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kareinaBack when I had plenty of time to spend at the computer for non-work as well as work stuff I posted here nearly daily. The upside to that was that it gives me a pretty good record of what I was up to then, but the down side is that I wasn't doing much outside of working on my PhD and going for walks. These days there is so much I would like to record about what I am doing, but the only way I can manage it is to take time that I should be doing something else (like, now, for instance).
I have managed a couple of f-locked posts in recent weeks, but they have focused on very narrow topics and haven't included updates on everything else in my life. So, what all is "everything else"?
Music
I had been largely neglecting the poor hammer dulcimer I bought at the beginning of the year--my days were so full and busy I wasn't making much time to play with it. Especially after hurting my back earlier this summer and setting up a computer station around the rocking chair--the large wooden speaker to which the monitor arm is attached kind of overlaps where I would prefer to stand while playing the dulcimer, and it took until this week to realize that rather than moving the heavy speaker to the right I can slide the dulcimer to the left on its stand; while it looks better centered it isn't in any danger of falling off if slid half way to the side.
A couple of weeks back I saw an email sent to the local folk music and dance group announcing a class in playing the nyckelharpa. At the time I looked at the announcement wistfully, thought about how full our calender is, and deleted the message. Some days later the topic of nyckelharpas came up in a conversation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lord_kjar, and he also expressed interest in learning to play.
Last weekend we went to Sorsele for their annual Folk Music festival and some of our traveling companions mentioned the nyckelharpa class, which they are teaching, and next thing I knew and I were agreeing to attend the class, on Monday nights.
The class had four students this week, and two teachers. The other students have experience playing other stringed instruments before so for them it is a simple matter of learning to push buttons in order rather than touching the strings with bare fingers. I have never played any instrument before buying my hammer dulcimer last January, and it is HUGLY different to get a new note by hitting a different string than having to press a button with one hand and move a bow across the correct string with the other. Needless to say, I was not able to keep up with the others following along with the very, very simple tune he was teaching. So one of the teachers took me into the kitchen for private teaching, and the others made music in the living room. Hearing the fluid sounds coming from them and comparing it to my attempts to figure out the coordination and learn a pattern at the same time made me feel slow and clumsy. However, I was able to play, more or less, two tunes by the end of the lesson (Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, and Svara Valsen ("difficult waltz", a name that is intended to be ironic because the tune is so easy). The others all assure me that this progress for someone new to playing instruments at all is, in fact, very good progress. I hope they are correct.
As soon as we got home from the lesson I then tried playing those tunes on the dulcimer. MUCH easier! so many fewer things to worry about at once. With the dulcimer one hits the correct string in the correct area, and you get a note. With the nyckleharpa one must hold the correct button (and there are many, many to choose from) at the same time as sliding the bow, oriented in the correct manner, across one of four strings to choose from. The strings are set over a curved thing so that one needs a different angle for each string, and it is totally possible to get two strings at once instead of the one desired.
The patterns are easier on the dulcimer, too. They started me with tunes written in the key of C, so one needs only whole notes. On the dulcimer this means to go one note higher than the last one hits the next string above the last, and to go one note lower one hits the next string below the last. But the modern nyckleharpa is a chromatic instrument, which means that it also has buttons for the black keys on a piano. Therefore to play a C-scale one plays the second string without buttons for C, then uses the index finger to press a button in the middle row to get D, then skip a button and press the one after that with the middle finger to get E, then the next button with the ring finger for F, then skip another button and use the little finger to get G, then switch to the first string without buttons for A, use the index finger to press a button on the top row to get B, and finally the middle finger on the next top row button for the next C. Keeping track of which ones to press and which ones to skip, and spreading the fingers out far enough to reach the buttons all while trying to move the bow in the other hand takes a bit of practice to get working.
