kareina: steatite vessel (2nd PhD)
We did manage to get on the road early enough on Friday morning to swing by Storforsen on our way to Arjeplog, where Josie took a photo to prove we were there. It was a beautiful sunny day, and it would have been nice to have more time there, but since we had a meeting to get to we continued along the way. We arrived at the Silvermuseet about fifteen minutes before 14:00, but the museum is closed for lunch between 13:00 and 14:00, so we went across the street to a cafe and had a bite to eat first. Then I went to my meeting and Josie drove over the hotel and checked in.

I didn't really know what to expect from my visit, so was delighted when Ingela took me in to a back room where she had set out all of their soapstone objects for me to look at, photograph, and measure as I will. That was so cool! I just love the cute little bowl (# 477 in the photo). It is only about 3 cm in diameter. (Yes, I do also have photos with a scale bar, I just opted not to include those on the scrivener cards I have made for each object.)

While I was playing with the toys working, Josie toured the museum and spent time in the giftshop listing to Sami music with the clerk there trying to decide which CDs to buy (she would up getting three of them, I think). I took a quick run through the museum when I was done with the artefacts, but really should go back another time to take a better look. Need more friends to come visit for long enough that we do some sightseeing, too.

We stayed that night in a hotel in Arjeplog, where I copied the notes from my phone into scrivener, and started cleaning them up and adding photos, etc. Then the next day we continued on to Jokkmokk, pausing at the Arctic Circle for a photo. We arrived in Jokkmokk just before noon, which is when the Ájtte museum opens, so we had only about a two minute wait till they opened the doors.

After we left the museum we went looking for lunch. We went into the first resturant we came to, a pizza and pasta kinda place, and I didn't see anything on the menu that I would eat, so we turned around and left. We got a few steps away from the door when an older gentleman stepped out and called us back. He'd heard us discussing the fact that I am too fussy of a vegetarian to be able to find food on a pizza menu, and he asked if I eat pasta. I admitted that I did, and he whipped out a little note pad and started quizzing me on other ingrediants I will and won't eat, and eventually wound up with an acceptable list of things they had in house that I would eat, and he insisted we come in and eat. Josie got the day's special pasta (involving ox tail and a cream sauce), while I got mine with a variety of fresh and canned veg and kidney beans. Much to my delight, the meal was tasty. I ate half of it at once, and took the rest with me, and ate the rest later during the drive.

Saturday evening my friend Julia visited, and David was over, so we just lounged around and talked for much of the evening.

Sunday I worked on getting the rest of the samples into scrivener and their locations plotted on a map (she had given me printouts of maps with the locations marked with dots, so I then had to find those locations on the wonderful on-line Swedish map page and determine their lat/long.

Sunday evening was a special Folk Dance session in Gammelstad. We had about 30 people show up, most of us dancers, but enough musicians to give a good rich sound. This was my first real exercise since surgery (I don't count my daily yoga, which has been kind of modified), and it felt so good to move. I was careful not to raise my arms too high, even when spinning under my partner's arms, and the muscles in my chest/shoulders only complained a few times, and not loudly.

However, I think that pushing myself that much was good for me, since today during yoga I was able to do a handstand for the first time since surgery (11 days ago), and I can now lift my arms nearly fully overhead, so long as they are a little forward. If I try to pull the arms back into the plane of my body when they are up then they lower themselves as I do. But it is noticeably better. Josie says she is enjoying watching how I am a little better each day.

Today I worked from home, and then we went to Nyckelharpa night. Josie loves listening to the music and working on a project as much as I do. Tomorrow I need to actually go into the office, so I had better post this. Luckily, yoga is already done, so there is only a nice hot shower between me and my bed.
kareina: (BSE garnet)
The weekend of the 23rd I had nothing on, so I actually made progress on uni work. On Monday I had Nyckleharpa, so I worked in the office till time for that, and then spent a delightful evening stitching and listening to beautiful Swedish Folk Music. On Tuesday it was warm enough to take my trike in, but after working all day I was tired and unfocused, so when time to head to Phire rolled around I just packed up my computer, hopped onto my trike and went home, and worked from home on Wednesday. Wednesday evening I drove in for Phire practice, and then out to Gammelstad for Herrskaps Dans, and then worked from home on Thursday as well. That night a couchsurfer, Antero, from Finland, arrived and stayed through today. He was delightful company, and content to spend hours working on his computer, so I was able to continue working from home for chunks of the weekend. I did take him to Phire practice on Friday evening, he opted to stay home Saturday during the day while I went to the Frostheim annual general meeting, and on Sunday I took him to see Gammelstad.

Sadly, he brought a cold with him, so today I have been pretty low energy and coughing a bit the latter part of the day (the first part of the day it was a slightly runny nose). Despite the low energy, I did get some work done today, and even finally managed to finish up the report of how much of each type of gas the lab typically uses per hour. Since He is being used way faster than usual since the laser was fixed I set a copy of the report to the guys at the laser company wondering if they have any insights.

Often when I get around to typing these updates it is past midnight, and I close by saying that I need to do yoga and get to bed. Tonight I feel it is past midnight, though it is not quite 21:00. So I will go do yoga, take a hot shower and get some sleep. I need to be healthy again before my surgery in 11 days...
kareina: (acroyoga)
I finally updated my work log summary and looked at the totals. As a half time employee I should have worked 140 hours for the first seven weeks of this year. I didn't work much at all my first week this year, since the laser was broken, and I wasn't recovered enough from losing mom. Even so, I have worked 176 hours so far this year. This is not sustainable. I need to remember that even though there are lots of people wanting to use the lab that I am only supposed to give them 20 hours a week, and to say no to more bookings once that is achieved. This last week I also managed to work 22 hours starting to catch up on Durham stuff, but I only did that by working on both Saturday and Sunday.

