kareina

...About how life is the process of telling oneself that "after this week things will slow down again", and then repeating it weekly thereafter.

When last I posted I had been home from 12th Night for a week, and only just managed to finish blogging about the event, and should thus have more time...

Have I mentioned that I have enrolled in the Lövånger folkhögskola?  The literal translation for "folkhögskola" is "public high school", but this is not a good translation.  This is a public educational system for adults that is aimed at people who either didn't go to Gymnasium (the Swedish upper secondary school aimed at people who are either going to go on to University, or who are going into a trade, either way it is a focused education on the specific path the student has chosen (e.g. their planned university major, or their prefered trade), or who did, but now want to study something else, perhaps for fun, perhaps as a step to a different career path.  This is the first year they have had a folkhögskola. It is being provided by the Edelviks folkhögskola, 43 km inland from here, and I am delighted that the school popped into existence at the exact time that I had been thinking "when I get my thesis submitted, I should find a Swedish course of the sort that Swedes take in highschool, I think I have gotten good enough at the language that I could manage it".


The program they are offering is the "Almän kurs", which offers the base classes that are offered in gymnasium, but not the speciality-specific ones that one would have had if one actually enrolled in in a gymnasium program.  The package they offered is: Svenska, Engelska, Samhällskunskap, Religionskunskap, Historia (Swedish, English, Community knowledge (or social studies), religion knowledge, and History).  On the first day of class (Monday 15 January, the morning after we returned from 12th Night), the school director came in and had a one-on-one conversation with each student to devise our personal study plan.  When I first applied for the course I wrote that I wanted the Swedish course, but didn't even think of the other options.  After talking to the director I agreed to attend also the social studies and history classes, in a large part because they would require me to actually use my Swedish. This turns out to have been a Very good idea, and I am absolutely loving being a student again!


The program is "half time", which means we meet two days a week. On Mondays there is an hour of Swedish class starting at 10:30, followed by a 20 minute break, after which there is an hour of English class (I sit in the other room and do my Swedish, work on my own, which means that I am available if anyone wants help with their English, as I am the only native speaker of English in the group). Then we get an hour for lunch (I normally stay and keep studying in between eating what I brought with me, or talk with my classmates), then we have an hour of Swedish Literature, and are done for the day.

The morning Swedish class is writing exercises, with a little group discussion, and the after lunch Swedish class is reading aloud as a group and discussing what we are reading.  None of us in this group are native Swedish speakers.  We have one German woman who was sent to Sweden for safety during WWII, arriving when she was 5 years old, and then sent to live with a family in Vebomark,  a village 17 km from here. She lived there for nine years before moving back to Germany to join her surviving parent, their new spouse, and her siblings (including getting a number of younger half siblings over time). Later in life she wound up moving to Denmark for some years, and sometime in the last year or three she got the opportunity to purchase the house in which she lived as a child, and has moved back "home", and is loving it. Despite having learned Swedish as a child, she has a noticeable accent that is both influenced by German and Danish, but isn't so strong as to interfere with understanding her.  She and I are the two strongest Swedish speakers in the group, with different strengths and weaknesses based on the differences in our backgrounds.

Two of the other students, a couple in their 30's (V and M), wince everytime someone asks where they are from, then he explains that "well, we are from Russia, but we are Ukraine", which explains the wincing. They moved to Sweden as refugees, and while they can speak Swedish, their English is still better than their Swedish, so they are really needing to work to understand, and I often serve as an interpreter, especially for Wednesday's class--our Monday teacher is super fluent in English, too, and is the English teacher as well as the Swedish teacher). There are several girls from places in Africa (at least one is from Somalia), but they are all so soft spoken I haven't really caught so much about their background, even though they have participated in the presentation round. They are all in their 20s, I would guess, though it is tough to be certain, as they all wear the hijab.  

