kareina

As regular readers will remember, I sing with the student choir at the University here in Luleå. For the past couple of years we have been heavily recruiting exchange students and have maintained a good mix of people from all over the world, though, of course, the faces change each year and, for many of them, each semester. The new semester started last week, and already we have our first gig of the season: performing at the banquet welcoming the newest crop of Exchange Students to Sweden. However, most of the choir isn't available for this performance (even lord_kjar is out of town this weekend. There are only four of us who are able to participate--one soprano, me (alt), and two tenors. One of the tenors is Swedish and the president of the choir, the other two are exchange students themselves. Therefore, given the limited number of people for this gig, rather than actually doing full choir arrangement we have opted on a simpler set:

The president and I will be introduced as ambassadors for the student choir, come to invite them all to come participate with us on Tuesdays, and we will welcome them to Sweden with a traditional Swedish drinking song. As soon as we start with "Helan går!", the choir exchange students will stand up at their place and sing the reply, and then walk up to join us on the stage, where we will give the full song another run through, in unison. Then after we sing that one our president will announce that he understand that the dinner has a theme for the evening of Cartoons/comics, and will point out that our choir has a new mascot, the spider pig (which one of the exchange students will be wearing as a placard on his chest). Then we will sing the Spider Pig song (which I had never heard of before Tuesday--I am so out of touch with popular culture, I didn't even know there was a movie for that cartoon family). After we sing the line "can he swing from a web?", I will snatch away the spider pig, turn him back right side up, and sing a solo "No he can't! He's a pig!", before the soprano snatches the pig back from me to turn it back into a spider pig for the song finale. Then we will tell the crowd that if they join us on Tuesday they can hear this song done in full four-part choir arrangement, and take our leave.

I think it will be fun, and I can't believe that I, whom my friends used to tell me not to sing with them because I sang in a monotone "and it throws the rest of us off", will be singing a solo! I have come a very, very long way. With luck it will get even better soon. Another of our choir members teaches voice lessons, so we will be meeting up on Sunday afternoon to trade a singing lesson for a massage.

The drinking song we will be singing is extremely well known throughout Sweden, and in a fair few other places as well:

Helan går
Sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej
Helan går
Sjung hopp faderallan lej
Och den som inte helan tar*
Han heller inte halvan får
Helan går
(Drink)
Sjung hopp faderallan lej


Which roughly translates to:

The whole goes (down the hatch)
sing fa la la...
The whole goes (down the hatch)
sing fa la la...
and those who don't take the whole (drink in one go)
he cannot have half of it either
sing fa la la...


As our president was teaching us the words tonight I commented that "I need to remember that 'får' rhymes with 'går', and not 'tar' so that I pronounce it correctly". Therefore I was highly amused to come home and read on the Wikipedia page for this song that "*In the classic version, "trår" is used instead of "tar". "Tar" is modernized, and doesn't rhyme." Edited to add: Our Choir president replies "Well, in this one case I'd argue the modernization is an improvement anyway. "Trår" means "yearn", which doesn't really makes as much sense as "tar"." I argue that he is mistaken--I think "those who don't yearn (to drink) the whole (glass in one go) can't have half of it either." works just fine.

The last couple of days have been unseasonably warm. One of my friends today said that she heard that yesterday was the warmest day on record for Sweden in the last century. I believe it. When we were driving to Boliden at one point the thermometer in the car said that it was +9 C! This is not a reasonable temperature for this far north this time of the year--it is supposed to be winter already. This afternoon it was raining, and nearly all of the snow was gone from the yard (though every place anyone has walked or driven or done anything else to compact the snow it was solid, very wet, ice), and there were even standing puddles! Ick! (Note: the work we did on the yard this summer was worth it--none of those puddles are anywhere near the places we walk, unlike what happened when we bought the house last year.)

