kareina

 I have been so busy working on my thesis that I had forgotten that my many weeks ago past self had sent in an abstract for a conference. In Gothenburg, in January. Past me was thinking "by then my thesis will be done, so I can go present my work, and, since it is halfway to Drachenwald Coronation in Germany from here, I can just keep on going to the event".

I arrived in Manchester on Wednesday morning. Lucky for me as the train was approaching the city and I was gathering my stuff I noticed that the older gentleman sitting across from me had the most delightful rainbow shoelaces, so I complimented him on them, and we got to talking. When I took out my phone to figure out how to get where I was going he asked where I was headed, so I showed him the dot on the map, and he pointed out that rather than waiting till the Manchester Piccadilly station, I should get off at the Manchester Oxford road station instead, my walk will be only 5 minutes instead of 20, and the stop is sooner. So I took his advice, and reached the AirBnB just after 10:00, where I dropped off my luggage and picked up the key from my host, and then went directly to the conference.

UKAS is a science-heavy Archaeology conference, and, judging by the conference, the currently most fashionable sort of science for archaeologists to do is isotope studies of human, plant, and animal remains to determine if they ate local food (or grew locally in the case of the plants), or came from elsewhere. Next most popular is to look at bones, teeth, or residue in cooking pots, to figure out what people (or animals) have been eating.

My poster was the only one where the science was being applied to rocks, though there were two geoarchaeology posters that look at soil (we three share a supervisor).

But the poster I found most inspiring was the guy who is making 3D models of animal skulls by taking photos from all angles and letting the computer stitch them together. This made me wonder if one can also use the face recognition software to identify/classify archaeological objects. The 3D model guy tells me he knows of an archaeologist who is, in fact, applying face recognition software to pot shards.

On the first day a couple of people came over during a break to see my nålbindning. (typed this far, and then got distracted working, noticed the open tab, and decided to post as is...)

While I was too busy to check blogs due to travel to Known World Dance and Double Wars, they have published the call for papers for the European Textile Forum. While I haven't made it to one of these since moving to Sweden (darn finances getting in the way of fun stuff, anyway), the ones I attended while living in Italy were, without a doubt, the best conferences I have ever attended. An entire week of focusing on medieval textiles with delightful people who share the passion for the topic! I strongly encourage everyone I know who likes this sort of thing to attend.

The conference in Denmark this weekend went well, though it seems perhaps a bit silly to spend so much time in transit for such a short time on site. Flew down Saturday afternoon, and home Sunday evening. Ah well, that is as much time as I was willing to spend away from home.

It was good to spend time with my cousins, who I haven't seen since mom and I visited them a bit more than a year and a half ago. When last I was there their young son (who is now 11 years old, and speaking much better English than last I saw him) proudly showed off the small treasure chest he had with rocks. Therefore this time I brought him the last of the pretty rocks I had collected on the trip to Cyprus two years ago (the rest went to my nieces in Seattle). He was very enthusiastic about receiving them, correctly identified the pyrite in about 1/10 of a second of looking at it (which is all one needs if one has ever seen it before), and then happily got out his collection, which had grown enough since my last visit that he now has three large plastic boxes with individual cubby holes for each rock, and a bit of paper towel in each to cushion them.

On the way home I finished the book I had brought with me, and I had plenty of time to change planes in Stockholm, so I stuck my nose into a bookstore, and walked out with four books in Swedish. The three books of the EarthSea trilogy, and a copy of Neil Gaiman's "Odd och frostjattarna". I had never read the latter before, and found it delightful. I managed to finish it before landing in Luleå, and it was so nice to read a book in a single day again (that used to be normal, but, other than books written for very little children, it hasn't happened since I switched to reading in Swedish). Granted, it is so short that it took only 2 hours, but still...

There was more, but it is way past my bedtime, and I get to play with building the earth cellar tomorrow...

Just like every other holiday in Sweden, Midsummer is celebrated on Midsummer Eve, not the day itself. However, in our case the day started the day before that. On Thursday one of our (exchange student) friends from choir, came over for dinner for one last visit before he returns to Germany next week, and then we took him with us to the park in town where the Luleå Hembygdsgille (folk music and dance group) runs a Midsummer celebration, where we helped to wrap leaf covered branches around the midsummer pole thingie for the next day (I try not to think of it as a cross, so as not to be uncomfortable participating in someone else's religious ceremony).