The Wednesday class starts at 08:30 with a one hour, 20 minute social studies session, followed by a break, followed by a second session of social studies, followed by lunch (I stay and do reading or homework), followed by a one hour, 20 minute history session. Guys, I love the Wednesday class so much! This is a larger group, as we have even a few Swedish--two women who are a little older than I am, and have lived in this area all their lives, and one who is in their mid 20's I guess, who let us know the first day that they are autistic.  They are all in the social studies class, which is primarily class discussion supplemented with reading, and some written exercises, and I am loving it. I often need to repeat things for V in English (our Wednesday teacher understands English, but prefers to delegate speaking it to me), and V does his participation in the discussions in English (which, if he starts speaking fast, we need to then translate back to Swedish for our German classmate, but when he remembers to speak slowly she is able to keep up).

The history class is one I am enjoying even more. For that one it is only V and I, but they are running it anyway (apparently there had been three of us who signed up for it, but, so far, the third one hasn't attended, so I  don't know if they will. They aren't running the religious studies course, as only two people had expressed interest in that one, and they didn't think that was enough to pay a teacher, so I am glad they are running history for only us two), so I do a lot more English interpretation, repeating for him what the teacher and I say in Swedish.  We started with pre-history and when humans and other tool-using primates split off from the ape-line primates, then jumped to when the ice melted back from Sweden and the early hunter-gatherer settlement of this area, with people coming in along the coastline from both the north and the south.  

This week it was the Viking Age, which meant no new information for me, who has absorbed a fair bit of general knowledge on the period through both the SCA and my archaeology degree, yet I really love sitting there, working on my sewing, discussing what happened when, and the likely reasons that Scandinavians went a viking in the first place.  Both Mondays and Wednesdays I go home from school in a seriously good mood.

The other three days of the week I have used for doing my obligatory job applications (I really hope that I don't have to start a job till after the term ends, I am loving school so much) and unemployment paperwork (which hasn't yet been processed to the point of receiving benefits--though sometime this week my status for my case changed from "new" to "under processing", so hopefully I will find out soon how much/if I will be getting payments), housework, and projects.  However, now that I have had more than a month to recover from the push to finish my thesis I am also starting to feel like I really ought to take that paper draft that has been sitting mostly done for ages and par it down to the correct word count to submit it to the journal.  So perhaps that will even happen in the next week or so. It would be nice to have it submitted by the time my Viva (thesis defense) happens (which hasn't been scheduled yet).

The other thing that has happened is that we got a housemate for the month. B, an SCA guy from Pennsylvania, has wanted to move to Europe, and ideally Sweden for a while. So some months back he posted to the Drachenwald FB group saying that he does, and asking questions about where are good places to move, and why, etc. He has visited Sweden (and many other places in Europe over the years) before, and has gotten to the point in his moving daydreams that he thought it would be worth testing it. Since we have a guest room, and he likes snow and winter, we decided he would rent our room for a month, and see how it feels to actually live here, as opposed to visiting. Since his job includes a work from home option he came on over. If he works from around 15:00 to 23:00 while here he is on duty at the same time as his colleagues and available for meetings as needed.  This appears to be working for him, as it means that he can get up in the morning and go for a walk while the sun is up, and then settle in to work afterwards.

He flew in on Sunday 28 January (last weekend) and we drove down to Umeå to pick him up, and went straight from the airport to their fighter practice (in fact, I dropped Keldor off at practice on the way to the airport, which is a 9 minute drive from fighter practice site, so he had a chance to start armouring up while I did the pickup). We had planned on my fighting too, but when I woke up on Sunday morning there was something weird going on with my hip. I did my yoga that day directly after getting up, and my hip felt like something was out of adjustment, and it was hard to pull my left leg forward to get from Downward Facing Dog to Low Lunge. This was weird, and annoying.  Sadly, as the day progressed the hip kept getting worse and worse, so we didn't even bring my armour, as it didn't sound fun to try to fight when I don't have proper range of motion with one leg.  Even more sadly, we had planned on going straight from fighter practice to an acroyoga session that was just starting up for the term that day, that a friend of Keldor's had pointed out for us, as he thought we would enjoy it.  We would have, but by the time that session started my hip was really acting up, so it wasn't possible to rotate my left leg outwards at all, and attempting to move it forward (as in walking) wasn't going properly, and sometimes even hurt.  So we didn't go to acroyoga, and I was sad about missing it (but it would have been stupid to try given the way the leg/hip was doing).  Instead we swung by the pet food store, bought some new fish for Keldor's aquarium and some cat food, and then went to the big grocery store and got some stuff (me walking way slower than normal, in my quest to find ways to walk without causing any discomfort, and with a component of forward motion).000

