kareina

... and I feel much better as a result.

When we went to bed last night I was feeling rather stressed looking at the calendar and everything coming up and wondering how I was going to find the time needed to prep for each fun thing on the list, in addition to accomplishing work and basic life and home maintenance chores. I was also feeling the changes that start to creep in to one's body when one hasn't made time for anything resembling a workout recently.

The intrest in training has been there, I have just had lots of very full on days in a row, and I am just not getting to it.

Therefore, when I woke today at 03:30 I decided it was time to move, and, unlike some way early mornings when I think that, I actually did.

The DownDog yoga app I am so fond of recently added a Beta test version of a "Strength Flow" routine, wherein one does a bit of yoga, then it gives a bit of strength training exercises from their HIT (high intensity training)app, then goes back to yoga. I had tried this a week or so back, with just a 20 minute session (which came with one 4-minute HIT section in the middle). This morning I did a 45 minute session, and loved it. The yoga bit was a great mix of stretching and strenght poses, and the two 4-minute HIT sections where enough to make me break a sweat, but were still doable (though I did one set of pushups from my knees).

Now I am ready to go back to bed for an hour or so and then face my day. But unlike last night, I am looking forward to the day and optamistic that it will go well and I will be ready to head north for Spelmansstämman this evening.

Why not? I managed to post yesterday, if I do it again today, that is every day this month.

The day started out well. I woke early and with energy, so I did a workout, which means that I have done a workout every morning for seven days. I am using the DownDog HIT app, and have worked myself up to a 15 minute session (a week ago it was 8 minutes), with 30 seconds workout alternating with 5 second rest. I have told it to give me level 3 upper body, but only level 2 for core and lower body, because I still want to get better at handstands, and this seemed like the best way to get it to pull helpful stuff for that goal from its database.

Then I did a little bit of weeding in the garden. The squash is starting to grow big enough to believe that I will get to eat some. The pumpkins on the other hand, are still very, very tiny. When I came in I made a really yummy ( Pear and mango Custardy cake )

Then I went to the computer to work, but instead of making much progress, I got to experience the joys of dealing with bureaucracy:

I applied for the LTU physiotherapy course this spring (the day the applications opened). Sweden uses a single university admissions department, for all Swedish universities, and their web page indicated that they only wanted my official high school transcripts, and that my previous university degrees don't matter. This struck me as weird, given that I graduated high school 39 years ago. But I ordered my high school transcripts to be delivered, and included a letter with my application saying that I have a Bachelors, Masters, and PhD in geology, and would they like those transcripts too? (with which I included photos of the degrees) They never replied to that letter nor answered the question. They did, however, send me a message on 16 June saying that they had looked at my transcripts, and found them insufficient in math courses. I called them, pointed out that while I may not have taken many math classes in high school, I had gone as far as calculus in University, and I thought I would have no problems with the math required for this program. The guy I spoke to agreed, and told me to submit a form for them to consider my life experience, which I submitted within the hour after speaking with him. Today I get a message from them saying that since that form arrived too late they will not consider it, and I am not qualified for the program. I promptly wrote back to point out that I had submitted the form within the hour after they asked for it, and that can't possibly count as late. They replied at 16:15 saying that the deadline to submit that form was the day before they asked me for it, and if I have any further questions please contact the university, which is open till 16:00. Stay tuned tomorrow for another exciting episode. Will the poor person stuck answering the phones tomorrow when the rest of the university is on summer holiday be able to help? Will our our hero be stuck in a bureaucratic dead end, unable to qualify for a course they may well actually be over-qualified for? Will some job offer come through that sounds more fun than becoming an undergraduate student again?

This morning I did my workout (the third time of doing the Day 1 routine for the 1.1 version of the workout (which has only a Day 1 and a day 2--I will do one more Day 1 and one more Day 2 before moving on to workout 1.2), ran a load of laundry, then borrowed the Blue Car to head to town--I have been procrastinating going to the fabric store for months now--ever since I ran out of the white bias tape I was using to finish the seams of the purple linen sweater I half altered to fit me, back in early March. I have been wearing it anyway, but it would be even more comfortable if I were to take in the right side, too. However, the only fabric store in Luleå doesn't carry white bias tape (which is what I used before). I did pick up some dark blue, and some off-white. I will decide later if I will try to find the white on line somewhere, use one of the other colours, or just never get around to finishing the project. I did, however, also pick up some more thread, some ribbon to decorate the bonnet for my 1795 costume, and some hooks and eyes for the underdress for that costume.