However, one of the things that is making this much work productivity possible is that I am really enjoying all of my evening activities, which means that I stay at work till time to head to training.

Monday evening was Nyckelharpa night, so I stayed at work till time to go, and David picked me up there. This was the first Nyckelharpa night of the year, and it was so much fun! I love the music they play, and I made some progress on embroidery for my next pretty 12th Century dress (started that project more than a year ago, but it got put aside when my viking coat vanished and I needed to make a new one. That coat is now usable (though still has seam embroidery to do), so I can work on other medieval projects again).

Tuesday was Phire (acroyoga and juggling!), followed by Choir, after which I walked home, and then did half an hour of snow shovelling (since it was still nice and cold and the snow fluffy and easy to deal with, and I knew that it was supposed to warm up late in the week), so I really enjoyed that evening.

Wednesday was Phire (acroyoga, aerial silks and juggling!) followed by Herrskapsdans in Gammelstad. Therefore I went to the effort of hooking the battery back up on the car and driving to work, so that I could drive to dance after practice. I was slightly late for Herrskapsdans, because just as I was about to go Villiam said "I want to try a thing". We got it to work, so I pulled out my phone and asked Anton to take a photo:

acroyoga

Thursday I had to go in to the lab to run one last experiment in the morning, and then I took my computer home and worked from home on Durham stuff for the rest of the week. I had said yes to a couple of couch surfers from France when they wrote on Wednesday asking if I had room for them on Thursday and Friday. They were supposed to arrive on the train to Luleå that got in at 14:00, but due to the weather the trains were delayed, and they finally reached my house at 0:30, which was good for me as it meant that I stayed up working till they got here, then I fed them and showed them the guest room, then I chatted with Crian on a video call before finally going to bed around 03:30.

Friday I still managed to get up before the couch surfers, so I got some work done before they came upstairs. Then I had second breakfast as they had first, and they went off to Gammelstad to see the Church Village etc. I spent part of the day shovelling the last of the snow that I hadn't already gotten off of the driveway earlier in the week, but it was much harder work, since it had warmed up to +5 C, and the snow was now wet, heavy, slushy stuff instead of the beautiful soft fluffy stuff I had been enjoying. The rest of the day I alternated between making progress sewing the new edging onto my phone baldric, reading, and working. Then, since I was feeling lazy I hooked up the car battery again and drove in for Phire practice at 17:00. The couch surfers had planned to meet me there, but they got lost, and by the time they found the gym the door was no longer propped open, and I didn't see their text message saying they were here (since I was busy doing acroyoga and juggling), so after about 15 minutes of not getting in they went to the grocery store and got some stuff. I found them when we were done and drove them home, where I showed them how to bake bread, and videos of Swedish folk dancing, and we did some acroyoga.

Saturday they departed for Trondheim and I enjoyed another day of mixed snow shovelling (this time moving the stuff that had slid off of the shed roof and landed in the driveway), sewing, work, and reading. Other than for shovelling I didn't leave the house all day, nor did I see anyone after the couch surfers left, which was a lovely way to spend the day.

Sunday I sent my friend Julia, who lives in Gammelstad, a text message (in Swedish) asking if she was coming in for the normal Sunday Phire board meeting, and if so was she driving, and if so, would she be heading home by 18:30, and if so, could I get a ride with her? She said Yes, so I then sent another message to my dance teacher asking if I could get a ride home after dance, and she said yes. So I enjoyed a third lazy day of mixed work, shovelling, relaxing, and even filling in US tax forms ready to print and post. Then, just after 18:00 Julia picked me up and took me to dance. Dance was much fun, and on the way home from dance I found out that one of the girls in my group is now dating one of the guys I know from gaming and larp. Small world. They met through the Vänster Partiet.

Today (Monday) I needed to bring the computer back to the office, so I opted to take the bus in. After several days of temps as warm as +5 C it was nice to see it cool back down to just under freezing. It snowed pretty much all day long--every so often I would look up from the computer to see pretty big snowflakes blowing past my window. However, it was too warm for fluffy snow, so it formed a wet, heavy, dense coating. This week, for the first time I attended the AMT (Avancerad Motoriskt Träning) at the gym at LTU. It only started recently, and is being taught by Anton, who is the one who runs the Phire parkour sessions. The Monday night session starts at 16:30, which means I can go, since my card is good to get in anytime before 17:00. It was a really good workout--he pushed us harder than I have been pushing myself lately. After training Julia picked me up and we went back to my place, where I fed her dinner and then we traded massage.

But now it is 23:26, and I should do my yoga and go to bed.
kareina: (folk dance)
For those of you who have read my posts about how much I love attending Nyckelharpa night every other week and have wanted to hear it for themselves, Khevron has shared some videos he took last night:

viedo #1

video #2

video #3

If his privacy settings are such that you can't see the videos, add him on FB and tell him I sent you.
kareina: (acroyoga)
It has been a lovely day. I had a meeting in the morning, so acroyoga wasn't till 11:00. Ellinor couldn't make it, but Johan and I practised for an hour before I returned to work. It is amazing how quickly we have gotten back to were we were before we went home for the summer. It is a pity he can’t stay in Luleå this winter. Oh well, we have till Thursday morning to practice, anyway.

