kareina

The evening of Friday, 9 December 1966 an Air Force doctor, stationed at Lackland Air Force Base, was called away from a formal Christmas party to help my mother with the delivery of her first child. Since he came to her side still wearing his best suit, with tails, my mother always told me that my birth was "a formal occasion". I presume that, after that initial meeting to see how mom was doing, he had time to change into his normal work clothes, since I wasn't dragged out into the world, bottom first, trying to hold on with all four limbs, till Saturday, 10 December.

I turned six, for the first time, on Sunday, 10 December,  1972, by which time I had already seen much of the world, having already lived on three continents and visited many more places, both by flying and through long road trips. Around this time my parents divorced and my mom was once again working a Civil Service job at Lackland AFB and we lived in a house off base  at 8611, Falling Timber St., which house no longer exists, though you can still see on Google Maps the outline of where the house was.

I was in the second grade, and a voracious reader. That was the year that my mother took one look at the school book I had been sent home with to read aloud to her (Henny Penny, a book with lots of pictures and only one or two lines of text per page), and made an appointment to talk to the teacher, showing her the books I read at home (many paragraphs per page, and, if there was a picture at all, usually not more than one per chapter). The teacher agreed that I was reading well over the assigned level, but said there was nothing she could do about it; that the requirements were set at the District level. My mother promptly joined the PTA, and got the requirements changed. After that, the four classses of students in my age level were combined, and divided again by reading level for reading class, so that those of us who could already read well got more interesting things to read at school, and I begin to really love being a student.

My second sixth birthday took place in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday 10 December, 1982, where we had been living for six years. I was enrolled at Steller Secondary School, an open-concert alternative school of 200 self-motivated, geeky students, where I was thriving. I had joined a Medieval household, Purwydd, and we gathered each month for a wekend Revel in one or another of our houses, wearing our costumes, cooking feasts, and having fun. We also joined the SCA and attended their events, hanging out with this weird group of adults who did this too, and I was already feeling at home, having gotten hooked on the dancing and the bardic circles.

My third sixth birthday was Thursday, 10 December, 1992, and I was living in An Tir, in the newly forming region of the Summits. I had been a Viscountess for nearly six years, and served as Regional Chatelaine, which office let me learn everyone's SCA name, as I was the one publishing the Summits Directory, a phone, physical address, and email address book that listed all the SCA names of everyone in the region, cross-referenced with their moder names, and also listed everyone's offices, household affiliations, which branch they lived in, and anything eles of interest that might help people connect with like-minded people in the area. I stole the idea from the Oerthan Directory in Alaska, and did it for my own selfish purposes, wanting to be able to stay in contact with (and remember the names of) the people I saw every weekend. This was around the time I built myself some armour and began learning to fight. While my main focus was the SCA, I was also still a keen student, enrolled at the Southern Oregon State College, where I had finally declared a major (geology), after 8 years as a full-time student who had already been enrolled at five different universities/colleges.

My fourth sixth birthday took place on Tuesday, 10 December, 2002. I was living in the Principality of the Mists, West Kingdom, and had been a member of the Order of the Laurel for two years. We were traveling to SCA events every weekend, but the weather there was too hot, so during the days I would stay in the shade and be a consort, making certain my champion had everything he needed to enjoy his day in armour, and I never missed watching one of his tournament fights. But after sunset, when the temperatures eased and the bardic circle started, was my favourite time, with many happy hours spent joining in on the group songs and listening to solo performances. For me the bardic arts really do the most to preserve our SCA culture and give us real glimpses of the cultures prevalent in the real Middle Ages.

This was  also the first time in my life I wasn't a student, having finished both my Masters in Geology (in Alaska), and a certificate in Massage Therapy (in California).

My fifth sixth birthday was on Monday, 10 December,  2012. I had moved into the house at Rutviksreleln 59, Luleå,  Sweden the month before, and we'd manage to get the paperback bookshelf built and the last of the boxes unpacked on time for a combination house warming and birthday party the weekend before. I was still very active in the SCA, but, since Luleå is a bit far from the rest of the Kingdom, I was mostly attending events in the north, which left plenty of time/energy available for new hobbies, including Swedish Folk Dance, singing in a student choir, and gaming. I was employed at LTU for my second postdoctoral research project, and thus I still felt like a student, only I got paid to do it.