Then I relaxed a bit (including a nap on David's lap), checked email, and went to Phrie practice, where Johan and I did acroyoga. It is so nice having him back in town so that we can do acroyoga daily again for a while. I will miss him when he heads back to Storuman. After Phire I picked leaves from the black currant bushes and set them drying (and made one pot of tea from fresh leaves, because why not?). Then I curled up with the computer, and a friend commented on my photo from the other day of the fireweed and spruce tips that went into lunch that one can also make a syrup out of spruce tips. So I put down the computer, went out, and picked about 700 ml of them. They are soaking now, and I will boil them tomorrow. The recipe she had uses far more of them, but as a trial to see if I even like the syrup, this should do. As I was harvesting them I couldn't help but wonder if the syrup would make good ice cream.

Tomorrow Johan and I will do acroyoga at 08:00, and in the afternoon I will head to Stenudden for a small Spelträff (gathering of folk musicians)

It is now 2.3 months since my surgery, and I feel completely recovered and ready to resume working out again. As a result, I stayed up way too late last night, playing with Trello, filling in cards on my new workout board. I am loving Trello as a way to organise and track workouts. Why did it take so long for me to think of that use for the app after my sister Beth told me about it? As of last night I have created a workout board, with lists for the first four months worth of workouts my trainer designed for me back in 2016, with cards for each day's workout, and checklists for the things to be done each workout, plus due dates for each workout for the next few months (remembering to leave days off here and there, and to make certain that none of the workouts are scheduled for days I will be at an SCA event, folk dance weekend, or short course).

So far I have done the first two of the workouts. How much easier it is t keep track of them this way than when I did them in 2016: Do round 1, ticking off the boxes as I go, then add a comment with notes (e.g. "managed the handstand for 36 seconds against the wall", or "had to the push ups as 'negative push ups') for that round, then un-tick the boxes as I go through round two, enter more comments, and repeat till done with the workout. If my future self cares, she can look back at the workout comments to see how long each section took, based on the time stamp of the comments...

Now I have a few months before I have to finish adding more workouts to the board...

I think I am doing the workouts better this time. I think I kinda ignored the part about "five minutes of indoor walking or other activity that raises your heart rate" as the first step of the warm-up portion back when I first started working out with my trainer, but this time I am setting a timer, putting some folk music into my hearing aids (still loving the new bluetooth adapter for my new hearing aids--it is now so easy to listen to stuff from my phone--just press play and it goes straight to my ears, with no extra button pushing!) Boy can I tell that I haven't done anything in the pull up family in ages though. Doing the "five jumping negative pull ups" (jump up grabbing onto the chin-up bar, palms facing you, pause for a moment at the top, arms bent, then slowly lower yourself back to the floor by gradually straightening your arms) was hard, and required resting between each rep. But then, this is exactly why I am starting over from the beginning.

I have set the workouts onto the calendar so that the amount of time that elapsed between him giving me one and the next is the same as it was back in 2016, but I am aware that there might be times I decide to push everything further into the future to make room for extra times doing the same set of workouts, because I can't quite manage everything in it. Or there might be times where I jump to the next set of workouts after fewer days repeating a set because I find them too easy. But having the old plan as a starting point feels like a good thing.

I got up this morning early enough that I even had time to get out the rake and start to pull some of the remaining dirt (that had come from the trench we dug last autumn for the internet cable to the house) back into the trench (it had frozen into place before they actually laid the cable into the trench, so we used some of the dirt from the pile by the road to fill the trench, but, of course, now that the ground has thawed, the fill has compacted, and it is in need of more). I managed about 15 minutes of that before David arrived to take me into Porsön on his way to work, and from there I caught a bus to town for my appointment. It turns out that this is one of those doctor’s offices where one doesn’t need to check in at arrival, so I had time to do a bit of nålbindning until it was my turn. The exam consisted of my filling in a health questionnaire (to which I felt compelled to add one more question—in the section on sleep, I reported no problems at all going to sleep, nor with waking up at a bad time and lying there not able to sleep. However, they failed to ask about “how often do you fail to go to bed at a reasonable hour because there are too many interesting things to do?” (Often. Pretty darn often.) Then she pricked my finger and took a blood test, and while the computer analysed that she took my blood pressure, which she said was good. Then I got to do a condition test, where I sit on an exercise bike and pedal for four minutes at an easy (too easy, actually, it was hard to keep to the target of 60, I kept going over, and then, of course, when I tried slowing down again it would drop under) pace for four minutes, followed by another four at a much harder level of resistance (hard enough to actually change my heart rate and breathing rate). Before I started she had strapped a monitor around my ribs, and put another on my wrist.