However, tonight while we were at dance practice it finally cooled back off enough to permit the rain to turn into snow. So now we have a wet snow accumulating on top of the wet ice and sticking to it just enough to provide traction and nice, safe footing. It is now possible to walk without fear of falling, and the ground is once again white and beautiful, and I am much happier. Not that it is actually cold, mind you, it is only 0 C, but so long as it doesn't go above zero again this snow should stand a chance to stick around. I sure hope that it does.

Dance practice was fun--since it was the last of the season we were in costume. There were only six of us in attendance, but we enjoyed dancing, and ate pound cake with raspberries and cream. I love dancing, but I am not going to try to run dance again next semester--the most we ever got to show up on a given week was six people, a couple of times it was only 4, once no one showed up besides lord_kjar and I, and one other time we canceled in advance because the ones who usually make it knew in advance that they wouldn't be able to. If we get more people showing interest in the future we can try again then. I still have the Swedish Folk Dancing, after all. So it isn't like I am not doing any dancing.

After dance the huge fluffy flakes of falling snow was so pretty once I got home I got out my spark and went for a a quick ride/kick down to the end of the road and back. Fun! It is a 20 minute walk to do that distance on food, but kicking down the road with one foot on the sled runner meant I could go there and back in 12 minutes.

Now I need to go do my yoga and get to sleep--our choir has its annual Lucia performance in the morning, and we need to gather at 06:30 to get ready for the 07:30 performance. Then we have a second gig at 09:00 at a business across the street from the uni before I can really start my work day. Then, in the early evening we have one more performance, and then a choir party at our house, so it will be a musical day.

This past weekend only had one thing on the calender as the weekend approached: a party for out choir on Saturday evening, to be held at our house. He was on call, so when he got the call on Friday evening that he would have to go to Skellefteå on Saturday morning we formulated a plan: He would do the two hour drive south, do the job, then, on his return trip, stop half way and visit his parents, since he had some things he needed to discuss with his mom. In the meantime I would have the whole morning and afternoon to bake bread for the party and clean the house (which needed it, since we have been too busy with both work and projects to keep on top of the basic cleaning). However, on Saturday morning he called a colleague at the Skellefteå office who agreed to go do the computer repair in his own town and save lord_kjar the trip. He then called his mother, who told him we should come over as they were doing are doing a party for the visiting grandkids and your brother in Skellefteå and his wife and son would be there, too.

Therefore we revised the plan: I started the bread rising, and he started housecleaning. While the bread did the first rising I helped with house cleaning, and then I shaped the loaves (one large loaf with chunks of garlic in it, which would roast to tender goodness while the bread baked, one medium cardamom bread, braided, and one filled loaf using the rest of the cardamom bread dough and a filling of almonds and pistachios in a thickened milk sauce) and put them in the fridge. That took the whole morning, and by noon we were on the road south.

We had a delightful visit with his family (he got to discuss the things with his mom that prompted the call--she is a self-employed accountant/tax prep. person, and we wanted an explanation of the paperwork that had been posted to us by the tax office about our property) and, and while we were chatting she pointed out an ad in her local paper for someone selling a timmerlada (wooden barn/shed originally intended for storing hay) who was asking only 10,000 SEK for it (this is the cost of a nyckleharpa, and about 1/4 of what other people have been adverting used timmerlador for). We have been wanting another shed, so he gave them a call, and we agreed to go look at it the next day.

After having cake and cookies with the family soon after we arrived, and then an early dinner with them a bit later we were back on the road to head home around 16:00. This got us home before 17:00, which gave us a bit more than an hour to get the bread baked and create a table out of saw horses and a door and a bench out of a solid plank and some large bricks so that the kids would have somewhere to sit (the choir is a "student choir", so it is mostly undergrads, but since it is open to all and has only one entrance requirement (must love to sing) there are a few of us who are not undergrads) during dinner.
( the choir party itself and the games we played )

The party broke up around 01:00, and we were in bed by 2:30, which gave almost enough sleep before heading out in the morning to go look at that ( timmerlada for sale )

Some of you may recall my mentioning in the spring that our choir recorded a few of our songs. The guy in charge of that has finally sent out the link to the recordings, so if any of you (other than mom, who I suspect will be) are interested in hearing them you can go here to listen to them on line (there are four songs, the fourth of which is in English, the others in Swedish), or here to download the files onto your own computer. If the link gets broken let me know--he says that he is hosting these on his own page for now, but hopes to eventually move them to the official choir web page later...