The class is designed to run every other week. In the three days since it met I have spent some time practicing every day. My habit has been to play first on the dulcimer, to remind me of the pattern of the notes, and then spend more time with the nyckleharpa trying to make the tune sound good there, too.
projects
Sewing
1) I have actually been making progress on the bliaut I cut out in December of 2010, just before moving to Sweden. All of the pieces of fabric have been hemmed, the embroidery for the neck line is done, all of the triangles that make up the gores (three triangles per gore) have been stitched together, the sleeves have been assembled and attached to the body, the side gores have been attached to the body on one side, slits have been cut in the skirts and hemmed for the first two skirt gores. This means that "all" I still need to do is insert those two gores, cut and hem the other two slits, insert those two gores, attach the neck embroidery, cut the neck hole, turn the embroidery to the outside, cut away the excess fabric, turn the edges under, sew it in place, then put the dress on and figure out how much of body rectangle is waist so that I can trim the waist curve, and add lacing loops. (I decided to try this one with a gathered/runched waist, so the waist is some inches longer than it needs to be, but I will wait till I can try it on and be certain exactly where the top of the waist is, and how much needs to be gathered to get the hem to sit right.
2) I have made more progress on my fur-lined hood (which was close to done when the snow melted and got set aside during the summer, as I didn't need it then). So far I have stitched all the fur pieces together and mostly assembled the wool shell. I need to do a bit of finishing on the wool shell, and then attach the fur to the shell. However, I may be adding yet more fur. The first plan was to turn the fur edges to the outside, but I think that while this works very well at the face opening, for the mantle it will probably be better to sew a strip of fur in a ring the right size to go all the way around the hem, then attach the wider end to the fur lining, and the narrower end to the wool, so that there is a nice looking fur ruff all the way around that just stays where it is supposed to, and doesn't fold back down.
nålbinding
1) I have started another pair of spiral-striped socks/boot liners in heavy wool. The first pair were made to fit my cute Swedish boots, and are quite comfortable. But I made them only a bit higher than my ankles, and I did them in red and blue. This pair is blue and black and I intend to make them taller.lord_kjar just finished himself a very warm pair of fingerless gloves in the same heavy blue and black yarn that are really nice. We are both working in Finnish stitch, and there is a huge difference in the appearance of the finished product--his thumb is much larger than mine, so the width of the rows is quite different.
2) I made some further progress on a pair of leg warmers I started back when I lived in Italy. When first I started that project I was working both-handed. I had one on my left thumb and one on my right thumb, and would do a stitch on one side followed by a stitch on the other. Partly to see if I could, and partially as an experiment to see if that was a good way to make certain that the size changes (adding extra stitches to get wider or skipping some to get narrower) happened in the same way on both of them. It worked very well, when I was living alone and had nothing to do.
owever, switching back and forth took more of my attention than I wanted it to while hanging out visiting with people, so instead I switched to working on one for a while, and then the other. Sadly, paying more attention to conversations than stitching has meant that they have gotten wider in different ways--I work on one for a while, put it away, work on the other, and the next time I check they are very different widths, so I add extra stitches to the skinnier one to catch back up. They have quite different silhouettes now, and I am not terribly happy with them. But they are leg warmers--they will mostly be under jeans or a long skirt, and most people won't be looking closely at them, so I continue to keep them as my in-between nålbinding projects project, and progress happens until I get distracted and start another new project, again. I have completed so may other projects since starting this one.
Progress is happening faster these days--I actually have data, and have been doing stuff with it. The geologists at the mine have promised me the information I am missing, and I think it will all come together. Good thing too, I have been at this job 11 months already! One thing that I think will really help was this week's discovery that the university supports remote desktop access of our work computers. Now I need no longer plan ahead if I am going to work from home--I don't need to take the office computer home (which comes with the bother of packing it up, carrying it, unhooking my home computer from the second monitor and internet plugs etc, moving it somewhere else, setting up the work computer, hooking it to the second monitor, internet plug, etc.), I can simply turn on my work computer, open a VPN connection, activate Kerberos, and push the button that lets me access my work computer (fortunately, I already have the habit of re-starting my computer at the end of each work day, so that it is sitting in a ready to log in mode when I arrive, so it is on and accessible from home, too). This means that I can both access my files, and use programs on that computer, from home. Since I have two monitors on the home computer when I am doing this the notebook monitor is showing the notebook, and the large monitor is showing what is happening on the work computer. I run both computers from the same pen and keyboard, and if I have any reason to copy-past information from a document on one into a document on the other I can do so, without the bother of transferring whole files. I love living in the future! This means that I will be free to work whenever I have the energy to do it, not only those times I also have energy to go all the way to the office. It is, once again, possible for me to make progress on evenings and weekends, too!
