kareina

Ever since we bought the house last November we have wanted to host some sort of SCA gathering here (larger than dance practice), and, at long last, one has been scheduled. On Tuesday we missed choir practice (since

lord_kjar came home from Double Wars with a bit of a sore throat, and so probably shouldn't be singing). Therefore we suddenly had a free evening, so we decided to head to the Frostheim sewing night instead. We have been wanting to attend this local SCA sewing night since it started up last autumn, but it meets every other Tuesday, and we are normally at choir on Tuesdays. Somehow spending a week at Double Wars helped me to be even more keen to show up--one week of hanging out with SCA folk and working on sewing projects wasn't enough--I wanted more.

While at sewing night we all discussed plans for a summer SCA gathering & potluck, at which we could dance, sew, do archery, fighter practice, soak in the shire hot tub, or whatever else we feel for on the day. A couple of dates were suggested, and the one that worked for most of us present was Mid-Summer itself: 22 June. This is in direct conflict with the Drachenwald 20-year Anniversary event, but there are a number of us in the shire who would have liked to have attended that, but can't, so having our own revel on that day sounds like a very good thing to do.

If any of you have been contemplating a visit to Northern Sweden, this would make a grand excuse. The midnight sun is delightful--we are just far enough south that we do have a sunset at mid-Summer, but it never gets dark. So come join us!

I have enjoyed reading year end summaries/holiday letters from some of my friends and family this week, and it has inspired me to try to see if I can summarize my 2012.

( January = traveling )
Total for the month: 19 of 31 days sleeping away from home.

( February = less traveling )
Total for the month: 9 of 29 days sleeping away from home.
( March = working on a bus )

Total for the month: 17 of 31 days sleeping away from home.

( April = dancing and gaming, and more working on a bus )

Total for the month: 12 of 30 days sleeping away from home.

( May = Cyprus and Double Wars )

Total for the month: 14 of 31 days sleeping away from home.

( June = Folk Music! )

Total for the month: only 1 out of 30 days sleeping away from home!

( July = Hängnan Medieval Days! )

Total for the month: 7 days out of 31 days sleeping away from home, but five of them were in my own pavilion, only a 20 minute drive from home, so it kind of felt like being at home anyway.

( August = mostly at home )

Total for the month: 4 days out of 31 days sleeping away from home.

( September = mom visits! )

Total for the month: 4 days out of 30 days sleeping away from home.

( October = waiting )

Total for the month: 4 days out of 31 days sleeping away from home.

( November = House! )

Total for the month: 4 days out of 30 days sleeping away from home.

( December = All moved in! )
There are still a few days left of the year, but we have no plans to go anywhere else, so I feel safe to say: Total for the month 3 days of 31 sleeping away from home.

That makes the total for the year 102 days sleeping away from home, or 28%. I hope that 2013 has more time at home; I like home, and like it even better now that "home" is a house of our own with a view that is naught more than fields and trees and lots of beautiful snow!

Current Mood: busy

Last Sunday morning we went in costume to the movie theater with others from Frostheim, where people were waiting in line to buy their tickets to the Hobbit premire, and entertained them a bit. Then, in the afternoon we had the choir "Julton" performance in town, at the big brick church. It was rather different from last year, when we were performing in the smaller blue church. Last year it was just two choirs joining together, and it took an hour or two out of the day. This year there were rather more choirs performing, and we had to performances at both 16:00 and 19:00, but we needed to arrive at 13:30 for the rehearsal, which meant spending over five hours there, to sing three songs on our and four with the other choirs. This was a rather large chunk of time. We had fun anyway, of course, but there are other things we would have liked to have done with part of Sunday, too.

Monday was my birthday and nyckleharpa class in the evening. Since it is the last class before we break for the holidays it was more of a music session than a lesson, and we brought a cake to share. Normally I like to bake a new birthday cake for my birthday, since I love to eat cake batter, but there was simply no time this year. Luckily, we had backed cake one day last month, and decided at the time that we didn't need to eat both layers by ourselves, so we popped one into the freezer. We took it out of the freezer in the morning and went off to work for the day (I love my walk to work!) This meant that we had just enough time after work to split the cake, blend some mango with raspberries and cream to fill the middle, then frost the cake with freshly whipped cream, and decorate it with sliced kiwi fruit, blueberries, strawberry, and raspberries before we had to head to class. My but they were surprised when we showed up with it, in the nice fancy glass cake plate. They had made lussebullar and pepperkaker, so the mid-class break had rather more food to share than normal. Sort of made me wish I was hungry/interested in food in the evenings. However, since there was so much to choose from it meant that there was some cake left over for me to have at lunch the next day.

