kareina

It has been a delightful weekend. On Friday evening I joined my friends D & C for dinner at their place (which has been beautifully re-done since last I saw it), and then we went to "Danceaholics Anonymous", where much dancing was done. I taught a bit of Swedish Folk Dancing, we did some square dances, some contra dances, and even one SCA dance (taught by another SCA person present). Then I went back to their place, slept in a nice comfy guest bed, and in the morning we took a delightful walk up the side of the mountain to the Newtown Falls and on to the Junction Cabin.

It was very lightly raining, so I borrowed one of their Tasmanian leather hats to keep my glasses dry (otherwise the rain was so gentle as to feel nice after last weekend's heat). I had planned to try to pick up one of those hats for lord_kjar, to replace the leather hat he has that is wearing out, but until that walk I hadn't considered getting one for myself. It turns out that when they are not too big for me (like lord_kjar's is) they are really quite comfortable and very good at keeping glasses dry in a light rain. Therefore, if I manage to find time to get one before I fly on Friday, I think I will get two...

After the hike I baked a blueberry cake for C to take with her to a workshop she was attending that afternoon, while she got ready to go, and then my friend S picked me up and took me to G's place, where we had several hours of delightful conversation and good food. Then we went back to his place, where I got a not uncomfortable couch for the night, and in the morning clovis_t's mum picked me up and brought me out to their place for lunch, which featured lots of good food from their garden. Their property is just as lovely as ever--I really love the cliff that backs their land and looms over everything, and how lush and green everything is.

After lunch we gathered up the SCA stuff that clovis_t had left with his parents when he moved to Scotland five and a half years ago. Some of it I will bring back to Sweden with me, and the rest I will hand over to an SCA friend here to either sell or give away as appropriate.

Then she brought me to my hotel room for this week. Not as nice as the dorm room I had last week. The kitchen here has only a tiny fridge, hotplate, and microwave--so no more home-baked bread for the rest of the week, though I can still do stove top pancakes and the like.

Now I really should wrap this up, do yoga, and get to bed--tomorrow starts my week of serious training on the care and feeding of a Laser-ablation ICP-MS laboratory.

One of our friends, K, who lives about 45 minutes south of Umeå, and so nearly 4 hours south of us, had decided she wanted to host a sit down dinner for New Year's Eve. She first considered a potluck, so that no one person would be overburdened with cooking. However, reading my friends' reports on their Thanksgiving dinners had me wanting to cook a traditional Turkey dinner just like I grew up with. When I suggested this she was enthusiastic, since she has seen them on TV, but never had a chance to try it. I couldn't do exactly what my family always did, since we normally roasted a twenty pound bird (one at Thanksgiving, and one at Christmas), and the largest I could find in the grocery store here was 5 kg. Therefore I bought two of them.

Since I would be cooking in someone else's kitchen a long way from home I did as much pre-cooking in advance as I could manage. I baked bread for the stuffing on the 27th so that it would have a bit of time to dry out before putting it in the birds, which I moved to the fridge to start thawing that afternoon. On the 29th I started the piecrust dough. This turned out to be the best crust I have made. My grandmother used to make hers with lard and (at least when doing a large batch, like for pasties) she would beat an egg with a spoon full of vinegar and enough water to make one cup of liquid for the dough. However, whilst that results in a good texture, I really don't like the flavour, since I don't like the taste of any pork products and I truly hate the smell and taste of vinegar. Therefor I used butter, as I always do (1 cup butter to 3 cups flour), but this time I used egg, lemon juice and water for the liquid, and it came out perfectly. I also started the refrigerator roll dough, browned up a mixture of ground moose meat, oats, egg and spices to be used for the stuffing, and mixed the spices with sugar for apple pie that day.

The next morning we packed up everything, and got on the road in the early afternoon, arriving at our destination at a good time to start baking the pies. We had brought with us our cool tool for peeling, coring, and slicing apples with an easy crank of a handle, and K. had gotten one for Christmas, so it took pretty much no time at all to get the apple pie ready, with two people slicing, me rolling out the dough, and a fourth nicely arranging the sliced fruit into the shell. I always do my apple pie the way my Aunt taught me—with the sliced apples piled up a good 4 inches higher than the top of the pie plate. This results in a nice domed crust, and the fruit cooks down to level with the rim during baking.

