kareina

One of our friends, K, who lives about 45 minutes south of Umeå, and so nearly 4 hours south of us, had decided she wanted to host a sit down dinner for New Year's Eve. She first considered a potluck, so that no one person would be overburdened with cooking. However, reading my friends' reports on their Thanksgiving dinners had me wanting to cook a traditional Turkey dinner just like I grew up with. When I suggested this she was enthusiastic, since she has seen them on TV, but never had a chance to try it. I couldn't do exactly what my family always did, since we normally roasted a twenty pound bird (one at Thanksgiving, and one at Christmas), and the largest I could find in the grocery store here was 5 kg. Therefore I bought two of them.

Since I would be cooking in someone else's kitchen a long way from home I did as much pre-cooking in advance as I could manage. I baked bread for the stuffing on the 27th so that it would have a bit of time to dry out before putting it in the birds, which I moved to the fridge to start thawing that afternoon. On the 29th I started the piecrust dough. This turned out to be the best crust I have made. My grandmother used to make hers with lard and (at least when doing a large batch, like for pasties) she would beat an egg with a spoon full of vinegar and enough water to make one cup of liquid for the dough. However, whilst that results in a good texture, I really don't like the flavour, since I don't like the taste of any pork products and I truly hate the smell and taste of vinegar. Therefor I used butter, as I always do (1 cup butter to 3 cups flour), but this time I used egg, lemon juice and water for the liquid, and it came out perfectly. I also started the refrigerator roll dough, browned up a mixture of ground moose meat, oats, egg and spices to be used for the stuffing, and mixed the spices with sugar for apple pie that day.

The next morning we packed up everything, and got on the road in the early afternoon, arriving at our destination at a good time to start baking the pies. We had brought with us our cool tool for peeling, coring, and slicing apples with an easy crank of a handle, and K. had gotten one for Christmas, so it took pretty much no time at all to get the apple pie ready, with two people slicing, me rolling out the dough, and a fourth nicely arranging the sliced fruit into the shell. I always do my apple pie the way my Aunt taught me—with the sliced apples piled up a good 4 inches higher than the top of the pie plate. This results in a nice domed crust, and the fruit cooks down to level with the rim during baking.

The pumpkin pie filling had been pre-cooked back in October, when the local store actually carried pumpkins (something that doesn’t usually happen in Sweden)—I had cut it up and roasted it then, and mashed the result and froze it. So on the day I needed only combine it with milk, cream, eggs, and spices. I had considered baking the rolls that evening, too. However, when I had consulted Google about turkey roasting times it was convinced that two small birds take way less time than one large one of the same mass. Therefore I decided to do the roll baking in the morning, before putting the turkey in the oven. (Can I just mention here how much I miss living in a house with two full sized ovens, so that one can bake rolls to be done at a similar time to the turkey, instead of hours in advance?)

Since I believed the estimates of timing I had read on line, I opted to sleep in on the 31st—instead of getting up to start the turkey around 06:00, I didn't even finish my morning sit ups till nearly 08:00, which meant I had the rolls out of the oven and the birds in by 09:30. This turned out to be too late for our originally planned eating time of 14:00. However, this also turned out to be a good thing, since the weather had turned crappy—with lots of rain and melting and very icy roads, so some of the guests were later to arrive than they had planned, and our actual meal start time of 15:15 turned out to be perfect for them. Even so, if I ever do two birds at one time again I will do the 06:00 start, as it will be easier to relax during the process.

While the birds baked we did the mashed potatoes and fruit salad (read: a large variety of fruit + whipped cream). I skipped the almonds in the fruit salad this year due to a nut allergic person. However, that person was also a vegetarian, so I left the nuts in the stuffing, which consisted of the above mentioned home baked bread, cooked moose meat etc., some quinoa, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, and walnuts, and more herbs and more spices. We cooked most of the stuffing inside of the birds, and the overflow got put into the oven with milk poured over it when the turkey came out. This worked out well, since some of the vegetarians present will eat wild game, but not store bought meat, so they could try that version of the stuffing.