It is a sad fact that people moving to Sweden with a driver's licence from the US, or from Australia (I have both) can't simply trade in their licences for a local one, but must instead jump through all of the same hoops a Swedish young person must do to obtain their licence. However, one of those hoops is a fun one: The Slippery Course.

This is a half-day session learning how to handle your car in slippery conditions, or having fun sliding around in a car. When we arrived this morning we started with a short lecture, in Swedish, by a guy who speaks REALLY fast. Luckily, I could read the slides, but then I needed to ask google what a handful words were (Before today I didn't know that "breaks" were called bromsar)

After the lecture we first played with some props--they have a bunch of car seats set up on a metal frame that can slide on rails and then come to an abrupt stop--the slope of the rails is set up so that at the moment of impact we were going at all of 10 km/hr, yet still the jolt was very noticeable. The next toy was a car set up on a frame such that it can rotate on its long access. They had us get in, fasten the seat belts, and then they rolled us, first one way, then the other, then fully upside down, where they held us for a bit (while the young girls squealed) before turning us back right-side up again.

I don't know if they said so explicitly (since I followed only most of the Swedish), but I suspect that the whole point of this part of the class was to make us WANT to wear our seat belts when we drive. They also showed us some films involving car accidents, and they showed a demo of a skull on a spring, and the difference between a sudden stop with and without a headrest behind the head (hint: you really don't want to be in a car without one).

After that they took us outside and divided us into pairs, so that each car would have one passenger and one driver. Our teacher suggested that I go second, so that he could do the explaining in Swedish and I could see what to expect, that way when it was my turn he wouldn't have to think so hard about the English words to explain what to do.

Our first task of the day was to drive a short stretch of road just long enough to reach an assigned speed, then attempt to make an abrupt left hand turn through some flexible tall traffic cones. However, the road surface just before the turn was (intentionally) both wet and oily.

Our teacher had done a demo of the tasks we would be doing when we first arrived, before we even got out of the car, so we *know* that it is possible to make that sharp left followed by a gentle right without colliding with any of the tall traffic cones. However, when the girl I was paired with tried it the first time, using the assigned speed of 50 km/hr, she failed to make the turn properly, and we managed to slide sideways through all of the cones at once.

She tried it a few more times at slower speeds, and never did manage to pull that one off, though she got better with practice. The next task was to do a more gentle change of lanes and straighten back out in the new lane, again doing the maneuver on a slippery surface, with the target path marked by more of the tall traffic cones. This proved easier, yet still she hit the cones on the first couple of attempts, then, finally found a speed slow enough that she could negotiate the maneuver.

Once she proved that she could do it they had us turn off the anti-skid technology that the car comes with, and she tried it again. This time we not only hit the tall traffic cones, we also did a full 180 degree spin before she managed to regain control of the vehicle.

After that set of playing on her part (and she was loving every minute sliding around) it was time to switch drivers. And I discovered that yes, 30 year of driving experience does matter. While I never did manage that really sharp left without clipping one or two of the tall traffic cones, I didn't go through them all broadside like she did.

And when I switched to the change of lanes I managed to do the maneuver at all the required speeds with only some sliding into yet another lane before recovering, but never hitting the tall traffic cones except for the time I had to do it without the anti-skid technology. He asked us if, having done this course, we would choose a car with that technology, and we both said "yes please".