Tuesday evening was choir, which was our last rehearsal for Wednesday morning's Lucia choir performance.

Wednesday evening we went to see the Hobbit, in costume, because we had free tickets from being entertainment on Sunday morning.

Thursday we got up at at 05:00, so we could be at uni by 06:30 so that we would be in costume and ready for the 07:30 performance. After the performance, followed by more lussebullar and pepperkaker, I went and did some microscope work, followed by picking up my holiday gift from the Uni. This year the uni presented us all new carry on suitcases, and mine came with a bonus package--a hand-held battery operated luggage scale (good up to 50 kg). Today they sent an email explaining that the orders had been placed at different times, and that as a result some suitcases came with an extra something, and if we happened to have gotten one think of it as a lottery win.

Thursday evening we hosted the party for the choir at our place. This was much fun. Eight of the kids made it out, and we played twister (I did really well there--daily yoga helps), another fun game that involves singing an entire verse of a song that starts with the letter provided before someone on the other team started singing one starting with that letter. As we played I felt like our team was well behind, but, at the end of the alphabet (which we went through in random order) our team was only one point behind. We also did a little medieval dancing to show them what it was like.

Today I worked from home, and was glad I did--there had been a fair bit of snow + wind during the night, so it would have been a harder than usual walk. Indeed, all of the paths we had shoved in the yard here had disappeared in the night between the fresh snow and the wind redistributing the older snow. I opted not to bother doing any shoveling during the day, because I wanted to wait till closer to when

lord_kjar got home from work. That turned out to give me an unexpected advantage, as I mentioned earlier, as we have the best neighbour.

lord_kjar got home after 19:00 tonight, and I rather expected him to be too tired to do anything besides sleep this evening. Much to my delight, he came home motivated, so we finally attached the back to the paperback bookshelf in the bedroom, and added hooks to the back to hang clothes from, and put up a lamp in my new walk-in closet. Only one very full week after the shelves were built...

And you know what is really great? We have almost nothing on the calender this weekend--we just need to clean the apartment on Saturday and go to folk music on Sunday...

It snowed a fair bit last night and today, and there was wind the whole time. Early this afternoon I did a tiny bit of shoveling, just to clear a path from the front door to the edge of the hill, where we are dumping some of the snow with intent to make the hill taller and thus better for sledding (though we still need to make or acquire something resembling sleds), and planned to head back out later in the day to get the driveway, since it was still coming down and still blowing, too. Therefore I went back outside a little before 5pm to start shoveling, and discovered our next door neighbour already out there, using his snow-blower in our driveway! I went over and gave him many enthusiastic "Tack så mycket!!!"'s and then I started shoveling a path to the shed. Before I managed to finish that he had done all of the half of the driveway that leads towards his side and all of the parking area. Then I used the shovel to get the other half of the driveway, so that we can do loops if we feel like it. There was enough snow that just doing half of the area took me fully 2 hours (my exercise log loves me today!), so I am extremely grateful for the kindness of our neighbor, and will have to think of something nice we can do for him.

I have moved a lot over the years, and as a result have managed to keep the pile of my stuff down to a reasonable size (when I moved to Sweden I initially brought only what fit in my luggage for the flight, and then everything else followed later, and it all fit into one rental van. As a result of not having way too much stuff it is normal for me to get everything completely unpacked and put away within two weeks of moving into a new place.

lord_kjar, on the other hand, had been living in the same apartment for five or so years, and the same town for about ten years, so the amount of stuff he had accumulated was significantly larger than my pile.

Add to that information that normally I have been a student with oodles of free time and now I have a "real job" and too much to do at work to take more than a couple of days off for moving and it is easy to understand why it took a month this time to get everything unpacked. As I type this it has been 34 days since we got the keys to our house, and 30 days since we moved the stuff over from the apartment. While most of the stuff was unpacked and put away straight away, some of the stuff has had to wait till we had time to build places for it. We finished the new frame for the paperback shelves on Thursday and the shelf for the projector on Friday, which is also the day we unpacked the paperback books and finished hooking up the computer and projector to the stereo equipment. Those two projects accomplished and we can now claim to be completely moved in.

