kareina

Today during my yoga session I learned that while I am strong enough to get my legs off the ground for pendulum pose when they are crossed in a full lotus position, if my cat places only her two front paws on my thigh, that is enough additional weight that I am promptly sitting on the ground again!

I am still writing in chapter 3, with some detours in to parts of chapter 5 that hadn't been done yet, now that I have come to artefacts that were found very near source quarries. I really need to wrap this up and get on to chapter 2 and the discussion and conclusion chapter as soon as possible. But I am enjoying it--engaging with the artefacts, even virtually, is fun, and learning the geography of random corners of the country where they were found is also fun. So is making the figures. It is only the looming sense of overdue deadline I am not so fond of.

I am not doing much else right now. Well, on Monday when Keldor got home from work he suggested I take a break and join him in the forest, there being plenty of chanterelles to pick just now. I went along, but while he walked here, there, and everywhere picking lots of mushrooms, I stayed surprisingly near the car picking blueberries. 1.5 hours of squats later and I had more than 1.5 yogurt buckets worth of berries picked, and he'd filled his huge waist pack with mushrooms. We dried the berries (about 0.5 liters dried) to add to muesli later, and he cooked up the chanterelles straight away in butter, most of which to freeze for future meals, though he's eaten some already (I am not a huge fan, so I save them for those who are).

My Swedish is noticeably better these days. Funny how much it improves when one actually uses it. Nowadays when I write to museums for more information, I just do it automatically in Swedish, without even thinking about it and do most of the editing and grammar fixing myself, before I toss it into google translate to see if I missed any typoes that happen to be some other word.

Heard today that one of my friends in Tasmania has died. She is one who was at least as old as my mother, and didn't look at all young when we met, in 2003, so it isn't so surprising that only 20 years later she's gone, but it is sad. She had a facebook account but literally never posted anything on it, and I don't think she ever saw the chat messages I tried sending to her (she never replied), but she was delighted to see me when I was down there for a conference in 2015 or so, and she often pressed like on my FB posts, so I know she hadn't forgotten me. I hope my adventures brought her some amusement, and that her friends and loved ones are comforted with happy memories of time spent with her.

Much to my delight J(J) returned to Luleå last weekend, so we met on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and today to do acroyoga. So much fun! I have missed J, who has spent much of the summer with family. Sadly, tomorrow they will pick him up on their way to an adventure in Jokkmokk, and then I won't see J again for some unknown number of weeks. Shortly before he came back I saw a photo of an acroyoga pose that looked interesting and worth trying. So, of course, we had to try it, and since we can't see if we are doing what is in the photo, we filmed our pitiful attempts: once with me flying, and again with J flying. Since then we have gotten it much closer to working, but haven't gotten new videos up, so you can laugh at those, if you like.

This summer has zipped by rather quickly. When J(L) came back north for a summer job and moved in with me six weeks sounded like a nice long time, but it is already over, and J is heading back to Åland. It has been wonderful sharing my home with J--such good company, and really likes my cooking.

Now I have just over a month before E will arrive, if Migrationverket approves the visa application, which I really, really hope they do.

This is turning out to be a fantastic berry year. I haven't gone out for blueberries yet, but everyone who has has picked lots and shared photos. I thought about going to get blueberries today, but thought first I would check the åkerbär (arctic raspberry) that grow in the swampy forest at the bottom of our property. We have never had very many of them. The last couple of years we didn't get any. The first couple of years we were in this house I found only about 12 berries. Today, on the other hand, was a good year--I lost count after eating 40 of them! However, by that time I was no longer motivated to go looking for blueberries, so that can wait till tomorrow.

While this year is not a very good berry year compared to others I have seen since we bought this house, still I have been eating smultron (wild strawberry) daily since getting back from the Medieval days at Hägnan event in July, strawberries since a week or so later, the red currants came ripe this weekend while I was in Norway, but there were still enough left by the birds for me to freeze an ice cream box full of them, the raspberries are starting to ripen, and the black currants are getting close. (Ok, I picked enough black currant to make a small batch of jam yesterday, even though they aren't all ripe yet, as we were totally out of last year's jam, and I love that stuff--I make it by boiling fruit without any additional sugar, and it is nice and tart).

I have been eating fresh nettles all summer, and the kale and silverbeet I planted has been feeding me daily. I am also finally starting to dry nettles again--we ran out of last year's dried nettles early this spring, right after the fresh ones started growing. Since we have done so much major landscaping projects we have plenty of areas which were taken down to bare dirt which have new, tiny nettles growing in, so I am harvesting them--kind of like spring nettles, but they are available now, when I have a bit more time for harvesting than I did in the spring.

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.

I commented here yesterday that today I ought to look at the comments from the reviewers and do whatever it takes to get that manuscript revised to suit them. I even went so far as to add it to my calender. Did I do that?

Let's see:

I started the morning by discovering that we have way more red current bushes than we had thought. Last year we found the few red current bushes on the west side of our field, right next to the sharp bend in the property line. I had picked most of the berries from those bushes the other day, but one of the plants had a bunch of berries that weren't completely ripe yet, so I left them. On that day we had also walked down to the bottom end of the property to see how the black currents were coming along, and on the way back noticed another red current bush at the south edge of the field, but since I didn't have a bucket with me then I had resolved to go back later, and today was later.

I picked the few remaining berries from red current bush location #1, then went to location #2, picked those, then saw another bush a bit further into the trees, and picked those, which led to another bush, and so on till I got to the little shed down there (where the previous owner's horses went when they needed shelter). That is about where the black current bushes start. There is a rather good sized chunk of land down there which is now mostly nettle and black current--the current bushes had been planted as a small scale commercial venture some decades ago, and have been left to run wild for at least a decade (though one can still see the hints of rows in google earth).