In addition to what I cooked a few of the other guests (there were 26 of us for that meal) brought vegetable side dishes. All of my life when guests asked my mother "what can I bring" for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, she would give them the list of what we are making and suggest that they bring a vegetable side dish. I do not remember one time when the vegetable side dish turned out to be something I was interested in eating. This time was no exception, since it had mushrooms in it. Sigh. There are ever so many vegetables I like, yet people seem to think that holidays are a time to combine the few I don't care for in new and interesting ways. It is not easy being fussy.

The nicest thing about doing the turkey dinner was that it meant that we ate early enough that I actually got to eat, too! I get so tired of attending SCA events where the feast isn't served until my weird appetite has turned itself off for the evening and I am just not interested in food at all. It was nice to be able to eat with everyone else for a change. I even tried a small bit of the turkey, even if is store bought meat, and, of course, I ate the gravy. I love making gravy, and think I make a very tasty one.

After that meal we cleaned up a bit and spent an hour or so with people chatting in small groups. Then our hosts passed out pieces of paper to everyone, with a short character description on it, and we had a( surprise mini-LARP )

After the game we did some SCA dancing, and then there was another pot-luck meal (but that one was late enough that I didn't eat anything), followed by going outside to shoot off rockets for midnight. I considered going to bed after that, since I was tired, but then they started singing, so I couldn't resist staying away and enjoying the singing, so I didn't actually get to bed till almost 03:00. However, lord_kjar and C didn't come in till 05:00—they sat up with a couple of the guests who had arranged a ride home from another friend who was working night shift and could pick them up on the way home from work. Pretty much everyone else stayed the night—the advantage of our hosts having a large house—there is room enough for everyone.

I had started boiling the turkey bones to make a soup the night before, and then turned it off and put it into the cellar to keep cool sometime in the late evening. Then the next morning I warmed it up enough to separate out the bones from the liquid and bagged the stock up to be frozen. Our hosts enjoy cooking, and they said they would happily make use of the stock later, since we wouldn't be heading home for a few more days, and therefore didn't want to bring it with us.

We had planned on heading over to another friend's house to spend the afternoon with him, but we got a late start at leaving K's house, in part because I was still dealing with turkey stuff, but also because lord_kjar was helping them deal with their heating unit, which was having issues. lord_kjar grew up with the same sort of pellet-burning heater, so he knew some things one can do with them. Hopefully the repairs they did worked—one does not want the heat in a house to go out in the middle the winter—frozen pipes are a very expensive problem, and best avoided.

We did eventually make it to D's house a bit after 15:00, which didn't leave as much time as I might have liked to hang out with him, but it was long enough for me to try on his re-enactment costume, for he and lord_kjar to play violin, and to just hang out and chat for a bit. Then he had to go meet some friends for dinner, so he walked us to a Chinese restaurant (since the Indian one next door, which had been our first choice, was closed), and we three had a lovely dinner and conversation, followed by a nice long walk (the warm weather had, by then, been going on long enough that the ice had completely melted from the sidewalks, so it was, finally, easy walking), and then we went to a grocery store to pick up stuff for breakfast the next morning. This got us to late enough that we could meet our friend LH at the hospital where she works just as she got off of duty, and then we went back to her place, where we cooked some scones and whipped cream to serve with the jam we had bought (I didn't eat any that night, of course, but it made a lovey breakfast the next morning.

We spent both that night and Friday night at her place, just relaxing and hanging out. lord_kjar had had a slight cough for weeks, but around this time it got much worse and he wound up with a fever, too, so he was really content to just relax and be social. I went out each day for a walk, because she lives in a pretty area in the countryside north of Umeå. He was still feeling under the weather on Saturday, so C and I did most of the driving back to Luleå, letting him drive only for the last 40 kilometres, when he was feeling rested, and we were tired.

She drove as far as Skellefteå, where stopped by lord_kjar's brother's house exactly on time to be invited to dinner (and early enough that I could eat, too!), and I drove from there north.

