kareina

We had seven of us for Frostheim's craft night tonight. Not quite all at the same time though--V. arrived early and left early. S. came a bit later, but also didn't stay long, and J., a totally new guy, arrived during the last 45 minutes we were there. However, I am glad I did, since O. had asked me to bring in my armour and swords and stuff to show him, and he sounds keen to try fighter practice on Sunday. Also, since the armour was there O. spent the evening trying stuff on and thinking about what he will want to do differently when he builds his own, so it was worth the effort of bringing all the stuff.

L. had finished the nålbinding project she started last week (her first, ever), and was ready to be shown how to start a project again. She is one of the students in the group who is also in my department, and trying to decide what she wants to do for her Master's project, so I shared some ideas of projects she could do with the laser. My apprentice, E. is the other, and she is also considering laser-based projects for her Master's, if she doesn't go with a geophysics project. It will be interesting to see what they wind up choosing.

My other apprentice, A. finished a project tonight--a lovely blue wool triangle cloak for which she has tablet woven a maroon and grey edging. I quite like how it came out. I have made progress on my glasses case--the strap is nearly completely attached now, only 12 cm of seam left to do on it, but now it is finally wearable. I made the strap for this one a good bit longer than the last, so it rides down by my hip, instead of my waist, which means that I don't have to remember to take it off when I put on my coat, which will make life much easier. It will also be nice to always have all four pairs of glasses in reach, so I can just grab the pair I need for any given task, and not try to use the wrong ones because I couldn't be bothered walking all the way to my backpack.

Last night's snow actually stuck in a few, isolated, spots, which meant that tiny pockets of the world were fresh and white this morning (if only about 1 mm thick), but, of course, it didn't last, and by the middle of the day it was +5 C. Even so, there is still a fair bit of snow out on the field, even if it is mostly gone in the forest and up by the house. I need to remember to take a photo of the yard tomorrow to compare with the ones I took last year and the year before on that date.

When we walked from the house to lord_kjar's parent's motorhome to sleep last night the driveway was comprised of a thin layer of snow left behind after plowing, the texture of which was that perfect consistency to make that squeaky-crunchy sound snow makes on a cold day. Winter-perfect.

When I woke up this morning and walked into the house it was necessary to be careful, as now the driveway is comprised of ice with a film of water covering it, and all of the drain-spouts from the roofs of the house and out-buildings were running liquid water. It was also lightly raining, but I suspect that most of the water film over the driveway came from melting rather than precipitation.

We had planned to spend some of today wandering in the forest here so that lord_kjar and his brother start to get familiar with it (remember that his parents only bought this farm in May). However, with the rain it was decided to do a bit more work to finish up the new car port instead. While the boys did that I made progress on my book and took a nap.

Since the 25th is just an ordinary day in Sweden, dinner for the eight of us tonight didn't have quite so many choices as yesterday. I took "only" the roast moose, moose balls, baked omlette with cheese, salad, potato, and left over mixed root vegetables dish from yesterday, and ignored the saussage, normal meat balls, pork dish, the fish and potato dish, the other fish and veg salad, or any of the five or six store bought bread options.

It is always mind boggling to me how his mother manages to produce dinners like this--I never see her doing the food prep, other than the last minute putting it all out. It is nearly enough to make one believe in magic.

Not that I would want to eat like this most of the time. I am content with my one-dish meals or soups, and with grazing all day, one item at a time and wait an hour before the next thing. My poor tummy doesn't like getting it all in one go like today. Especially when my mouth wins the debate and I take seconds because it was tasty.

Edited to add: and then she fed us blueberry cake with whipped cream and some other sweet fluffy sauce thing (I skipped the latter). My poor tummy is so full, but my mouth thinks longingly of thirds on desert...

I am sad to report that after last night's snow we had rain this morning, which has removed all the snow on the roads and side walks, and all but a tiny hint of it on the fields. I hope this doesn't turn out to be the pattern for the winter, yet am fearful it might be, since that it what happened the winter before last...

However, anytime I am despairing over our weirdly warm winters here in the north, I can read blamebrampton's reports on spring and summer heat down under, and realize that, actually, this isn't anywhere near as bad as things could be. Take care, drink water, keep cool...

I have heard a couple of people locally complain that they are still waiting for summer to arrive. Me, I say it has been here for 70 days, and that it has been wonderful. Why 70 days? because that is the number of days it has been since temperatures dropped below zero C. Why wonderful? Because temps have been mostly ranging between 15 and 20 C, and it hasn't gotten unpleasantly hot yet, and we have had a good mix of rain and sun. The strawberries seem to agree--they didn't like last summer's two weeks of 35 C temps and not much rain*. This year the berries are more numerous, and more than twice the size of what they managed to produce last year, and this makes me happy.

Hopefully the raspberries will also do well, though it still seems to be too early for them, judging from the few bushes near the strawberries. The rest of the raspberries are down on the lower part of the property, with the mosquitoes, so I haven't checked them yet. I should also take a walk out to the forest to see if there are any blueberries yet...

*to be fair, they didn't like having been transplanted last spring, either, but they would have liked having been plowed under even less, we we moved them anyway before taking the plow to the field.

Edited to add: Yes, there are blueberries out there. The nearest patch was only a 7 minute walk from my door. However, just now they are so jealously guarded by viscous mosquitoes that I was only able to pick a large handful of them before being forced to retreat--this despite the fact that I made certain to bundle up in jeans, heavy long sleeves, and a shawl wrapped around my head and neck--since they couldn't get anything else, they flew into my face and behind my glasses till I gave up. Perhaps another day.