When I was done she explained that the numbers that the monitors report mean different things depending on one’s age and gender. According to her chart my numbers put me in the “really excellent condition” category. I couldn’t resit asking what categories the same numbers would put me in if I were younger. Had I gotten this score while still in my 40’s, that would have dropped me down one notch into the “really good condition” category, but these numbers for a 20-something would be one notch lower yet into the “good” condition category. I can live with these scores. :-) She also said that the blood tests came out at the best possible level for everything except for cholesterol, for which my numbers are at the bottom end of good. She went on to say that she wouldn’t worry about that—that there are two types of cholesterol, “good”, and “bad”, and that in general women tend to have higher levels of the good cholesterol, and if she were to do further tests on me that is likely what she would find.

In addition to the various tests we had a fair bit of pleasant conversation (all in Swedish!), so that by the time I was done it was nearly 10:00. I have been avoiding going into town to get stuff, because, town, for weeks now. So I decided to stay a bit longer and run my errands. While walking towards my first stop I called David to report on the exam and ask if he could remember any other errands I should do while in town. He couldn’t think of any, but was still in my ear when I got to the shop, which wasn’t open yet. There was, however, a little old lady standing outside the door, under the cover of the porch (it was raining, gently), and as soon as I walked into range she begun talking to me (in Swedish, of course) She clearly needed someone to complain to, and I would do. David was quite amused to listen to her go on. When she got to the part in her rant about church, how people aren’t going often enough these days, and asked me if I go to church regularly (nej), she then replied “that one should go regularly”. I couldn’t resist asking her varför det?, which got her to stop and look confused for a moment, before deciding to ignore the question and resume talking to me like I had said nothing out of the ordinary.

Luckily the shop then opened, and I could buy my couple of packets of nutritional yeast (after asking where they are this time—the down side of buying two packs at a time is that by the next time I need to head to town to get more they have re-arranged everything and it is in a totally new place). Then I went on to the camping store and got some new Marino wool tights, my last pair having worn through the knees (which now makes three pair with no fabric left on the knees). I choose a pair of men’s extra large, because that was only ones that felt long enough—the ankles of the woman’s large and extra large both miss the bottom of the ankles. I will need to take them in at the waist, of course, but I always have to do that with the wool tights.

Since I couldn’t remember any more errands I took the bus back to uni, arriving there with just enough time to eat a little before meeting Johan for acroyoga at 11:00. After that I finally got to start my work day, and worked till the car place called to say the car was ready (well, other than a short nap on the camping mat on my office floor, because I needed it). So I wrapped up what I was doing and did the 20 minute walk over to pick up the car. At that point I could have returned to uni for Phire practice, but it was much too tempting to just take the car home, so I did, and enjoyed an hour relaxing before deciding that I would return to uni for choir. But it wasn’t quite time to leave, so that meant that I had time to unpack my lunch box, wash the dishes (which I had, of course, rinsed at work), and tidy up a bit before heading back. As it turned out Phire was still there when I arrived, so I got a few hugs, and did a tiny bit of handstand practice. Julia, who has finally finished the sign language class that conflicted with choir, was able to stay, so it was her first week to attend, and my first week back since before the trip to Ireland. We both enjoyed it, and afterwards I gave her a ride home, since the next bus would have been quite a while.

Tomorrow I have a technician coming to do routine laser maintenance, so I had best do my yoga and get to bed…

I wound up staying up till 03:00 last night making plans for a trip to Trondheim in the next few weeks and looking for couch surfing hosts. Therefore I turned off my dawnlight when I went to bed, figuring that it would be wise to sleep in. I did, however wake on my own around 09:15 or so, and was lying in bed, contemplating getting up and doing a workout, when I saw someone pushing a bike across the driveway, and remembered that my apprentice had been planning on coming over to resume work on her master's thesis now that her health is better. So I got up and got dressed and we chatted and caught up for a bit while I had breakfast, then we both settled into our computers to work. It was lovey to have company while working, and nice to have someone to eat lunch with.

Just after we finished eating lunch David and Caroline came over, so we visited with them briefly before returning to work. She reached a natural breaking point in her work around the same time that Caroline and David wanted ficka, and I was feeling hungry, so I took a break and sat down and ate some more with them, but Evelina decided that it was a good time to head home, so she did. Then I looked at the clock, realized that it was nearly 16:00, and decided to eat a bit more, and then got ready to bike to Phire practice.