After our lunch break our group swapped driving courses with the other, and she and I did the other exercise. This time the game was first to make a prediction of how long it would take to stop this time, then get up to an assigned speed and hit the breaks at a specific point, then see how many meters it took to actually come to a stop. The course was marked so we could easily read it off. Then we did the same thing, at the same speed on the second course, which was slippery with water and oil.

The difference? Well, at 30 km/hr we each, in turn, managed to stop on the good road in 12 meters, but but it took her 45 meters on the slippery road (I took notes when she drove, and she when I did, so I only have the written records for what she did, but I can remember some of my numbers anyway). At 50 km/hr she was able to stop in 20 meters on the good road, but took fully 90! to stop on the oily one (but I did it in 70, so some of that is experience). They didn't let us try the slippery course at 70 km/ph, but on the good road it took her 30 meters to come to a full stop.

All in all I found the course to be entertaining, and rather valuable. I wish they had had something like that when I was learning to drive. Now that this hoop has been jumped through I need only finish doing the practice exam questions on line and then take the driving test itself. That has been scheduled for early July, so I have a deadline to complete the practice questions.

After the course, since I had set aside the full day for the course, but we got back to Luleå (the course is held in Piteå, 45 minutes south of here) in the early afternoon, I opted to use the opportunity to run a few errands in town, and met lord_kjar there (he has a cold, so had taken the day off of work).

This evening our choir did a recording session, for the first time since I joined the choir. It was much fun. We sang five different song (2 to 3 takes each) and had a great time doing it. We had a good turn out for the recording session--we had six each sopranos and bass, and four each altos and tenors. I am looking forward to hearing how they come out once the guys have finished editing them. Technically choir is over for the semester--our last rehearsal was yesterday, but today was a recording session, and Friday we perform at the Farewell Dinner for the Exchange Students (since a high percentage of our Choir are exchange students).

In Sweden, the first of May is a holiday—spring is a big deal in countries where they have real winter. However, Sweden, being Sweden, since the holiday is the 1st, they celebrate on the 30th of April (they do that at Christmas, too—with the parties and Christmas dinner all happening on Christmas Eve). So, how do they celebrate spring here? Bonfires! Lots of them (do an google image search for "valborg"). The official celebration at the university involves a huge bonfire—the stack of wood they had set up and ready to burn was way taller than I am. It also has an official entertainment program. Our choir (which is a “student” choir for the university, but one needn’t be a student to participate) was the opening act.

Therefore, after a busy day working from home on my part (and getting caught up on laundry in between doing stuff on the computer) we headed into Uni around 17:00 to join the rest of the choir in one last rehearsal and warm-up session, and just before 18:00 we went outside to perform. Had we done this last week it would have been sunny and warm (daytime temps of +10 C (~ 50 F) or so), but yesterday was rainy during the day, and overcast for the performance, with temps only just above freezing. Despite the less than ideal conditions we still had an audience that was larger than the choir (and since we are up to five to eight people per voice these days, our choir is a fairly decent size), and we all enjoyed it—it was fun to sing, and our friends in the crowd said we sounded good.

After our performance we hung around to chat with folks for a bit, and then we returned home with a couple of friends from choir. They have bikes, so they followed us (we had driven in, since we weren’t done with dinner till after it would have been time to start biking). I also wanted a bit of exercise, but didn’t think I could spare the full 45 minutes it would have taken to walk home, so instead I had him drop me off on the side of the road when we were most of the way home, and did a nice 14 minute walk, which got me there only a minute or two before our friends arrived.

Our left-hand neighbours had their bonfire going when we got home (the right hand neighbours had done theirs before we left to go to uni), so we four went out to join them for a bit. I am pleased to report that I was able to participate in conversations in Swedish, and only had to fall back on English words twice while hanging out with them.