I managed to put in five hours of LTU work today, and really should have done Durham stuff this evening, but instead I went to the first Nyckelharpa night of the season, and even brought my dulcimer, so I got to play along with the 3.25 songs I know, in addition to making progress on my Viking coat. The coat is up to about 27 or 28 hours of sewing now, and I am really happy with it. It was delightful to see Birger and Siv again, to hear a bit about their summer, to share the story of Kaarina’s laureling song (I still need to write that post!), and to encourage them to come to Umas Hostdans event and Norsskensbard contest in October.
kareina: (Default)
Tonight I managed to finally get started on the embroidery for the sleeves on the 12th century dress I started six month ago on the lovely 3-in-1 wool twill I bought at the last Medieval Week I attended. The neck embroidery is done, but since it took six months to accomplish just the neck, doing the sleeves are likely to take a rather long time.

Today was the first Ore Geology Seminar for the year at LTU. This is a new thing we are starting, and the hope was that it would be a good place for our PhD students and researchers to share their work in progress and get good ideas. So far so good--today's presentation was on a structural geology regional research project here in Norrbotten. He showed pictures of some troublesome thin sections. While most of the samples from the area have kinematic indicators with one sense of shear direction, a few of the ones with K-feldspar porphyroblasts show the opposite direction. He noted that, in the case of the ones which show the opposite sense of movement that the pressure shadows are very weakly developed, and perhaps he can discount these as not being a very good reflection of the deformational system. This prompted another of us to point out that he could send the samples to the really good SEM with EDS down south and they can measure the C-axis orientation, which could help answer the question as to the true sense of shear. Several of us now sound rather interested in using this technology...

And, finally, the reason I am posting tonight after Nyckelharpa, when I should have already done my yoga and gone to bed. Week 8's summary of how I spent my hours (now that week 9 has started):

Goal:  56 25 20 20 20 15 10 2
  sleep useful tasks Durham LTU social exercise entertainment make music
Week 1 48 40 0 13 37 15 14 0
Week 2 56 38 20 14 20 7 15 0
Week 3 52 25 11 24 37 12 6 0
Week 4 54 25 44 1 25 10 10 0
Week 5 53 28 38 1 22 11 14 0
Week 6 52 38 9 22 16 17 13 0
Week 7 51 29 8 17 23 19 22 0
Week 8 50 35 9 23 30 11 10 1
 

I managed to get LTU back on track after week 7's downturn, but my Durham work suffered (five of those nine hours were accomplished on Sunday, after deciding to start sharing my totals).  If I hadn't exceeded my social goal by 10 hours, and had put that energy into working on my thesis instead.  It would also have been good to use those extra five hours of useful task time to work out a bit more. But at least I finally did a bit of music--singing in Choir. Now if I would just tune my poor dulcimer, which has been sitting neglected all year--I have only touched it to show it off to visitors, and then with an apology that it has been too long since it was last tuned (even I can hear that it is off, which is saying something).

kareina: (Default)
To get to Crown last weekend I left the house at 02:00 Friday morning and drove 1 hr, 45 minutes to the airport at Kemi, just a bit over the border in Finland. I should have left even earlier than that--I had been thinking it was only a 1.5 hr drive (which it is, from the site we are holding Norrskensfesten in two weeks).
 
Luckily, the Kemi airport is so tiny that my pulling into the parking lot 10 minutes before boarding was meant to start meant that I had plenty of time to pay for parking, clear security, use the loo, refill my water bottle, send a couple of text messages, and do a quick Duolingo lesson before actually boarding the plane.
 
I managed a half an hour nap on the plane, and another at the Helsinki airport before Mistress Celemon's flight. Then she and I, and the Prince of Nordmark hung out and waited till Ville, the event Autocrat arrived to get us.
 
It was a bit more than an hour to the site, which is a large scout camp with many buildings. Ville unlocked all the buildings and gave us a quick tour, mentioning as he did that they were planning on closing off the little room at the end of the main hall for a "special thing" that would happen that evening. Since he is a pelican I guessed that it might be a peerage vigil, and if so, possibly a pelican, and didn't think anything more about it then.
 
After we helped Ville unload the trailer and he left site to go get more stuff Celemon unpacked our stuff, put on garb, and then we used the extra kitchen in the main sleeping hall to cook some homemade noodles and a baked eggplant and tomato dish to go with it for lunch (we rounded out the meal with my favourite form of juustuo--the Finnish "coffee cheese").
After lunch she went straight to a nap and I went out for a 45 minute walk in the forest, where I found a few blueberries frozen on their bushes (not many, most plants were completely bare, but every so often there were 1 to 3 berries left on one plant), so I did them the kindness of warming the poor things in my mouth and tummy.
 
Then I got a 45 minute nap, and by the time I got up a fair few others were starting to arrive, so after a quick dinner of leftovers I went down to the main hall, where I was sent to the kitchen hall to help get more tables, but I got distracted there--the cooks had just cut open a bunc of squash, and, when asked said they had planned to toss the seeds, so I rescued them and took them up the hill to the other kitchen to roast them for desert. Yum! There were enough to share with people and then save some for the next day.
 