Friday we got up early enough to unload the huge lathe he dad is lending us from the giant trailer (which we hauled here with the tractor on Wednesday, after having loaded it onto the tractor on Tuesday--remind me to post photos of the loading at some point if you are interested in seeing it). It now sits in the car port, awaiting our creating a concrete platform in the shed with a window for it to live upon.

Then we went to the Gillestuget (the little old school building in Gammelstad where the Hembygdsgille does folk dancing, meetings, etc.), and lord_kjar loaded up a trailer of stuff to take to the park in town to set up the sound system for the stage there, and I practiced the day's dance program with the others. (lord_kjar used to do the dance performances on Midsummer too, but in recent years (and for as long as I have lived here), he runs the sound instead, saying it is a nice change from the dancing, and he thinks it is fun, too.)

After the trailer was loaded and the dancers were happy that we all know what we are doing, everyone sat down to a lunch of traditional Swedish food. As is usual when that is what is being served, there was not much on offer that I eat, since I don't care for fish and don't eat meat (other than the occasional wild game, which doesn't cause the same issues with my digestion as store-bought meat does), so all I took was a couple of tiny boiled potatoes, a couple of thin slices of cheese, a little bit of salad (lettuce, tomato, cucumber), and half a hard boiled egg. The tiny amount of food on my plate got comments from the others at our table, since they each took two to three times as many different items as I had taken. However, I rarely eat much at one sitting, since I prefer to spread my food intake more evenly across the day time hours, and I had food in by back pack for later, so it didn't worry me to have only a little. I did, of course, take plenty of strawberries for desert, with cream, when that was put out.

After lunch lord_kjar departed with the trailer for town to set things up there, and our group, in our folk costume finery, gathered at the entrance to the open air museum at Hängnan (not far from the Gillestuget) and paraded in to the stage, musicians playing. We dancers left our baskets and bags on the stage behind the musicians and then we went out into the dense crowds (literally thousands of people gather in this park for Midsummer; some years it has exceeded 10,000) to do the traditional raising of the leaf and flower covered pole, which includes carrying it in a loop around the area and then standing it up in a hole in the ground, followed by dancing around it.

I am told that everyone in Sweden who is old enough to dance at all has participated in these dances--all families make certain that their kids get a chance to do the dances around the midsummer pole, whether at a large celebration like this one, or at a private one at someone's summer cottage, and everyone knows the songs well enough to sing along. At our celebration the musicians play the traditional songs and a group of us join them on stage to sing the words into microphones, while the rest of us lead the dances around the pole (I, of course, was with the dancers). The dances all fall into the category of "mimed dances", which is to say there are hand motions. For one we play the part of bunnies, horses, and elephants, and use our hands to show the relative size of each creatures ears, tails (and trunk!), for another we mime playing musical instruments, and a third involves leaning one way and another ("hit" and "dit"). The sequence of dances takes a good 10 to 20 minutes all told, and is fun, and the part of the crowd closest to the pole, which contains lots and lots of children, and a few adults, all dance with us, and everyone sings.

Then we moved over to the stage for a folk dance performance, and as soon as that was done we went to town and did it all again at the park there, for the much more reasonably sized crowd there (probably still more than 1000 people, but the people density was better).

For the second performance, since there was more room to move in town, we added in a promenade dance involving as many people from the audience as we could persuade to join us, doing all of the traditional patterns of couples splitting up, coming back together, reversing the line to walk under the arch of joined hands of the couples following, splitting the line into two by alternating couples going either left or right around the dance area, and then joining back together in groups of four, and again in groups of eight (I have done this with the dance group in Australia, and at the end, when everyone is lined up in groups of eight across the room, they followed it with a pattern dance that needs dancers to be in groups of eight--a great way to start an evening of dance).

