kareina

Some of my friends are being extra careful with social distancing and not getting out of the house much, if at all. Especially for those of you in that situation, I share a link to the view from other people's windows, and, if your view is nice or interesting, encourage you to add yours. I just emailed them mine.

I paged through the sequence twice and determined that, at least today, they are coming up in sequence, and not randomly, because two noteworthy ones were back to back both times. So far they have about 111 windows to choose from, but if more people add them...

Some of the ones I found pretty are:
* Arnulf's window in Bavaria, Germany
* Nicolas's window in Parkstein, Germany
* Harmut's window in Stnkt Augustin, Germany
* Christine's window in Bavaria, Germany


But my very favourite of the ones that are already there is:
* Lina's window in Asechireid, Switzerland

I had this week off from LTU because I had planned to head to Double Wars, but it was cancelled. However, I thought I could use the time productively, and get some rest, too, so I kept them as vacation days.

Monday: Acroyoga in the early morning before work, then worked in the archive in the morning, spent an hour in the afternoon helping David with manoeuvring a large rock into place on the terrace edge, an hour in the evening moving the last of the rocks into place for the new frame for the strawberry patch, followed by an hour and a half of sewing whilst doing video call for company, and then 25 minutes yoga with the DownDog app

Tuesday: Went to Storforsen for work (so didn't do acroyoga before work, but did bike to town to meet the others). 15 of us from various departments at the museum went out to inventory the stuff in the various cabins at the Museum of Logging there. (Of course I volunteered when I heard that I could get paid for a trip to one of m favourite places in this area.) In the evening I did a couple of hours sewing and video call.

Wednesday: Acroyoga in the early morning before, then worked in the archive in the morning, spent an hour digging dirt from the pile left over after the landscaping project a couple of summers ago, sifting out the rocks, and spreading the dirt on the bottom layer inside the stone frame.

Thursday: was a holiday, but I still went in for acroyoga in the morning (though we bumped it from 07:00 to 08:00, because holiday), then I relaxed with my computer and food for a couple of hours, and went out to work in the garden at 13:30. First I moved the dirt from the small raised beds near the house to the strawberry patch, then put the five new bags on top, then I extracted the strawberries from the clumps of grass, dirt, and berry plants that I had dug out of the patch on the 8th, 9th, and 10th of this month. Since the clumps had been sitting for almost two weeks the dirt had dried enough to make it fairly easy to separate the berry plants from the grass and everything else and put them back into the strawberry patch on their own. This whole process felt like it took perhaps two or three hours. You can imagine my surprise when I looked at the clock when I finished the task, and it was 21:30, fully eight hours after I started! No, it wasn't dark, yet. That is one thing I love about living in the north--spring planing doesn't happen until after the sun starts staying up late.

Friday (today): Not an official holiday, but I work only four days a week at the archive, and never on a Friday, so it might as well have been a holiday. I started with acroyoga, of course. I had thought to go directly from there to buy some more dirt to re-fill the other planters by the house, but we finished at 09:00, and that store doesn't open till 10:00. So I went home, got some food, and sat to the computer, and didn't manage to move again for a while. Eventually dragged myself out the door around 13:45. By the time I was driving home from buying the dirt I was sleepy, so I lay down on the couch for a bit, and didn't wake for 2.5 hours (I guess that working eight hours in the garden the day before did take some energy, even if it didn't seem so at the time). Then I finally got around to making a new batch of smoothie, having eaten the last of the previous batch early in the week.

This time I used:

- carrot
- spinach
- cucumber
- avocado
- apple
- cantaloupe
- raspberry
- blueberry
- mango
- black currant
- strawberry

Ran them through the food processor (a little at a time), then stirred them together and ran it through the food processor again. This was enough to fill 38 silicon muffin cups and put them in the freezer (the berries and mango were frozen before I started, everything else was fresh, which gave it a good smoothie texture before freezing), which means that this batch should last more than a month, even if there are some days that I eat more than one of them.

Then I did 1 hr and 40 minutes of sewing in a couple of zoom calls.

Tomorrow is Saturday, which hopefully means more gardening or other home improvements plus sewing time.

Different countries are approaching the pandemic differently, and Sweden is at only medium level restrictions compared to many other countries--it is forbidden to have gatherings of more than 50 people, and encouraged to work from home where possible, but small gatherings are still ok, and many are still going in to work. In the past week I have seen only one person wearing a mask.

Since I am working half-time at the Norrbotten Museum Archives, and they don't really want people to take home the archive documents to sort them so that the data entry on what is in there can happen, I am still going in four days a week (because if one works half-time four 5-hour days is nicer than five 4-hour days). Some days I take my tricycle in (which was why I saw one person wearing a mask--they were walking on the bike path), because exercise (never mind that there are places where it is still icy or slushy making those bits difficult going). Other days I drive because more sleep, or an errand to do directly after.

In the afternoons I am doing LTU work--the Uni encourages everyone who can work from home to do so, but it is still permitted to come in for lab work or other things one can't do from home. In the evenings I am mostly tired so I read a bit, do yoga, and then go to sleep, and wake up again at 05:30 or 6:00 so that I have time to do a few things before heading to work. Some days I do a video call or zoom meeting, which means sewing progress.

This weekend in a holiday in Sweden, and it started already Thursday afternoon. Therefore I made no attempt at any LTU work, and instead used that energy to finally clean off the extra table in the office, which had become a catch-all of sewing projects in progress, debris from completed sewing projects, chunks of fabric I ran out of energy to record in my Trello inventory when last I was updating that. Yarn balls that were also awaiting time to get added to the Trello inventory, and random event site tokens. It was nice to have energy to deal with that, at a time where there was also enough daylight left to get photos of the fabric and yarn for the Trello cards.

Then, in the evening we attended a Virtual Medieval Week event in Visby. Caroline had noticed a couple of days ago that it was going to be on, and contacted me to be certain it would be ok to come watch it on the big screen, and could she invite Sara-Olivia and Ellinor too? So we gathered here, in our medieval costumes, didn't hug one another (Don't like social distancing, even if I understand it), and all worked on projects. Three of us were sewing, and two knitting, and on the big screen behind us we, and a couple of hundred other people all watched the Virtual Medieval Week. It started with a short film advertising Medieval Week, with lots of footage from past years. Much to our delight, one of the first bits of film is a close up of our friend Cajsa doing a fire performance.

Then Björn, who is an SCA guy who is originally from Luleå, and is one of the main organisers of Visby's Medieval Week, and another lady I recognise, but whose name I forget, acted as our hosts for the evening. They had three different Visby locations set up, and the Zoom meeting jumped from one to the other, with each speaking in turn, and then introducing the next act. There were sessions with musicians performing, one with some jousters (practising social distancing of one-lance length away since the original middle ages), fire performance, and more. For the performers they put on screen a Swish number to which the audience could send money, and in between performers they gave people the opportunity to use Swish to buy a virtual beer or other beverage at the pub, Kapitelhusgården, or contribute directly to Medeltidsveckan. I have no idea how the fund-raising portion of the evening went. I didn't contribute, since I know that my job is ending, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone did.

Björn assured us that Medeltidsveckan would happen this year, in some form, no matter what. They hope that the 144 days between now and then are enough to permit it to run as normal, but if necessary they would do what it takes to make it possible virtually. So those of you who live far away, and have never had the opportunity to attend, if things don't go well, and we still can't have large gatherings in August, perhaps you can at least check it out from a distance.

(Funny aside: In the Zoom meeting some people were using the chat window, and one guy said "Hello from Kansas!", to which someone else very promptly replied "You are not in Kansas anymore!")