That evening was a short court, at the end of which their Majesties called up Countess Anna (who lives in Frostheim) offer her a place in their Royal Household as the Kingdom Rapier Champion, and their apologies for it being so later in their regin, but this was the first chance they had had to see her in person.

At this point I was beginning to doubt my earlier guess, even before Master Ærikr started to protest that she, as his Scholar, wasn't available to be joining the Royal household, since she was already in his. The King, rightly, pointed out that since Ærikr is in fealty that there is no conflict, yet Ærikr managed to find a few more ways to protest, until the Queen suggested that the problem could be solved by admitting Anna into the Order of the Defence, which idea was approved by both members of the order present, and she was sent off to vigil.

I spent much of the time waiting for my turn at the vigil dancing, which was much fun, and then went up the hill, did my yoga, and was in bed before 01:00. I would have enjoyed staying up late talking with people, but I was too short on sleep to accomplish it.

Saturday I was up at 08:00, and soon went down the hill to the hall for breakfast, then back up the hill to put on wool and fur (much of which Eino had brought for me, since he and his girlfriend had driven, but I flew carry on only--sadly for them it turned into a 14 hour trip due to the muddy snow in the north plus road works).  I was one of the people doing introductions/boasts of the fighters and consorts at the beginning of the tournament. I got to introduce William and Isebetta, Sitgot and Jovi, and Eino and Singhild.  This was much fun. In addition to boasting of them, I couldn't resist when I got to Eino telling everyone that he is so keen to fight that he had driven 14 hours to get there, driving south, and ever further south, and ever further south, since most folk who traveled any distance to get to Finland had to go north...

The tournament had 17 fighters, and they ran it as a round robin, with plans to then do a second round robin with the best four. However, there was a best three, and then a three-way tie for fourth place, each of whom had killed one of the others, in a circle. So first those three had to fight for the right to be in fourth place, and then they did the second round robin.  Much to my delight, the four finalists came from four different regions: 1 from Aarnimetsa, one from Central Region, one from Insular Draconis, and one from Nordmark.  

Since I was running short of sleep before the event I found myself nodding off during the first half of court that evening, which I felt bad about, since the awards were (as usual) going to very deserving people.  However, when they got to Anna's admission to the Order of Defense I woke up and listened to the speeches with interest.  I was not surprised that her sibling took the opportunity to speak for the pelicans, and the tale he told of the young maiden who had staged a coup when the seneschal of the incipient shire of Aarnimetsa hit burn out and wanted the group to give up on the goal of becoming a full SCA branch.  Apparently she managed to get the group full shire status, but burned herself out in the process. Clearly she recovered, since she went on to become first Baroness of Aarnimetsa and is still active all these years later.  I also enjoyed Ærikr tale of how it was Anna who first inspired him to take up fencing.

Saturday evening I helped serve the feast, since I wasn't hungry anyway. I also took the time to preform my sestina, which I had entered into the A&S competition.  It was fun, and I got a couple of compliments on it.  After the feast we did some dancing, but by that point I was so sleepy I could barely stay awake to dance, so I went to bed just after midnight. I had thought to sleep in, too, but at 07:00 Eino woke me to ask if I had packed the bag he needed to take home for me. I hadn't, so I got up and did so, getting it together before they needed to start driving north.

Sunday morning I got to enjoy some of the left overs from feast. The desert had looked particularly like something I would enjoy, so I was delighted that there was some left the next day:  A castle, baked from an egg-flour pastry, and filled with whipped cream and fresh fruit.  It was, in fact, as tasty as it looked.  I also really enjoyed the oatmeal with blueberries in it served with more of the left over whipped cream.

After a leisurely breakfast I packed up the rest of my stuff, and did a bit of cleaning of the site before Kaarina was ready to go.  She and I took Judith to the airport for her flight to Korea and then went to the village where Kaarina lives.  I really liked her place--a house in the country with pretty views, and a very comfortable feeling.  We cooked some soup for dinner, and then did a 45 minute loop walk across the fields and around through a bit of forest. Such a nice place she lives. She and I were both tired, so we called it a night at around 22:00, and I managed to sleep till 06:00.  Then we had a hour for breakfast before she dropped me off at the bus stop (along the side of the highway in the middle of no where) on her way to work.  The bus to the airport takes 1.5 hours from her place, including changing buses at another middle of nowhere spot. 
 
Even so I still had 4 hours to kill before time for my flight, so I found the spa and invested in a foot massage, and then wandered a bit more and found the "book exchange room", where I did my yoga, curled up on the lounge and read for a while, and took a nap before reporting to my gate.  The flight home was uneventful, and the drive from Kemi to Luleå went smoothly.

I got home just on time to head straight to the lab and check in with the technician who was doing some routine maintenance on the machine, and pick up Evelina and Ellinor and head to Nyckelharpa night, which was delightful, as always. I truly love the Swedish folk music. It is such good sewing time for me. This time I didn't bring my dulcimer, since there hadn't really been time to pack it, and that was probably a good thing, since there were a dozen of us there, and adding another large instrument would have been a bit much.
 

kareina: (Default)
I spent 1 hour and 40 minutes this afternoon in a skype call with my potential supervisor for my second PhD project. She really wants me to apply, and tells me that I am the best candidate for the position. We finally decided that I will be studying Viking Age Soapstone Vessels for my project, and I have till Friday to complete the project proposal and turn in my application. We also agreed that, assuming all goes well with this project then we can apply for funding for the other projects, in turn. We are both thinking in terms of long term collaboration, with me based in Luleå. Needless to say, I am pretty excited about all this.

