been processed), or a preliminary composition map (if it has), with lines showing which image comes from which quarry.  

 

The nine quarries for which I have samples but have not yet run maps are circled in red.  I would love to get at least one sample from each of those accomplished before I start that job, in just over two weeks. 

 

As you can see, there are sometimes duplicate maps from the same sample, and sometimes from more than one sample from the same quarry (and sometimes both). This was done at the suggestion of one of my colleagues here, who pointed out that if one is going to try to make generalisations about a specific quarry it would be wise to check more than one sample and more than one place on a sample to demonstrate that the results are consistent for a given sample and a given location.

( large photo behind cut )