The pumpkin pie filling had been pre-cooked back in October, when the local store actually carried pumpkins (something that doesn’t usually happen in Sweden)—I had cut it up and roasted it then, and mashed the result and froze it. So on the day I needed only combine it with milk, cream, eggs, and spices. I had considered baking the rolls that evening, too. However, when I had consulted Google about turkey roasting times it was convinced that two small birds take way less time than one large one of the same mass. Therefore I decided to do the roll baking in the morning, before putting the turkey in the oven. (Can I just mention here how much I miss living in a house with two full sized ovens, so that one can bake rolls to be done at a similar time to the turkey, instead of hours in advance?)

Since I believed the estimates of timing I had read on line, I opted to sleep in on the 31st—instead of getting up to start the turkey around 06:00, I didn't even finish my morning sit ups till nearly 08:00, which meant I had the rolls out of the oven and the birds in by 09:30. This turned out to be too late for our originally planned eating time of 14:00. However, this also turned out to be a good thing, since the weather had turned crappy—with lots of rain and melting and very icy roads, so some of the guests were later to arrive than they had planned, and our actual meal start time of 15:15 turned out to be perfect for them. Even so, if I ever do two birds at one time again I will do the 06:00 start, as it will be easier to relax during the process.

While the birds baked we did the mashed potatoes and fruit salad (read: a large variety of fruit + whipped cream). I skipped the almonds in the fruit salad this year due to a nut allergic person. However, that person was also a vegetarian, so I left the nuts in the stuffing, which consisted of the above mentioned home baked bread, cooked moose meat etc., some quinoa, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, and walnuts, and more herbs and more spices. We cooked most of the stuffing inside of the birds, and the overflow got put into the oven with milk poured over it when the turkey came out. This worked out well, since some of the vegetarians present will eat wild game, but not store bought meat, so they could try that version of the stuffing.

In addition to what I cooked a few of the other guests (there were 26 of us for that meal) brought vegetable side dishes. All of my life when guests asked my mother "what can I bring" for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, she would give them the list of what we are making and suggest that they bring a vegetable side dish. I do not remember one time when the vegetable side dish turned out to be something I was interested in eating. This time was no exception, since it had mushrooms in it. Sigh. There are ever so many vegetables I like, yet people seem to think that holidays are a time to combine the few I don't care for in new and interesting ways. It is not easy being fussy.

The nicest thing about doing the turkey dinner was that it meant that we ate early enough that I actually got to eat, too! I get so tired of attending SCA events where the feast isn't served until my weird appetite has turned itself off for the evening and I am just not interested in food at all. It was nice to be able to eat with everyone else for a change. I even tried a small bit of the turkey, even if is store bought meat, and, of course, I ate the gravy. I love making gravy, and think I make a very tasty one.

After that meal we cleaned up a bit and spent an hour or so with people chatting in small groups. Then our hosts passed out pieces of paper to everyone, with a short character description on it, and we had a( surprise mini-LARP )

After the game we did some SCA dancing, and then there was another pot-luck meal (but that one was late enough that I didn't eat anything), followed by going outside to shoot off rockets for midnight. I considered going to bed after that, since I was tired, but then they started singing, so I couldn't resist staying away and enjoying the singing, so I didn't actually get to bed till almost 03:00. However, lord_kjar and C didn't come in till 05:00—they sat up with a couple of the guests who had arranged a ride home from another friend who was working night shift and could pick them up on the way home from work. Pretty much everyone else stayed the night—the advantage of our hosts having a large house—there is room enough for everyone.

I had started boiling the turkey bones to make a soup the night before, and then turned it off and put it into the cellar to keep cool sometime in the late evening. Then the next morning I warmed it up enough to separate out the bones from the liquid and bagged the stock up to be frozen. Our hosts enjoy cooking, and they said they would happily make use of the stock later, since we wouldn't be heading home for a few more days, and therefore didn't want to bring it with us.