Just after she and I said goodbye my apprentice arrived, and we bounced together about this, and then she tuned the moraharpa and I tuned the dulcimer, and then we packed up both instruments, loaded them into the car, and went and picked up my other Masters student and my acroyoga partner and went to Nyckleharpa night (David couldn't make it this time, he had a work meeting that went till 19:00, and was followed by a company provided restaurant meal and yet more work related conversation). I played along on the few tunes I know, looked at the sheet music I have painted, but haven't yet tried playing for a couple of others, and the rest of the time worked on the hood in progress for the Norrskensbågskytt (Northern light's archer)--now most of the northern-lights patterned tablet weaving has been sewn to the hood. After music Siv showed me her progress on her viking costume for Norrskensfesten, it will be beautiful, and Birger showed me the tablet weaving he has been doing, which is also beautiful. I am so delighted that they are joining us for the full event this year. They are such delightful people.
kareina: (Default)
Working backwards of wonderful things from today:

Nyckleharpa night! Always a highlight--who wouldn't want an evening making progress on a sewing project while listening to Swedish folk music played by a room full of talented musicians?

Dinner! I lined a pie plate with bread dough, filled it with a mix of canned artichoke, black beans, tomato, and spices, then covered with more bread dough, brushed it with butter, and baked it. Yum!

Acroyoga! While the pie was baking Ellinor and I went outside and spent a delightful half an hour discovering that while we haven't had a chance to practice together pretty much all summer, the strength training she has been doing means that pretty much everything we tried we could do. So much fun to balance, upside down, my shoulders on the bottoms of her upraised feet, and then have her spin me around like a ball on a seal's nose. And then we practiced handstands going into forward rolls, and several times I managed to pause and hold the handstand for a number of seconds before rolling out of it.

Riding home! After a number of rainy and cloudy days in a row, it was really refreshing to leave work this afternoon to a clear blue sky paired with cool, comfortable temperatures, and it made for a really pretty tike ride home.

Good news from work! One of my colleagues, who is just back from a major geology conference in Canada tells me that she met people from the states who have developed a good sulphide standard that they are willing to sell, which will make analyzing sulphides ever so much easier.

Fun in the lab! The guy who fixed my laser last week, while I was on vacation, also made some adjustments to the system which makes it possible to get much lower power from the laser than hitherto, so today I had fun shooting at sulphides with really low powers (less than 1 J/cm^2). Tomorrow I will look at the craters in backscatter electron images on the SEM and see if we have solved the problem with too much melting under the laser beam.

Dried berries! When I woke up this morning most of the black currants in the food dehydrator were ready (and the last of them were done when I got home from work), so the container is now half full, and it should be pretty easy to get enough more dried before the berries quit being ripe so that they will last me till next summer.
kareina: (stitched)
Yesterday was the first nyckleharpa night of the autumn, and, as always, it was ever so much fun. Seven people playing nyckleharpa, while I worked on my sewing project. I so love living in Sweden!

Today was my first day back in the office after my week of at-home vacation, and I can't claim to have accomplished much, other than battling my way through the pile of email that had accumulated. Then I went home and took a nearly 2 hour nap. But this evening was the first choir meeting of the autumn, and it was much fun. Even though we hadn't done much advertizment, we still had ten or so people, and it felt good to sing again. One of the new girls sings really well. At one point we were doing a round, and our conductor put that new girl and one of the boys into a group of their own, and the other two groups had 4 of us each, and I had to struggle to sing with my own group instead of following the group of two, since they were so loud and clear behind me.
kareina: (me)
I have been trying to convince my apprentice, E. and my acroyoga partner (also an) E. that they want to come with us to Nyckleharpa night for many weeks now. Or rather, I managed to convince them weeks ago that they wanted to, but since it only happens every other week, and they have both managed to be sick or have conflicts, tonight is the first time it actually happened. They are both musicians with a city orchestra, one on the clarinet, the other cello, and both did well with picking up nyckelharpa (the cello player), and our huge base moraharpa (the clarinet player) and playing along. Since we took the new car we also had room for my dulcimer in the car, which is the first time in ages that I brought that along. It was fun to join them for the few songs I knew, though, with five nyckelharpas and a moraharpa playing I couldn't really hear my own instrument.

In between playing along I made some good progress finally turning the scrap wool from the veil I made quite a while ago into a small coif for me. It is nice to pick back up a long unfinished UFO. Granted, the only reason I did on this occasion is that the time before heading out that I would have spent getting my gambeson in progress to a state that was portable (I finished quilting the back at the weekend's gaming con demo, and haven't had a chance to cut out the next pieces yet) was instead finishing up E's letter of reference for her application to head to Japan this summer for a student research experience. I hope that she gets it. However, I also hope that she stays here this summer, since she plans to be my (unpaid) lab assistant if she doesn't, so that she can learn to use the LA-ICP-MS in prep for doing a Master's degree with it next autumn. In other words, it looks like my apprentice in the SCA will become my student in real life, too. Not so surprising, since we first met on a geology field trip to Cyprus in 2012, when she was one of the students, and I was one of the teachers. She has been referring to me as "her professor" ever since.