However, on this occasion, the groups of eight was the last set in the figure, and marked the end of the dancing for the day. Therefore, we all helped lord_kjar load all of the sound equipment and other items back into the trailer, and he and I took it back to the Gillestuget to unload. Then we returned to our house, where his parents (who had joined us at the park in town for the performance) joined us for coffee and to see what all we have accomplished in the way of home improvements since their last visit.

Then we were both tired, and lord_kjar wasn't feeling so good, so we went to bed early (21:30!), which meant that I was awake and doing my morning situps at 04:30 today. This is good, because it gives me plenty of time to accomplish a few things before I fly to Copenhagen later this morning, where I will participate as one of the panelists in the session "New concepts of mobility to foster career development and gender balance in Europe" at the Euroscience Open Forum. This session is sponsored by the Marie Curie Fellowship Association. They asked me to participate in it since I had done so much work for the booklet of role models for mobility of women scientists that we put together a coupld of years back.

I never really liked the idea of traveling to a city at midsummer, when I could be home in my nearly country setting working on the earth cellar, but they managed to talk me into participating anyway, since they cover the travel costs to get there. So I fly down today, and will arrive around 15:00. My cousins, who live in Denmark, will pick me up at the airport, we will drop my stuff at their place and relax a bit, then I will head to the conference venue for a meeting with the other panelists at 17:00, then back to my cousin's house to hang out with them for the evening. Tomorrow morning we have the conference session, and then in the evening I fly home again. I am looking forward to seeing what lord_kjar does with the tractor while I am gone, now that we finally have it here.

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)

Not that I was without internet, mind you--I have a smart phone, and a tablet (wi-fi only), but I have hardly touched a real computer since my last post, which was sometime before I departed for the conference, so if I am going to try to catch up on what has been happening, I had probably better start with that.

The conference was for the Society of Geology Applied to Mineral Deposits (SGA). My boss is the president of that organization. Therefore, when I suggested to him some time back that since the sessions directly or tangentially related to my current research project were limited enough that I could save the department money by attending only the first day (when the 3D model session in which I had a poster was meeting) he replied that I should attend the full conference.

However, the conference is in Uppsala, which is near enough to the "Stockholm" Arlanda airport that I was able to book my flight there on Monday morning and arrive on site before the opening ceremony (but I did miss the "ice-breaker" on Sunday evening).

I was glad that I did, because it meant that we could drive to Storeforsen on Sunday and have an adventure. We had a houseguest that weekend--one of my Finnish cousins, K, who lives in Helsinki, had been in southern Sweden to visit his parents (who moved to Sweden in the 60's and never left, but raised him tri-lingual, so he opted to move to Finland as an adult) and decided to do a train trip north, with a stop here to visit me, then bus to Happaranda, walk over the border to Finland, and train down to Oulu to visit cousins there before heading back down to southern Finland. When asked what he wanted to do he suggested "wildlife or nature", which made the choice of adventures easy. Storeforsen is Europe's largest rapids, and is a very pretty area. Highlights of the day include eating wild blueberries, scrambling around on rocks, and swimming in a lovely, quiet, peaceful side channel of the river that goes through a lovely rock canyon. That water was cold, so I am glad we found that wetsuit in a second hand store this spring--makes swimming ever so much more fun to not be cold and to keep the sun off my skin.

The conference itself was busy, and fun. I attended interesting sessions, visited with colleagues I already knew, met some interesting people, and actually spoke to a fair few about my research during the poster session. Diversions while I was there included meeting up with liadethornegge for lunch and museums on Tuesday (thanks! It was fun!), meeting up with lord_kjar's brother and his wife and kids for dinner and hanging out till after midnight on Wednesday, and meeting up with another SCA friend, C, for lunch on Thursday before heading to the airport for my flight home.

Got home Thursday night, and Friday I celebrated having a real kitchen and oven again by spending the morning baking--we did pasties, bread rolls (with almond meal in them, yum!), and an oven pancake with broccoli and carrot in it. Then we hopped in the car and drove to Skellefte, where we stayed with some SCA friends who also do "Lajv" (the Swedish word for what we call "LARP"). Since linda_linsefors talked lord_kjar and I into trying that this autumn we spent much of the evening learning about the world we are going to go pretend to be a part of.