We had planned on heading over to another friend's house to spend the afternoon with him, but we got a late start at leaving K's house, in part because I was still dealing with turkey stuff, but also because lord_kjar was helping them deal with their heating unit, which was having issues. lord_kjar grew up with the same sort of pellet-burning heater, so he knew some things one can do with them. Hopefully the repairs they did worked—one does not want the heat in a house to go out in the middle the winter—frozen pipes are a very expensive problem, and best avoided.

We did eventually make it to D's house a bit after 15:00, which didn't leave as much time as I might have liked to hang out with him, but it was long enough for me to try on his re-enactment costume, for he and lord_kjar to play violin, and to just hang out and chat for a bit. Then he had to go meet some friends for dinner, so he walked us to a Chinese restaurant (since the Indian one next door, which had been our first choice, was closed), and we three had a lovely dinner and conversation, followed by a nice long walk (the warm weather had, by then, been going on long enough that the ice had completely melted from the sidewalks, so it was, finally, easy walking), and then we went to a grocery store to pick up stuff for breakfast the next morning. This got us to late enough that we could meet our friend LH at the hospital where she works just as she got off of duty, and then we went back to her place, where we cooked some scones and whipped cream to serve with the jam we had bought (I didn't eat any that night, of course, but it made a lovey breakfast the next morning.

We spent both that night and Friday night at her place, just relaxing and hanging out. lord_kjar had had a slight cough for weeks, but around this time it got much worse and he wound up with a fever, too, so he was really content to just relax and be social. I went out each day for a walk, because she lives in a pretty area in the countryside north of Umeå. He was still feeling under the weather on Saturday, so C and I did most of the driving back to Luleå, letting him drive only for the last 40 kilometres, when he was feeling rested, and we were tired.

She drove as far as Skellefteå, where stopped by lord_kjar's brother's house exactly on time to be invited to dinner (and early enough that I could eat, too!), and I drove from there north.

We got home before 21:00 on Saturday, with enough energy left to put everything away, do yoga and play dulcimer before going to bed. Sunday we spent a good hour shovelling snow. While it warned up so much in Umeå that most of their snow melted from the rain and huge swaths of grass was showing (looked rather like late March), up here it warmed up only enough to put a bit of a crust onto the snow, and there was new snow, too. This meant we had a bit more than a decimetre of snow on the driveway, which had a thin crunchy crust, and it held together very well. This meant we could slide the shovel under, break it up, pick up chunks of it, and then stack them on top of what was already on the shovel, before pushing it over to an appropriate place to pile it. That hour was long enough for C. and I to clear one entry to the driveway and paths to both cars, but it took another 45 minutes the next day to finish the rest of the driveway and parking area. I love winter—it comes with a built-in work out plan.

lord_kjar had also scheduled Monday to be a vacation day, so he didn't have to go into work, but I hadn't, so I had planned to go in. However, when I started walking in Monday morning I realized that the only reason I was going in was to get some exercise, and that I could just as easily work from home, so instead of walking to work I turned the other direction, to enjoy the pretty moon in the western sky, and did a short loop before heading home and settling into a day with the computer being useful.

Monday evening C started coughing, and I noticed that my lymph nodes were swollen. Not wanting to experience the bad cough that lord_kjar hadn't yet completely gotten over, I decided that the best defence is a good offense, and we turned on the sauna and cooked ourselves for a while. I did my yoga in the sauna as it heated, then relaxed, and went to bed straight after getting out (they sat in the sauna longer, as they hadn't been in there during yoga (it is a small sauna)), and I was asleep by 21:00. I slept under two thick feather doonas, and between their warmth, having pre-heated my body in the sauna, and my immune system doing battle with little invaders, I sweat fairly heavily all night long, which was probably a good thing, since I woke up at 06:00 feeling a fair bit better (if still a bit tender in the lymph nodes). So I got up, tossed my pillow cases and doona cover into the laundry (leaving the other doonas and bottom sheet on the bed since they were still sleeping, not having gone to bed themselves till midnight) and did a bit of sewing and went for a walk. Then I crawled back in bed and took a bit of a nap before we all got up and had breakfast together.