Today was fun at work--I got to spend the day helping the PhD student in the next office (who is 99% done with her degree--she has defended and everything, but still has a few weeks left to do stuff till her funding runs out) set up a laser experiment. It took 6.5 hours to set it up, let it run (1 hour), do a preliminary glance at the data and agree to actually do stuff with it in the morning, and chat briefly with my boss.

Since I need to meet her at 08:30 I really should have been in bed a while ago, but there is still yoga to do, so perhaps I had better put down the computer and get to it.
kareina: (stitched)
Last night I managed seven hours of sleep, which was more than I might have gotten, but I had forgotten when I lay down that I had switched the dawn light from 05:30 to 06:20 the night before when I had stayed up rather later. So when I finally woke up at 06:15 and looked at the clock I decided that it would be wise to do only part of the morning phone app workout, so I could make it to work on time to meet my friend at the gym at 08:30 as planned.

Then, as I started my morning situps before getting out of bed, I turned wireless on my phone to read LJ, and saw a FB message from her, sent after midnight, saying that she wasn't sleeping due to a headache, and so didn't think she would make it to the gym. My first thought was "ok, I don't have to go". Then I thought again and decided that, no, of course I was going.

Then I got up, got dressed for the phone app workout (bra out the outside of yesterday's shirt, so that should I sweat, it isn't on the bra, and I can still wear it the rest of the day), went to the living room, opened the app, and discovered that it thinks today is a rest day. For all four categories of exercises. This was a bit of a surprise, since for weeks now it has been a rest day for three of the four at once, and the fourth gets a different rest day. However, having gotten dressed to work out, I deiced to do a little anyway, and spent 10 minutes moving. Then I got dressed for work, posted to the Phire FB group that even though the one friend couldn't make it, I would still be going to the gym if anyone wanted to join me, had breakfast, and spent 15 minutes shoveling snow till [livejournal.com profile] lord_kjar was ready for work, and then I rode in with him.

As an aside--the downside of yesterday's long day at work and then having fun with friends on campus is that meant that no one was home yesterday to do the shoveling when we got the first decent snowfall of the winter. Not that it was much snow this time, either, but at least it was deep enough that one wouldn't want to wear low shoes in it. To make matters worse, after weeks of lovely temperatures (read: -10 to -30 C, or "cold enough not to melt and get slippery), today it warmed up to 0 C, so after sitting in the warmth the snow was getting a bit heavier than it was when it fell. Needless to say, I didn't get much of the driveway done in the 15 minutes I had before work.

Arriving at work I took my computer to the lab, turned on the plasma on the ICP-MS, and then went to the gym, where I was met by another Phire person I had only seen one time before. We had a nice workout and enjoyed chatting while we did. I did only a short 30 minute session, as I wanted to be certain I was ready when my lab technician arrived at 10:30 or 11:00.

I was, and spent a couple of hours with him, as he looked at the laser and checked a few things, explaining as he went. I now understand why it was that when I asked for the laser to deliver a fluence of 7 J/cm2 it was only giving about 3.5 J/cm2, but if I asked for 50% output I could get 7 J/cm2. It turns out that when the laser was installed the technician opened up the sample chamber, turned off the safety feature that keeps the laser from firing when the door is open, set in a sensor, fired the laser on it, and took notes as to how many J/cm2 it delivers at each % of output. Then the computer looks at my request, compares it with that table, and sets the output level at that given by the table to yield the result I want.

Expect that sometime between installation and when I first noticed the problem something has gone wrong, so that it simply isn't giving as much energy as it did when that table was created, so now when I ask for 7 J/cm2 it uses the 40% output that it thinks ought to be good enough, but really, we need 60% these days.

Eventually the technician had enough information that he was ready to actually open up the machine and get to work, but first he needed lunch. He didn't really want me present for the opening thing up and changing stuff with the optics, saying that I wouldn't be able to help, and he didn't really want someone else in the room when the laser was unshielded. So, it being plenty late enough to do so, I went home for the day, enjoying a nice walk through a forest of snow-covered trees.

That gave me time for a short nap (~20 min), some food (baked a yummy cornbread) and a good book, running a load of laundry, and a bit more snow shoveling, before it was time to head to uni for the Frostheim social/crafts night.

I brought my dulcimer, which seriously needed tuning after the temperature changes this week, and made some progress on my tunic in progress. This week there were four of us for most of the evening, but a friend who can't eat gluten dropped by on his way to his martial arts session to try the cornbread, since I had told him I was bringing it).

We had my senior apprentice working on her wool dress, the friend from Phire who didn't make it to this morning's workout, working on her wool dress, me working on my wool tunic, and a really cute new guy, working on some chain mail project he started working on three years ago (he is so in the right place!) It was a lovely time, and I was quite surprised when the apprentice's husband returned to pick her up, as I didn't think it was that late.

As we were packing up to go I looked at my phone, and saw that my service technician had sent me a text message at 19:30 saying he was finally done for the day, having found the root cause and started the repair, and suggesting that I meet him tomorrow at 10:00. I am glad I didn't stick around till he was done!

From there I went over to the local grocery store to pick up my package, since I had received a text message earlier in the day saying it was in. But we also needed a few things from the store, so I filled a basket first. Then, when I had found everything I wanted, I looked at the line to deal with the one human on duty, and went over to the self-scanning station, and checked myself out. Then I hopped in the car and went home, and it wasn't till I pulled into the driveway that I realized that I hadn't picked up the package. Oops! I have now added it to the calendar for tomorrow, so hopefully I will remember.