Given the time of day I opted to try the bike path that goes from my place through Björsbyn and then turns south to the Uni, as that would have the sun at my back for most of the trip. However, I think it would have been faster to take the bikepath that runs along Haperandavägen, since that one is totally clear of snow and ice, but the one I took has a number of areas that are covered with a rather slushy ice that makes it hard to keep pedaling. Indeed, I had to get off twice to push it was so bad. This meant that biking both ways was nearly half an hour, and I enjoyed more than an hour and a half of acroyoga at practice.

The delightful young man (with the pretty, thick, hair that reaches his hips when it is braided) that I met at Cajsa's farewell party a couple of weeks ago was finally able to meet me to try acroyoga. He enjoyed it enough that we will meet again during lunch on Monday (he thought it might be wise to recover over the weekend).

After practice I picked up a few groceries on the way home, and accomplished a couple more hours of uni work before packing everything I want to take with me to the SCA event in the morning (which is just an afternoon workshop on calligraphy and illumination, followed by a banquette and a court, since the teacher of the workshop is also the Princess). Unlike typical events in this area, this is only Saturday, we don't have the site on Friday night nor on Sunday morning. I haven't been to a one-day event since moving to Drachenwald!

Now to do my yoga and get to bed so that I am awake on time to pick up the students who are riding with me.

I woke up inspired to work out this morning (this inspiration may have had part of its source in this delightful holiday video from Norway), so I started a load of laundry, did my work out, ran the next load of laundry, chatted a bit on the phone with David, who has started phase one of their trip home: bus to Gothenburg, where they will enjoy a long lunch with some of Caroline's friends, and then board the night train home. While on the phone I wanted something to do with my hands, but didn't feel like getting out a sewing project, so I took my old bamboo toothbrush, cut off the brush end, cut the handle in half, and turned the first half into a nålbinding needle. Now the third load of laundry is in the machine, and I think I will put on my skis and go for a short adventure before deciding if I want to bake cookies before Stephanie and family arrive this afternoon (they were meeting Gilbert in Oulu at noon, their time, so in about 10 minutes). It is a three hour drive, plus how ever much time the spend in town in Oulu before heading this way, so I have a fair bit of time.

Tomorrow morning we will go to fighter practice and from there out to Storforsen.

At the SCA event this weekend I spent the first part of the event wearing a tunic and my new Tjorsberg trousers, with the really comfortable sheepskin feet, but as it came time for the evening feast I decided to change into a dress. Remember how some weeks back I said that I had needed to change out the underarm gores in my 12th century underdress so that the sleeves would fit over my larger arm muscles? Well, this time, when I put on the dress I noticed that the fabric was kind of straining over my lats. (Which explains why I found it so difficult to put on. Yes, it has always been difficult to wriggle into this dress, but I barely managed getting the narrow part of the waist over my shoulders at all this time.) Yet, it was still reasonably comfortable, providing the same really good breast support it always has, so I put on the overdress and enjoyed the evening.

However, late in the evening I managed to move my arms and flex my shoulder muscles in such a way that I heard a ripping sound, followed by several other ripping sounds. We looked, but saw no damage to the over dress (which laces up the sides, so better handles the larger muscles), so suspected that it was the underdress. Sure enough, when I finally took it off that evening I saw several rips in the part of the dress that falls between the shoulder blades--a long one pretty much dead center, and a few smaller ones parallel to it between the mid point and my left shoulder blade. Sigh. Luckily, none of them extended low enough to compromise the breast support the dress provides, since that mostly comes from the fact that the dress diameter just under the bust is exactly the same as the circumference of my ribs at that point, and that point is all ribs--it is just under the newly bulging lats.

Therefore today after work I cut out a diamond-shaped hole from the back of the dress and sewed in a diamond shaped replacement, cut on the bias, so it is a bit stretchier, though the same size (after finishing the seams) as the shredded part which I removed. Then I opened up the seam between my back and the underarm gore from the bottom of my lats to where the underarm gore hits the sleeve, and added an insert there. I used the original square underarm gores for this--sewing one straight side to the bottom edge of the underarm gore, one straight side from that point along the body rectangle to the point at the bottom of my lats, and then sewed along the hypotenuse of the triangular gap to let third the edge of the new gore curve to fill the space. Then I trimmed off all of the square that wasn't needed and finished the seam. This adds about 2 cm at the widest point, which takes the strain off of the fabric over my back. With luck I won't grow so much more in the way of muscle bulk, even though I have every intention of continuing to train and get stronger. But the new underdress in progress will be cut a bit loose over the shoulders, just in case.