After breakfast he and I were motivated enough to build a stand for the moraharpa, so now both the cello and the moraharpa can stand up on display, ready to use at a moment's notice. We have also worked on sewing projects, and I managed to get caught up on some computer stuff. Now it is time to do yoga and get to bed—I should actually go into the office tomorrow to see if the department head is back from holiday—I need his signature on the form to get reading glasses, and my appointment for that is Thursday.

Yesterday was a fun-filled, and busy day. It started with some past-due home maintenance--I cleaned out the drain trap under the bathroom sink, and since I was still feeling motivated, I also pulled the shower stall forward so that I could get to the plastic pipes that run from the shower to the drain the the floor, and I took them apart and cleaned out the accumulated hair and ick from there. Yah, I know, most people wouldn't think to include these sorts of tasks under the category "fun", but, honestly, I like making gross things clean again--there is something so satisfying about it. It is also wonderful to shower without standing in water deep enough to cover my feet, too.

Then we went to lord_kjar's office to print some new passport photos for me (the ones I had turned in with my passport application last week were, so they tell me, covered with white dots "like they had been put into an envelope before they dried". So I need to send them some new ones. Luckily, I am sending everything to the Australian Embassy in Stockholm, not needing to send it all the way to Australia. From there we went to the post office and picked up my US passport (which the Australian embassy returned, since having seen it, they no longer need it to process my application for the new passport), and from there to the grocery store, where we bought a couple of turkeys.

Yes, that is right, two of them. Swedish turkeys as so small! We bought the two largest we could find, one 5 kg, the other 4.5 kg. Together they are pretty much the same size as I used to roast for holidays in the states and Australia (where I tended to go for the 20 lb birds). They have been put into the freezer, where they will wait till the New Year's party at our friend K's house in Umeå. She wanted to do a dinner, and had thought about a potluck, and I thought it sounded like a great excuse to do a proper holiday turkey dinner.

Then we went to the housewarming party for our local count and countess. My, did they luck into a nice place! I love the timbered room with the old style fireplace downstairs. Would be perfect place for having a bardic circle. From there we went to a folk dance.

Last night's folk dance, like all of them I go to totally reinforces my desire to keep living in Sweden. Swedish folk dancing is just so much fun! The musicians in the Luleå Hembygdsgille are so talented! The crowd this time was small--five musicians and 10 dancers, but the quality of both was high, and I had ever so much fun. I, of course, danced every dance--sometimes I was the only one dancing. This despite the fact that before we walked in the door I had been ready to take a nap. But dancing always provides energy!

In the middle of the dance we stopped for "fika", and, since I never eat that late in the evening, I got my nÃ¥lbinding out of my pack and stitched a bit, and managed to finish the project in progress, which took 9.8 hours over the course of 54 days to make (can you tell this has been the "live in the backpack in case I need a project" project?). ( photo )

This hat is all the fault of a friend of mine in the West, who saw the photo of me dressed as a Viking man and fell in love with the hat. She wondered if she could make one using nålbinding instead of knitting, and I had to try.

I had some nice baby wool on hand in red and black, so I gave it a try. My first attempt, using my favourite Finnish stitch, was just ugly, since every stitch interlaces with at least three on each side of it, so colour transitions get very messy. Therefore I stitched to Dalarna stitch and tried again, and was happier with the results. Since this yarn is thin I worked with a double thread.

This hat fits me better than the knit one I had borrowed from lord_kjar, so he tells me that next time I play Vitbjörn I will look a bit less like a dwarf.

The temps this weekend have been lovely: -5 to -10 C, so we haven't lost any more of that think layer of snow we have, and today I even walked on the ice on the water at the bottom of our property. First time I have been willing to risk that this winter. I am a bit concerned with the forecast though--it says that it should warm up above zero by Wednesday. I hope they are mistaken.