However, the self-annoyance at forgetting the package was completely overshadowed by the joy at discovering that [livejournal.com profile] lord_kjar, who had stayed home from Frostheim to finish up a few things for work, had finished up the shoveling while I was gone.

Now I should do yoga, before [livejournal.com profile] lord_kjar puts down that nyckleharpa he just started playing...
kareina: (stitched)
This evening, shortly after [livejournal.com profile] lord_kjar got home from work, as we sat in the living room chatting to one another we heard a sudden loud, sharp, cracking sort of noise from the corner of the room where the nyckleharpa hangs on the wall. So we went over to investigate and discovered that the piece of wood through which the strings attach at the base of the instrument has very abruptly cracked. This is an instrument we bought from the man who made it, who had commented when he sold it that he wasn't certain if the wood he had used there was thick enough to be up to the tension of strings in tune, so if it ever breaks give it back and he will fix it. It had, in fact, split once before, in a position which was fairly easy to fix (after going through the bother unstringing all 16 or so strings (most of which are resonance strings--only a few are actually in contact with the bow when playing). The last time [livejournal.com profile] lord_kjar fixed it himself, since it happened in a time when we didn't have too much else on (by comparison), and he could spare the time.

However, this weekend is the largest folk music weekend of the year for northern Sweden: Spelmanstamman (musician's gathering). On Saturday we will be performing with our dance group, he will be playing Nyckleharpa with the Nyckleharpa group, and he will be joining all the musicians on stage for the "Allspel" (everyone plays). In addition he is running sound for one set of performers in one of the barns on site, and had planned to spend this evening testing the various speakers he has borrowed to be certain that they work well with the sound equipment he owns. Tomorrow night is a concert followed by a dance (and our shift working the hamburger stand for an hour, starting at 23:00), and he does still have to work Friday during the day. So there literally is no time to fix it before the event.

Therefore we called the instrument maker, who said to bring it back, he would loan us another to use this weekend and would fix this one later this summer. He also had an additional speaker we could borrow for the weekend, so the 30 min one-way drive was worth doing. Now he is happily downstairs testing sound equipment, and then he will adjusting the tuning on the new nyckleharpa and practice playing with it a bit. This one isn't quite exactly the same as the other, and he is used to playing without looking at the keys, so he will need to work at it a bit to get it comfortable enough for performances on Saturday.

Not the best timing for the instrument to break, but Way better that it did it today, when we had time to go get a replacement instrument, rather than on Saturday before the performance!
kareina: (Default)
I haven't really done much in the way of uni work in the past week, since we have been in the process of moving house (nor had I expected to). Therefore I resolved to head into the office today to see if I could remedy that situation, and used the self-bribe of "it will be good exercise to walk in" as motivation to actually do it. Now, when I woke up and saw the rain (which has long since washed away the beautiful snow we had had) I almost changed my mind and stayed home to do more unpacking, but somehow the lure of exercise outweighed the rain, and off I went.

I left at the same time as [livejournal.com profile] lord_kjar did, and we walked together for the 8 minutes it takes to get from our house to the main road. At that point he walked up to the bus stop with the obvious red shelter to keep passengers dry whilst they wait for a bus and I took the side road (which has pretty much no traffic!) to the bike path to the uni. The plan had been for him to take the bus and for whomever got to their work first to call the other, so we could see how the times compared. However, it turns out that the big, obvious, easy to see, bus stop is NOT the one the bus actually goes to. Instead the bus turns onto the same side road I took just before reaching the bus stop. He saw it do this, so he walked home, got the car, and drove to work instead (the bus runs once an hour, so he knew it wasn't worth just waiting for the next one).

My walk took 50 minutes, and other than being rather wetter than ideal was actually fairly pleasant. Consulting the map I think it would have been slightly faster if I had taken the branch of the bike path that goes over the first bridge over the road the uni is on, rather than waiting for the second bridge, but further experimentation is in order.

Once I had settled into work and done a bit of reading to get my mind into the correct mind-set I decided that it was high time I returned to using that 3D modeling program which is meant to be the corner stone of my work. So I opened the program and opened the project and got an error message that the program couldn't find one of the files it needs. I checked, and sure enough, the file was not in the folder where it belongs. I checked several other possible locations, to no avail. Then I checked the recycle bin, and found it, with a date of deletion listed as 18 October.

This struck me as odd, since there would be no reason for me to have deleted the file, so I checked my log of tasks done and saw that on 18 October I was in Boliden collecting rock samples. All I did with the computer when I was down there was record notes about the samples and file samples into folders. I didn't have any energy left over to do modeling, and certainly didn't go near those folders on the computer. Therefore I am quite certain that I am not the one who deleted those files (it turns out that several of them from that folder got deleted on that day).

I restored the files and mentioned the incident to a colleague across the hall. A third colleague heard me, and told me that she had had a number of vital thesis files deleted while she was in the final stages of thesis writing, and that the problem turned out to be the uni-provided sync program which makes certain that the files on our C drives match the backed up versions on the uni H drive under our log in names. Apparently when that program loses contact with the server it can decide to delete files, since it can't copy them. She solved the problem by uninstalling that program and taking the responsibility to do her own backups.