Other than damaging the dress (which was fun when it happened), the event was a good one. I did much crafts, got to visit with many delightful people, did some dancing, some singing, and even took a short walk. I should have brought my fur hood and muff though. I hadn't expected to go outside, but I did try to watch the fighting, both the torchlight tourney Friday night (where my poor champion took a cup shot :-( and the day time tourney on Saturday. I didn't stay out long for either of them--while the weekend weather was generally warm and sunny, there was also an icy breeze, which I wouldn't have noticed if I had brought the fur.

It must have been sunny and warm at home over the weekend, too, since the bike path between here and uni has pretty much had all of the snow and ice melted away from it since last I took it. Only places which are shady still have some ice. I noticed when dropping O. off at home after the event that the part of the path I can see from the road was clear, so I opted to take my trike in this morning, and was pleased that my 45 minute walk was thus shortened into a 26 minute pedal. (good thing, too, since the above mentioned repairs to the dress took nearly 4 hours!)

My apprentice was supposed to do her analysis of the Roman coins today, but we are nearly out of the Argon gas needed for the ICP-MS, so instead we just set up the experiment, polished the coins, and took photos of them under the laser camera--it will automatically stitch together as many as 7 x 7 photos (which measures about 4 mm wide and 3 mm tall), and it took six sets of 7 x 7 photos to get the entire coin cross section photographed. But it makes sense to get good photos of "before" we fire on it with the laser.

So the plan is (assuming that the gas arrives on time) to run her analyses as the demo experiment on Wednesday during our lab demo day. Hopefully my colleagues will be ok with this.

I have been feeling like I am not being very good about doing my workout lately, so I just checked my exercise and counted how many days I have spent doing what activity recently (since switching from the summer program back to the normal program), to see if my perception is grounded in reality. The totals:

stats for the past 40 days:

activity # of days done
yoga 40
situps 40
trike 22
day one 6
day two 6
day three 6
day four 5
walk 5
dance 5
7 min hang 5
manual labour 4
meet trainer 3
acroyoga 3

so, if you count meetings with my personal trainer, I have done my assigned workout 26 of 40 days (or 65%, but only 57% if you don't count those meetings)

yoga and morning situps are daily

and other forms of physical activity happened on at least 44 other occasions*, so more than one thing a day, on the average, but sometimes it is several one day and none the next. (Note: when doing the counting, I only counted each type of activity on a given day, so riding my trike both to and from uni counts as once, not twice, in this summary)

In other words, I could be doing much better with the actual workouts, but I am reasonably active otherwise. Indeed, my exercise log for this month shows that this is my most active September since I started keeping records on the computer (2005, when I started my PhD program), with an average of 1.98 hours a day this month.

So I guess I shouldn't really be surprised that my food log is also running high, as is my weight--I am up to pretty much 57 kg (126 lbs), yet I am looking slimmer in the mirror than I remember looking this time last year (when I was 2 to 3 kg lighter)

I have just managed to catch up my exercise log after getting a little behind in getting the information from my phone and into the spreadsheet during the trip to Italy last week. I am pleased to report that, even though while traveling there were a couple of days when the only exercise I got at all was my daily yoga, I have been doing enough workouts, acroyoga, and biking and/or walking to work often enough that my March average hours a day is still 1.79 hours/day of physical activity. This is down compared to January (2.20 hrs/day) and February (2.65 hour/day), but it is the second best March since I started keeping the log on a computer (in 2005), and the month isn't over yet.

It is now 11 weeks since I started my sessions with my personal trainer, and I am seeing improvement in my overall strength and balance. Today at Phire practice I tried, for the first time, doing and handstand and from there rolling onto the super thick mat we use for aerial silks. Not only could I do the rolling out of the handstand, I also managed, a couple of times, a pause in the handstand for a few seconds before rolling--this is the first time I have tried hand-stand without a wall, human spotter, or giant rubber band to help, and I am pleased to have managed this milestone.

On the other hand, returning to aerial silks after 4 weeks where it wasn't an option (due to travel on my part, mostly) really emphasized how much further I still have to go. At the start of practice this evening I couldn't climb the silks at all--my hands simply wouldn't grip the fabric enough to work my way up it. However, after doing some acroyoga and handstands suddenly my hands remembered how it is done, and I managed to climb and do some simple poses, though I confess I couldn't remember much of what I had been able to do when last we tried.

With luck there may be some photos from tonight's session--my friend who likes playing with antique cameras joined us tonight, and took a bunch of photos, it will be interesting to see if any of them came out once he has a chance to develop the film.