I already mentioned that I was up late at the SCA event on the weekend because I was having so much fun. Well, that pattern has continued into the week, too--I haven't made it to bed before 01:00 all week, but am still getting up early enough to do the 45 minute walk to work in the morning. Mind you, I am not arriving at the office at 07:00 or 07:15 as I often do, but instead more like 07:30 or 07:45, but I am still the first one in my corridor. However, I have still be going home at 11:00 or 12:00 when lord_kjar goes home for lunch, so I may want to work a few hours on Friday to make up for it.

So far this work week has been spent researching travel and accommodation for the conference in Australia in February, reading my student's thesis drafts, and compiling information as to what standards are available, from where, and for how much, so that we can decide which ones to get now, to have ready when the Laser Ablation-ICP-MS arrives, and which ones we will wait on till the lab is generating a bit of income from fees paid by the users. (It is farily obvious that if the department doesn't have the budget to cover a full time salary for me, they don't have a huge budget for buying standards, either. (not that it is broke or anything, just that, like at most unis, the cash available in the department is mostly tied to specific research grants, and can't be used for things not directly related to those projects)).

At home I have been focusing on projects. I want a new bliaut--my first one is getting worn out. We have some lovely dark blue silk that I want to use, and have been wondering if I want to do it with or without the tummy gathers that was fashionable in the 12th century. I haven't been all that happy with the gathers on brown wool bliaut, but that has more to do with the fact that they don't always sit right, and often need adjusting. Somehow I don't think I would have that problem with the lighter weight silk. However, another issue with the brown is that the skirt is heavy enough that even though when I first lace the dress the hem is all one length and up off the ground, over the course of the day it droops on the sides and people start to step on it while I am dancing, which isn't an issue with the older blue bliaut, since it is only just long enough for me, even unlaced (the brown is longer than I am tall when it is unlaced).

But what has really and truly decided me on skipping the gathering this time around was the hours I have spent doing two different cutting diagrams--one if I make it extra long and gather it up, and the other if I don't. The latter option lets me get another set of skirt gores out of the fabric, transforming the skirt from just under 3/4 circle to just about a full circle skirt. Can you say "dancing skirt"? I apologize to people who care about 12 Century fashion and think that this style is better with the tummy gathers--I am going to go for the fuller skirt instead...

When I woke up and looked out the window this morning at first I couldn't tell if there had been a heavy frost or a light snow, but then I saw that the snow was still falling from the sky (but couldn't have been doing so for long, given how little had landed--besides, the sky was clear and starry when we got home last night), so I got up and dressed and went out to enjoy it. Beautiful! It kept falling for the 30 minutes I was out enjoying the forest. By the time I got back there wasn't yet 1 full centimeter of accumulation, but it is still coming down, so am hopeful that it might amount to something and stick (it has been -3 to -9 C all week, with no snow yet (other than the brief dusting we got at the beginning of the month on a day it was +3, so didn't last at all), so the ground is cold enough to keep the snow from melting, if we don't get any more bad (read: above zero C) weather. (Ok, so after all of the warm spells of last weather, which meant we never got decent, fun to play in, snow, I am a little paranoid.)

Last night was a folk dance evening--one of those gatherings that are a huge part of the reason I live in Sweden. Picture if you will, an old fashioned one-room school house, filled on one end with musicians playing violin, nyckleharpa, bass, clarinet, and even tuba, and the rest of the hall filled with dancers. We actually had more musicians than dancers for most of the evening, so the sound was fabulous. The occasion this time was a folk music course that had happened during the day (we didn't attend--the course was full before we had time to even ask about it), so the evening dance was scheduled to give the musicians an opportunity to keep playing, and they seemed to really enjoy it. Unlike some of the big folk dances that happen during the summer Spelmannstämman gathering of musicians, this event attracted only people who either wanted to dance or wanted to play--there were no people just standing around watching. However, we had an odd number of dancers. I know this because there were a number of dances where I danced by myself, since everyone else was already dancing with someone or playing a musical instrument. Luckily, I also enjoy dancing by myself, so it was all good.