Some of my friends have been posting photos or descriptions of the new spring growth in their areas. I see these, look out my window at the snow we still have, and smile at how good I have it.

True, winter has been hit hard. Not only have temperatures been above freezing for at least part of most of the days since late February, the last couple have been above freezing all day, and made it to +12 yesterday. Despite that, the remaining icy snow in the yard is a good half a meter thick, except for that little patch between the walkway and the house, from which all of the snow has melted.

Tonight, at our normal Sunday evening folk dance session, I got to fly (like this) for the first time in a long time! That is just so much fun. I was enjoying dance before that moment, but adding that into the mix has me home after dance bouncing and full of energy! There are actually four of us in the group who want to fly, but only two these days with the strength to be the supports, and one of them is shorter than I am, so our dance teacher thinks it looks better if the shorter girls fly instead. We so need more tall, strong, dancers in the group. Know anyone you can send our way?

In other news, today we got the forge out and we made a tool for tuning the piano. ( I get to say  )

Now he is happily tuning the new piano (did I remember to mention the new piano? His sister called a week or three back to say that one of her colleagues had an old walnut piano they wanted to be rid of, and did we want it, free. Well, plus the cost of shipping it here, but that is close enough to free for such a nice instrument) while I bounce happily to you guys about my day.

The day also started nicely, with delightful -6 C temps, so I went skiing. Not that one actually needs skis just now--the hard packed ice we have left from all the beautiful snow we got at the end of January is more than firm enough to support my weight if I wanted to walk on it, but skiing is better exercise, because it uses arms too, so I should do it as often as I can before that nasty spring weather we have been having ever since I got back from Australia finishes killing off my poor ailing winter. Seriously--it has gotten above zero every single day since I have been home. There was a time when March was one of the the coldest times of the year, but not this year. Not last year either. Oh, wait, no complaining--the day has been too fun for that...

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.

Well, when we got home from our excursion to the mountains and winter yesterday it was a nice, beautiful -5 C here, and the couple of cm of snow that had fallen Saturday morning was still here. A bit crunchy from having been rained on before it cooled off, but the world was covered with white and not looking anywhere near so dark and dismal as it had before that snow fell. However, today had been predicted to be warmer, and, sadly, it was.

When I got up this morning it was already +2 C and there was a warm wind blowing, which meant that our street, which hadn't been plowed yet, but had been driven enough to trample most of the snow down, was very wet and icy. Only the very edges of the street, which hadn't yet been driven on, was reasonably safe to walk upon, since it had a couple cm of slushy snow, which was much better traction than the street itself.

The bike path which runs from our neighbourhood to the uni, on the other hand, had been plowed, which meant that it didn't have any of that good traction slushy snow anywhere, but instead was a rather wet layer of ice, with occasional patches of dirt showing (they haven't paved this path yet). Luckily I have good boots and good balance, and was able to make it to work only five minutes later than the walk normally takes, and I didn't actually slip once.

However, I didn't even try to walk home after work--by lunch time it was raining and everything was even slicker, so I got a ride home from lord_kjar, where I spent some time chopping ice from our walkway (which wouldn't have needed doing if we had been home on the weekend, as I would have gotten the snow completely removed from the walkway before it had a chance to freeze solid). Can we please just have winter yet, with no more temperatures above freezing till at least February or March? April or May would be better...

I worked from home today, so got no exercise. Therefore I went out for a walk this evening. It was a beautiful moonlit night, so when I got to the place where our road crosses the water I couldn't resist turning left and heading out onto the frozen lake, enjoying the way the thin layer of snow atop the ice glistened in the moonlight. Such a beautiful and peaceful setting.

I thought about turning left again when I reached the bottom of our property, but it was such a beautiful night I couldn't bear to end the walk so soon, so instead I continued on to where the water passes under the main road, and took another left, and then again onto our street to wend my way home. Have I mentioned lately how much I love living in northern Sweden? Even though today was a warm day (+5 C!), the ice is doing ok and I can walk out upon the water and enjoy the view.

Then, after I got home lord_kjar and I got to chat via skype with a loved one, and that was delightful, too. Now my daily yoga is done, and I need to get some sleep. I hope you all have had as nice an evening as I have.

I have mentioned repeatedly how weird our winter was this year, and how little snow we got. I just found this photo from a year ago on 21 April, 2013, which shows how much snow was left at the time:



Coincidentally, the earliest walkway photo progress I took this year was also on 21 April, as you can see, not a drop of snow remained on the ground:



It truly was a weird, low-snow winter. Our next door neighbour normally has a big bonfire in his yard for Valborgsafton (31 April), but this year, while made ready the pile of logs weeks ago, he opted not to light it, because the field was naught but dry grass (last year the grass near the fire was still snow-covered), and he didn't want to risk starting a runaway fire.

Our choir normally performs traditional spring songs at the big Valborgasafton bonfire at the University, but this year, since we are such a small choir, we opted to instead go do two indoor performances at some old-folks homes, to bring spring to those who can't get out and see it for themselves. Afterwards half of us (which is to five--it is a SMALL choir this year) came over to our place and sang for the neighbours at their bbq--while they didn't have the bonfire lit, they did have a small fire for sausages etc.

I also found this photo, from March 2013, which shows why we still had a decent amount of snow left at the end of April last year:



This year the deepest bit of snow in the yard was only about 1/3 of what we had left in March last year...