kareina

With three of us living here these days, two of whom love to cook, the fridge which came with the house has been much too small. I, of course, have been of the opinion that if we were to get rid of everything I would never eat (e.g. pickles, olives, pickled fish, other fish, metal tubes full of processed cheese and other random stuff) that lives in the fridge there would be plenty of room, but since they are both very of all of those things we decided to just invest in a second fridge.

It arrived Wednesday, so we did a bit of re-arranging down stairs. The linen closet that used to be at the bottom of the stairs next to the two extra freezers we have is now in the corner of the guest room (which required that many of his boxes of stuff find other homes). On Friday, since the new fridge had achieved a nice cool temp, we took the opportunity to move everything from the upstairs fridge and freezer into the down stairs fridge and freezers and defrost the upstairs one. Since we were at the SCA event most of Saturday we waited till today to move stuff back, and, while at it organize stuff. So now the upstairs fridge has only stuff I eat, plus those things I don't eat that they particularly like for breakfast, and the downstairs fridge has duplicates of stuff (especially butter, which we use a rather lot of), and lots more jars and tubes of things I don't recognize as food. The plan is that leftovers will go upstairs if it is something that I can eat, and downstairs if it contains vinegar, fish, or any of the other things I don't eat, so that I don't have to ask if something is safe.

Then we dealt with the freezers, and now there is one drawer for each category of stuff, and a map of which drawer is which on the outside of the freezers. It turns out that we have pretty much eaten all of the ready-to-eat meals (e.g. pasties, lasagne, beetloaf, etc.) that had been in the freezer, so it is time to start cooking for the freezer again. We are also pretty much out of bread rolls, so I need to bake them, too. I have started the freezer re-filling process by baking some oven pancake with thinly sliced reindeer meat in it. Yum! I am not certain how much, if any, will actually make it to the freezer.

C. has a lead on a possible local job. One of her friends in the local Middle Eastern dance group says they need someone where she works, so C. will be meeting the manager there tomorrow. It isn't in her field, but if she takes that job she would be free to keep looking for work as a biologist, without being obliged to apply for lots of jobs she doesn't want in order to keep getting unemployment payments.

I happened to glance at FB today at the right time to see a post from northernotter about the talk she will be doing on her hand-woven reproduction of the Skjoldehamn find next weekend. Clicking on the link reveals that the other speaker will be Lise Bender Jørgensen, who has published so many books on archaeological textiles. Of course I have to go!

So I have booked train tickets to Narvik for way too early next Friday morning, and then I will take a bus to Tromsø, spend the weekend there, see the exhibit, attend the talks, and then bus back to Narvik Sunday evening to catch the train home on Monday morning. Since I will be missing work that Monday I can work the following Friday to make up for it, so I don't even need to take a day off. Norway! Mountains! Textiles! I am looking forward to the trip.

This weekend's home improvement project has been prep work to consolidate our beds, in preparation for C moving in. When I first met lord_kjar he was sleeping on a queen sized bed on a simple IKEA frame. It is a fine bed, and we slept on it for several years before deciding to buy the king sized memory foam mattress upon which we now sleep. When we bought the larger mattress we decided to move the old bed to the guest room, and we just put the mattress on the floor, where it has been working just fine. However, when C moves in she will be bringing her bed with her. It is a queen sized IKEA bed with a large amount of storage area under the mattress, which easily lifts up on some sort of spring-loaded pivoting system.

Since this will be more large beds than we have rooms to keep them in, we decided to double up our old and new beds into a single unit. Therefore we built an extension for our old bed frame that is the same height as the old mattress. Now we can put the king sized mattress on top of the old mattress + extension, and it will work just fine. Should we have lots of house guests at once, we can move the large mattress to the living room floor, and that will still leave the queen sized bed in the guest room.

And last, but certainly not least: Snow! Yesterday we finally got something resembling a decent snow fall! Combined with some pretty good winds, so this morning when we woke up we had some lovely snow-dunes stretching across our yard. It took me about 40 minutes to use the shovel to clear the path to the shed where the snow-blower lives, and then another hour for him to use the snowblower to clear the driveways, while I used the shovel to clear out the rest of the walkways, and tidy up some of the narrow little ridges of snow he left behind.

Of course I used the snow I shoveled to build up a little hill in front of the house, and after we were done I got out my sled and played on the hill a bit. So wonderful to finally have decent snow!

Now it is time to head to folk dance for the evening, so even if there were more to say, I have run out of time to say it...