kareina

Having lost mom recently, I have been thinking a lot about what is important in life, and how to ensure that one enjoys life as fully as possible, even though it is short. I started thinking of what kinds of things I already have as life-habits, and what other life-habits I would like to have, and I came up with the following list of things to do daily, in addition to things like breath, eat, drink, sleep, and also in addition to my official work and research for my degree.

* Do Yoga (I already do this daily, and love doing it, so it will lead the list)
* Make music or sing something
* Read something for fun or learn something new
* Reach out to a loved one you haven't heard from recently
* Tidy up, mend something, or otherwise make an improvement to your physical environment
* Stand on your hands (I have also been doing this daily, and want to get to the point that I don't need a wall to be involved, so it is important to keep doing it!)
* Make progress on an art, craft, or other creative project
* Engage in other physical activity over and above the things already on this list.

Today I have done everything but the yoga so far, and am about to do that, so I am off to a good start. :-)

I also worked for a bit, since that part arrived, and I took out the old one and put in the new. Sadly, there is still no He flowing through the line, so I have sent the email requesting that they send me a technician to fix the problem ASAP, but given the holidays, it could be a while, never mind that the contract is supposed to be within two business days.

Crossposts: https://kareina.livejournal.com/529994.html

Edited to add a ( photo )

The Luleåhembygsgille (folk music, dance, etc. group) went as a group to Kalottspel, a folk music gathering in Målslev, Norway (around half way between Narvik and Tromsø) this weekend. Eighteen of us did the 10.5 hr bus drive together, and another met us there, preferring to take his own car and arrive earlier. We had a very good mix of ages--three young children, a couple of teenagers, and adults ranging from probably twenty-something to likely sixty-something. Gender balance, on the other hand, wasn't really present. Two of the kids were boys, and three of the adults in the bus were men.

As to be expected on such a trip, the journey was part of the fun. We gathered early for a 06:00 departure from Luleå, which meant that I had risen at 03:30 so as to have time for a brief workout and packing the little ice-chest before the taxi came to take me to the meeting place.

Like some of the others, I took a nap for the first portion of the trip--I have seen that part of the highway before, and wanted to be awake when we reached the mountains. We did a couple of short stops early on to pick up people who live an hour north of town then stopped in Kiruna for a lunch break, so the driver could have his mandatory one-hour rest break.

The others all went to a restaurant with a buffet, but whilst it would have been nice to join them for the company, I didn't see anything on offer that I wanted to eat, and I had lots of yummy food with me, so I waited at the bus (such restaurants usually don't care to let you in if you don't pay, so I didn't even ask).

Kiruna is located along the eastern edge of the Swedish mountains, so from there the drive becomes even prettier. Much to my delight, soon after leaving Kiruna a bunch of us broke into song, giving me a perfect mix of lovely sights to see out the window and sharing one of my favourite activities with others. We sang many Swedish songs I already knew (or had at least heard before), and many more that were new to me.

We arrived at the site just before 17:00, which gave us time to settle in and pay for courses before the evening concert. Our home for the weekend was a conjoined pair of school classrooms, obviously for little kids, judging by the books and toys available. One of the rooms had a small loft, which I claimed for my nest--it was just big enough for my camping mat on the diagonal, with my bag of stuff in the corner. Luckily it wasn't a hot weekend, or the loft might have gotten too warm, since there was no openable window at that level. But it turned out to be a perfect place for me to sleep, even if it wasn't tall enough to sit fully upright.

As it turned out I had too much stuff. I had been expecting something like our Spelmanstämman, which is held mostly outdoors, and open to the public (for an admission fee, of course), with performances all day and even some craft booths. Instead it was more like our trettondag kurser (13th day courses), with workshops during the day, concerts in the evening, and folk dancing all night, but all indoors. So I didn't need my folk costumes nor did I need most of the other warm clothing and rain gear I had brought. On the other hand, I could have brought my hammer dulcimer, which I wouldn't have wanted along at an outdoor thing, but would have been find to have in the classroom we called home.

Friday evening's concert was three guys who were really good (I bought their CD). Two had a relaxed performance style that included a normal level of audience interaction, but the guitarist played with his eyes closed and really focused on what he was doing. Especially for the song he did as a solo (which he afterwards said wad mostly improvised on the spot) it felt almost like an invasion of his privacy to watch him doing something so personal, but oh, did it sound fabulous!

Friday evening's dance was held at a small hall a few kilometers away, so there was a small buss available to transport people back and forth. I danced every dance for the first two hours, then was both getting sleepy and having more problems finding people to dance with as everyone who wanted to dance were already on the floor, and the others seemed to be there just to watch, judging by their refusal when asked to dance. Therefore, when I saw the bus about to depart with the kids who had been the musicians for one of the early dance sets, I took the chance and went back to the school and got some sleep.