I, on the other hand, am a lazy creature. I want my computer to back itself up, so I don't have to. I know that "data which exists in only one location does not exist", but I don't want to have to be the one to do the backing up. Therefore I sent a note to the Uni IT guys to explain my problem and then started actually doing some work with my data. An hour or so later one of the IT guys came to my office to say that he checked and my computer is from the batch that has a problem with that program, and that the solution they have found for the problem is to do a complete re-installation of the computer and then do certain upgrades to the program.

Now, I don't like having my computer re-installed any more than the next guy--it takes days to get all the programs I need back in place and to change all the preferences to what I want them to be. However, I don't want the program deleting any more vital files, and I also liked the excuse to go home early and not come in at all in the morning (he doesn't think he will finish doing the complete back up and re-installation before mid day tomorrow) so that I could do more unpacking at home. Therefore I agreed to the plan, took careful notes about the incident and what work I had started and what the next step was, and took a walk home. A much nicer walk, with clear skys and no rain at all. In the process I confirmed that there is, in fact, a small, easy to miss, sign on a stick, with no shelter for passengers, that says that the bus stops just a short way down the side street. Perhaps tomorrow he will try the bus again, or maybe he will just take his bike--it might be faster.

Tonight is Nyckleharpa class, and I haven't practiced anywhere near as much this fortnight than I did last fortnight. Even so I am getting more comfortable playing the tunes I have learned--they start to flow together like music, rather than being disconnected phrases with pauses in between while I try to remember what keys to push next.
kareina: (Default)
I recently posted about one of the new tunes I am learning. However, it turns out to be more complicated than that. [livejournal.com profile] lord_kjar looked at the tune and said that it isn't quite how they play it locally, and suggested another web page we could look at for sheet music for it. It turns out that the two versions of sheet music are different. So just now I did the same tracing exercise on the new version as I did the first version I found, and then moved the chunks of music to line up with one another so as to compare how they differed. While I was doing that he sat down with the nyckleharpa and played the tune the way he knows it, and jotted down the letters he plays.

Once I had the two versions written side by side we compared his version, and circled the places he agrees with them. It turns out that his version matches the newer version for the first three bars, then the older version for two bars, and then he alternates which version he agrees with for the rest of that half of the tune. Both versions are nearly the same for the other half of the tune (what he and one of the two versions calls part two, but what the other one plays first), but where they do disagree with one another he again takes turns as to which one he agrees with.

Then we compared the hasty notes I had taken at class last week, and they also bounce back and forth as to which one they agree with, but in places I agree with neither, and in other places I am missing whole phrases (but then, I always knew my notes were probably wrong).

So, what version should I learn???

Edit to add:

I decided on a composite--this version mostly agrees with what [livejournal.com profile] lord_kjar plays, but for one bar my memory of what I was taught last Monday is the same as the other set of sheet music, so I am going to stick with that version, for now.
Expandour composite version of Lanna Villes Scottis )
kareina: (Default)
Monday evening was our second lesson on playing the nyckelharpa. The other students are all experienced musicians. I am not. This means that I showed the greatest improvement from the previous lesson of two weeks before. However, this does not mean that I could keep up with them. Even with the two tunes we had learned the first week the best I could manage was to sort of hit some of the keys at the correct time, but not the entire tune at once at the speed they were playing them. Therefore soon after we started working on a third tune, which the others started learning the previous session, the second teacher took me upstairs, where she taught me the third tune one-on-one.

It is amazing how much more I enjoy the one on one learning than the group session--I really can't keep up with them--all they are learning is how to apply a skill they are already good at (playing music) to a new instrument. I am trying to learn how to play music in the first place.

The new tune is a lovely one, but more complicated than the two from the first class. As a result I couldn't really hold all of the bits in my head after we went home. I had written down the letters of the notes, but I am not really certain that I got them written correctly.

Last night when I went to practice I could do both of the first two songs I learned, but I was just too tired to actually manage to work out the third. Tonight I gave it a try a bit earlier, and was getting something closer to right on that third tune, but couldn't quite remember it all, and was getting less and less convinced that I had written it down correctly. Therefore I consulted my good friend, Google.

The first thing I found was a person playing the tune on the nyckleharpa. This is useful, because I can watch the fingers and be reasonably certain that yes, he pushes the same keys as my teacher does for this tune, but I am just not yet fast enough to follow what someone else is doing (which is frustrating, since I can learn dances that fast--why is playing music so much harder than dancing?)

Therefore I went looking further, and managed to find a web page that has sheet music (plus a midi file, which sounds right to my ear). However, I can't actually read sheet music, yet, though I know which lines go with which letters. Therefore I took a copy of the sheet music into CorelDraw and wrote the letters over each dot, then printed only that layer to get a lovely decorative series of letters rising and falling in time to the music. ExpandThis I can play to! )
kareina: (Default)
Back when I had plenty of time to spend at the computer for non-work as well as work stuff I posted here nearly daily. The upside to that was that it gives me a pretty good record of what I was up to then, but the down side is that I wasn't doing much outside of working on my PhD and going for walks. These days there is so much I would like to record about what I am doing, but the only way I can manage it is to take time that I should be doing something else (like, now, for instance).

I have managed a couple of f-locked posts in recent weeks, but they have focused on very narrow topics and haven't included updates on everything else in my life. So, what all is "everything else"?

Expandmusic )

Expandprojects )

Expanduni work )

Expandtravel/family )

Expandhealth/fitness )

There are many more categories of things happening in my life, but it is time to put down LJ and get to them.

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kareina: (Default)
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