travel/family
I really enjoyed my mother's visit here, though it was much too short. I have already reported on the first half of her visit, and leaving her in Finland for a week. The following weekend we spent Friday night at home, got up at 04:30 to drive back to Oulainen (it was necessary to scrape ice off the windows that morning, but I strongly suspect that everyone who slept in to a more reasonable hour didn't have to bother). We arrived around 10:00 local time (there is a one-hour time change) and enjoyed breakfast with the cousins before taking a nap. After the nap we enjoyed a very nice day visiting with the cousins, and after dinner a friend of mine who lives in southern Finland, but was in the north for personal reasons, also dropped by. It was good to see her again. We got back on the road not too long after dinner (which was held nice and early, at what my body thinks is a good time to eat (15:30) and enjoyed a pleasant drive home. Some of my cousins cried when we left, I think they would have liked to keep mom (and us) there longer. It was sweet.
The reason we did the trip that quickly on the second weekend was so that we could do some of the normal Sunday activities of folk music and dance. Mom came along for those and enjoyed them, though she didn't join us in the dancing, since her back was bothering her a bit.
The following weekend, as I mentioned above, was a road trip with folk music friends. We rode in a van with two others on the trip out, and four others on the trip back. For the trip out there were a few other cars that caravaned with us, and we all stopped at the town of Alvesbyn for ficka. The cafe had a variety of deserts, but the one I couldn't resist was a sweet cardamon bread split in half and spread very thickly with whipped cream. Before moving to Sweden it was very rare for me to eat baked goods from a cafe, as they were never as good as I would make, and most places used super-sweet frosting rather than plain cream as I would have done. Here they often serve things I like. Fortunately, I am rarely near a cafe, so, with luck, I can stay slender despite being willing to eat the publicly available baked goods when they cross my path.
health/fitness
Back in early August I did something wrong to my lower back/hips at fighter practice, and then spent the next several weeks trying to undo the problem. I eventually got it sorted and have enjoyed normal pain/free days ever since. However, between taking it easy while it was healing, folk dance class not happening for the part of summer after midsummer, and having been unusually hungry for a few weeks in there, I was starting to notice that I was getting a little softer about the middle, and the scale had climbed up to 58 kg (~128 lbs) (which is still way, way lighter than my "normal" weight pre-PhD program, which had been 155 to 160 lbs, but it is also noticeably lower than the 54 kg I weighed when I left Tassie (though, to be fair, that was a different scale than I have now, so who knows if the two scales would agree). Therefore I have started jogging occasionally. Since 19 September I have gotten out for a short run 10 different times, with distances ranging from 2.4 to 3.6 km. While I was in Finland one of my cousins recommended the RunKeeper phone app, as it does GPS tracking of where you go. I have been having fun with it, but I note that fog makes a huge difference to GPS accuracy. On clear days the short path I take is 2.4 km, but on a fogggy day the same path gets recorded as 5 km! Then it is necessary to go in and edit out all of the zigs and zags that I didn't actually take (especially the ones where it thought I was running on the lake surface, or through a building or through the dense forest instead of just taking the path). Luckily, it is easy to do those edits from their web page, rather than fussing with doing it on the phone. I am not yet seeing much change in my appearance from adding this little bit of activity, but the scale claims I am back down to 56, so either the accuracy of the scale is off (likely, it is a cheap scale), or there is some change in my body that isn't showing to my eye (possible).
I have, of course, kept doing my yoga daily every evening, and my morning situps etc. every morning, even while the back was bothering me (though I did sometimes modify the routine), so while I did less than usual in the way of physical activity this summer I still averaged more than an hour a day of some type of exercise, so my base line this summer isn't as bad as it might have been.