We got home before 21:00 on Saturday, with enough energy left to put everything away, do yoga and play dulcimer before going to bed. Sunday we spent a good hour shovelling snow. While it warned up so much in Umeå that most of their snow melted from the rain and huge swaths of grass was showing (looked rather like late March), up here it warmed up only enough to put a bit of a crust onto the snow, and there was new snow, too. This meant we had a bit more than a decimetre of snow on the driveway, which had a thin crunchy crust, and it held together very well. This meant we could slide the shovel under, break it up, pick up chunks of it, and then stack them on top of what was already on the shovel, before pushing it over to an appropriate place to pile it. That hour was long enough for C. and I to clear one entry to the driveway and paths to both cars, but it took another 45 minutes the next day to finish the rest of the driveway and parking area. I love winter—it comes with a built-in work out plan.

lord_kjar had also scheduled Monday to be a vacation day, so he didn't have to go into work, but I hadn't, so I had planned to go in. However, when I started walking in Monday morning I realized that the only reason I was going in was to get some exercise, and that I could just as easily work from home, so instead of walking to work I turned the other direction, to enjoy the pretty moon in the western sky, and did a short loop before heading home and settling into a day with the computer being useful.

Monday evening C started coughing, and I noticed that my lymph nodes were swollen. Not wanting to experience the bad cough that lord_kjar hadn't yet completely gotten over, I decided that the best defence is a good offense, and we turned on the sauna and cooked ourselves for a while. I did my yoga in the sauna as it heated, then relaxed, and went to bed straight after getting out (they sat in the sauna longer, as they hadn't been in there during yoga (it is a small sauna)), and I was asleep by 21:00. I slept under two thick feather doonas, and between their warmth, having pre-heated my body in the sauna, and my immune system doing battle with little invaders, I sweat fairly heavily all night long, which was probably a good thing, since I woke up at 06:00 feeling a fair bit better (if still a bit tender in the lymph nodes). So I got up, tossed my pillow cases and doona cover into the laundry (leaving the other doonas and bottom sheet on the bed since they were still sleeping, not having gone to bed themselves till midnight) and did a bit of sewing and went for a walk. Then I crawled back in bed and took a bit of a nap before we all got up and had breakfast together.

After breakfast he and I were motivated enough to build a stand for the moraharpa, so now both the cello and the moraharpa can stand up on display, ready to use at a moment's notice. We have also worked on sewing projects, and I managed to get caught up on some computer stuff. Now it is time to do yoga and get to bed—I should actually go into the office tomorrow to see if the department head is back from holiday—I need his signature on the form to get reading glasses, and my appointment for that is Thursday.

I am just back from Nordanil, the Lajv (LARP) where I got to play a Viking Storman for the weekend. Everyone tells me that with the beard and man muscles I was convincing enough that they never had any difficulties remembering to refer to my character as "he". This pleases me. I was one of three women on site playing male roles, but the other two were playing young boys who didn't yet have beards, and at least on one occasion that I know of, someone referred to one of them as "your sister" to which herhis brother corrected "my brother".
( the write up for the weekend got long, so I will put most of it under a cut )
The next thing I knew I was yawning and walking into the dark forest with my wife and all of the other characters, and that was when everything went weird, as they do.
( the part of the story that I understood at the time ) Oh, I should mention more about the hird, and by extension some of my character's back story:( back story )
( before returning to the story of this weekend's event )and while I was there the "game over" bell rung, so when I came out everyone was talking at once and hugging, and I happily joined in the group for my share of hugs and happy babble, now in English when speaking to me.

Between conversations with people on site and with my traveling companions on the drive home, I have pieced together (  a few plot details that I had missed  )
Was it fun? Yup.
Would I do it again? Yes, but only if the weather is nice and cool like this weekend was—no way would I be willing to wear my man muscle padding under layers of wool clothing on a hot summer day!
Would I have changed anything? Yah, make more of the major plot bits happen during times of day I (and my character) wanted to be awake. (I would change the part about how much Swedish I understood, but that problem will solve itself if I keep living in Sweden long enough, which I plan to do.)

Oh, my goodness--it is now 01:30 and I started typing around 21:00. This is nearly nine full pages in Word. I wonder if anyone will read all of it?

I am proud of myself--today it was 30 C in the shade, yet I managed to go out and accomplish stuff. lord_kjar and I managed to move the next 6 large rocks into place ready to concrete into the earth cellar walls.

