kareina

Today has been a busy day. I worked from home yesterday as I didn't want the bother of going anywhere on the day I had a video job interview, but I knew that I should go to the office today, to let my colleagues know how the interview went. As luck would have it I arrived at the same time as Christina, so I was able to fill her in on the interview straight away. She confessed that she has been so busy with teaching and meetings that she had forgotten to send in the recommendation she said she'd write. I assured her that it was probably fine to get to it later this week, since they said they had a few more interviews to do before making up their minds, and that could take a couple of weeks.

Then I settled in to work, and after posting about the literature stuff I did this morning, I suddenly felt inspired to start looking again at the results from the SEM work I had done in Durham last autumn. I should have dealt with it straight away after returning (and had started to so so), but then I got the call to go to Seattle for mom's last days, and then after my return I found out about uncertainties in my job, surgery, job applications, etc. all of which made picking that part of the project back up seem kinda bothersome.

But today it was fun to work on that stuff, and I have made good progress, and am well set up to continue tomorrow. I wound up working today till 16:00, when it was time to drive David to the shop to pick up his car, which is finally repairs (for way too much money, but the list of things they replaced is huge). Afterwards we both drove to the house, he packed up the spare mattress to take to the apartment for houseguests there this week, and he drove me back to uni to get by trike and pedal home.

I had hoped to harvest the garden vegetables straight away when I got home. It dropped to +1 C last night, and my phone thought it would drop all the way to 0 C tonight and tomorrow. I wasn't certain if it would actually get cold enough long enough to do any damage to them, but I didn't see any point in risking it.

However, when I got home I was tired enough to need to curl up on the couch with a book and some popcorn first. When I had recovered enough to head out it was already 19:00, had gotten pretty dark out, and even started raining. So I put on my coveralls, grabbed the really big bucket (big enough to soak the trays from the food dehydrator) and went out.

I pulled the purple carrots first, and put them in the bottom of the bucket. Then the beets, and finally the kale. The carrots and beets completely filled the bucket, and the kale I just bundled together and brought in, roots and all. I then spent the better part of three hours cleaning it all. I wound up with two large bags full of kale leaves, one large bag of beet greens, one large bag carrot tops, one very large bag of beet root, and one bag of purple carrot. I will do something that freezes well with the greens tomorrow, as they won't last, and probably turn the beets into beetloaf this weekend.

As I worked I listened to a Swedish audio book I have listened to before whilst reading the text version at the same time. While much better in Swedish than I have been, I still prefer to have seen the text at least once before trying to listen to an audio book without reading at the same time. Since I was often running water to get dirt off of veg, I put my hearing aids onto mute.

After getting the veg into the fridge and the scrap out to the compost bin I did my yoga, and the audio book finished just as I was finishing up yoga, so I turned my hearing aids back on and started getting ready for bed. After brushing my teeth when I went out to turn of the lights I noticed that there was a faint sound coming from somewhere. It reminded my vaguely of the alarm the UPS on the server has if we have had a power outage, only much quieter. So I went downstairs, but the sound vanished as soon as I went through the curtain and started back down.

Having grown up with a hearing problem I don't have a lot of points in "which direction does the sound come from?", but after wandering around and listening various places I finally determined that was loudest in the kitchen. It was kind of hissing, and kinda squealing, kinda high pitched, and just barely loud enough to be heard, even with the hearing aids. I wondered if there was some problem with one of the electrical appliances, and went around unplugging everything I could find, but the sound didn't stop. Then I called David to ask if he had any suggestions, and, of course, he first suggested everything I had tried. Then, about the same time, we both remembered that when we got the house insurance one of the things they gave us was a small moisture sensor to put under the kitchen sink and report if there was ever a leak.

So I opened up the cupboard under the sink, pulled everything out, and found a small alarm that was, in fact making noise. I figured out how to turn it off, and set it aside whilst i cleaned up under the sink. It was, in fact, wet in there. While I had tried to be careful when washing the greens and roots it seems that while using the lift out spray nozzle that I managed to get some water down the hole where the nozzle comes out. oops! I have no idea how long the alarm had been going off. It was just barely audible (but very annoying) after I turned the sound on in my hearing aids, but while they were set to mute the outside world and pipe in the audio book there was no hope of my hearing it.

Now everything under the sink is clean and dry, and I have recorded today's adventures for posterity. Now I think I will head to bed as I had planned. Tomorrow I will return to the office to work (no choice about that really--I left my work computer there when I came home this evening, as I knew I would be too busy to do any further work today), and I hope I continue to make such good progress.