Saturday morning I had time to take a walk and enjoy the views to be had in a broad Norwegian valley with a meandering river surrounded by a nice mix of farmland and forest, and even a couple of grass-roofed houses. Then it was time for the workshops—some of us went to dance, others music, and five of us went to the workshop for Norwegian folk songs. We made up the bulk of the class—the only other people in the room were the teacher and a Norwegian woman she obviously already knew.

The format for the class was that the teacher would sing a song, then I took a photo of the lyrics from her print out, and while I looked at the photo and copied out the text by hand onto a blank sheet of paper the teacher read the text out loud for the others to hand-write their own version (the teacher is a firm believer in the fact that one remembers better if one writes it out oneself). During that part she also clarified the meaning of words as needed. For the most part a Swedish speaker can communicate just find with a Norwegian, each speaking their own language, but some words differ quite a bit.

Then she would sing the song again, one phrase at a time, and we would echo the phrases. Then she would sing the harmony and a couple of us would learn that. Finally we would sing the song through together a number of times before we all took out our phones or other recording devices to record the whole song so we could listen to it and remember it later. This approach doesn't give time to learn many songs (we did only two), but it does increase the odds of us remembering the songs. Perhaps it might have gone faster if most of the students were Norwegian instead of Swedish and they could have skipped the part where we discussed the meaning? I don't know.

Then we had some time to relax before the evening concert, and we decided that our group would contribute a performance of handskarna du gav mig,one of the songs we had sung on the bus during the drive over, so we spent some time practicing that, and deciding how best to blend the singing with the bass and clarinet playing. The concert started with the traditional allspel (everyone plays), and our group was the fourth act. It is tough to say from the stage how it sounded to the audience, but it sounded really good from where I was standing. I really enjoyed most of the concert, which had enough acts that there was in intermission before the last few. The last act of the evening, however, had the sound turned up way too loud—at first I simply turned off my hearing aids (which is enough to let me work in a workshop with a variety of power tools running with no discomfort), but then the volume rose again, and I was forced to also try covering my ears with my hands. When even that didn't help I gave up and left the room. Our class room was right across from the performance room, and even with the door shut the hand full of us who had left the room because the noise was too much for us, could still hear some of the sounds from the speaker system. I wasn't surprised that I wasn't the only one who fled from the high volume, but I was surprised how many stayed.

After the concert it took just over a half an hour to clear the chairs out of the way to create a dance floor, and once again I danced every dance for the first two hours. At which point I was once again feeling sleepy, and, once again, hit a point where everyone willing to say yes to dancing was already on the floor. Therefore, once again, after getting a number of "no"s in a row, I gave up and returned to my loft for some sleep. I am told that for those people willing to sit and talk for a bit before getting up and dancing again that the dancing went on all night. The teen girls in our group tell me that they stayed up all night, then had breakfast and packed up before boarding our bus home. I don't recall being able to do that at their age—I have always been too fond of sleep to miss out entirely.

The only thing on Sunday's schedule was the trip home, which was a lovely mix of singing songs and enjoying the views, interesting conversations, taking naps, and reading. We again stopped in Kiruna for a long break, but we did fewer other stops, so we were home pretty much exactly 10 hours after we departed.

I was pleased that I managed to do so well speaking Swedish all weekend. Before the journey started the man who organized the trip told me "Du få inte prata engelska på bussen, bara svenska!", and indeed, I did manage to carry on conversations only in Swedish for both bus trips, and more than 90% of my conversations on site. I did revert to English a few times, and not only to speak with the woman who attended the event from Germany and couldn't speak Swedish or Norwegian, but it felt good to actually be able to participate in normal, every-day conversations in Swedish, and not just with the two people who normally speak Swedish to me.

Work this week wasn't expected to be easy--lasers, at least the kind we have, are meant to be used regularly, and really need to be fired every two weeks in order to stay in prime working condition. I have just had two weeks off of work, which means that the laser wasn't fired during that time. So it wasn't surprising that I needed to do a gas exchange first thing on Monday, because the old ArF gas that has been siting in the chamber ready to fire the laser has gotten stale, or whatever happens to it to make the laser need a lot more power put into it to generate the same amount of laser energy. Neither was it surprising that even after the gas exchange I couldn't get a good performance report on Monday, or even Tuesday. However, by Wednesday morning things had settled in, and I got a passing performance report and ran our "check standards" lab book, just to get more data points as to how our system is performing.