Next week, on Saturday, 10 December,  I will turn six for the sixth time, and am feeling as delightfully gleeful about how that number sounds as I would have been if someone had said it to me the first time I turned six. I have been living for a year in the house I bought last Christmas, in Lövånger, Sweden. I am the acting Seneschal of the group which will, hopefully, become the Barony of Trenneälvar, by combining the Shires of Frostheim, Reengarda, and Uma. The path towards that goal has been a little rocky, with some people being vehemently against the idea, and others overwhelmingly in favour. However, the poll asking people to answer indicating where they lie on the continuum between those extremes draws to a close this week, so, unless we get a lot of last minute "no"s, it looks like we will resume work on the project this winter, and see where it leads.

I am not currently enrolled as a student,  but I just signed up to take the SFI (Swedish for immigrats) course again, but online this time. Not to learn the language, after 12 years here I am fluent, but to have access to their resources to get help with pronunciation and, hopefully, improve my accent enough that strangers quit switching to English when they hear me speak. It will be interesting to see how it works, and how much time I can devote to that goal.

But I haven't posted in days, and mom, at least, wants to hear what I am up to.

Tonight was the last gymnastics of the year, and so much fun, as always. While I am still miles from my goal (be able to roll slowly into a handstand the same way I do for headstands), I have gotten to the point where if I have my head against something and both hands on the ground in front of it I can hop both feet into the air and pull them up into a headstand. If the "something" is a wall then I can stay in the handstand against the wall. If it is the red half round mat then I can pause ever so briefly before letting my legs fall over and my body roll over the curve of the mat to a standing position.

Tonight I also practiced sitting down on that mat, then arching over it till I am doing a back bend over it, with hands on the ground on one side, feet on the other (the top of the half circle is just below my spine in that position), then I can shift my weight so that much is on my hands, but some is on the mat, lift both legs up and over till they reach the ground on the other side of me, at which point I stand up. This felt easy enough at first try that when I encouraged Ellinor to try it I was surprised to discover that it was hard for her, and I needed to help her lift the legs up and over. But on the other hand, she can do the back flips by jumping and throwing herself back (with a spotter), and I don't dare do those yet.

Had a good skype meeting with my PhD supervisor on Monday, and have revised a minor grant application (a little $500 student stipend, which would still help if I get it) based on her suggestions.

Sunday was a lovely Birthday. I was up late Saturday night preparing, and finally got to the part about starting the bread dough at 23:00. Then I did yoga and tidied up a bit more, and once the dough had doubled I kneaded it again and spread it out flat on a baking pan and set it downstairs, where it is colder, but not as cold as the fridge, to rise slowly while I slept. About five hours later I got up and popped it into the oven and while it baked I made some egg butter, starting with whipping the cream to make the butter (I had boiled the eggs the night before. When the bread came out I went back to bed for an hour or so, and then got up and cut the loaf into three layers and made a smörgåstårta that I was willing to eat:

One layer of home made hummus (starting with grinding sesame seeds in the mortar and pestle to make tahini), one layer artichoke, spinach, alfalfa sprouts, sunflower sprouts, roasted garlic, and fresh cheese, and I covered the outside of the loaf with the egg butter and decorated it with slices of carrot, cucumber, tomato, and a little tiny salad green thing I don't recall the Swedish name for (it starts with an M), and never learned the English word.

The result was pretty. I remembered to take a photo, but who knows how long it will be before I remember to get it from the phone onto the computer?

Then I decorated the cake. I had baked it the day before, trying a variation of my favourite pound cake recipe (1 lb each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour). This time I decided to see what happens if one also adds 1lb of milk. I also decided I didn't need a full pound cake, so I did 11 oz of each ingredient instead (that being the whole number on the scale for five eggs, which seemed a reasonable number). I also added some baking powder and baked it in three layer pans. I probably should either have used only two pans, or made a bigger batch of batter, as they were a bit thin. They didn't rise much, but I think That they should probably have gone into a hotter oven. A normal pound cake bakes slowly, but I think this one had enough extra liquid that it should bake hotter and faster. However, it was really yummy, and while dense goes really well with the raspberry-almond blend I spread between two of the layers and the blueberry-almond blend that went between the others. I frosted it with plain whipped cream (of course) and decorated it with frozen berries and segments of Clementine orange.