The fact that I have been getting up early so that I can do the 45 minute walk to work and still be there by 07:30 (and sometimes even earlier) means that I have also generally been going to sleep fairly early. This, not surprisingly caught up with me, and as the clock neared 22:00 last night I was getting pretty sleepy, though, of course, still dancing, if not with quite as much energy as when the night was young. I was contemplating if I should lord_kjar and our housemate, C, if we should call it a night and head home so I could get to sleep, but before I got around to asking the musicians did one final number and started packing up. I remember a time when I would have been disappointed to have the dancing end so early in the evening, but, on this occasion I was delighted, as I really was pretty sleepy, but I also didn't want to miss any dances. If they were done playing then I wouldn't miss any.

Ok, it isn't me flying in this photo, but he can, and has done this with me, too. However, our dance teacher wanted the smallest girl in the group for this, since it is prettier the higher she spins, and since I am several inches taller my feet wind up closer to the ground. Just linking to the photo here because I made an attempt to describe this in my post the other day, and this is so much better than a verbal description.

We had a couple of delightful couch surfers the first part of this week. They arrived Tuesday afternoon and stayed through to Friday morning. She is from California (grew up in Santa Cruz, went to UC Berkeley for undergrad, and is now at UCLA for a PhD studying butterflys), and her boyfriend/traveling companion is from Portugal--they met because he wrote some code to make a camera follow a butterfly in a wind tunnel). We brought them with us to Choir on Tuesday, which turned out to be a very good thing, since she since soprano, and if she hadn't been there we would have had only one soprano, and they both had fun. Wednesday they cooked us dinner and we stayed up too late chatting, and Thursday we took them to the Frostheim arts and science night, which they also enjoyed. (He had never heard of the SCA--she had heard of us, but never been to any SCA activities--if any of you know people in her area that might be a good SCA contact let me know and I can forward details to her.)

They left Friday during the day, and Friday night we finally got around to starting dealing with the one major issue with the house that we have known about since the inspection before we bought the place. One of the rooms downstairs has a raised floor, which had mold growing under it. The rest of the basement has painted concrete floors, and no problems. We are fairly certain that the mold under the raised floor didn't start growing till the previous owners switched out the old wood stove heating system for the down hole heat exchange system (which is what wikipedia says is the English term for "bergvärme")--wood stoves dry out the air much better than the mix of electric and geothermal heating we now have. We have been meaning to take out that floor since moving in, but hadn’t gotten to it till now, since there were plenty of other things higher on the priority list.

Friday lord_kjar took off the top layer of that floor—a not too bad looking fake wood floor that is actually only a few millimetres thick, and came off with ease. Under that there is a red fake tile layer that looks like it may well date to 1966, when the house was built. It is harder to pull off, and below that is a layer of plywood held up by boards which have layers of insulation between them. That is where the mold is growing. He got the top layer off and did a bit of removing a corner of the rest, to see how tough it is going to be. It will be doable, but not easy, and it was getting late, so we shut the door to that room and went to sleep. Even with the door shut the rest of downstairs was smelling of mold the next morning, so we opened the window in there (on this occasion it may be a good thing that the winter has been so darned mild—with the temps above zero, again, this week, it isn’t a hardship to leave that window open) and covered the under-door crack with cloth from the rag bag. With luck we will get a chance to finish removing the rest of that stuff and clean the underlying concrete with bleach to get rid of the last of the mold before we paint it.

Saturday morning we went into the city center for the Frostheim annual meeting, where I was disappointed to discover that just because I can understand everything in Swedish at my SFI course does not mean that I can follow everything said in a Shire business meeting. Ah well, I did catch more of it than last year, which was more than the year before. Eventually it will all make sense.

After the meeting we met up with some of the folk from our Choir for some random drive-by performances. We went into one of the malls, found a nice spot near the escalators, and sang a song, then quickly left, went into another mall, found a nice spot and sang a song, and then again at a third mall before deciding we were done for the day. While most people passing through the malls paid us no attention, we were pleased to note that at each stop there were at least a couple of people who paused to listen.

After the performance a number of us went back to our house, where we baked home-made pizza and cookies. Yum! The good news is that the six of us were enough to finish all of the cookies straight away, so I am not tempted to eat left over cookies. The better news is that there was left over pizza, so I didn’t need to cook today.