Then we went inside and fed our guests some fika (in this case sandwhiches, fruit, nuts, banana muffins (which I had put in the freezer after baking them as the batch was too big to eat at once) and cookies (which I had baked a week or so back, but which keep well). Since we were sitting around the table chatting, I took that opportunity to make my version of hais, which uses a much lower proportion of bread crumbs than the original (but always home-baked bread for the source of the crumbs), and more different types of nuts and dried fruit in addition to the ones mentioned in the provided link. I also never roll mine in sugar—it is better without.

Neither girl had seen this sort of food before, and they happily helped with the grinding (I used an old fashioned hand-crank meat grinder, since our food processor is broken, and we don’t have a mortar and pestle large enough to make this.) and sampling of the finished product. After that we retired to the basement, where we watched a Monty Python movie I had never heard of before—Yellowbeard, and I made some good progress sewing on my new undertunic. (I am so looking forward to wearing this tunic—it is a very soft white linen woven in a herringbone twill pattern.)


Since I had had such a low energy day on Monday, but felt fairly good when I woke up on Tuesday, I opted to start that day with a quick run. The forest path is still not really a pleasant option, since the snow remaining on it gives it the texture of soft beach sand, but there are wet patches in addition. Therefore I opted to just run to the end of our road (which is a dirt road) and back—only 13 minutes, but since this was the second time I have run at all since autumn, I am ok with that. This morning I woke up thinking of projects, and nearly started my day with sewing. But, when I went to get dressed, I saw yesterday’s running clothes hanging on the hook, and that inspired me to do it again. Today I did it in 12 minutes. Granted, my phone log keeping app doesn’t do fractions of a minute, therefore I have no idea if the change in time from yesterday is 60 seconds, or not quite two minutes (since I don’t know if yesterday was 13 min, 59 seconds, or 13 min zero seconds, or something in between).

Since today is a holiday lord_kjar and I will devote much of our day to projects, but right now "we" are filing my taxes (which are due by tomorrow). Which is to say he is dealing with the Swedish web form on his computer and I am providing moral support sitting next to him and keeping him company. That process is nearly done, so it is time to close this and get going with my day.

I have been working from home recently, as I find I am actually more productive when I do, but some things I simply can't do from home. We don't have a rock saw, nor do I really want one, since they are messy things. Therefore, after eating lunch today I went in to uni and spent all afternoon cutting chunks off of the 79 rock samples I collected on my last trip to Boliden. I will keep these bits (each appropriately labeled, so I know which one is which, of course), and some of them will later be turned into thin sections for detailed analysis of the minerals present. The rest of the samples will be crushed and sent off to the lab to find out what % of which elements make up the composition of the rock.

I managed to finish up that in good time to make it to choir practice. I have always loved singing, but this semester our choir has been particularly fun. Last term the total number of our choir members had been dwindling, so that on some occasions we had only two tenors, one bas, three sopranos, and a handful of alts. But due to a combination random chance + some good recruitment we are back up to 5 to 7 people per voice, and the group has a really good energy to it. We have a small performance coming up on Saturday (at the celebration of the orchestra's 35 anniversary), and even though one of the two songs we are doing is new this semester (and it is one of those songs which changes time signature every bar or three), we are ready for it, and it will be fun. We have planned to get together one more time this week for an extra practice, and I am looking forward to that too.

After choir I went grocery shopping, since I had put it off long enough that the downstairs freezer was completely out of frozen veg, and the upstairs freezer was getting quite low. I opted to drive out to the larger grocery store, as it has a better selection of everything than the little store across the street from uni--largely because I wanted to get more edamame, and they don't carry that at the little store at all. Sadly, the big store was out of edamame, so I had to content myself with just stocking up on other frozen veg and fresh fruit and veg.

By the time I got home from that it was well after 21:00, and I probably should have done yoga straight away, but it was such a beautiful evening I couldn't resist going out for a walk--the sky is a rich velvety black, studded with bright stars--the more than half full moon was bright enough that the trees cast sharp shadows on the snow, and the snow sparkled. At first I thought to walk just down the road to where it crosses the lake, but everything was so pretty I couldn't resist turning left and walking out on the snowmachine tracks on the lake. When I got to the part of the lake directly below our house I decided to try breaking a path to the house, since I was wearing my good winter boots and snow pants (in addition to everything else--it is -10 C out).