Given how many red current bushes I had found scattered here and there among the trees I suspected that over on the other side of the black currents I might find more red currents, so I continued working my way down the property, and went all the way to the water's edge. I did, in fact find more red currents ready to be picked, and, even more exciting, I spotted some åkerbär. They are not yet ripe, but they are showing a hint of colour, and you can bet I will be checking them pretty much daily from now till they are ready to eat--their flavour is worth crossing through the mosquito rich portion of the property!

I spent nearly 1.5 hours picking berries, and wound up with two full liters of red currents to put into the freezer. On the way back up to the house I also discovered that we have a few high-bush blueberry plants growing between the red current location #1 and the change in slope from the field to the level the house sits at. I had never actually seen high bush blueberries before, but I knew they existed, since I had a field assistant from Bulgaria with me when I did my field work in the Brooks Range for my Master's degree; when he saw the tiny low-lying alpine blueberries I was happily eating during the last half of that field season his reaction was "you would bend down for this?". He then explained that back in Bulgaria blueberries grew on bushes at waist height.

Therefore, when I saw bushes at waist height in my own yard that contain clumps of berries in various states of ripeness ranging from whitish pink to full dark bluish purple, I happily started eating the dark ones. Yum! Even better, when lord_kjar got home and I showed them to him he tried one (he had never seen high bush blueberries before either) and said that he isn't all that impressed with them, so I get them all to myself!

After the berries were picked, washed, and into the freezer I curled up with a book and lunch. lord_kjar got home for lunch just as I finished eating mine. I checked the wall we had scraped yesterday, and it was dry (despite yesterday's rain), so I had him raise up the tractor scoop and I went to work painting the next bit of the wall while he went in and had his lunch. I managed to finish before he had to go back to work, which is a good thing, since, left to its own devices, the tractor scoop will gradually lower itself.

This wouldn't be a problem if not for two factors: 1) the way the hinges are set up for moving the scoop one can drive right up to the wall, start raising the scoop, and in the process the scoop becomes further from the wall. Therefore it is necessary to then drive further towards the wall if one wishes to stand on the scoop and paint the wall. Therefore, if one were to just let the scoop sag over time it would also come a bit forward in the process, and would thus eventually hit the wall. Strangely, we don't wish this to happen. and 2) in addition to simply lowering, the scoop also rotates as it ever so slowly sinks. This means that when we raise it we angle the base of the scoop, where we are standing to paint, nearly flat, but tilted such that were we to spill water (or paint) onto it, the liquid would flow towards the back end of the scoop. However, over the course of the hour it took me to do the painting the tilt gradually changed, passing through horizontal, and ending with a slight lean outwards. Not enough to make anything sitting on the scoop fall off, but enough that were water spilled it would run off the front of the scoop and land on the ground below. Needless to say, if left to do this long enough, eventually the solid objects (including the paint bucket) would fall off the scoop. Since I don't know how to drive the tractor this means that I can only use the tractor as scaffolding when he is home to lower the scoop when I am done. (...and to be available to make minor re-adjustments to the position of the scoop if needed. This wasn't needed today, but yesterday, when we were both standing on the scoop it did that slow sink a bit faster due to the extra weight, so he needed to take the ladder down twice to go re-lift and tilt the scoop to a better position.)

After he lowered the scoop and moved the tractor away I had time enough to also paint the part of that section that one can reach from the ground. Soon after I was done and had cleaned everything away for the day it started gently raining. After it had rained for a while I checked the wall, and was delighted to discover that none of that rain was actually hitting the wall. The overhang of the roof is just wide enough that such a soft rain, falling exactly perpendicular to the ground, completely misses the wall. Now this wall is more than half done (since it turns out the tractor scoop is a bit over 1/4 of the width of the wall. Hopefully we will have a few more windows of painting opportunity in the next few weeks.

After I cleaned up the painting mess and got a shower it was time to play in the kitchen. When we were in the grocery store last night I was delighted to see some beet greens (with beet roots attached), so I bought them. By this afternoon the greens were looking kind of wilted, so I cut them off and put them soaking in cold water to perk them up a bit while I made a beetloaf with which to restock the freezer.

( Today's beetloaf recipe, on the off chance that anyone wants to try it. )

The beet loaf was delicious, and holds together really well when sliced. We ate a slice each straight away, and the rest of the slices have been packed into two ice cream boxes and put into the freezer to be eaten whenever we are hungry but have no time/energy to cook, or want something easy to take with us.

Then we went out and bought a second hand double-bladed plow he had seen advertized on blocket (the Swedish on-line source for second hand everything). He had been wanting a better way to smooth out the field so that, eventually, we can host Medieval camping events, and this should do the trick. The plan is to plow the field both north-south and east-west, then use the other tool that he has from his dad to break up the plowed earth into clumps, then he will be able to drag some sort of smoothing device (perhaps made from logs, perhaps one of those long stones we bought) to level the field off. It will be interesting to see how much of that list he can accomplish between now and when we need to return the tractor to his dad at the end of the summer, given that we also want to work on the earth cellar and have other projects, too.

After we got home I also mixed up and baked some oven pancakes to put into the freezer. With all of the hot weather we have been having we had run out of the last stash--I rather enjoy getting out a slice of frozen pancake and gnawing on it while it thaws. It is a nice, cold snack, and usually lasts more than a page or two into a book (unlike the thawed version).

So, nope. No uni work today. Perhaps tomorrow.