Saturday evening our next set of couch surfers arrived. These two live in Uppsala, where they are PhD students. She comes from Solvania, and he is French. They have a conference in town this week, and wanted to come early to do some sight-seeing and ice skating. They actually flew in Saturday morning, but wanted to have time for adventures, so they walked from the airport to the city, stopping to play on the ice along the way. Sadly for them, spring is seriously early this year, so the ice was kind of went and not so good for skating, but they did find the kick-sleds the city provides, and enjoyed those.

This morning I got up early and walked into uni to do some photocopying. Our couch surfers slept in a bit later, such that they were walking to uni, with the plan to visit Teknikins Hus (the cool science museum on campus) as I was walking home, so we stopped and chatted a bit before heading our separate ways. We met up again in the evening at the Folk Music session in Gammelstad—they enjoyed listening to the music as much as I always do, and they also enjoyed watching a bit of our folk dance class, but they went out and explored Gammelstad for the second half of class and then rode home with us, where they gave us some gifts for hosting them--a photocopy of a book on nålbindning for Uppsala (part of the reason she sent us the request is that she also likes nålbindning) and a wooden needle she had made.

Tomorrow it is back to class and back to work. We don't have any any more couch surfers scheduled--after getting three requests in a row so quickly I have set my status back to "no" so that we can focus on project and work for a bit. But they were all such nice people hopefully I will remember to turn the status back to "maybe" in a few weeks or so.

We have been wanting to organize the workshop in the basement of this house every since we moved in, which was a year ago in November. However, other things kept falling higher on the priority list. Until today. Today we finally built the last few shelves we needed and did some major re-arranging of stuff. It is still not perfect, but it is looking ever so much better, and it will be so much easier to do stuff in there. I particularly like the part where the long boards are no longer lying on the floor in the way, but instead are across the top of the shelves. What a nice welcome home after being out of town for most of this year.

Other nice reasons to be home: the weather! While it was warm here (above freezing) for the first half of the week, it has cooled down to a lovely -15 C, and there was a bit of fresh snow, so when I arrived last night the world was beautiful, and I am so happy to be home after so many days down south where there was no snow at all, but plenty of rain.

The geology conference was nice though, and both of my talks went well. I did the first talk (based on my PhD research) as the first speaker of the morning on the first morning of the conference. My second talk (based on the research I have been doing here at LTU) at 14:00 on Friday, so not the last talk, but well into the conference winding down. I am glad that one was so late in the conference, because that made it possible for me to do some major changes to my talk on Thursday--I replaced the sets of still photos of my geological models with movies that show the models by rotating them so that we can see them on all sides. Much spiffier!

Tomorrow our folk dance sessions start up again after the winter break, and I am looking forward to that, too.

I nearly forgot--another highlight of being home--I came home to a lovely hand-made card from aelfgyfu in my mail box. It was so pretty and fun (some fashionable Penguins wearing wigs from the 17th Century enjoying a tea party under the Aurora) that I have put it up on my wall, where I will be able to enjoy it year round. (yup, me, who never puts art on the walls insisted on it)

On Saturday one of our friends (our folk dance teacher) had a 60th birthday party. Since she was born in the 1950's she decided on a 50's theme for the party, and nearly everyone went dressed in period-appropriate clothing, and a number of people went to the effort of doing their hair in 50's style too. I made a new skirt for the occasion. I have wanted a circle skirt for years, so I couldn't resist the excuse to actually do it. Monday evening I dug into our fabric stash and found a nice blue cotton fabric that looked useful. lord_kjar also had some blue and white fabric trim in two widths that looked nice with it, so I opted to use that, too. Monday evening I cut the fabric (four large wedges with one straight edge the selvage, the other straight edge 90 degree from there, with a curve cut for the waist, and another curve for the hem), sewed the wedges together, gathered them onto the waist band, and finished the waist band with two bits of the wider trim (one at the top of the waist, the other covering the seam between the waist and the skirt). That took about 2 hours and 40 minutes, and I wisely decided to put it down for the night, since it was already 23:00.