And just on time too, since we had the housewarming party yesterday (Saturday). I did take the day off of work on Friday to cook for the party. I made two pies (one sweet, one savory), two (Huge!) loaves of bread (one to turn into a Smörgåstårta, the other turned into a cinnamon braid coil), two salads, and two batches of cookies (one gluten free). In addition to all that I had baked a blueberry cake on Thursday, and I pulled some other baked goods I had made earlier out of the freezer, and I made a fruit salad on Saturday morning.

When I put it all out at the start of the party it completely filled the table (and it was hard to find space in the fridge for everything before it was put out). I had no idea how many (if any) people would come to the party, but I knew that I would need food, and I like feeding others...

Part of the reason for not knowing how many people would attend is that December is a busy time--most of the people we invited had multiple invites for Saturday. Some of them stopped by on their way somewhere else, others popped in after attending other things. We generally had about six to eight people here at a time, but over the course of the day we had a total of 25 guests:

lord_kjar's brother and his wife, two of our neighbors, two friends from choir, six friends from dance, one of my work colleagues (plus her wife and their son), five of our gaming friends, and five of our SCA friends. (note that the tally includes people who could have been counted in more than one category, but I just picked one category for them on this occasion in order to get an accurate total).

Three of them were still here in the evening, so we turned on the sauna and finished up the party with relaxation, and we managed to get to bed before midnight (first time in ages, since we have been working on getting the house ready well into the night. It is good that there were only the five us us left at that point, since our sauna seats only six.

Today we will spend the full day in town for choir--our choir is joining some other choirs for a group performance in the church in town. We will have a set on our own, each of the others will have sets of their own, and there will be some songs sung by all of us together. Then an hour or so later we do it all a second time. Add to that the practice session before hand, and it will eat the whole day. Luckily, we have plenty of left over food to take with us!

Current Mood: happy

This week hasn't seen as much progress on the moving in front as I might have liked--Monday night was Nyckleharpa class, so we didn't have time in the evening to do anything, but we were both inspired when we got home and stayed up till 02:00 unpacking, cleaning and organizing stuff in the shop.

Tuesday evening was choir, so the plan was to head from work to the apartment to do a bit of cleaning there before choir. He managed to fully enact this plan, but I wound up working a bit later than I should have done, and so only had enough time to clean the tops of the kitchen cabinets and the shelves in the upper cabinets. Next time we head that way we will need to get the lower cupboards. He managed to put all the doors back on their hinges, vacuum and mop the rest of the apartment. Not so much to do there, but we have the place the the end of December, so there is plenty of time left to go back and finish it up. This time we took with us most of the lights for the ceiling.

Unlike most places I have ever lived, in Sweden it is normal for apartments to come with no lighting at all, just wires sticking out of the ceiling to which you can attach your own lights. The upstairs of this house also came with no lights, but downstairs mostly had lights. We have been making do with a few portable lamps at the house, moving them from one room to the other, but that gets old, fast. Therefore we fetched some of the lights from the apartment, and bought a few more, so now we are mostly set. Still need one more over the kitchen table, and one in the hallway, but those will be covered when we fetch the last of the lights from the apartment, and we don't *need* them yet.

Wednesday we bought the aforesaid lights and put them up, Thursday we managed to start organizing the downstairs "Theater" (because "living room" isn't pretentious enough), and covered the big window there with house insulation--it was single pain glass and let in way, way too much cold, and who needs daylight in a room with a projector and screen, anyway?

Friday afternoon I managed a small adventure. I have been walking to and from Uni by a fairly direct path along a road, but on Friday I decided to see if I could find a trail through the forest for a more scenic walk. The google maps satellite image makes it look like there may be one. I managed to find a trail, a nice broad one. I was so absorbed in just enjoying the walk that I didn't notice when the trail swung in a broad arc back the direction I had come from. However, when I saw a side path heading up a hill I decided to look at the map in my phone and see if it would be a better option. When I opened the phone and saw the blinking blue light showing were I was and saw how it moved when I did I realized that continuing forward would take me back towards uni, so instead I went over the hill, past all the beautiful rock on top, past the nicely set up fire pit for doing singalongs, and then cut back down the hill to pick up the trail I had followed in to the forest, then exited it on the road I normally walk and went on home. My normal walk is just over 4 km, and adding the extra loop made it just over 5 km, but it was a fun addition to the trip. I think I now know where I should have turned to catch the other trail that aims more directly towards my neighborhood than going by the road, but it will have to await another nice day when I feel adventurous to give it a try.