The cake was ready just before my apprentice Anna and her husband Gunnar arrived at noon. We chatted for a bit and then ate smörgåstårta, and then chatted more and worked on sewing projects till David arrived, at which point we ate cake. More conversation and sewing till I was hungry again around 15:30, so I got out the smörgåstårta again, just as Birger and Siv arrived, so we ate smörgåstårta, followed by more cake, and some cookies (I baked the Finnish style Christmas tarts I posted a recipe for recently, but filled them with more of the raspberry almond blend that went into the cake). Once we had eaten enough Birger, Siv, and David got out their violins and Nyckelharpa and played Swedish folk music while the rest of us enjoyed it and I did more sewing.

Then everyone save David went home around 17:30, and he and I enjoyed a bit more time together, and I did my yoga while he played the piano (I have missed that, it has been a long time since he played the piano). Then he was feeling tired and wanted to play computer games, so he went back to Caroline's apartment and I updated my logs a bit, till Ellinor arrived.

She had been to the concert that our frinds Evelia (my other apprentice) and Cajsa had performed in with their orchestra, and then took the next possible bus to my place, which got her there around 20:30. I fed her smörgåstårta and cake and we chatted till 22:00 and then I drove her home.

Then I returned to my computer to finish updating my logs and noticed that my cousin Karl had sent me a fb message suggesting that I call, so I did, and we chatted for an hour. I hadn't talked with him in ages, so it was nice to hear from him.

That brings me mostly up to date, but now I really must sleep, as I need to meet a PhD student at 07:00 (6 hours from now). We will watch the Lucia performance (first year since moving to Sweden that I haven't been part of the Choir performing, but choir conflicts with gymnastics), and then I will start training her on the laser.

Yesterday evening my friend Kaarina asked me to have a look at her documentation for her 12th Night A&S competition entry. Reading her poem and her write-up on the style she used for it inspired me to also want to enter one of my songs or poems. A reply to my quick note to Kingdom A&S confirmed that I wouldn't need to be present to enter, and it is ok if the piece has been used in a local competition, so long as it hasn't been entered at Kingdom. Therefore I have just spent the evening writing up a first draft of my documentation, during which I discovered that the Harley manuscript 978, in which Summer is icumen in first appears (f. 11v), is available on line. Even better, the song has a text-box insert in latin which explains that it is a round and the fact that the second voice begins at the location of the red cross in the sheet music. So totally cool! And something I never would have known if not for her inspiration to do this. (If anyone wants to see my documentation, leave a comment and I can send you a copy. Mom, I will just send you one anyway, you don't have to ask.)

To make things even better, Kaarina is willing to find some other singers to perform my song as a round at 12th Night. Sadly, I won't be at the event (which is being held in southern Finland the same weekend as I will be attending the wedding of a friend here in northern Sweden), but with luck someone will record it for me. It is a good thing I am not competitive at all, since I am competing against a woman who is so amazingly talented at song writing. She tells me she isn't competitive either, and is just happy to inspire people to do more music.

In other news, work is going well. While we had issues with the ICP-MS earlier in the week, and team viewer session with a tech in the UK sorted them out, and I am once again running trace element composition maps. My colleagues all want to get me to full time, as soon as the budget permits, and now that we are starting to get external users (paying customers) to the lab, the odds of this happening go up. Of course now that we have paying customers, I had to actually look up what my salary comes to by the hour, since our lab price for internal users and others from academia is one rate for the machine time, and the addition of my salary for the time I work on the job. Therefore I sent an email to accounting and asked "just what does it come to by the hour?". She replied by sending me a spreadsheet containing the salaries for everyone in our Division and how those monthly rates translates into hourly cost. This is a fascinating document. I mentioned this to one of my colleagues, and she said "yes, that information isn't secret", but I wouldn't have known where to find it before getting the spreadsheet. So, of course, I have used the filter option to compare people of different rank/job title. There isn't so much variation within a given rank (though, of course, there is some), but the highest paid person in our division (a chaired professor who is Very Good at getting us funding) does make about 2.6 times what I make. I was very pleased to note that there doesn't appear to be any gender-based difference in salary earned in our Division--the variation is totally related to job title, and in the upper levels if there is only one woman in the level she is either the highest or in the upper half of the group for that level (we often have only three our four people at a given level, which is how it happens that there are sometimes only one who happens to be female).

Tomorrow is Friday, which means I get to stay home, do house work, bake myself a birthday cake, and do other prep work for Saturday's party. It will be interesting to see how many people are able to make it to the party on Saturday, and how many of them are there at what times of the day.