That evening, after we got home, I spent some time laying on the floor, trying to find a way to self-adjust or stretch out whatever was wrong, and in the process something happened, and suddenly I couldn't really move my leg at all, but just lay there on my back on the carpet, legs bent, and called for Keldor to come help. He managed to help me get turned over to try to stand, and I quickly gave up, so he carried me to bed, undressed me, rubbed my hip with both voltaren (a topical pain reliever for muscles) and some liniment (which warms the muscles), and I took an alvadon (both pain relief and muscle relaxant--it is mostly the latter I needed it for--whatever was going on didn't hurt at all, if I didn't try to move the leg, but some directions of movement did hurt) then he used the massage pistol on my legs and hips and things relaxed enough that I was able to walk to the loo on my own (and did so the normal several times during the night). Before I went to sleep that night I scheduled a physical therapist appointment, but the earliest option was Tuesday during the day.

Monday morning I was able to walk, but things were still a little weird with the hip, so I got B's help carrying our "spark" (kicksled) up from the basement, figuring that at least having the handles for support would be a good thing (one sees old people using kicksleds as winter walking aids all the time up here), and it might be that standing one leg on the runners and kicking with the other would be nicer on the leg/hip than walking. I don't know if that theory was correct, or if the underlying problem had solved itself, but either way it went ok to "kick" to school, and by Tuesday morning my leg was doing much better. I took the spark again to the health center, which made the hip feel a little uncomfortable, as the last bit of the trip was uphill, but when she did the exam there was no observable issue, and while a few movements and poking at it created "sensation", they didn't hurt the way they had on Sunday, and I had full range of motion back.

So she said that I should just keep doing my normal physical therapy for hips from my older hip problem (which does NOT present like Sunday's issue, but which might be related), and that it should continue to get better on its own, but if not, schedule a new visit in three weeks. She considered and rejected sending me for x-rays, saying that it probably isn't the kind of problem that will show up on x-rays, but if it doesn't clear up on its own that might be worth trying. On Wednesday my hip felt totally normally, and I even did handstands a number of times during breaks in class. I still took the spark, as we have had temperatures flipping back and forth just over and under freezing, so it is icy out, and thus the spark is safter. However they have spread gravel on the ice, which means that there are a number of areas where they sled doesn't glide, and I have to try to take some of its weight and push it carefully over the gravel. We need it to cool back down below freezing, stay there, and add a layer of snow to cover the gravel, which the predictions say might happen starting Monday, but in the mealtime it will still be warm (up to +4 C) and melty this weekend.

If my hip continues to be good we will head to Umeå on Sunday for both fighter practice and acroyoga, and I really hope this happens!

...but there are so many interesting things to do!

This week they installed the ICP-MS at work, even though they can't install the laser ablation system till next year (due to complications that include someone failing to order the gas containers from the US, and the connection points are not compatible with gas containers manufactured in Europe). They managed to get it on line and pretty much working on Monday, which meant that on Tuesday they started doing training for us. Since the guys doing the training have come up from Stockholm and are only here a few days that means that I get to work full time this week instead of my normal half time, so that I can get full benefit of their availability. (I have anticipated this need, and so have been careful to work a little less each day most of this month, so that I would have the extra hours available now so I could be here long days and not go over my total number of hours for the month.)

