kareina

It hasn't quite been three months since K. visited, and we realized that the love we feel for one another is really, seriously, mutual. In that time we've managed to see one another in person every 5 to 14 days, with visits ranging in length from 12 hours to 4 days. Every time we meet we do acroyoga together, and yesterday evening's visit brought us to 11 hours of acroyoga practice together, and I really pleased with how quickly we are progressing. He'd never tried acroyoga before, so the first time, as one would expect with a beginner, his legs really shook when he tried to base. Yesterday he was so stable I could do the lean forward into bird on his upraised feet without taking hands first. It helps that he has been doing plenty of strength training so it is only balance/technique that he needed to develop. The new trick he found on line, where both people start out lying on the ground, head to head, ears side by side, and then the flyer goes into shoulder stand and the base grabs their hips in hands and their feet with feet, and gently tugs the flyer up and over into bird-in-hands is getting so much easier. I can see that, soon, the flyer won't need to help by using their hands at all for that transition. This is So Much Fun!

His personal situation is still complicated (else we'd see one another in person far more often) and we are doing our best to be patient and hope that he will be able to resolve everything in a good way. In the meantime D. wishes that things work out such that I go move in with K, because then D&C could have this house. The part about living with K has a huge, huge appeal for me, but I really love this house and, more importantly, the huge yard and all the berries that grow in it, so I would love a resolution that involves living here. On the other hand, he has an even bigger property, so bringing berries with me would be an option, if it comes to that.

It is taking time to work things out, and it is totally unclear how things are going to go, other than he and I are both very, very clear that we wish to be together. But in the meantime I am very ok to take time for a resolution to his personals situation. While long-distance isn't ideal, I love what we already have: K and I spend a half an hour every morning talking on the phone as he goes to work, and we meet every night at 21:00 to do yoga over and talk before sleep (often later than we should), and we often talk on his way home from work too (depending on if he sleeps at his dad's house, five minutes from work, or if he drives the half an hour home), plus all of the many sweet messages we send one another pretty much all day long. I haven't been this head over heels in love with someone in a very long time, and to have it so obviously mutual is amazing. This does mean that I am posting far, far less often, since the time I used to post was shortly before heading to bed, but now that time is happily occupied.

In the meantime I got the bad news that I don't get to go to Norway for that amazing summer job carving soapstone at the Lofotr Viking Museum, because Norway is keeping its borders closed to non-essential people through at least August. This is disappointing on several accounts, since it would have been a fun job, would have looked great on my CV, and the pay would have been nice. On the other hand, this means that I will get to see K more often than I would otherwise have done, and that fills me with such joy.

I have been making slow, but steady progress on my data processing and meeting with my PhD supervisor every Monday to check in. She and I are both very excited to see my results, and think that this is some serious ground-breaking work that I am doing, and really want to get this first paper ready to publish as soon as possible. We don't yet know if we are going to be able to get funding to do the analyses of the artefacts that is necessary to complete my PhD research as planned. If not we have discussed a couple of options. One would be to downgrade the degree to a Master's in Archaeology (by research), at which point, since I already have a PhD in geology I would qualify for post-doc positions in geoarchaeology, or if I found a fully-funded interesting sounding PhD position in Archaeology, I would be qualified to go that route. Another possible option would be to redesign my current PhD to make it a methodology focused project, rather than my current plan to both develop the technique and then apply it to a suite of artefacts. It will be interesting to see where this goes, too.


Seriously, these days my life is at that point in the story where the reader really wants to know what is going to happen, but I can't just skip a few pages and find out, I really need to keep going through the days one at a time. Luckily, the days are so full of joy that this is easy to do.

This weekend is the Drachenwald Laurels' Sponsored Prize Display event over zoom that I have been organizing. Now that the registration deadline is past I need to finish working out the schedule and let the participants know.

Every so often one does fall in love at first sight. Happened to me tonight. I had commented to David that I plan on heading out to the site for Norrskensfesten on Friday to measure the rooms and sketch building maps so that I have them for planing how tables will be arranged for feast (and how many can be seated), and to have available for putting in bids for Kingdom University later. So this evening he says, "when you go out there, you can borrow my new toy", and shows me his laser measuring tool, and then whips out his phone and shows me the corresponding app. I wasted no time at all, but was promptly downloading and using bluetooth to introduce my phone to the tool. Minutes later I had a sketch of my living room, annotated with the measurements. This is going to be so much better than heading out there with a tape measure, and I won't even have to take a friend--one person is all it takes to drive the laser.