Friday evening we went shopping again and this time bought electrical supplies so that we could hook up the stereo equipment in the theater, and so that we can move the big, high powered, electrical outlet to the other side of the shop, where the equipment that will actually need it resides. Then he worked on attaching wires to stereo equipment, while I cleaned residual sticky stuff from the boards of the bookshelf--when I shipped the paperback shelves from Australia I used packing tape to bundle the shelves together for shipping, and when it arrived in Italy I just turned them sticky side down and put books on the other side. But now we are building a whole new frame for the paperback shelves--one that actually reaches from floor to ceiling in this house, and if we are going to that much effort it is time to clean up the shelves themselves, too.

This morning we did normal domestic chores (laundry, vacuuming, baking saffron rolls) before his mother and sister and her two daughters came over for a visit. They loved the house, the girls loved playing with the toys and musical instruments. After they left we went for a short walk in the forest in the dwindling evening light and were home by 14:34. Now he is resting while I type this, and this evening we are hoping to actually build those bookshelves. I really do want to be completely moved in before a full month of home ownership has passed, and it is still looking possible, though tight, since we don't really have any time available tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning we need to be at the local movie theater at 08:30, in costume, to entertain the crowd waiting to purchase their tickets for the Hobbit (sales start at 09:00). In exchange for the SCA being there in costume for this we get free tickets to see the movie. I think it will be a fun morning. In the afternoon we have a choir performance, and in the evening is the normal Sunday evening dance class, so that really only leaves today for shelf building. Next weekend in the housewarming party...

lord_kjar stayed up till midnight last night building me a monitor stand. Sadly, I forgot to take photos during the day today, so you will have to content yourself with a description for now, and I will see if I remember the existence of cameras tomorrow.

With this addition the craft room/library/office is now done. He has his computer desk between the two windows, my work station is in front of the right hand window. From my rocking chair I can look past my monitors to our yard and the lovely tree (see the last post I did which actually had photos). Along the right hand wall (as one faces the windows) is a row of bookshelves. Since he got rid of some old papers when we moved these shelves now contain both books and papers and a few random craft items that didn't fit elsewhere. the back wall contains our stack of amazingly useful drawers full of pretty much everything that needs to be easy to find, but is kind of small. the left wall is built in cabinets and drawers which are now full of fabric (on shelves and in drawers) and SCA clothing (hanging from hangers).

In the middle of the room is the floor loom, and attached to the side of the loom is my new monitor stand. It is actually a double shelf--the upper shelf is large enough for my personal computer, and the monitor arm attaches to the edge of that. The lower shelf is a convenient place to set down a bowl of food before I sit down so that it will be in easy reach from the chair. to the right of my rocking chair is an old large wooden speaker which serves as a support for the other monitor arm, which has been converted to a tray for my work computer. The tray to support my computer drawing tablet and pen is also attached to that speaker. This means that I can sit here and do uni work using the work computer and the spare monitor, and if I need something on my other computer I have only to turn slightly to the left. This is a huge improvement over the set up at the apartment, where it was necessary for the computers to take turns sitting on the stand, and I could only use one at a time.

Needless to say, I am quite happy with this set up, and worked far later into this evening than I would have done if I had gone into the office. I think that working from home will be good for my research. Granted, I will still need to go in sometimes, but first I want to catch up to where I think I should have been by now...

This makes three rooms done--next we start on downstairs. However, he had to drive to Kiruna for work today (4 hour drive), and isn't home yet (it is 20:30, so he should be home soonish), so I don't think it will happen tonight, and this weekend is an SCA event, so perhaps next week will see more progress on the house front...

Current Mood: pleased

Some of you may recall that I have, off an on over the years, had a goal to "read at least 1000 words from the Geologic Literature a day". This goal has helped me keep on top of the piles of reading a research scientist needs to do, and the discipline of doing it daily, even on weekends and holidays, also helps. However, it happens occasionally that I miss a day, for whatever reason. Before starting my current job my record was remembering 321 days in a row. That one ended when I was in the process of packing up and getting ready to leave Italy to move to Sweden, and, indeed, I decided to just plain take a break from the daily reading, and made no attempt to read any science papers for the year I was not working. However, once I got the job offer to start doing research here I started doing the daily reading again.

I needed to--I was moving into a new field within geology, and had no where near enough background knowledge to do the job without lots and lots of reading. I am pleased to report that this time I managed a much longer stretch without forgetting--from the day I got the job offer I made time to read things from the geologic literature for 410 days in a row! Until this weekend. This weekend I was so focused on making progress on the house and getting everything where it belongs that I simply didn't think of reading at all. On Friday I had made the effort to put a few files into dropbox in hopes that I would spend an hour or two working from home, and a couple of times over the weekend

lord_kjar asked me if I was going to do that work, and each time I decided that it was far more important to do things for the house. Clearly I meant that, because on none of those occasions did it occur to me that in addition to uni work that needs doing I also had reading I should be doing, and so I didn't do it. Oops.

