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and another week slips by
Oct. 14th, 2014 03:56 pmLife has been delightfully pleasant--full but not hectic, with a bit of emphasis on music lately. I am now the person responsible for taking the photocopies of new sheet music for choir and typing the music into NoteworthyComposer to make midi files so that we can all listen to our parts and practice at home. I was really delighted when I found out that the midi files it exports come with text, and when one plays the midi there is a little blue box that highlights the syllable that goes with the note playing at the moment. This is fun, but a little challenging since I have no music training whatsoever, and my hearing is bad enough that I can't necessarily tell if it sounds wrong or not, so I need someone else to check my work before I can post the files to the choir web page. Since I am already doing this for choir I have also started doing this with things we want to do for our choir band, too.
I have also been making more time to practice playing my hammer dulcimer, and I bring it with us on alternate Monday evenings for the nyckleharpa night--then I play along for the few songs I know, and work on sewing projects while they are learning new stuff (since it takes the other 5 to 10 minutes to learn a new tune well enough to play along, and I can't play along till I have memorized every string I need to hit for that song, and that is a process that can take several weeks (though for one particularly easy song, which isn't done at the nyckleharpa nights, I managed it in only a couple of days). On Sunday we made it to the folk music session for the first time in ages, and I brought my Dulcimer there, too. It was fun. I still got in plenty of sewing time, but about every 20 minutes the circle came back around to my turn to pick, and I would suggest one of the few tunes I can play (I can play 8.5 songs now, 3.5 of which are Swedish Folk music and often come up on the Sunday sessions.)
My Swedish has been improving ever since C, our temporary housemate moved in. She is an SCA person from Goteborg who has a 2 month job in Luleå, so she asked on the Frostheim facebook page if anyone had a room available, and, since we got the guest room fixed up and usable this summer, we did. She is a delightful person to have around--she is a neat tidy person who cleans up after herself. She loves to cook, but the kitchen is always clean, just how I like it. She talks Swedish with me 98% of the time, which means that I am practicing lots more than I had been. The past few days I have been reading aloud to her and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lord_kjar from the Swedish translation of Neil Gaiman's Odd och frostjättarna. The last time I attempted to read out loud from a Swedish book to lord_kjar he needed to correct my pronunciation at least once every sentence, and he only bothered to do so if I said a word so wrong it became another word or wasn't understandable at all. Now they are only correcting me once or twice a page, and then only for really hard words (go type "själ" into google translate and push the speaker symbol to hear what it sounds like).
This week the Uni had a free clinic for people with back or other pain could come in and be seen by a team of Master's students getting their degree in physiotherapy. Since I have been having an issue with some of the muscles in my back (along my spine, between the shoulder blade and my waist) knotting up while I sleep and hurting just enough to wake me, I made an appointment, and I am glad that I did. It hasn't been what one would call a problem (though I do miss being able to sleep deeply for a long time at a stretch) in that the pain would go away as soon as I woke up and started moving, but it was just annoying enough to make it worth replying to the email looking for people to come to the clinic.
It turns out that the muscles on the right side that are responsible for holding my scapula to my back are weak. I hadn't noticed the difference in strength from one side to the other, but when he had me hold my arm straight out in front of me and he pressed down on my arm I had no problems resisting with my left arm, but the right arm collapsed almost immediately. He has given me a few exercises to try to strengthen them and, with luck, the problem should go away. The pain area is the same spot that hurt when I hurt my back at fighter practice just over two years ago. I thought the problem had cleared up, but apparently I have been compensating with other muscles, and have done so for long enough that there are issues now. Oops. Makes me wonder why we don't go see a physiotherapist once every so often just for a check up--does anything need fine tuning? Imagine how bad off I would be with this issue if I didn't have the habit of daily yoga?
I have also been making more time to practice playing my hammer dulcimer, and I bring it with us on alternate Monday evenings for the nyckleharpa night--then I play along for the few songs I know, and work on sewing projects while they are learning new stuff (since it takes the other 5 to 10 minutes to learn a new tune well enough to play along, and I can't play along till I have memorized every string I need to hit for that song, and that is a process that can take several weeks (though for one particularly easy song, which isn't done at the nyckleharpa nights, I managed it in only a couple of days). On Sunday we made it to the folk music session for the first time in ages, and I brought my Dulcimer there, too. It was fun. I still got in plenty of sewing time, but about every 20 minutes the circle came back around to my turn to pick, and I would suggest one of the few tunes I can play (I can play 8.5 songs now, 3.5 of which are Swedish Folk music and often come up on the Sunday sessions.)
My Swedish has been improving ever since C, our temporary housemate moved in. She is an SCA person from Goteborg who has a 2 month job in Luleå, so she asked on the Frostheim facebook page if anyone had a room available, and, since we got the guest room fixed up and usable this summer, we did. She is a delightful person to have around--she is a neat tidy person who cleans up after herself. She loves to cook, but the kitchen is always clean, just how I like it. She talks Swedish with me 98% of the time, which means that I am practicing lots more than I had been. The past few days I have been reading aloud to her and
lord_kjar from the Swedish translation of Neil Gaiman's Odd och frostjättarna. The last time I attempted to read out loud from a Swedish book to lord_kjar he needed to correct my pronunciation at least once every sentence, and he only bothered to do so if I said a word so wrong it became another word or wasn't understandable at all. Now they are only correcting me once or twice a page, and then only for really hard words (go type "själ" into google translate and push the speaker symbol to hear what it sounds like).This week the Uni had a free clinic for people with back or other pain could come in and be seen by a team of Master's students getting their degree in physiotherapy. Since I have been having an issue with some of the muscles in my back (along my spine, between the shoulder blade and my waist) knotting up while I sleep and hurting just enough to wake me, I made an appointment, and I am glad that I did. It hasn't been what one would call a problem (though I do miss being able to sleep deeply for a long time at a stretch) in that the pain would go away as soon as I woke up and started moving, but it was just annoying enough to make it worth replying to the email looking for people to come to the clinic.
It turns out that the muscles on the right side that are responsible for holding my scapula to my back are weak. I hadn't noticed the difference in strength from one side to the other, but when he had me hold my arm straight out in front of me and he pressed down on my arm I had no problems resisting with my left arm, but the right arm collapsed almost immediately. He has given me a few exercises to try to strengthen them and, with luck, the problem should go away. The pain area is the same spot that hurt when I hurt my back at fighter practice just over two years ago. I thought the problem had cleared up, but apparently I have been compensating with other muscles, and have done so for long enough that there are issues now. Oops. Makes me wonder why we don't go see a physiotherapist once every so often just for a check up--does anything need fine tuning? Imagine how bad off I would be with this issue if I didn't have the habit of daily yoga?
