kareina

My sisters and I have taken to having a weekly happy hour, but given that this involves three time zones (one lives in Seattle, another in San Francisco, I am in Sweden, and the fourth is in the Melbourne area) it wasn't so easy to choose a time when we would all be awake. The two in the states are the ones most likely to want a glass of wine or something during a happy hour video call, so we agreed on 22:00 on Friday evening, Pacific time, which now that everyone has either sprung forward or fallen back means that it is 07:00 Saturday for me, and 13:00 Saturday in Melbourne. They gave me the morning shift because I never drink alcohol, and Kirsty the afternoon, as just late enough if the day that if she wants a glass it isn't too unreasonable.

I wound up staying up till 00:30 on Friday testing my new bluetooth dongle for the computer which pipes the sound directly to my hearing aids. Well, actually, that zoom call with some friends in the West Kingdom only lasted till around 23:30, but then, as I went to disconnect my Oticon bluetooth adapter that talks to my hearing aids from the computer dongle and re-connect it from the phone, I realised that I need a place to store the computer dongle, and it is quite small, and therefore easily lost if it doesn't have a home. So I started a skype call with a friend in Canada (who refuses to use zoom for reasons of privacy and security) and sewed a quick extra pocket onto my phone baldric. (If you are curious enough to click on the link, know that the baldric strap is about 7 cm wide just there where the blue cotton twill edging for the pocket for the Oticon is, and the new pocket is the darker, 2 cm wide, more densely woven black wool to the right of the slit in the Oticon (that lets sound better reach the microphone). This took about 30 or 40 minutes to make, which is why I wound up staying up late. Of course, that last call I had to rely on just the computer audio (since I didn't feel like doing the project in the living room, where I have the phone stand for doing video calls with the phone), because I needed the dongle to fit the pocket. It has a lid that holds shut with velcro, and I think it will be a safe place to keep it, and ensure that it is always within reach when I need it.

I got just after 06:30 on Saturday got dressed etc., went to the computer and put the dongle into the computer, thought I had it properly re-attached to the phone, went to connect to Zoom, realised that I had no sound in the hearing aids, looked at the phone, and discovered that when I had told it to turn off bluetooth that it didn't actually turn off, so the light showing connection was connection to the phone. So I turned off the phone bluetooth, and tried again, it looked like it should work, but I was still having issues--Zoom claimed to be using the dongle, but no sound. So I gave up, unplugged the dongle, left the meeting in the computer, turned bluetooth back on on the phone, and reconnected to the meeting via the phone, went to the living room, set the phone in the holder, and started sewing on my blue and red wool tunic in progress while we visited.

We talked for a couple of hours, and it was good to catch up. My Seattle sister has been doing a Family Spirit week all week, posting photos of their costumes to FB. They did Formal Friday, Monochormatic Day, Disney Day (which included a reference image), and Emo day.

If my sister's privacy settings means that those don't show, suffice it to say that they had a lot of fun with the dressing up. One of my nieces is highly competitive, so, of course, it was also a contest. They did blind voting, wherein they stood around the table and everyone set a napkin in front of the person they wanted to vote for (not permitted to vote for oneself). At the end of the week three of them were tied for second place, and little miss competitive just barely won, but, of course, put on as many airs as if she had won with a landslide.

After a couple of hours visit the US sisters decided that they needed to go to bed, Melbourne needed to get busy, and I was ready to put my sewing down. I spent another couple of hours on useful tasks, and then decided I wanted a nap. As I was falling asleep I thought I heard the front door open, but was too tired to even call out a greeting, and just drifted off to sleep. Around 11:30 David came in to say that he and Caroline were just having fika, and after they were done eating would be heading to the store, and did I want to come along? He knew my answer would be yes, since we had discussed the fact that the plant cuttings that had been put into water last week had enough roots now that they really did need to be given some dirt.

So got back up, ate a quick second breakfast (first breakfast hadn't happened till after I said goodnight to my sisters), and off we went. First stop was Bloomsterlandet (literally "flower land"), to get the dirt, and, since I was there, some seeds for the garden, since spring is coming. Nearly all of the snow between the house and the walkway has melted, and the snow/ice other places is getting rapidly lower. Of course, as I type it is snowing again, but I don't expect it to last, given that the forecast shows temps above zero C for at least part of every day in the foreseeable future.