There are many more categories of things happening in my life, but it is time to put down LJ and get to them.
I have managed a couple of f-locked posts in recent weeks, but they have focused on very narrow topics and haven't included updates on everything else in my life. So, what all is "everything else"?
Music
I had been largely neglecting the poor hammer dulcimer I bought at the beginning of the year--my days were so full and busy I wasn't making much time to play with it. Especially after hurting my back earlier this summer and setting up a computer station around the rocking chair--the large wooden speaker to which the monitor arm is attached kind of overlaps where I would prefer to stand while playing the dulcimer, and it took until this week to realize that rather than moving the heavy speaker to the right I can slide the dulcimer to the left on its stand; while it looks better centered it isn't in any danger of falling off if slid half way to the side.
A couple of weeks back I saw an email sent to the local folk music and dance group announcing a class in playing the nyckelharpa. At the time I looked at the announcement wistfully, thought about how full our calender is, and deleted the message. Some days later the topic of nyckelharpas came up in a conversation with
lord_kjar, and he also expressed interest in learning to play.Last weekend we went to Sorsele for their annual Folk Music festival and some of our traveling companions mentioned the nyckelharpa class, which they are teaching, and next thing I knew and I were agreeing to attend the class, on Monday nights.
The class had four students this week, and two teachers. The other students have experience playing other stringed instruments before so for them it is a simple matter of learning to push buttons in order rather than touching the strings with bare fingers. I have never played any instrument before buying my hammer dulcimer last January, and it is HUGLY different to get a new note by hitting a different string than having to press a button with one hand and move a bow across the correct string with the other. Needless to say, I was not able to keep up with the others following along with the very, very simple tune he was teaching. So one of the teachers took me into the kitchen for private teaching, and the others made music in the living room. Hearing the fluid sounds coming from them and comparing it to my attempts to figure out the coordination and learn a pattern at the same time made me feel slow and clumsy. However, I was able to play, more or less, two tunes by the end of the lesson (Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, and Svara Valsen ("difficult waltz", a name that is intended to be ironic because the tune is so easy). The others all assure me that this progress for someone new to playing instruments at all is, in fact, very good progress. I hope they are correct.
As soon as we got home from the lesson I then tried playing those tunes on the dulcimer. MUCH easier! so many fewer things to worry about at once. With the dulcimer one hits the correct string in the correct area, and you get a note. With the nyckleharpa one must hold the correct button (and there are many, many to choose from) at the same time as sliding the bow, oriented in the correct manner, across one of four strings to choose from. The strings are set over a curved thing so that one needs a different angle for each string, and it is totally possible to get two strings at once instead of the one desired.
The patterns are easier on the dulcimer, too. They started me with tunes written in the key of C, so one needs only whole notes. On the dulcimer this means to go one note higher than the last one hits the next string above the last, and to go one note lower one hits the next string below the last. But the modern nyckleharpa is a chromatic instrument, which means that it also has buttons for the black keys on a piano. Therefore to play a C-scale one plays the second string without buttons for C, then uses the index finger to press a button in the middle row to get D, then skip a button and press the one after that with the middle finger to get E, then the next button with the ring finger for F, then skip another button and use the little finger to get G, then switch to the first string without buttons for A, use the index finger to press a button on the top row to get B, and finally the middle finger on the next top row button for the next C. Keeping track of which ones to press and which ones to skip, and spreading the fingers out far enough to reach the buttons all while trying to move the bow in the other hand takes a bit of practice to get working.
The class is designed to run every other week. In the three days since it met I have spent some time practicing every day. My habit has been to play first on the dulcimer, to remind me of the pattern of the notes, and then spend more time with the nyckleharpa trying to make the tune sound good there, too.
projects
Sewing
1) I have actually been making progress on the bliaut I cut out in December of 2010, just before moving to Sweden. All of the pieces of fabric have been hemmed, the embroidery for the neck line is done, all of the triangles that make up the gores (three triangles per gore) have been stitched together, the sleeves have been assembled and attached to the body, the side gores have been attached to the body on one side, slits have been cut in the skirts and hemmed for the first two skirt gores. This means that "all" I still need to do is insert those two gores, cut and hem the other two slits, insert those two gores, attach the neck embroidery, cut the neck hole, turn the embroidery to the outside, cut away the excess fabric, turn the edges under, sew it in place, then put the dress on and figure out how much of body rectangle is waist so that I can trim the waist curve, and add lacing loops. (I decided to try this one with a gathered/runched waist, so the waist is some inches longer than it needs to be, but I will wait till I can try it on and be certain exactly where the top of the waist is, and how much needs to be gathered to get the hem to sit right.