Looking at the Runkeeper web page, it turns out that going from the house, down the road to the lake, and walking on the lake to just below the house is 1.1 km. Walking up to the house from the lake is 0.3 km. However, by coincidence, both segments of the journey took 14 minutes, despite their very different lengths. Once again I found myself choosing to crawl for the parts with deeper snow, as it is easier going that way. I suspect that if I make time to take that trail again before the next time it snows it will go faster.

After the walk I chatted on G+ video hangout with lord_kjar, and our friend L in France, while I did yoga. They have both sensibly gone to sleep, and I should do the same now that I have typed this. However, I am tempted to tune the other half of my hammer dulcimer--I managed to get it half way done (for the first time since moving in!) last night, but stopped at the half way point to take a video call, and didn't pick it up again afterwards, as it was very much bedtime then.

I have moved a lot over the years, and as a result have managed to keep the pile of my stuff down to a reasonable size (when I moved to Sweden I initially brought only what fit in my luggage for the flight, and then everything else followed later, and it all fit into one rental van. As a result of not having way too much stuff it is normal for me to get everything completely unpacked and put away within two weeks of moving into a new place. lord_kjar, on the other hand, had been living in the same apartment for five or so years, and the same town for about ten years, so the amount of stuff he had accumulated was significantly larger than my pile.

Add to that information that normally I have been a student with oodles of free time and now I have a "real job" and too much to do at work to take more than a couple of days off for moving and it is easy to understand why it took a month this time to get everything unpacked. As I type this it has been 34 days since we got the keys to our house, and 30 days since we moved the stuff over from the apartment. While most of the stuff was unpacked and put away straight away, some of the stuff has had to wait till we had time to build places for it. We finished the new frame for the paperback shelves on Thursday and the shelf for the projector on Friday, which is also the day we unpacked the paperback books and finished hooking up the computer and projector to the stereo equipment. Those two projects accomplished and we can now claim to be completely moved in.

And just on time too, since we had the housewarming party yesterday (Saturday). I did take the day off of work on Friday to cook for the party. I made two pies (one sweet, one savory), two (Huge!) loaves of bread (one to turn into a Smörgåstårta, the other turned into a cinnamon braid coil), two salads, and two batches of cookies (one gluten free). In addition to all that I had baked a blueberry cake on Thursday, and I pulled some other baked goods I had made earlier out of the freezer, and I made a fruit salad on Saturday morning.

When I put it all out at the start of the party it completely filled the table (and it was hard to find space in the fridge for everything before it was put out). I had no idea how many (if any) people would come to the party, but I knew that I would need food, and I like feeding others...

Part of the reason for not knowing how many people would attend is that December is a busy time--most of the people we invited had multiple invites for Saturday. Some of them stopped by on their way somewhere else, others popped in after attending other things. We generally had about six to eight people here at a time, but over the course of the day we had a total of 25 guests: lord_kjar's brother and his wife, two of our neighbors, two friends from choir, six friends from dance, one of my work colleagues (plus her wife and their son), five of our gaming friends, and five of our SCA friends. (note that the tally includes people who could have been counted in more than one category, but I just picked one category for them on this occasion in order to get an accurate total).

Three of them were still here in the evening, so we turned on the sauna and finished up the party with relaxation, and we managed to get to bed before midnight (first time in ages, since we have been working on getting the house ready well into the night. It is good that there were only the five us us left at that point, since our sauna seats only six.

Today we will spend the full day in town for choir--our choir is joining some other choirs for a group performance in the church in town. We will have a set on our own, each of the others will have sets of their own, and there will be some songs sung by all of us together. Then an hour or so later we do it all a second time. Add to that the practice session before hand, and it will eat the whole day. Luckily, we have plenty of left over food to take with us!