Early this evening I was playing with my new hammer dulcimer, which arrived this week, trying to re-learn the songs I had been working on back when I lived in Tasmania, and had a different hammer dulcimer there. However, either I was doing something wrong back then, or this one has a slightly different arrangement of where the notes are than that one did, because the patterns I had learned no longer, quite, apply. ( what do I mean by the phrase slightly different arrangement? ) That project wound up eating three hours of my evening, but, not surprisingly, looking at the tune in that sort of graphic presentation makes it much easier to try to go from what I see on the screen to hitting the correct strings. Yes, there will be lots of work required to get my hands to hit the correct string, at the correct time, every time, but the learning what the correct string is part will, I hope, go faster this way

In other news, one of my friends I met at the two European Textile Forums that I attended has published a summary of the last one we attended. Since a number of you are interested in textiles I thought I would share the link here. Do go look, and do consider attending this year's forum, too! It should be lots of fun (not that I can go register until I find out if I will have any teaching commitments that conflict, but if I can go, I shall).

This week's progress report on uni work: Good. Spent Monday-Thursday at the home office of the mining camp, selecting samples for geochemical analysis. Because this is my first contact with drill core one of the geologists there generously gave me her time to work with me, and discuss what sorts of details I should be looking for in the rock when deciding on where to take samples. It was fun and educational.

This morning I didn't get any uni work accomplished, instead I drove out to the hospital for my appointment to get new hearing aids. I didn't really expect to get new ones today, but I did! I explained to the guy that to my mind the most important thing was to get something that could communicate with my phone, and that is exactly what he gave me. I now have a new pair of hearing aids, and a little white box that hangs from a string around my neck that acts as an interpreter between my phone and the hearing aids. If I want to listen to music from the phone I push the music button on the box, and suddenly I can hear music, perfectly clearly. If I get a phone call I simply push the phone button on the box, and I can hear the other person just as clearly as if they were talking to me in the same room. No line noise of any kind. In fact, if the other person doesn't at least say something like "uhhuh" regularly to indicate that they are still listening, I can't tell if they are there at all.

I am not certain that someone who doesn't have a hearing problem can ever appreciate just what a miracle this is. I grew up hard of hearing, and phone calls have always been a challenge for me, since I could not see the other person to read their lips, and the volume on the phone was never loud enough. My first love was so soft spoken it was actually impossible to communicate with him on the phone at all. He would say "mumble, mumble, mumble", and I would say "WHAT?", and he would repeat his unintelligible murmurs, and I would shout "What did you say?".... I suspect that with this new technology it might even be possible to communicate with someone like him over a phone. But, to be fair, I haven't given it that hard of a test, yet.

It is now nearly 01:00, so I had better go do my yoga and get some sleep. We booked the laundry room for 07:00 tomorrow (ok, I suppose that it now counts as today), and it would be nice to get some rest before starting on that project, especially as we have gaming planned for the rest of the day, and it would be nice to be awake for that.

Having grown up with a hearing problem I tend not to pay attention to sounds unless I know that they are somehow significant and it is important to do so. As a result there are noises I hear, but don't register. Yesterday was a prime example of that. I'd worked late the night before, so slept in in the morning, and while my years took in the loud noises from the street, my brain didn't bother processing the information--I live in a city just now, there are always noises from the street, and there were certainly no sounds that I'd never heard before. As a result I didn't make the connection that at least one of those noises, whilst one I'd heard before, was not one I'd heard in a city before. It wasn't until I walked out the door on my way to school and saw the guy standing in the basket at the top of the extendible crane thingie using a chain-saw to give a hair-cut to one of the trees that the fact that I'd been hearing the chain saw, alternating with the sounds of the crane lowering, moving to the next tree, and raising again, all morning long.

Looking down the street it was easy to see which trees had been trimmed, and which still were to be done--they removed a fair bit of biomass from each of them. The day before yesterday I couldn't see through the folliage to the building my office is in, now it is possible to see the windows above my office. In another week or so, when the last of the leaves on the remaining branches fall, it will be possible to see my office from my apartment once again. Remembering that there was at least one wind-storm last winter that causes some really major huge branches (the size of trees themselves) to come down, I am not surprised that they are getting a haircut now. I also expect that after next spring's growth comes in most people won't be able to tell that anything had been removed. Of course, I don't intend to be here to see it.

Realizing that at this point pretty much all of the jobs for which I have current applications in progress, or will be applying to soon are for an August start I am now starting to think about how I wish to spend my first vacation in years. I haven't had time truly off since starting the PhD project. Sure, I took days now and then, but even then I knew that time off then meant longer time would be needed to finish the project. Yes, I did have two weeks between turning in my thesis and starting this job, but that isn't much, really. This time it looks like I might actually get several months off in a row. (Subject to change, without notice, if I happen to get a job offer that starts sooner than that, of course.)

