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the rest of the week
Wednesday I finally got my first dental appointment. The one that had been scheduled for 20 Sept, but the dentist got sick, and was rescheduled for 27 Sept, but they were sick again. This time everyone was healthy, so the first phase of "fix a decade's worth of damage to my teeth" has commenced. They filled a cavity in one of my back teeth, and then did something about the teeth in front left that had the most damage from years of not knowing that brushing one's teeth can cause serious damage. My gums are fine front and center, and longer back, but the teeth just to the side of front, where things rotate to the back, have lost much of the gums covering the roots, and the roots and top edges of the teeth had eroded back, leaving a shelf which caught food in an annoying manner, and looked very disturbing. So my dentist has used modern filling material to build up an outer coating to cover the exposed roots, and make a smooth, planar surface from the bottom of the tooth to the remaining bit of gum. It looks so much better, and feels much better too, other than the part where the surface isn't as smoothly polished as my teeth, so my tongue is drawn to it, feeling the difference in texture. I will ask if it is possible for that to be polished even smoother when I go in next Wednesday for the next phase (more of the same, different teeth, probably the other side), or if I will just have to live with that forever. They did warn me that the downside of doing this approach is that it is possible for the "filling" to just fall off, but if that happens they can replace it again. If it does it within the year, there isn't even a charge for the replacement.
Wednesday afternoon I worked from home, but returned to the office with the "normal" bus on Thursday morning, as I had meetings all morning. When they were done, at 14:00, I took the bus over to help Torunn lift things down from on top of the bookshelves, clean off the dust and pack them up to head to their new homes. It has been a year since she lost her partner to cancer, and getting his apartment cleaned out and emptied has been a slow process, which is not helped by her living in Stockholm, and only having time to come up here and do things occasionally, but incremental progress is still progress, and it will get there. Hopefully, she will keep coming up for our events even after she is done taking care of his stuff.
Then we headed to Uma's social/crafts night, stopping on the way so she could do a daily geocache. It was raining, but the one she chose was under a roof for a bicycle parking area, so we weren't out in the rain much. It was a good night for her to have a friend along, as I could give her the boost needed to reach the cache itself. At social night she encouraged us to take some of the yarn that had belonged to her partner's mom. I don't *need* more yarn, but I do use it regularly, so I took some in colours that I enjoy. Afterwards I went back to her place and we talked a bit longer before I went to sleep on the couch.
I didn't have any meetings on Friday, so I could work from home. I checked the bus schedule before bed, and it turns out that the earliest bus from Umeå to Lövånger leaves at 05:00, but there isn't a bus that early from Tournn's part of town, so if I wanted to take a city bus from there and then transfer to the regional bus home, the earliest I could do it would be leaving at 06:30. Of course, I could also have just gone into the office and worked there, too--once the city bus starts going the buses to the university are around every 15 minutes. So I did the logical thing--I didn't set an alarm, and decided to let when I woke dictate which option I took. When I woke a little after 04:00 I had enough energy to decide to just walk to the city center, which google says is 32 minutes from where I was. Of course, in the time it took to get my stuff packed up and use the loo and head out the door google said that I should arrive at the bus station at 5:07, or seven minutes after my bus leaves. But I know that it is possible to walk much faster than Google's estimate, if one is in a hurry, and the longer the trip, the easier it is to shave off a few minutes, so I decided to try.
Just before I got to the river I saw one of the electric scooters that are available for rent at random spots all over the city. I hadn't used the system before, but thought "why not?", so I scanned the QR code on the scooter, downloaded the app, gave it my credit card info, scanned the other code on the scooter to check it out and wake it up, then rode it the rest of the way to the bus station. I arrived in time to clock out on the ride, add a photo of its location to the system, so the next person can find it through the app, rather than just happening upon it as I did, board the bus, go upstairs to "my" seat (left side, all the way forward, for the best view), take off all of my bags (since I had a pillow with me, the yarn, and a couple of large pewter tankards that Torunn didn't want, I was more heavily loaded than normal), and my coat and get comfortable before the bus started driving. I had time to start working before Keldor woke up and called me. When I described my morning's accomplishment of making the bus on time he told me that I sounded as smug as if I had just scaled Everest. I think he was right, I was pretty pleased.