Since leaving work today I:

* Baked homemade pizza (artichoke heart & spinach)

* walked to choir

* enjoyed the last choir session of the term

* walked home

* looked at Double War photos on line

* played hammer dulcimer

* read aloud to lord_kjar (from The Name of the Wind)

* did yoga

* started nålbinding liners for my cute Swedish folk boots

* wrote this post

Now I really should go to bed, since it is 01:00, and tomorrow is a work day...

I haven't really posted much lately, so I thought I would take the time to type up what I have been up to for the past 9 days since my last update...

The big reason I haven't made time for posting is work. I am enjoying the job. Since it is academia I have a fair bit of flexibility in when I work, but I am trying to make certain I am at the office and working during business hours. What time I actually get there in the morning largely depends on when lord_kjar leaves the house. In theory he is meant to be at work at 08:00 every morning, but what time he actually leaves depends on where he will be working first that morning. On the (thankfully rare) days he has to work in Kiruna (about 4 hours drive north of here) he leaves at 04:00, on the days he has to work at an office next to uni (10 minute walk from here) he sometimes doesn't leave till well after 08:00, because the person he would need to meet won't be in earlier than that. As a result my working day has been starting anywhere between 08:00 and 08:45.

At 09:15 (or so) every morning the geologists gather in the tea room for morning fika, and again at 14:15 for afternoon fika. After forgetting to join them the first day I set an alarm to go off at the same times every day. I still don't always make it downstairs for that break, but when I do I enjoy it. There are enough of us in the department from other countries that English is a fairly normal language to hear, but Swedish is even more common, and I am pleased to report that I am catching more and more words when I listen to Swedish conversations progressing at full speed around me.

I have been making decent progress on tasks necessary for publishing papers on my previous research, and have also been making good progress on reading stuff for my new research. On Monday I had my first meeting with folks at the Mine with whom I shall be working for my research. There are several PhD students in our department who are also working on projects with that mining company, so when they heard I was to make the trip south they asked if they could come along because they had things they needed to do on site. As it turned out we wound up splitting up the drive--the uni rental car was delivered to my door at 07:00 on Monday morning (how civilized that it comes to me!), and I picked up student #1 at her home across town on our way south. This got us to the airport at Skellefteå at 09:20, just as the plane was landing. We picked up my boss from that flight, and off we went to the mine.

My boss and I met with a handful of folk at the mine headquarters, and another geologist joined us via video conference from the south of Sweden. I liked everyone I met, and the project sounds like fun. It will take time before they can get me data, now that we have worked out which of the many regions in the area will be my focus, but I will put that time to good use reading the literature they gave me and learning how to use the programs I will need once the data arrives.

After our meeting my boss and I and student #2, who had gotten another ride south drove back north. We dropped him off at the Luleå airport, where his car had been waiting for him for a week while he was off at a conference in Spain, and she and I returned to Uni. I suspect that the slight sniffles I had yesterday and today were picked up on the drive south--student #1 greeted me with the news that she had come down with a cold on Friday, which had interfered with her plans for the weekend. While I didn't touch her or anything she had touched, we were in the car together breathing the same air for 1 and 3/4 hours...

Last weekend was a local SCA event. It was a very pleasant weekend. One of my friends from gaming had been invited along to the event by some of his friends, and since he is slender we were able to dress him in some of my spare tunics. I enjoyed dancing, ran a discussion on the history of the SCA (including reading aloud a "Once upon a time" story about the first ever SCA event that a friend gave me years ago) on Friday night, and I taught a workshop on wool applique on Saturday. I took a nap during the tournament (we had given a friend a ride, so there was no room in the car for my armour, even if I had practiced at all since I got back from Australia--I really should make more time to practice, but the local practice is Sunday mornings, and in the months since my return either we are out of town, or the shire forum contains a post saying "no practice this week", or, occasionally, we are home, and it is on, but we were up way too late on Saturday to get up that early on Sunday.