In the process it was necessary to bring up another pallet of them from the field (these are the large mostly rectangular stones that we bought (cheap!) in the spring). To do this we first needed to move the one really long one, which had been laying across the top of the stones that pallet, out of the way. So we did what we always do, wrapped a chain around it, hooked the chain to the tree trunk attached to the forks of the tractor, lifted it up, and carried it over to its new resting place. After he put it back down and we unhooked the chain we discovered that this time, in the process, one of the links on the chain nearly broke. All of the rest are still nice regular ovals--that one was stretched to round, and the metal had a crack 3/4 of the way through it. We think that probably one of the links had gotten stuck, so that when he lifted the stone instead of the link rotating so that the pressure was on the skinny part of the oval it was instead along the long side, and the weight was too much for it that way.

I am very glad it was only a partial failure, since the stone is long enough that it may well have broken if it had dropped, even from the low height of the tractor forks. (not that anyone would have been hurt in the process, since he was inside of the tractor, and I walked many meters away (into the shade!) before he lifted it.)

We moved half of the stones into place, then took a lunch break. After lunch I went down to the red current bushes (which are near where we fetched the pallet of stones from, so I had noticed that they were ripe) and picked a 1/4 of a yogurt bucket worth of berries. Then we walked down to the lower field to check the progress of the black currents. One or two of those berries are getting close to ripe, so I need to check them again tomorrow evening, or perhaps Monday. Then we did the second half of the stones. The last one we needed to cut--none of the stones on the pallet were quite short enough to put into the remaining spot in the wall. It turns out to be a good thing that we needed to cut it, since the spot in which it needed to sit had odd angles at each end, so a rectangle stone wouldn't have been the best fit, and we would have had to fill in a triangular shaped gap with small stones when we did the concrete.

Instead we measured the angle and length we wanted, he got out the concrete drill and we drilled in a line of holes, then we put pointed metal sticks into the holes and hit them each in turn with a sledge hammer till the rock split. The result was a perfect fit into where we wanted it, and now we have a smaller triangle shaped stone that will, no doubt, be needed somewhere else. (yah, I know, photos would make this so much easier to explain--why do I never think of that while I am standing there in front of the stone?)

After dinner we started scraping paint from the next section of the east wall of the house so that the painting project could continue, but we only managed to do the part we could reach from the ground before the gnats and horseflies drove us back into the house. (where did that lovely breeze we had had earlier in the day disappear to? If it had still been there we could have gotten so much more accomplished, without any tiny creatures attempting to fly up my nose or into my eyes.

So instead we went to the basement (wonderfully cool basement!), where he attached a loop to the sheath of his new sword so that he can hang it from his belt, and I started using the power planing tool to clean up some boards from an old pallet so that I can later glue them together to make a round shield for that Viking Lajv in August. I manged to clean up six of the eight boards that survived the pallet disassemble process before my hands were tingling too much from the effort of holding/pushing the boards across the planer, so I had to take a break.

Then we came up stairs and sat down to the computer, where I discovered that the organizer of the Lajv has created a FB group for those players who are in the household of my storman character, and she has found someone to play my daughter. So we chatted on skype with linda_linsefors about the event and via FB chat with the daughter. I did some writing in the GoogleDoc that summarizes our family history and created a spreadsheet, too, so that we could work out timelines and everyone's ages. These files have been shared with everyone in the FB group, but most of them are going to Visby, so I don't expect most of them to be able to look at it till they get back, so after this burst of energy with pre-event planning and character development I can go back to nice, easy, sewing (I haven't touched my beard in days, need to get back to sewing on that, too!) and wood working projects.

Now it is really much too late, so I will do my yoga and get to bed, and see if I manage to wake up early enough and with enough energy for both days this weekend to be productive. (I may not be working this summer, but he is, so I still feel the difference between week ends and week days--he isn't available to drive the tractor during week days.)

Oh--I nearly forgot to mention: his finger has healed enough that he was able to play violin today. First time since getting it caught between rocks just over a week ago.

This weekend was Spelmansstämman, the big gathering of folk musicians and dancers from all over northern Sweden and further away (including a buss of 20 from Norway, a couple of guys from Germany, one of whom comes every year). It is always a fun event, but this time it was even more fun than usual. A couple of our SCA friends from out of town came up for it and stayed with us. She arrived on Thursday evening early enough to join us for dinner and we spent a delightful evening hanging out with her.