I did need to take an afternoon nap on Friday, thanks to the extra early morning, but had no problems working till I had done enough hours for the day, and then I switched to thesis-adjacent activities. I *should* be working on my thesis corrections. But I had been wondering lately how to approach the paper I want to write on Swedish steatite artefacts, and I had also been wondering if I wanted to teach a class at Drachenwald's Kingdom University. When I woke up from my nap I did so with inspiration on how I want to approach both, so I started with first filling in the google form for the class, and then starting a powerpoint presentation for it. For the most part I am adapting thesis figures, but I have made a few new slides. I got all the main slides for the talk itself done Friday evening, in addition to doing some correspondence about our upcoming Norrskensbard contest event. But then I decided to do an appendix, and copy in to the bottom half of the talk *all* of the figures from my thesis appendix, showing photos of every steatite item in Swedish museums that has photos, with their locations plotted on maps, and lines showing which item is from where. This is the meat of my research, for that part of my thesis, and the data from which I drew the conclusions that make up the talk itself. There may be people who are interested in flipping quickly through these images, so why not include them in the talk? I wonder if Drachenwald Kingdom University counts as a conference, and if so, if I can put a copy of this talk on my publication list on DiVA?
Of course, when I did the figures for the thesis, I set up PowerPoint to have the same proportions as a sheet of A4 paper, which means when they were imported into this talk they don't fill the screen in the same way, and I can make them bigger. Furthermore, I have a coloured background for the talk powerpoint, while I had a white one for the thesis figures. This means that things like the sample names, which are black text with no background, show up way better in the figure than in the talk, which means the solution is to add a white rectangle behind all of the images that make up each figure and stretch it to the right size and shape to make a nice frame, as well as letting the black text have a white background. Therefore, even though I started this process on Friday, now, well into Saturday, I am not yet done converting all of the figures for the talk, which means I haven't actually started on those thesis corrections yet. It is a good thing I got a six month deadline for them! <pause to look up when "six months" will be, so I quit thinking of it in those terms, as that is an easy way to miss a deadline...> 30 March. I need to have them done by 30 March. I can do that, even without making progress on it today, and preparing the talk is a good way to review everything, and very helpful for that paper I will write. Or, so I am telling myself, anyway.
Wednesday afternoon I worked from home, but returned to the office with the "normal" bus on Thursday morning, as I had meetings all morning. When they were done, at 14:00, I took the bus over to help Torunn lift things down from on top of the bookshelves, clean off the dust and pack them up to head to their new homes. It has been a year since she lost her partner to cancer, and getting his apartment cleaned out and emptied has been a slow process, which is not helped by her living in Stockholm, and only having time to come up here and do things occasionally, but incremental progress is still progress, and it will get there. Hopefully, she will keep coming up for our events even after she is done taking care of his stuff.
Then we headed to Uma's social/crafts night, stopping on the way so she could do a daily geocache. It was raining, but the one she chose was under a roof for a bicycle parking area, so we weren't out in the rain much. It was a good night for her to have a friend along, as I could give her the boost needed to reach the cache itself. At social night she encouraged us to take some of the yarn that had belonged to her partner's mom. I don't *need* more yarn, but I do use it regularly, so I took some in colours that I enjoy. Afterwards I went back to her place and we talked a bit longer before I went to sleep on the couch.