I didn't get another chance to touch it during the week. Tuesday evening was Choir, Wednesday evening we went to iaido and jodo practice. This is a martial art that he used to do very actively, but had gotten out of the habit of attending some time before I moved here, and he has been interested in getting back into it. I was the only new student, so while the others used most of the gym to practice the more advances stuff one of our friends pulled me aside to teach me the basics. He taught only in Swedish, but he is always careful to speak slowly and clearly, and I did just fine following him, and enjoyed the session enough that I want to return again this week (in fact, afterwards I even looked up the name of the 12 basic movements and the 12 katas used in jodo and set up a form in the logging app I use on my phone, so that when I go I need only tic the ones I did on a given week, rather than having to type in a list and thus remember the spelling). Thursday and Friday I did uni work well into the evening, so I didn't get another chance to sew till Saturday morning.

Therefore I got up fairly early on Saturday and cut out some nice large pockets (big enough to hold a paperback novel) and inset them into the side seams of the skirt. That took around two hours, by which time lord_kjar and I could get him to mark the hem for me. Then I pinned the trim to that line and turned the sewing over to him to sew it to the fabric, while I baked some gluten free cookies to bring to the party. He also cut off the excess fabric and did the sewing of the bottom side of the trim to the bottom of the skirt, but I helped by sitting by him as he sewed and folding the cut edge of the fabric to the inside under the edge of the trim. That all took about 3 hours and 20 minutes, so total time elapsed for the skirt was six hours.

During the party there was, of course, dancing--first to 50's music on the stereo, and later in the evening to Swedish Folk music, since the birthday girl's husband and many of their friends are musicians who bring their violins and guitars to parties. I was very happy with my skirt for dancing--it is full enough that when I spin It gets out to completely horizontal (perhaps even a bit higher, it is tough to tell while being the one wearing it). I did, of course, wear a smaller skirt as a "petticoat", so I don't think my legs showed completely during the spins, but it was really fun to get that much movement from the skirt.

Sunday lord_kjar drove down to the Skellefteå area so that he could help out his brother fix some stuff with the wiring in his new house. I brought along my work computer and got in several more hours of work while the boys did wiring and his wife kept their small son entertained. It was nice to see them, and to see how well they have managed to settle in since moving. They have a much nicer house than we to--I envy them the spacious kitchen. Granted, my current kitchen is so much bigger and nicer than the one I had when we were in the apartment that I shouldn't complain.

This will be another very busy week--things to do most evening, and way too much to do for work, and I need to prepare a presentation the following week for the group trip down to Boliden to present to the folk at the mine headquarters what I have accomplished during my research. The others at LTU who have also done collaboration with Boliden will also be presenting their work. It will be fun, but that is one day lost in writing a paper. (but the presentation will nicely form the basis of the one I need to do for a conference in January, so that will be nice).

Ever since we bought the house last November we have wanted to host some sort of SCA gathering here (larger than dance practice), and, at long last, one has been scheduled. On Tuesday we missed choir practice (since lord_kjar came home from Double Wars with a bit of a sore throat, and so probably shouldn't be singing). Therefore we suddenly had a free evening, so we decided to head to the Frostheim sewing night instead. We have been wanting to attend this local SCA sewing night since it started up last autumn, but it meets every other Tuesday, and we are normally at choir on Tuesdays. Somehow spending a week at Double Wars helped me to be even more keen to show up--one week of hanging out with SCA folk and working on sewing projects wasn't enough--I wanted more.

While at sewing night we all discussed plans for a summer SCA gathering & potluck, at which we could dance, sew, do archery, fighter practice, soak in the shire hot tub, or whatever else we feel for on the day. A couple of dates were suggested, and the one that worked for most of us present was Mid-Summer itself: 22 June. This is in direct conflict with the Drachenwald 20-year Anniversary event, but there are a number of us in the shire who would have liked to have attended that, but can't, so having our own revel on that day sounds like a very good thing to do.

If any of you have been contemplating a visit to Northern Sweden, this would make a grand excuse. The midnight sun is delightful--we are just far enough south that we do have a sunset at mid-Summer, but it never gets dark. So come join us!