2) I have made more progress on my fur-lined hood (which was close to done when the snow melted and got set aside during the summer, as I didn't need it then). So far I have stitched all the fur pieces together and mostly assembled the wool shell. I need to do a bit of finishing on the wool shell, and then attach the fur to the shell. However, I may be adding yet more fur. The first plan was to turn the fur edges to the outside, but I think that while this works very well at the face opening, for the mantle it will probably be better to sew a strip of fur in a ring the right size to go all the way around the hem, then attach the wider end to the fur lining, and the narrower end to the wool, so that there is a nice looking fur ruff all the way around that just stays where it is supposed to, and doesn't fold back down.
nålbinding
1) I have started another pair of spiral-striped socks/boot liners in heavy wool. The first pair were made to fit my cute Swedish boots, and are quite comfortable. But I made them only a bit higher than my ankles, and I did them in red and blue. This pair is blue and black and I intend to make them taller.
lord_kjar just finished himself a very warm pair of fingerless gloves in the same heavy blue and black yarn that are really nice. We are both working in Finnish stitch, and there is a huge difference in the appearance of the finished product--his thumb is much larger than mine, so the width of the rows is quite different. 2) I made some further progress on a pair of leg warmers I started back when I lived in Italy. When first I started that project I was working both-handed. I had one on my left thumb and one on my right thumb, and would do a stitch on one side followed by a stitch on the other. Partly to see if I could, and partially as an experiment to see if that was a good way to make certain that the size changes (adding extra stitches to get wider or skipping some to get narrower) happened in the same way on both of them. It worked very well, when I was living alone and had nothing to do.
owever, switching back and forth took more of my attention than I wanted it to while hanging out visiting with people, so instead I switched to working on one for a while, and then the other. Sadly, paying more attention to conversations than stitching has meant that they have gotten wider in different ways--I work on one for a while, put it away, work on the other, and the next time I check they are very different widths, so I add extra stitches to the skinnier one to catch back up. They have quite different silhouettes now, and I am not terribly happy with them. But they are leg warmers--they will mostly be under jeans or a long skirt, and most people won't be looking closely at them, so I continue to keep them as my in-between nålbinding projects project, and progress happens until I get distracted and start another new project, again. I have completed so may other projects since starting this one.
Progress is happening faster these days--I actually have data, and have been doing stuff with it. The geologists at the mine have promised me the information I am missing, and I think it will all come together. Good thing too, I have been at this job 11 months already! One thing that I think will really help was this week's discovery that the university supports remote desktop access of our work computers. Now I need no longer plan ahead if I am going to work from home--I don't need to take the office computer home (which comes with the bother of packing it up, carrying it, unhooking my home computer from the second monitor and internet plugs etc, moving it somewhere else, setting up the work computer, hooking it to the second monitor, internet plug, etc.), I can simply turn on my work computer, open a VPN connection, activate Kerberos, and push the button that lets me access my work computer (fortunately, I already have the habit of re-starting my computer at the end of each work day, so that it is sitting in a ready to log in mode when I arrive, so it is on and accessible from home, too). This means that I can both access my files, and use programs on that computer, from home. Since I have two monitors on the home computer when I am doing this the notebook monitor is showing the notebook, and the large monitor is showing what is happening on the work computer. I run both computers from the same pen and keyboard, and if I have any reason to copy-past information from a document on one into a document on the other I can do so, without the bother of transferring whole files. I love living in the future! This means that I will be free to work whenever I have the energy to do it, not only those times I also have energy to go all the way to the office. It is, once again, possible for me to make progress on evenings and weekends, too!