It is a good thing I also want to do good things for my exercise log, or I may not have come into the office at all today, but I like the walk in (42 minutes this morning), and that provides me motivation to come in in the first place. Now that I am hear I should conclude this confession to the world and actually do the things with the data in those files that I didn't look at this weekend...

Current Mood: accepting

Since last I posted I have (with lots of help from

lord_kjar) managed to:

*Get most of the programs I use regularly back onto my work computer after the IT department reinstalled it.

*Got the music/dance room emptied of boxes and musical instruments hung up on the wall.

*took photos of that part ( and put them on line )
*Unpacked all the suitcases and boxes of clothes and SCA costumes and hung them up or put them into drawers, as appropriate.

*Finished assembling the hardcover bookshelves and got all of those books onto the shelves

*Put the large metal cabinet for shop stuff back together

*Organized the Server Closet/SCA store room so that computer stuff is on the back shelves and SCA camping gear is on the front shelf

*Took the handles off of all of the doors we have taken down and put them all into the other large downstairs closet for storage

*Turned the handle on the sauna door over (it is made of a chunk of wood with a curved branch sticking out of it) so that towels can hang on the branch, rather than sliding off of it to the floor

*Decided we need to do to re-build the paperback shelves into a wall in the middle of the bedroom, creating me a walk-in closet.

*Purchased some power tools that will be needed for re-building the bookshelf into a walk-in closet

*Re-assembled the set of shelves we took out of the server closet and set them up in one of the sheds, with boxes on it to organize our recycling before we take it to town (we have trash pick-up here for the composting and the "burnable" rubbish, but the recycling we have to carry away ourselves.

*Walked between home and Uni seven times (for a total of 28 km)

*Scheduled the housewarming party and sent out some invitations (see next, friend's-locked post for details)

We are both enjoying having a weekend with nothing else on the calendar (other than tomorrow's regularly scheduled folk music and dance) so that we can catch up on stuff—much of that got done in the evenings after work, but we got a fair bit more done today, I think.

Next week we only have evenings available because there is a local SCA event on the weekend, which we are looking forward to. The Queen is flying up for it, and I promised her I would bring her bedding, a cloak, and some feast gear, so that she doesn't have to carry such heavy stuff in her luggage.

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: Home!

Before

lord_kjar's father and brother arrived at our apartment early Friday morning we managed to pack everything into boxes and dissemble such shelves and cabinets as were better taken apart before moving (the huge metal tool cabinet had to be taken apart--it won't go through that door when assembled--we had to take it apart to get it into that room in the first place). As a result of all of our prep work, and the fact that we had already moved over and unpacked all of the kitchen stuff the rest of the move yesterday went very smoothly and quickly.

The trailer his brother has is huge. This is a good thing--we were able to bring everything over in four trip. One trip of just stuff to the basement, two of just stuff for upstairs, and the final, smaller, trip with boxes for upstairs and furniture for downstairs. When they went back for that last load I stayed home and turned the morning's bread sponge into bread dough and prepped pizza toppings. By the time they got back everything was ready and the pizza stone was hot.

However, the first pizza took longer to bake than I expected (but we were still eating by 16:00), and the cheese on top was browning before the crust was perfectly baked. Therefore before putting in the second pizza I switched the setting on the oven from plain heat to fan supported heat, and as a result the second pizza baked properly. Must remember that in the future. I should probably also have used the fan when I baked the pound cake on Thursday, since it took more than a full hour to bake, and even then the middle still had some undercooked bits. Useful information about the new oven.

After his family went home we spent the rest of the evening happily trying to do everything at once--a little assembly of shelves, a few things put away--back and forth in a lovely, fun, scattered evening.

Today we have walked to the bottom of the property (in the rain! What happened to all of yesterday's lovely clear, cold, snow?) and measured a few things in prep for heading out. Now it is time to go to a store and buy some wood to build a headboard for the bed and a few other odds and ends...

Current Mood: bouncy

MidSummer plans

summary of my 2012

It has been a busy week

We have the best neighbour!

all moved in

December? Already?!

Home office!

our choices clearly reflect our priorities

fairly decent progress on the moving in front...

Moved!

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June 2025

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