Then we went to the grocery store next door, where I only needed a few things. I had planned to get some cream for my next batch of cultured butter, and when I was walking to the dairy area thought of picking up some mascarpone cheese to make a black currant pie (in part because the containers that comes in here is a good size to take food to work for lunch, since it holds what I consider one large serving, e.g. 1 cup). However, I am not often in that particular store, and wasn't certain where to find it, and as I was searching the dairy shelves I noticed that they had plain skyr! I haven't seen plain skyr in a store here for about five years (and yes, I do check now and then). They carry the stuff with sugar and other stuff added, but I am so not interested in that. So I forgot about the mascarpone, and even about the cream, and just bought two containers of skyr plus the couple of not dairy items I was looking for, and we went home, where I enjoyed skyr with muesli and frozen cherries for lunch.

I did a few things on the computer, and then felt like I needed to Move, so I went to the living room, intending to do a DownDog HighIntensityTraining app session. However, David and Caroline had just settled into the beanbag for an afternoon nap, and they were so cute I didn't have the heart to disturb them. So I grabbed a grocery bag and the glass milk bottle, and took my trike to the large grocery store I normally go to. 36 minutes to get there, and 38 home, on a slightly different path. I got a liter of good milk (stick the glass bottle in the machine, and press "start") and three boxes of ecological cream.

Once I was home I introduced the cream to the culture and left it on the counter to get acquainted, and then consulted google about ways to make homemade skyr. There are a Lot of different approaches out there. They all agree that while skyr is referred to as a yoghurt because of its texture it is more like a cheese. Most of them agree that one should use some culture from a previous batch of skyr (which I expected), and they all seemed to think that heating the milk and cooling it is important (I didn't know about that), and some of them also suggest the use of rennet. One of them gave a recipe for a vegetable based rennet made from dried nettles. Since I have dried nettles I decided to try that. Their recipe involved boiling 450 grams of dried nettles for half an hour in 3-4 cups of water, and then using 1 teaspoon of the liquid (after straining out the leaves) in the skyr. I see no reason to use that much of my precious dried nettle stash at once (unless I am making a nettle soup), so instead I put two tablespoons in my tiny frying pan on the stove with 4 tablespoons of water, and let that simmer while I microwaved the milk (while most recipes said heat on the stove for half an hour, stirring constantly, one of them said you could do the heating in the microwave. Since David and Caroline were using both the stove and the oven for their cooking I decided that the microwave, on the far side of the room, was a much better option.

Once the milk had been heated to just under scalding, and cooled to just pleasantly hot I added the spoonful of nettle juice and a generous spoonful of skyr, and then set the bowl, covered, into the little oven (which was warm from having been between a oven and a stove burner that had been in use, and left them overnight. Now that I have had breakfast and caught up on reading everyone's new posts I will go see if I can drain out any of the whey before putting the skyr in the fridge. The cream, on the other hand, will need to wait till tomorrow before I set aside some clotted cream to use as is and whip it into butter. Luckily, it looks like I have the time, since Monday is also a holiday, so I don't need to go back to work till Tuesday.

Last night I worked on the Norrskensbard and "our songs" pages of the Frostheim web page, and then stayed up later than planned when I found out that my song had won the Drachenvision contest at 12th Night, and I took the time to include links for the video, too.

Needless to say, this morning I was feeling tired, but, also feeling hopeful that the company might return my messages and send a technician to fix my laser, so I forced myself out of bed at a reasonable time (not as early as the dawn light went off, but well before it went dark again). I then opted to take the bus, since I happened to leave the house at the right time to walk to the second bus stop and then only wait 2 minutes (which meant that the trip took only 25 minutes, which is about the same as it takes to bike in the summer (including locking it at the other end). It was a beautiful morning--I love the time of the year when there are stars and planets out when I leave in the morning. Sadly, with solstice behind us now it will soon be light when I get up in the morning.