On Saturday we drove further south to Umeå, where we stayed with friends of linda_linsefors and baked plain oven pancakes to eat with jam and cream, yum! I also taught them how to cook fresh artichoke and eat them with butter, lemon, pepper, and rosemary.

On Sunday we returned to Skellefte, where we visited another SCA friend, who has been storing some of linda_linsefors's stuff while she is in France for uni, and brought it back here so that she can use it at that Lajv this September.

Monday I mostly relaxed, but Tuesday and Wednesday I went into the office to work, since lord_kjar said yes to the "I know you are on holiday, but can you please come in and fix some stuff anyway?" question, and it was good to catch up on post-conference correspondence and turn in receipts and such. I also got my last set of thin sections, which is exciting, but I so don't have time to actually look at them, given how much else I need to be doing for work as soon as our vacation is over.

Last night I finally found the time to start setting the stones for our walkway into the ground, and I am very happy with how it is looking, and am looking forward to being done with all of it. Granted, the last half of it can't be done for a while--we don't want it in before we finish driving tractor over it, and that won't be done till we are done with the earth cellar and rest of the landscaping (changing the slope of the land so that water drains away to the far side of the sheds (we have already gotten rid of the huge puddles we used to get in the walkway to the house, but more needs to be done)

Today he went in to work "for a little bit this morning", and I am taking advantage of a sunny day to was the bed sheets, but it is nearly time to take the next load outside, so I will close this, and if he doesn't come home early enough to do earth cellar work with me (they made some progress on it while I was at the conference, but we haven't had a chance to touch it since) I will do more work on the walkway--I can still do a fair bit before I get to the part the tractor will need to be driving over.

I just typed up my travel schedule for my boss, and thought I would paste an annotated version of it here:

11-15 March: attend a 3D modeling Workshop in Nancy, France

26-30 March: Back to the mine headquarters to collect more samples from the drill core. There might also be a visit to the mine itself during that time.

5-13 April: will be out of the office some of this time (exact dates/times to be determined) due to the visit of a friend from out of town.

16-20 April: Back to the mine headquarters to collect more samples from the drill core

7-14 May: Cyprus--a geology field trip with the students. This is my first teaching assignment with this job.

14-20 May: Double Wars: Medieval camping holiday southern Sweden. I will get off the plane from Cyprus at 13:20, go home, grab a shower, cook some food, grab any forgotten last things and then take the night train south. I intend to sleep at least 10 hours that trip. Will arrive at the event at mid day on Tuesday the 15th, but lord_kjar and the rest of his traveling companions will have been on site since Saturday sometime, as they will leave home without me that Friday (while I am still in Cyprus). I had been looking forward to the road trip, but one can't really say no when they give one one's first teaching assignment, even if their is a partial conflict with other fun stuff, and I will get the fun of the ride home.

Sometime in late May/early June aelfgyfu will visit, so I will probably take time off to do tourist stuff with her.

10-15 July: Local Medieval Week (camping event)

That is as much as is scheduled so far...

In my over-crowded in-box is a note saying that the deadline to register for the European Textile Forum this year has been extended to 14 June. How I wish I could attend, the last two years were ever so much fun! This time it will be held at a history park in Austria, and will likely be just as much fun as previous years. Sadly, I cannot commit to attending anything this summer, since I do not know how long it will take to process my visa application (which I cannot even submit till I get to Australia on 1 July, which is after the deadline to register), and I can't return to Sweden till after the visa is approved (which could take many months, though I have met someone who got his approved in only one week). Therefore I encourage all of you to register for, and attend, the textile forum, and to then post photos and trip reports about it, so that I can at least enjoy reading about it...

For those of you who have expressed envy that I've been able to attend the last two European Textile Forums: They have just announced that the next one will be in the UK in September. Details to be released later, but this might be enough notice for some of you to make arrangements to get there then.

I don't yet know upon which continent I will be living by then, nor what I will be doing for an income, but if it is at all possible I will be there. The last two were both amazing--fun, educational, inspiring, full of living history and serious science research, many hands-on lessons and deep in-theory discussions. Totally worth the fact that as a conference it actually charges like a conference (actually, for a conference it is very reasonably priced, it is only expensive by standards of an SCA event).