I didn't have any meetings on Friday, so I could work from home. I checked the bus schedule before bed, and it turns out that the earliest bus from Umeå to Lövånger leaves at 05:00, but there isn't a bus that early from Tournn's part of town, so if I wanted to take a city bus from there and then transfer to the regional bus home, the earliest I could do it would be leaving at 06:30. Of course, I could also have just gone into the office and worked there, too--once the city bus starts going the buses to the university are around every 15 minutes. So I did the logical thing--I didn't set an alarm, and decided to let when I woke dictate which option I took. When I woke a little after 04:00 I had enough energy to decide to just walk to the city center, which google says is 32 minutes from where I was. Of course, in the time it took to get my stuff packed up and use the loo and head out the door google said that I should arrive at the bus station at 5:07, or seven minutes after my bus leaves. But I know that it is possible to walk much faster than Google's estimate, if one is in a hurry, and the longer the trip, the easier it is to shave off a few minutes, so I decided to try.
Just before I got to the river I saw one of the electric scooters that are available for rent at random spots all over the city. I hadn't used the system before, but thought "why not?", so I scanned the QR code on the scooter, downloaded the app, gave it my credit card info, scanned the other code on the scooter to check it out and wake it up, then rode it the rest of the way to the bus station. I arrived in time to clock out on the ride, add a photo of its location to the system, so the next person can find it through the app, rather than just happening upon it as I did, board the bus, go upstairs to "my" seat (left side, all the way forward, for the best view), take off all of my bags (since I had a pillow with me, the yarn, and a couple of large pewter tankards that Torunn didn't want, I was more heavily loaded than normal), and my coat and get comfortable before the bus started driving. I had time to start working before Keldor woke up and called me. When I described my morning's accomplishment of making the bus on time he told me that I sounded as smug as if I had just scaled Everest. I think he was right, I was pretty pleased.
I did need to take an afternoon nap on Friday, thanks to the extra early morning, but had no problems working till I had done enough hours for the day, and then I switched to thesis-adjacent activities. I *should* be working on my thesis corrections. But I had been wondering lately how to approach the paper I want to write on Swedish steatite artefacts, and I had also been wondering if I wanted to teach a class at Drachenwald's Kingdom University. When I woke up from my nap I did so with inspiration on how I want to approach both, so I started with first filling in the google form for the class, and then starting a powerpoint presentation for it. For the most part I am adapting thesis figures, but I have made a few new slides. I got all the main slides for the talk itself done Friday evening, in addition to doing some correspondence about our upcoming Norrskensbard contest event. But then I decided to do an appendix, and copy in to the bottom half of the talk *all* of the figures from my thesis appendix, showing photos of every steatite item in Swedish museums that has photos, with their locations plotted on maps, and lines showing which item is from where. This is the meat of my research, for that part of my thesis, and the data from which I drew the conclusions that make up the talk itself. There may be people who are interested in flipping quickly through these images, so why not include them in the talk? I wonder if Drachenwald Kingdom University counts as a conference, and if so, if I can put a copy of this talk on my publication list on DiVA?
Of course, when I did the figures for the thesis, I set up PowerPoint to have the same proportions as a sheet of A4 paper, which means when they were imported into this talk they don't fill the screen in the same way, and I can make them bigger. Furthermore, I have a coloured background for the talk powerpoint, while I had a white one for the thesis figures. This means that things like the sample names, which are black text with no background, show up way better in the figure than in the talk, which means the solution is to add a white rectangle behind all of the images that make up each figure and stretch it to the right size and shape to make a nice frame, as well as letting the black text have a white background. Therefore, even though I started this process on Friday, now, well into Saturday, I am not yet done converting all of the figures for the talk, which means I haven't actually started on those thesis corrections yet. It is a good thing I got a six month deadline for them! <pause to look up when "six months" will be, so I quit thinking of it in those terms, as that is an easy way to miss a deadline...> 30 March. I need to have them done by 30 March. I can do that, even without making progress on it today, and preparing the talk is a good way to review everything, and very helpful for that paper I will write. Or, so I am telling myself, anyway.