I managed to put in almost four hours of stuff for LTU today, and 43 minutes of Durham stuff (the latter of which was half replying to an email from my advisor setting up a skype call for tomorrow. I have made zero progress on my research since leaving Durham (for good and understandable reasons), and I am hoping that talking to her will remind me what I love about the project so that I resume work on it.

Then I came home (again by bus, since I happened to reach a breaking point at an appropriate time, which, given the fact that the bus runs only once an hour, is pure dumb luck). However, since I missed out on more than 40 minutes of walking I would have done if I hadn't bussed, I did do a half an hour workout this evening. I also finally got my exercise log caught up with transferring data from my phone to the spreadsheet. So far January's exercise log is looking pretty good. While I have had a couple of days where it was only yoga +/- morning situps, other days I did more than three hours of exercise over the course of the day (between walks, acroyoga, snow shovelling, etc.). If I can just manage to do more of the active days and fewer of the lazy days, while also picking back up the threads of my research, it will all be good.

It has been nearly two years since I started keeping track of where/when I go for walks/cycling/skiing/etc using Runkeeper. During the 20 months for which I have records I have only exceeded 100 km in a month on seven different occasions. This month is only nine days old, and already I am over 75 km. What a difference it makes having a 8 km one way trip to get to class. When I first started the Swedish for Immigrants course I was driving in, since 8 km is really too far to walk for a class that starts at 08:15, especially when I already have too much to do and not enough time to do it. However, as soon as the spring was far enough along that the plows pushed back the snow berms from the edges of the road I have been taking my tricycle in, and I like that much better than driving. The down side is that, often, when I get home I just want a nap, instead of having energy to work straight away. Though that could be as much from my tendency to stay up rather later than I should as from the fact that I am not used to pedaling 8 km at a time twice a day. Imagine what the log would look like if I actually made it to class every day!

Somehow Tuesdays has turned out to not be a good day for making it to class. The first Tuesday in March class was canceled in favour of an open-air day when everyone was meant to gather in a park and try winter activities and eat semlor and/or sausages. However, I didn't bother to go, since I am not fond of driving and had never been to the park before and had no idea where I would have parked the car if I did. Ever since then something has come up to prevent me going on Tuesdays. Once I was sick, other times I had meetings or needed to work on my paper, or just plain needed to sleep in. It is starting to feel silly.

On the other hand, other than the week I had a cold and missed three days of classes I have been very good about attending the other days of the week. As a result my Swedish is improving, and I have been making good progress on various sewing projects. It will be interesting to see how long I stick with the program--if I wind up with a day job I will have to stop, but even if I don't, once the weather is warm enough to start working on the earth cellar again I expect my priorities will shift.

Those of you who have been paying attention will know that spring has come early to northern Sweden. However, it has also stayed spring for a very long time. Even now, after weeks of temperatures mostly above freezing (though rarely getting as high as 10 C), there is still a fair bit of residual snow/ice in our field and sections of our yard. I suspect that the pathetic attempt at winter this year is the reason the snow/ice is sticking despite the warmth--every time it snowed it was followed by warmth and rain, but only enough to melt part of it and then re-freeze it, until we were left with a very solid crystalline mass that kept getting denser and denser. Now that very density is permitting large areas to stay whiteish, so all of these bright sunny days we have been having are brighter and sunnier than one might expect.

Even so there has been a fair bit of melting/thawing (aided by some regular ice-chopping on my part) along our walkway, and the paving stones we put in last autumn are once again exposed, and I am wishing I had had time to finish the whole project, instead of getting the cobblestones set around only half of the walkway. Now I need to be patient until the ground along the rest of it thaws enough that I can finish the job.

The other day I saw a post to the Kingdom email list saying that no one had bid to host the Kingdom University in November, and asking some group to please step forward. So I posted a copy of the note to the Frostheim facebook group and asked if anyone knows of an appropriate site in this area, since I certainly don't. It has been four years since I moved to Drachenwald and I have yet to manage to travel to a Kingdom University event--perhaps we can get it to travel to me. However, if we want to make it happen we need to be quick--they need a bid by Monday, and I am told that at least a group in ID is also interested. A few people have suggested potential local sites and are calling them. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it.