kareina

First of all, I am really delighted with the weather we have been having lately. We have had six days in a row with temperatures below 0 C, and on Friday night/Saturday morning we got a couple of decimeters of snow, which, thanks to the nice weather, is staying nice and soft and fluffy and beautiful, and I am ever so much happier. This is so much better than the warm and rain we had for my birthday and the couple of days thereafter--it got so dark and dismal after the last of the previous batch of snow had melted away from the yard, fields, and forest (while leaving wet ice on all the roads and walkways). The Swedish weather service (via my phone app) says that we should have good temps for at least the next ten days (which is as far ahead as they predict), so it will be winter at least through new years. I hope it lasts longer than that, and I have started counting the number of days in a row we stay below zero.

Secondly, Frostheim Jul was fun! The hall was supposed to open at 11:00 for a crafts afternoon, followed by a potluck feast in the evening. I decided that we should bring the moraharpa, in addition to my hammer dulcimer and lord_kjar's nyckleharpa and violin, so Saturday morning while I was outside shoveling snow from the walkway onto the sledding hill (to make it bigger) he went downstairs and built new arms for the stand we had built for the cello last week so that the stand would hold the moraharpa (since changing that one would be much faster than building a whole new stand).

He was nearly finished with that when it was time to head to the hall (we had the key, so needed to be on time!), so he drove me and my stuff (crafts projects, hammer dulcimer, and food) over to the hall, then he returned home and finished up the project and then brought the rest of the musical instruments plus the four or five things I had thought of that I should have brought but didn't.

I was alone in the hall for a while, which gave me a chance to get my stuff unpacked and set up some tables for craft stuff, and then I was joined by the weaver I have become a patron for (I have bought so much of her tablet weaving) and her husband, and we had a delightful time chatting and working on projects for a while. Then I decided it was time to start my broccoli pie and went into the kitchen about the time that the fourth person arrived.

E. is a delightful person--I first met her a couple of years ago when I was one of the staff members to accompany the undergrad geology students to Cyprus. She was the only one of the students on that trip with whom I really clicked--she just seemed like the kind of person who would blend in with my group of friends. When we landed at the airport in Luleå and one of my friends picked me up I found out that, actually, she is friends with him and a bunch of other people I enjoy spending time with. Since then our paths have crossed a few times, and, when she joined a student club for fire dancing and they decided that they wanted to become jesters the group joined Frostheim to get help with costumes.

What I didn't know about her before this weekend is that in addition to common interests in gaming, geology, and medieval stuff, she is also a very talented musician. She has been playing clarinet since she was nine, and this summer while at the Visby Medieval Week she purchased a Renaissance style olive wood clarinet which has the sweetest sound. She had it along this weekend, and she, I, lord_kjar, and a couple of our other friends spent a good sized chunk of the day playing music together. For the songs I didn't know she would tell me a few notes to just play as accompanying cords or single notes, and it was so much fun. She is really interested in learning to play dulcimer, and she is a good enough musician that when I slid the sheet of paper under the strings to reveal which note was which she could play simple tunes right away. So we have planned that we will get together regularly come January for music lessons--she will teach herself to play dulcimer, and then teach me.

By late afternoon we had both the group of musicians at one end of the hall, and a group of crafters on the other--some people working on their own projects, others learning tablet weaving (from my weaver). Then, as time for the feast approached more and more people arrived. I forgot to actually count, but given that each table seats eight people we had to have had somewhere between 30 and 50 people on site for the feast (I am not certain if that count includes the kids, of whom there were at least seven of them who appeared to be having lots of fun running around).

The parents all packed up and took their little ones home fairly early, and when they started packing everyone else cleaned up too, which meant that we were ready to lock up the hall around 22:00. One of our friends, who lives a good hour or so north of here, had been enjoying some mead and had had enough that he shouldn't be driving, so I offered to drive him back to our place, where he could sleep over and head home the next day. He appreciated that--he had expected to sleep at the hall, like we did for Norrskensfest last month. I appreciated it to, since it meant we could put our chests and bags of stuff in his car, and the musical instruments in ours and get everything home in only one trip instead of two.

Sunday morning we hung out with him a bit, then had some time for projects before it was time to go to the airport to pick up our current houseguests--an old friend of ours who moved to Stockholm a couple of years ago, and a friend of his who is visiting from Colorado. They are out at another friend's house for a gaming session tonight, but we opted to stay home and relax.