Friday morning lord_kjar had to work, but since I have finally finished my report and can't do more with the paper until my colleagues at the mine get back to me, I had Friday off, so she and I used the time to make her a pattern for a Viking apron dress for the Viking themed larp we are doing in August (the one where I will be playing a (male) warrior chief). She will also be able to wear the dress for SCA events, of course, which is part of why the organizers, who are also SCA, decided to do one set in this time period.

Friday afternoon the other house guest arrived, with his violin. lord_kjar picked him up at the bus stop and we all enjoyed lunch together, then spent the afternoon hanging out and doing lessons for them in Swedish Folk Dancing, since they had little experience with that (she had also had a lesson the night before). We also baked a pound cake, since the next day was his birthday. Then we went to the opening concert for Spelmansstämman, followed by the first night of folk dancing.

I have loved these dances since lord_kjar brought me to my first one (this is my fourth year!), and this time was even more fun than the previous years. In part because we had a couple of friends with us, and also because I have gotten to know more people in the local Folk Dance group, so there were lots of people I was comfortable asking to dance, which also meant that I also asked people I didn't recognize to dance as well. Sure, some of those declined, but I managed to dance nearly every dance that happened between 20:00 and 22:00 (only missed the ones that happened when I needed to go use a toilet--the short breaks where they change musicians aren't long enough to accomplish that errand, especially as there is usually a line, since the old school house we dance in has only the two toilets).

Then it was our shift to go outside and work the hamburger stand (most people in the folk music and dance group wind up working a few shifts over the weekend to ensure the event happens), so I missed an hour of dancing, but we danced more from 23:00 to nearly midnight, when we went home, everyone did some yoga/stretching, then I took a hot shower and went to bed, since we had to get up in the morning to make it back in for the final rehearsal before our dance performance. I am glad they all joined me for the yoga, since the company meant that it was easier to do enough stretching to keep my legs from hurting after all the dancing.

Saturday morning we were back on site by 11:00, our rehearsal was at 11:15, and then we spread the ground cloth in the shade near the stage and settled in to enjoy the performances that happened before our dance performance (well, our guests did a fair bit of wandering around, since he had never been to Hängnan before, but I mostly stayed at our spot with the musical instruments and lunch bag). The music was wonderful, as it always is, especially when the Luleå Hembygdsgillet (our folk music group) played, and our dance performance was fun. lord_kjar got mid-dance applause when he did the flying trick with the smallest girl in our group (he can, and has, done it with me, too, but it looks more impressive with the smaller girl, since she will float higher than I do). This trick involves the girl placing her hands on the man's hip bones as he wraps his hands around her upper back, then then start spinning around one another, and once they are going fast enough she picks her feet up and flies. It is lots of fun!

After the performance we enjoyed the rest of the afternoon on site listening to music, chatting with one another, and with a variety of other friends who made it to the event (including one of the exchange students from our choir), and passing out flyers for the Medieval days we have, at the same location, next month. We also found a birthday present for one of our guests: the booth that sells folk costumes and accessories happened to have one men's cap which was in exactly the correct size and the perfect colour to go with the beautiful blue-black herringbone twill wool vest he was wearing. The hat looked so good on him we bought it for him.

Then we went home, ate dinner and the pound cake with berries and cream to properly celebrate our guest's birthday, took a 20 minute nap, and then went back for the second night of folk dancing. This time I didn't have a shift at the hamburger stand, but lord_kjar did, so I just kept dancing all night. I did not, however, manage to dance all morning too--around midnight (after about four hours of nearly non stop dancing) my legs were getting sore, and the others were also feeling like they could be done, so we went back to the house, enjoyed more yoga and conversation, followed by the boys playing violin and nyckleharpa for us (neither had touched their instruments during the dance and were both itching to play) and then I took another hot shower to finish making the legs feel better before going to sleep around 03:40 (note that this far north and this time of the year the sun is not just on the way back up, it has long since cleared the trees at that hour).