In some ways I didn't really miss lord_kjar at all while he was off in Scotland for a training course this week. After all, we spent hours every evening talking via Skype or G+ hangouts(depending on if anyone else was joining us, since G+ is designed for group chats). But some things just can't be done over video call. My poor back is much, much happier now that he is home to apply massage and stretching done by someone else (always so much better than what I can do on my own) and helping things back into alignment. It still isn't perfect, but part of that was my own fault for not taking it easy enough this week, I think.

It was on Sunday that I did something wrong to my back at fighter practice, and Monday it was still quite unhappy with me--lots of sore, tight muscles and stiffness. I treated with frequent hot showers, tiger balm, and sitting in a nice, supportive rocking chair instead of the (normally really comfy) recliner. By Tuesday evening it was feeling pretty good--no pain at all, and fairly reasonable flexibility, given how stiff it had been. It was a little stiffer on Wednesday morning; I think that whatever I did to it would have benefited from sleeping on my back, but I cannot do that, I must be on my tummy or side to sleep, so I think the hint of curve to the lower back that happens in that position wasn't really beneficial to the healing process. But despite feeling a little stiff when I first got up, I felt pretty much normal by mid-morning. That is when I forgot the key rule in recovering from this sort of issue: Continue to take it easy for a day or three after it feels better.

Instead of taking it easy I decided to get to tasks that would have been done on Sunday if I hadn't hurt myself, and I grabbed the vacuum cleaner from its closet in the kitchen and carried it down the hall to the living room. In the time it took to get it there and go to plug it in my back started hurting. At least as much as it had on Sunday. Not good. Rather than actually using the vacuum in that state I left it where I had set it before plugging it in and returned to trying to fix my back issues: laying on the floor with the little foam ball under my hip and lower back. Frequent hot showers, and more tiger balm. Naps. I didn't get any more work done that day. I am such a wimp. It is a good thing that I am rarely sick or injured.

By Thursday I was feeling a bit better, enough to accomplish useful stuff in the afternoon and evening, and by Friday I was doing a fair bit better. Then Friday evening lord_kjar got home, and my back (and the rest of me) was much happier. Today he helped me do some rearranging in the living room so that my temporary solution of sitting in a rocker to use the computer is now a permanent one. We now have the monitor stand on one side of the rocker, and the laptop stand on teh other, so that I can use the large monitor as my primary monitor, and the laptop as a secondary monitor. I really like the set up, though I have rotated the large monitor back to landscape as its default orientation, since I need to use spreadsheets in my work so often, and that is the more useful shape for spreadsheets. However, when I want to read a pdf I simply rotate the monitor back to portrait and use the full-screen mode (and some people wonder why I prefer pdf to books--it is sooo much easier to read them!)

Tomorrow we have some couch surfers coming from the Netherlands, and Monday morning I depart for the departmental "kick-off retreat", where I will do a short presentation on my research and listen to others do presentations about what they are up to. We stay the night at the hotel (a two hour bus ride from here), and come back to town the following evening.

Today's really good news was an email from the Australian Journal of Earth Science , who have accepted my article for publication. The editor sent me a document with some minor additional editorial suggestions and some questions, which I have already dealt with and returned, and a request for high-resolution versions of the figures, which I need to deal with tomorrow. Hopefully I will get that completely done in the morning before our guests arrive, so that it is done and off my plate before I head out of town. It was really frustrating to have spent so long since completing my PhD to get this article finished and ready to submit, but all of the extra effort we put in before submitting turned out to be worth it, since it was accepted on the first go (well, there were some minor revisions suggested by the reviewers, which I made and returned to the editor within 48 hours of receiving the email, including waiting for replies from my erstwhile adviser).

I learned a new word today. I found it in the list of interests in the profile of a friend of a friend her on LJ (though it may be that a number of my own friends already list it, and I just didn't notice because I haven't been looking at interest lists to see what people list that I don't that I might like to add). The person who is credited with coining the term defines it here, and the person in whose journal I first saw the term defines it here.

