kareina

The holidays have more or less ended, but here in Sweden they wind down slowly. Tuesday (6 Jan) was a holiday, and I worked from home on Monday, so that was two days at home after returning from the New Year's adventures. Then I went to the office on Wednesday, and while there got the department head's signature on the form I needed for my eye exam the next day (so I can get computer glasses--since I need them for work the Uni pays for it).

Thursday my eye exam was scheduled for 09:00, so I decided it wouldn't be worth going into the office before that. Instead, when lord_kjar departed for work at 08:00 C. and I hopped into the car and drove into town. We parked at the edge of town, where parking is free and traffic isn't messed up, and walked the 15 minutes in to the docs. However, we got there a bit before 09:00, and they office wasn't opened yet. C. continued on a bit further into town to accomplish her errand (posting something), and I walked part way with her and doubled back to wait outside their door. A bit later they let me in, and then said that they had tried to call me--the doc is sick today. We still don't know why they couldn't call me--we compared the number they have on file for me, and it matches my number, but they tried it again in front of me and it didn't ring, but gave them a busy signal. However, two minutes later C. tried calling me, and it rung just fine.

The receptionist suggested I come back at 10:30, which was longer than we wanted to wait, but not long enough to really accomplish anything. C. was still suffering from the cold I pretty much managed to dodge, and not feeling up for any addition errands, so we walked back to the car (15 min), then drove back to the house (15 min), which gave me enough time to use the toilet and eat a quick snack before driving back and walking back, arriving just on time for the new appointment.

This optometry office isn't the same one through whom I got my distance glasses in December, because the University has a policy of naming one single business in any given category which then gets all of the uni business for that category. So I gave them the form I had printed and she did the exam in English (I suspect they are used to English speaking patients, since so many people working at the Uni come from other countries) After she did the exam she measured the glasses I got last month, and I am pleased that she agrees that they are the correct prescription for me.

It always surprises me that they are able to come up with the right prescription, since so much of an eye exam consists of "can you read these letters", which I can do even when they are rather blurry, and "which one is easier to read #1 or #2?"--in the latter case while one of the two is often "better", usually neither are "as good as I would like", yet, even so they manage to give me glasses that bring the world into a nice sharp focus.

She said that the glasses she will give me will be for both middle and close distances. The main part of the lens will be set to focus on a computer screen, and the bottom part for reading or sewing something I am holding in my hands. Then I had the fun of trying to choose frames, again. This being a different shop they didn't have the exact same frames I am already wearing, and that is probably a good thing, since it would be nice to be able to tell the computer glasses from the distance glasses at a glance.

So we looked around and I tried on lots of pairs (determining, once again, that my very tiny head makes most glasses look TOO BIG for my face). Eventually I was drawn to a pair of frame-less glasses which are more rectangular than the ones I am wearing for distance (which are also frame-less). However, then she looked at my prescription and said that those wouldn't be an option--they require a minimum thickness of glass to do the sorts of glasses which are held to the frames by drilling holes in the glass itself, and while my distance glasses are just thick enough for that, my computer glasses won't be.

So, back to the display board we went, and eventually found something that looked good on me but had a wire frame surrounding the glass. Then she looked at the paperwork and explained that the university pays for the glasses, but they are only willing to pay for frames up to 298 SEK--anything more expensive than that I need to pay. Having just payed way too much for the distance glasses and the "half price" prescription sunglasses I got last month, I wasn't interested in paying yet more for the computer glasses. Therefore I asked her what she had that is within that price range, and we settled on a third pair of frames which are not as cute on me as the first two, but cute enough to live with. She tells me I should get the glasses within two weeks, and they cost me nothing but a day of accomplishing nothing at work, since, by the time I got back to the car it was already 11:30, so I decided I may as well go to the grocery store on the way home, which meant that by the time I had stocked up on everything on the list we needed for lord_kjar's birthday treats I didn't get home till 12:30, and my work week was over.

Friday was lord_kjar's birthday, and it was also the first meeting of our band, the Solar Wind Orchestra, since we have all come back after the holidays. So we decided to do both a birthday cake and a smörgåstårta. One of the girls in the band can't have gluten, and neither C nor I have a sweet tooth. Therefore we opted to make buckwheat pancakes for the birthday cake (using buckwheat flour, oat flour and a bit of rice flour, all of which are gluten free), and layered them with frozen berries and whipped cream. This came out looking very pretty and tasting wonderful, though not sweet at all, since the only sugar in it was that naturally occurring in the blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.

The smörgåstårta, on the other hand, was totally not to my taste at all, and I had nothing to do with the making of it, but C. and lord_kjar loved every bite. They made it by buying a loaf of really soft commercial mush bread, cutting of the crusts, setting the squares down to make a layer of "bread" for the base, then they took some liver pate, some finely chopped pickles, and some cream and stirred it together to make an easy to spread filling, which they covered the first layer of bread with, giving a pink with green spots layer of filling about as thick as the layer of bread.

Then they took another layer of crust-less bread squares and covered the pink filling and took some chopped ham, whipped cream, mayonnaise, and canned mandarin orange segments and combined that to make a white filling with pink and orange spots, and spread that thickly upon the bread. Then they added one more layer of bread and frosted everything with a blend of whipped cream and mayonnaise, covered it with plastic and put it into the fridge overnight, so that the fillings could soak into the bread. The next day they decorated it by covering the top with bits of sliced gravlax (salmon cured in salt, sugar, and dill), räkor (shrimp), hard-boiled eggs, cucumber, spinach, mâche (Valerianella locusta, or "lamb's lettuce"), and fresh dill.