Sunday we went back to site on time to participate in the parade from the old stone church to the stage over at the open air museum, we girls just wearing our folk costumes, which we had been wearing all weekend (hers was her mother's wedding dress and is very pretty) and the boys playing their violins with the other musicians. Then we settled down in the same shady spot as Saturday to enjoy the day's "allspel" (everyone plays) (which lord_kjar participated in, but our guest decided that the stage was too crowded and he would just as soon sit and listen with us).

lord_kjar had played his nyckleharpa for Saturday's "allspel", but had his violin on Sunday, and said that it was easier for one big reason: with the violin he could hear his own instrument over everyone else's playing (since it is so close to his ear) and so had the feedback to let him know he was playing correctly. However, the nyckleharpa is played holding it down at waist level, so is harder to hear one's own instrument.

After the "allspel" it was 13:00, time for our last duty shift--sitting the gate this time. Since there were not so many people coming in our gate (which is over by the back parking lot that is used by those of us who are on duty, and we were all already on site) we took the opportunity to enjoy some lunch while we worked, and then at 14:00 we closed the gate for the weekend--anyone who wanted to show up for the final hour of the event needn't pay.

Then we walked back up to the church so that our guest could do some photography, and then we popped by the home of the other laurel in the shire, since he lives between the church and the open air museum. He had just finished taking a break from some yard work, and offered us Popsicles, which we happily accepted. Even me--yes, it is just sugar water, and I don't normally like or eat such things, but with all of the dancing and walking I had been doing all weekend, on short sleep, I think my body actually appreciated the energy boost. While there we asked him about the Viking themed larp, since I had asked him some weeks ago if he would be able to participate. It turns out he isn't available, but will happily loan me some of his costumes, armour, and accessories for that weekend, which will make it so much easier to appear to be a high-status warrior chief.

His wife got home just as we were about to leave, so we got to say hello to her too, and see how much their daughter has grown since I saw them last in December. That little girl has the biggest eyes! (Which will, no doubt, come in very handy many times in her life.)

We returned to the event, but the final act of the day had ended, and they had already closed down the fika stand, so we went home and enjoyed more cake, cream and berries there and a bit more relaxing and conversation (and copying some of lord_kjar's anime collection onto a hard drive for our guest to take home with her for later viewing before she had to start driving. His bus was a bit later, so we took him into town and did a stroll there--he hadn't ever been to Luleå before, and then dropped him at his bus at 20:00.

After dropping him off we went home and spent some time snuggling with one another before concluding the evening hanging out on skype with linda_linsefors. Yoga was done while we talked on skype, which meant that I got to bed before 02:00.

Today I spent the morning doing vacuuming, several loads of laundry (all of the guest bedding and our own bedding), tidying, and minor home improvement projects, followed by an afternoon on the computer, where I started putting together slides for the conference talk I am doing on the weekend (in Copenhagen) and replied to emails from a colleague at the mine (who will defer the decision as to if my paper is sufficiently vague about the details of the 3D model I created to be published as is, or if they are going to have to censor anything), and my Master's student (who returned the books he had borrowed from me by leaving them in the cabinet in the microscope room before he departed for his summer job, so I will need to go pick them up later and return them to my office).

This evening we had rehearsal for the Midsummer dance performance. lord_kjar won't be joining us for that performance (he never does these days--for Midsummer instead of dancing he runs the sound equipment for the performances at the park over near the city center, as it is a fun change for him after so many years of doing that dance performance), but he came along tonight so that he could stand in for the people who couldn't make it tonight, but will be dancing with us on Friday. So he spent part of the night as a 12 year old boy, and the other part as the boy's mother.

That took only about 30 minutes, which gave him time to check some of the sound equipment he will need on Friday (yes, the item that had been broken last summer has, in fact, been repaired in the mean time) before we went home, where we finally got around to measuring the two sheds we have, and all of the items in them, so that I could then sit down and draw them up in CorelDraw. Now we have a better idea of where/how we would be able to fit in his dad's lathe, which we may be picking up later this week when we go get the tractor.

Not that I was without internet, mind you--I have a smart phone, and a tablet (wi-fi only), but I have hardly touched a real computer since my last post, which was sometime before I departed for the conference, so if I am going to try to catch up on what has been happening, I had probably better start with that.