So, what to do when unemployed? Travel! Of course. Therefore I've sent a note to the Drachewald e-mail list letting folk know that I'm looking to do some travel, and would happily teach classes or workshops on any topic I know in exchange for crash space. I've already had replies from Sweden, Germany, Austria, and Finland saying I should come visit and offering me crash space. South Africa offered, too, but I politely declined--getting there would use up too much of my savings, and I don't really know how long I will need it to last. I won't make any firm plans till I've made more progress finishing up this project, but I think I will manage at least all of those countries, and possibly some others besides--I can do couch-surfing in addition to SCA travel. If any of my European readers wants me to come visit them on my great Drachenwald tour of 2011, let me know, I'll add your location to the spreadsheet and will work out a logical path from one place to the next later. Stop 1 will likely be Edinburgh, since I plan to leave my stuff with colvis_t until I know where I'll be living/working next. Because flying is often cheaper than train or bus, I may well be stopping back there often between trips, depending on where I can get cheap flights.

While the week's progress has been quite good, today's uni progress wasn't as much as it should have been. I did accomplish one important task that I'd been putting off, but I spent much of the rest of the day replying to e-mails. Oh well, tomorrow is a Saturday, and I tend to have less e-mail and LJ to read on weekends, so with luck I will get some work done during the day. In the evening I've been invited to a party by the guy who is on record as the official SCA contact for Milan--never mind that he hasn't actually made it to an SCA event in three or four years, still he is an Italian local, and can answer questions at need, and he does enough other re-enactment stuff that someone looking to do medieval stuff can find plenty to do by contacting him. Alas, the party doesn't even start till 21:00, and his place is a good hour away by public transit (he tells me that everywhere in Milan is an hour away from everywhere else--the buses and trains that connect the far-flung spots go faster than the ones that connect locations that are close to one another, and as a result it doesn't matter where you are going, it will take you one hour. He could be right about that--it takes an hour to get to the home of the family from Calontir, too. I've never really tried getting anywhere else though, so haven't really tested this theory.

Looking back on it, other than the one friends-locked post, I have been quiet here for nearly a week. My that slipped by quickly. During that time I have:

* Attended the local A&S night and determined that if I'm showing up the other folks don't (ok, it is just a coincidence, helped along by the fact that I've only made it twice thus far, and this was the first time it has happened since being switched to Tuesdays)

* Attended dance practice. Fun!

* Got my second experiment running. Yay!

* Learned where to take the gold capsules from the first experiment to get them mounted in epoxy in preparation for analysing them next week.

* Made three cylinders out of salt for future experiments and typed up my notes as to what is done to accomplish this, and why (we won't mention the part about how my boss, observing me do the first of them, nearly two weeks after he demonstrated the technique, suggested that rather than consult my notes I should simply think about what I'm doing and why and work it out for myself, causing me to feel, briefly, as though he was implying that I don't think--I got over it, and do see the sense in what he actually meant to say there).

* Attended two more Italian classes (which are mostly fun, but I found the one exercise very frustrating. She had us close our books and simply listen to the CD and then attempt to discuss in Italian what we heard. What *I* heard was the large amount of traffic noise recorded into the background of the conversation totally masking the words, but probably intended to add "colour" to the setting. Having grown up with the hearing problem, I can be a bit over-sensitive to times I don't hear things properly, and when the teacher suggested to me that I don't get frustrated, that we all go through difficult moments where we don't understand what we are hearing the first few times we listen to the recording in another language I actually crossed over the line into tears knowing that my problem in this case had more to do with my ability (or lack thereof) to hear/understand sounds that I don't *see* (I never listen to a radio that is talking, or books on tape--there is no point, words without being able to see the speaker aren't clear enough to understand without turning the volume up too loud for everyone else, even with my hearing aids in). It was a rather embarrassing moment. Fortunately for me, that was only one tiny portion of the day's lesson, and, once she gave me a transcript of the conversation to look at as I listened, I was able to make out every word over the noise of the traffic.

* Indulged in a rare spate of retail-therapy, stopping on my way home from the above mentioned lesson to purchase an immersion blender (I've been wanting something in the way of a food processor or blender, and this one turned out to be much more affordable than either of the above). To celebrate the new acquisition I made a blended bowl of soup out of some left over roasted pumpkin, potatoes, and garlic, to which I added red lentils, zucchini, and green onion. It was quite yummy! clovis_t wouldn't try it. Not only is it full of vegetables, whcih he won't eat if he can avoid it, he doesn't care much for soups, and on the rare occasion he does eat soup he picks out the solid bits that he likes and leaves the broth. He didn't understand why I'd want to use the blender on a soup, rendering it even further from his definition of "food" than it had been.

* probably a bunch of other stuff, but it is way late and I've still got my yoga to do before I sleep, so I think I'll quit typing here...