The result is very pretty (though we forgot to take photos, so you can do a google image search for "smörgåstårta" if you want to get an idea of how they look), but, to my mind totally inedible. The ONLY things I will eat on the total list of ingredients are the hard-boiled eggs, cucumber, spinach, and mâche. I would have been willing to eat the cream, if they hadn't mixed it with mayonnaise, which I can't stand, since it contains vinegar. (ok, I know it is possible to make a mayonnaise that doesn't contain vinegar, but they just used the store bought stuff in a metal tube, and there is no way that is ever going near my mouth). Even the bread totally loses me, since I eat only home baked bread if at all possible (and unless I am traveling it totally is, and even then I prefer bread that at least look home baked, not that weird square soft stuff they wanted).

I wasn't the only one at the party not to eat it--one of the band members is vegetarian, and another, as mentioned above, gluten free. However, there were a total of nine of us there, so the others made good progress on the smörgåstårta, birthday cake, and the apple pie I had baked the day before and we put out too, just because there were so many of us.

The music night was fun--one of the new guys has a drum (the drum player I mentioned from Frostheim Jul), and everyone agreed that it was great to have a bit of percussion. There were enough of us who are used to playing together that things sounded good pretty much straight away, but the extra voices and instruments added richness. I am looking forward to doing it again next Friday, though with fewer food options, since it won't be a birthday party, too.

I have mentioned some of us in our choir (Student Choir Aurora) get together now and then to do instrumental stuff +/- singing. Last spring we recorded some of our songs, and one of the guys has put the results for two of them onto his web page.

The first is the song Ridom, which long time readers might recall from my series of "learn Swedish one song at a time" posts. Since it was one of the first Swedish songs I learned, I posted verse 1 separately from verse 2 and verse 3.

The second song is Nu grönskar det, which I also (much more recently) featured on my "learn Swedish one song at a time" series here.

I know my mother will be amused to listen to these, and there is a chance that one or more of the rest of you will be looking for something amusing to while away a bit of time and thus might click the links as well, so I decided to share here. If we make any recordings this semester I will let you know, so you can see how(if) we have improved over time.

Yesterday we hosted another music night for folk in our choir. This time there were five us, and over the course of the evening between us we played two guitars, one each violin, nyckleharpa, cello, hammer dulcimer and harmonica, and we all sang. It was ever so much fun! I am getting much better at playing with other people, though I still can't play very many songs on the dulcimer. They arrived around 18:30 and we played till around 21:00, took a break, wherein I fed them some freshly baked rieska with butter I had churned from some cream just before they arrived (I, of course, ate my share when the bread came out of the oven, as I knew I wouldn't be hungry later, and who can resist rieska when it is hot?), and then we returned to playing. One of them (who had biked over) left at midnight, and the rest of us continued to play (interspersed with singing along with youtube videos of songs we might want to add to our repertoire) till nearly 02:00. We agreed to do it again next Friday :-)

Today's home improvement project was hanging a large white board cabinet on the wall in the living room. On of the businesses where lord_kjar was fixing computers last week was tossing it out, so he brought it home. This is one of those things which would have been in a conference room, with a white board on the inside of the cabinet, the doors are lined in cork so things can be tacked to it, there are rings inside one door for hanging notebooks from, and a holder on the other for a pad of paper. We think it will be useful for designing projects together. And we couldn't hang musical instruments on that wall anyway, since it is an outside wall.

This week I had a couple of days of additional work: getting cold feet in the name of science. Some researchers at the uni who do things with winter research had a project to test a variety of winter shoes and anti-slip devices, so they put out a call on the uni email list looking for people in the 40 to 60 year old age range to be the test subjects--we would get paid for our time and they provided lunch and fika. So I volunteered. They had originally planned to do this back in March, and I participated in the first part of the project there, wherein they did tests of our balance and how quickly we walk on clean, dry, indoor surfaces. However, we had really weird weather in March, and it turned out not to be possible to do the walking on ice tests, because it wasn't cold enough to make ice. (This is the first March on record where it was not.) So instead they booked time at an indoor ice arena, but the earliest time that wasn't already booked wasn't till this month.

Inside the ice rink the air temperature is between -5 and -10 C, so we needed to dress warmly. The tests consisted of a set of 40 different anti slip devices or shoes that we were each to try in turn (they had prepared lists for each of us as to which number we should test in what order to make certain that no one had to wait for the one they wanted to use next). For each of the anti slip devices they timed us to see how long it took to put it on, and we had to record if it was "difficult" "a little hard", "kind of easy", or "easy" to put on. Then we did the walking tests, with half of us wearing mobile phones strapped to our ankles that would measure our movement patterns. I was one of that group, so for me each walking test started with the man kneeling at my feet, activating the program for the next recording session, then I would walk the ten meters along the clean ice track, stop, turn around, then start back quickly, stop after two steps, back up to the start line again, then walk "as fast as possible" back to the beginning (the latter to simulate traffic issues). Then we repeat that on track of snow on top of ice (man made snow in this case, since we have none left here (unless you count a few shady places where it had been plowed up into piles). Repeat again on a plain concrete track, and once final time on a packed snow surface. Then time how long it takes to take off the device and record our thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of that device on each surface. It took all day Tuesday and half a day Wednesday to test all of them.

There are an amazing number of uncomfortable things one can attach to the bottom of one's shoes to prevent one sliding on the ice. A few of the devices we tried were actually comfortable. Since it was so cold while we worked (expect for when we were outside for the packed snow--even though it has cooled down again since the unseasonably warm weather we had in April, it is still above zero) I wound up eating nearly twice as much over the course of the day than I normally do (and I really doubt that my weight will go up as a result).

Tomorrow is folk dance, Monday I have Swedish class and a meeting with my Master's student, and Tuesday is the first day of the national exam to be done with the Swedish for immigrants course.