I very much like the word--sapiosexual clearly defines my own preferences in partners--I don't care what gender(s) people are, or what their body type is, if I fall in love with them I find them attractive, if I don't, I won't (thinking a package beautiful from a distance does not equate to finding them attractive--"ooo pretty" turns to "ooo gross" in a second if they display the wrong characteristics/personality traits/habits). If they don't have an impressive brain, I'm not going to fall in love. It is just that simple.

For me 2009 was a very good year. Some of the highlights:

* Completed my PhD
- Thesis submitted in June
- Comments from the examining committee received and acted upon in November
- Degree awarded in December

* Obtained first Post-Doc position & moved to Europe
- am truly self-sufficient for the first time in my life—not having my day to day living supplemented in any way by lovers, housemates, parents, or friends
- attended Geology conference in Edinburgh, Scotland
- attended Medieval Textile conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands
- attended SCA event in Germany
- attended SCA event in Stockholm
- attended Geology conference in San Francisco, California

* Got to visit friends and family in the US (including Alaska!) for the first time in many years. Twice for some of them in California and Seattle.

* Spent six months living with a family I adore, enjoying access to a garden full of fresh food while finishing up my thesis.

* Got to see one of my lovers fall head over heels in love and radiate the joy that comes with one’s first intense love

* Managed to maintain a strong loving friendship/connection with the lover with whom I’ve lived the longest, despite some major complications in his life

* Met many new and interesting people, and reconnected with many, many people with whom I’d previously lost touch

* Was reminded, yet again, that moving someplace new is a wonderful adventure, and that just because one moves on does not mean that one loses the connections with the people one cares about in the previous locations

However, no life is complete without some lows to balance the highs

* Didn’t have time to spend with one of my lovers while finishing up my thesis
- missed the frequent hikes and alpine adventures we’d enjoyed the year before
- missed living with him and the regular companionship/affection that entails
- missed him even more when I moved continents and regular correspondence didn’t happen as much as one might wish

* Was powerless to prevent the tragedy as another of my lovers had his heart crushed by the girl he’d fallen in love with (with a lot of help from a display of overwhelming intolerance on the part of her parents)

I fell in love with a roof-top this morning. Not just any roof-top, mind you, it is the roof of Milan Cathedral.

They charge 5 Euros to climb the stairs to the roof (an 8 if you want to take the lift, which, no surprises there, I didn't (and wouldn't have, even if the cost were the same--climbing is more fun)), and I wish they had some sort of season pass, so that I could pay one fee and return as many times as I like. Instead, I'm simply going to have to budget 5 Euros a week to get my fix.

The whole building, including the roof top, is made of marble, and it is lovely. Inside the Cathedral is impressive, as only Medieval Cathedrals can be, but it is still obviously a place of worship, and whilst I respect others to worship as they will, I can't help but feel myself that any god which desires worship isn't worthy of it. As a result, while I think the building would make a fabulous site for a Kingdom 12th night (for a Kingdom which expects a *huge* turn out to 12th night), I'm not overly interested in that part of the building; having seen it, I would be content to not see it again till my next international visitor arrives. (Will it be you???)

But, oh, the roof top! I could have stayed up there for hours, sitting in the shade with my sewing, admiring the architecture, the view of the Alps, the shade, the stone work, the fact that I was *up*, and the feeling of contentment that just being on such a glorious roof imparts. I actually got a bit teary eyed when it was time to go; I really didn't wish to leave. (Though, I would have been quick to leave once the sun finally cleared the highest part of the roof (upon which we weren't allowed to ascend)--shade is essential to my existence in such a hot place. The building having been built as a religious institution, it is no surprise that the highest part of the building is on the eastern side, and we had the good sense to not only get up early for the day's adventures, but make this our first stop of the day, so there was a fair bit of shade up there to enjoy.


There are lots of photos from/of the roof in clovis_t's facebook page, and a few in mine, but here are a few for those of you without the time/energy/inclination to go there.
( my roof-top )

( What I learned today )

I got this one from ariadne3, but I'm told that it has been around longer than I've been on LJ.

Reply to this post, and I will list three things I love about you. Maybe more than three :D Then repost to your own journal, if you want, and spread the love.