In addition to the teaching I also enjoyed plenty of SCA dancing and even some Swedish folk dancing at the event. The other violin player on site started playing some folk dance music so first lord_kjar and I danced, then we taught the Schottish to a couple of ladies (luckily I have been dancing the lead at the folk dance class we taught between Sept and the begining of November). Then one of the ladies wanted to dance with her partner, so I looked around for someone else to dance with. One of the guys watching said that he didn't know this kind of dance, but he can dance. Much to my delight he could, too. It took no time at all to walk him through the steps and have him dancing.

Other highlights of the event include singing and time soaking in the shire hot tub. I even got to eat a little of the feast. The first of the food was served at 18:30, which might have been too late for me to be eating, had I interrupted teaching to go get food from my own stash at 16:00 when I got hungry, but I was busy, so I decided to wait and see if I could manage to eat any of the feast. I pulled it off, but it took some effort to avoid getting grumpy due to hunger by the time it was actually time to eat. Of course the little I ate with the first serving filled me up nicely, and the rest of the feast went by without my tasting a thing, but it was nice to eat with people.

We wound up staying on site till the very end of the event on Sunday. The site was meant to close by 12:00, but with a bunch of us around to clean up things were clean and ready to go well before that time. However, the ride that was meant to pick up a bunch of the young people (including my above mentioned gaming friend) wasn't there yet. We couldn't take them in our car which was too full for their bodies even if seat belt laws didn't apply, but we did stick around to keep them company, and the missing rides did show up right at noon. Since it was only a 20 or 25 minute drive home that meant that we had time to not only unload the car but get things put away and spend a couple of hours relaxing before going out for the Swedish Folk music and dance session at a local cafe.

I am particularly fond of those nights, especially as the first one I attended was right after I moved here--that evening was such a fun night I got hooked on Swedish folk dance in addition to being smitten with the wonderful man I had moved here to be with. As we do every time we attend these I dance all night, but he spends part of the time dancing with me and part of the time playing violin with the other musicians. I mostly dance by myself when he isn't available, but this time I did get one of the other musicians to dance one dance with me after he finished his cinnamon roll (that the cafe provided for all musicians) and before he returned to playing.

In other news this week at choir I learned something that will be really, really helpful. Our teacher stayed after choir to work a bit with me to help me with my singing. She explained to me that the lower notes on the standard lines of sheet music (E and F), which is where most of the songs start for the altos, are higher and brighter in sound than my normal speaking voice, while the middle note (B) is well higher than that, and it is only when we drop a couple of lines below the bottom line that we get to notes wherein I need to sing lower than my normal speaking voice. She suggests that I can use this information to help me start looking for notes in the correct range based on where the dots on the page are, and it will be easier to match what I am singing to what my neighbours are singing.

I think that this will be very, very helpful information--I knew that the altos sing lower (generally) than the sopranos, and since I am meant to be singing with the altos I have been trying (when I think about it at all) to sing low--which generally means lower than my speaking voice. Which is not the direction I should have been going at all. No wonder I have such problems. In addition to not being able to tell if the note I am singing is the same as the note someone else is singing at the same time, I was also not even aiming in the correct direction. (Please note that even though I can't tell, I do, often, get the right notes anyway, or so I am told by the others, and I am told that I have gotten much better in the months since moving to Sweden.)

Last night lord_kjar and I made the drive down to Piteå (not quite an hour south) to visit his dad. I am pleased to report that I was able to follow much more of the conversation than last time we visited (his dad doesn't really speak English), and I was able to say some things to him in Swedish. He was quite pleased at my progress. It may be slower than I would like, but it is still noticeable.

But this catch-up has gotten long enough--he is asleep in his chair at the other computer, and I have yoga to do before bed, and tomorrow is a work day. This weekend a friend is coming to visit for the weekend, it will be good to see her again, and on Sunday our choir has a performance in town.