travel/family
I really enjoyed my mother's visit here, though it was much too short. I have already reported on the first half of her visit, and leaving her in Finland for a week. The following weekend we spent Friday night at home, got up at 04:30 to drive back to Oulainen (it was necessary to scrape ice off the windows that morning, but I strongly suspect that everyone who slept in to a more reasonable hour didn't have to bother). We arrived around 10:00 local time (there is a one-hour time change) and enjoyed breakfast with the cousins before taking a nap. After the nap we enjoyed a very nice day visiting with the cousins, and after dinner a friend of mine who lives in southern Finland, but was in the north for personal reasons, also dropped by. It was good to see her again. We got back on the road not too long after dinner (which was held nice and early, at what my body thinks is a good time to eat (15:30) and enjoyed a pleasant drive home. Some of my cousins cried when we left, I think they would have liked to keep mom (and us) there longer. It was sweet.
The reason we did the trip that quickly on the second weekend was so that we could do some of the normal Sunday activities of folk music and dance. Mom came along for those and enjoyed them, though she didn't join us in the dancing, since her back was bothering her a bit.
The following weekend, as I mentioned above, was a road trip with folk music friends. We rode in a van with two others on the trip out, and four others on the trip back. For the trip out there were a few other cars that caravaned with us, and we all stopped at the town of Alvesbyn for ficka. The cafe had a variety of deserts, but the one I couldn't resist was a sweet cardamon bread split in half and spread very thickly with whipped cream. Before moving to Sweden it was very rare for me to eat baked goods from a cafe, as they were never as good as I would make, and most places used super-sweet frosting rather than plain cream as I would have done. Here they often serve things I like. Fortunately, I am rarely near a cafe, so, with luck, I can stay slender despite being willing to eat the publicly available baked goods when they cross my path.
health/fitness
Back in early August I did something wrong to my lower back/hips at fighter practice, and then spent the next several weeks trying to undo the problem. I eventually got it sorted and have enjoyed normal pain/free days ever since. However, between taking it easy while it was healing, folk dance class not happening for the part of summer after midsummer, and having been unusually hungry for a few weeks in there, I was starting to notice that I was getting a little softer about the middle, and the scale had climbed up to 58 kg (~128 lbs) (which is still way, way lighter than my "normal" weight pre-PhD program, which had been 155 to 160 lbs, but it is also noticeably lower than the 54 kg I weighed when I left Tassie (though, to be fair, that was a different scale than I have now, so who knows if the two scales would agree). Therefore I have started jogging occasionally. Since 19 September I have gotten out for a short run 10 different times, with distances ranging from 2.4 to 3.6 km. While I was in Finland one of my cousins recommended the RunKeeper phone app, as it does GPS tracking of where you go. I have been having fun with it, but I note that fog makes a huge difference to GPS accuracy. On clear days the short path I take is 2.4 km, but on a fogggy day the same path gets recorded as 5 km! Then it is necessary to go in and edit out all of the zigs and zags that I didn't actually take (especially the ones where it thought I was running on the lake surface, or through a building or through the dense forest instead of just taking the path). Luckily, it is easy to do those edits from their web page, rather than fussing with doing it on the phone. I am not yet seeing much change in my appearance from adding this little bit of activity, but the scale claims I am back down to 56, so either the accuracy of the scale is off (likely, it is a cheap scale), or there is some change in my body that isn't showing to my eye (possible).
I have, of course, kept doing my yoga daily every evening, and my morning situps etc. every morning, even while the back was bothering me (though I did sometimes modify the routine), so while I did less than usual in the way of physical activity this summer I still averaged more than an hour a day of some type of exercise, so my base line this summer isn't as bad as it might have been.
There are many more categories of things happening in my life, but it is time to put down LJ and get to them.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-06 12:27 am (UTC)I was particularly amused at the image of your run taking you across the lake, and through buildings and deep woods... You are a kind of super-woman, but that might be more than even you can do!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-06 09:22 am (UTC)