The conference was for the Society of Geology Applied to Mineral Deposits (SGA). My boss is the president of that organization. Therefore, when I suggested to him some time back that since the sessions directly or tangentially related to my current research project were limited enough that I could save the department money by attending only the first day (when the 3D model session in which I had a poster was meeting) he replied that I should attend the full conference.

However, the conference is in Uppsala, which is near enough to the "Stockholm" Arlanda airport that I was able to book my flight there on Monday morning and arrive on site before the opening ceremony (but I did miss the "ice-breaker" on Sunday evening).

I was glad that I did, because it meant that we could drive to Storeforsen on Sunday and have an adventure. We had a houseguest that weekend--one of my Finnish cousins, K, who lives in Helsinki, had been in southern Sweden to visit his parents (who moved to Sweden in the 60's and never left, but raised him tri-lingual, so he opted to move to Finland as an adult) and decided to do a train trip north, with a stop here to visit me, then bus to Happaranda, walk over the border to Finland, and train down to Oulu to visit cousins there before heading back down to southern Finland. When asked what he wanted to do he suggested "wildlife or nature", which made the choice of adventures easy. Storeforsen is Europe's largest rapids, and is a very pretty area. Highlights of the day include eating wild blueberries, scrambling around on rocks, and swimming in a lovely, quiet, peaceful side channel of the river that goes through a lovely rock canyon. That water was cold, so I am glad we found that wetsuit in a second hand store this spring--makes swimming ever so much more fun to not be cold and to keep the sun off my skin.

The conference itself was busy, and fun. I attended interesting sessions, visited with colleagues I already knew, met some interesting people, and actually spoke to a fair few about my research during the poster session. Diversions while I was there included meeting up with liadethornegge for lunch and museums on Tuesday (thanks! It was fun!), meeting up with lord_kjar's brother and his wife and kids for dinner and hanging out till after midnight on Wednesday, and meeting up with another SCA friend, C, for lunch on Thursday before heading to the airport for my flight home.

Got home Thursday night, and Friday I celebrated having a real kitchen and oven again by spending the morning baking--we did pasties, bread rolls (with almond meal in them, yum!), and an oven pancake with broccoli and carrot in it. Then we hopped in the car and drove to Skellefte, where we stayed with some SCA friends who also do "Lajv" (the Swedish word for what we call "LARP"). Since linda_linsefors talked lord_kjar and I into trying that this autumn we spent much of the evening learning about the world we are going to go pretend to be a part of.

On Saturday we drove further south to Umeå, where we stayed with friends of linda_linsefors and baked plain oven pancakes to eat with jam and cream, yum! I also taught them how to cook fresh artichoke and eat them with butter, lemon, pepper, and rosemary.

On Sunday we returned to Skellefte, where we visited another SCA friend, who has been storing some of linda_linsefors's stuff while she is in France for uni, and brought it back here so that she can use it at that Lajv this September.

Monday I mostly relaxed, but Tuesday and Wednesday I went into the office to work, since lord_kjar said yes to the "I know you are on holiday, but can you please come in and fix some stuff anyway?" question, and it was good to catch up on post-conference correspondence and turn in receipts and such. I also got my last set of thin sections, which is exciting, but I so don't have time to actually look at them, given how much else I need to be doing for work as soon as our vacation is over.

Last night I finally found the time to start setting the stones for our walkway into the ground, and I am very happy with how it is looking, and am looking forward to being done with all of it. Granted, the last half of it can't be done for a while--we don't want it in before we finish driving tractor over it, and that won't be done till we are done with the earth cellar and rest of the landscaping (changing the slope of the land so that water drains away to the far side of the sheds (we have already gotten rid of the huge puddles we used to get in the walkway to the house, but more needs to be done)

Today he went in to work "for a little bit this morning", and I am taking advantage of a sunny day to was the bed sheets, but it is nearly time to take the next load outside, so I will close this, and if he doesn't come home early enough to do earth cellar work with me (they made some progress on it while I was at the conference, but we haven't had a chance to touch it since) I will do more work on the walkway--I can still do a fair bit before I get to the part the tractor will need to be driving over.