This morning I expected I might try running some other sort of analysis, but it wasn't meant to be--the vacuum pump in the next room was off, which meant that there was no vacuum in the ICP unit, which meant that the plasma wouldn't turn on. We have no idea why it was off--as far as my colleague B and I know, no one turned the pump off. When we tried turning it on with the switch on the side of the pump nothing happened. So we went back into the lab itself and turned off the main power switch on ICP-MS unit (into which the vacuum pump is plugged). After waiting 20 to 30 seconds we turned it back on, and this time the vacuum pump started up. After a bit of a wait it did its job enough that the green light came on, saying that the system had achieved the vacuum and was good to start.

Sure enough, at that point the plasma started just fine, but when I tried to run a performance report I got a new error message "Analyzer Pressure too high". Not having seen this one before I promptly wrote an email to the service people explaining all of the above, and asking what we need to do next, and spent the rest of the work day trying to catch up on the various emails sent to me while I was on vacation.

On the bike ride home I was delighted to see a work crew out, removing the curb from the center portion of the road which the bike path has been meant to cross. We cyclists have been having to drive around those curbs ever since they got the path mostly in last autumn. They were taking out the one closest to Uni as I went past, so I paused to express my appreciation, and I asked if this meant that the path itself would soon be paved. The guy who spoke to me didn't know the schedule for the paving, but I still think it is a good sign. They had already done the one where the path crosses a road just before the turn off to my neighbourhood, and it was a pleasure to just pedal straight across that road, rather than having to detour around the curb.

Since the paint is now dry on the upstairs shed window frame I had taken down to re-paint I tried to put the window back. Since I was working on my own I got it out by unscrewing the hinges with one hand, whilst holding the window (which was open and hanging out over the drop to the ground) with the other. Luckily, the hinges sat fairly tightly into their carved recess in the frame, so the window didn't try to fall while I was still dealing with the screws, but instead had to be plucked out of the groves when the last screw was out. However, I knew that putting it back wouldn't be so easy. Therefore I decided that it might be smarter to first screw back the part of the hinges that attach to the window frame, and then put the window onto the hinges. However, I failed to take into consideration the fact that once on the hinge the window exactly fits into the opening. Therefore it isn't actually possible to lift the window high enough to put the hinge back together when half of it is on the window, and the other half in the frame. Oops. And I had come up with such a good idea of wrapping a length of nylon webbing around the window to give me a good handle and make it less likely to be dropped in the process. At that point I gave up, left the hinge half screwed to the window frame till

lord_kjar gets back and there is one person to hold the window and another to drive the screw driver.

I have spent most of the evening getting ready for tomorrow's journey to Norway. I had packed clothes and dance shoes on Monday, but tonight I did more food prep of things to take with me, packed toiletries, do laundry and other house work so that the place will be nice to come home to, etc. Since I had just enough yoghurt left for one serving of muesli I decided to pick some smultrons (wild strawberry) to go with it, and I would have one extra yummy breakfast ready to eat on the road tomorrow (and the others will be my normal water on the muesli). However, this time, whilst picking the berries I was inspired to actually rip away the tall grass and other plants that have been growing over the rest of the smultrons (I had gotten the part that is easy to reach from the alleyway to the earth cellar a couple of weeks ago, just as the berries were first starting to come in). Today's reward was way more berries than I expected to find under all that growth--nearly a full cup of tiny, sweet berries! Yum!

It isn't yet 8pm, but I probably ought to do my yoga so that it is done when the last load of laundry comes out of the machine, then I can go to bed early--I have my alarm set for 03:30 so that I will have time to do my morning work out before I go, and actually get the food out of freezer and fridge and into the soft ice-chest before my taxi arrives at 05:20. The bus doesn't actually depart till 06:00, and it shouldn't be more than 5 or 10 minutes from here to the meeting point, but I didn't want to be late, which is why I gave it a full 40 minutes. Then I can sleep on the first part of the drive, so that I wake up on time to enjoy the mountains as we get to Norway. Have I mentioned recently how much I miss mountains? They are really the only thing that Luleå lacks to be perfect.

What I meant to do today:

1) Go in to Uni to discuss some calculations I've been working on with my advisor.
2) Spend time at Uni looking through the microscope at my samples containing albite to see which ones to analyse next.
3) Finish editing (for grammar) a paper for publication for which I'm the second author, and the only native-English speaker

What I did do today: ( so many distractions )

Oh well, at least I can still work on the editing! The fortunate thing about having an appetite which turns off in the evening making food unappealing till after I sleep again--there will be no more interruptions to work today because I'm hungry! (Of course,

clovis_t and I still need to do our daily yoga, and some exercise would be nice too...)

Current Mood: resigned to interruptions toda

clovis_t and I still need to do our daily yoga, and some exercise would be nice too...)

Current Mood: resigned to interruptions toda

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daily stuff to do to enhance quality of life

This year's Norway trip

and tomorrow, Norway

busy, if not productive day

busy, if not productive day

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May 2025

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