However, the fact that I am coming home much later than normal has not translated into doing less things with my time at home. On the contrary, I have added yet new projects into the mix. We have some little round wooden boxes we found at a second hand store some time back, and inspired by some beautiful painted ones that 12c_yseult did and posted photos of not too long back, I decided that I should paint these. I gave them a base and second coat in white early in the week, and then had to actually decide what to paint on them.

So I sat down to the computer and looked through the various files I have created in CorelDraw over the years, to see if any happened to be suitable for such a project. As luck would have it, I once did a vector drawing tracing of a Pictish pattern which I used to decorate a wax tablet I had made as a gift for my apprentice in Tasmania. That pattern was proportioned perfectly to go around the circumference of the box below the lid, so I decided to go for it, for at least one of the boxes.

However, I didn't want only the sides decorated, I wanted something nice for the top, too. So I took the pattern and tried to make it look good in a round. It took quite a while (almost four hours) of messing with it, but once I realized that, rather than having six repeats of the pattern around the circle, it would work better with eight suddenly it just worked, and I had a pattern I was happy with.

That was Tuesday evening, vanished into art projects, and by the time I finished yoga and went to bed it was pretty much midnight. Oops. This made me really tired on Wednesday for training. Tired enough that I forgot that I had an appointment scheduled with a physical therapist for Wednesday evening, until it was pretty much 16:00. That complicated things, since the appointment was scheduled for 17:00, and I was at the office, the appointment was in town, and our car was at home (where it is supposed to be).

I realized that I didn't really have time to do the 45 minute walk home to get the car and still do the drive into town to make the appointment on time. I also noticed that the PhD student in the next office was still in the building (everyone else on our corridor had already gone home for the day). So I explained to him my problem, and asked if he had a car nearby. He did--he lives in an apartment only a five minute walk away, so we walked over there, picked up his car key from the apt. and then he drove me home. That gave me enough time to plug in the car to warm up a little, use the toilet, grab a bite of food to go, and head to town, where I managed to find the location of the appointment fairly easily and was in just enough time to check in and pay the fee before the physical therapist was ready to see me.

The reason I had booked the appointment was because the last time I flew to Australia my hips really hurt by the time I got there, and they continued to bother me any time I sat for a long time or tried to sleep curled up (which had been my normal way to sleep before that trip).

I had had good success with my visit to the physical therapist training session in October, where I let them use me as a teaching example for the students, and they determined that the reason my back had been hurting when I slept was that I had been neglecting my muscles under my shoulder blades. After I started doing the exercises to strengthening those muscles I could sleep without back pain again. Therefore I decided to see if there was anything I could do to prevent having hip pains when I fly back to Australia in February, and booked an appointment directly with the teacher who had done October's lesson.

This turns out to have been a really good idea. He tells me that my problem is a mild case of FAI, where my hip joint is interfering with itself--instead of the leg bone rotating smoothly within my hip it starts to rotate, then shifts just enough that the leg bone bumps into the hip bone (which makes a clicking sound) before jumping past the bump and continuing to lift the leg. This is caused (at least in part) by my having neglected the small muscles in my bottom, which should be strong enough to keep the bones from bumping into one another, but aren't. In my case the issue is minor enough that I hadn't noticed it--when I try to lift my leg it moves, and I didn't realize that I was using only the big muscles and not the little ones which are supposed to be participating in the job.

As an aside, I suspect that this problem first started the year I first moved to Tassie--I remember having a problem with the muscles in my but hurting to the point that even doing a forward bend was a problem--when I did one during yoga (that was before I had started doing yoga daily, but I was doing it fairly often and wanting to do it more) it felt like the muscle was catching on something and getting stuck. Mom paid for me to see a physical therapist at the time, and he showed me a stretch I could do wherein I would lay on my side with my leg and hip bent and an friend would put an elbow into my but--if they hit the sore spot it would make my toes tingle and a sharp, yet pleasant pain, would result in the muscles of my but. The first year or three we were together clovis_t would do that for me often, and, gradually, I felt like I needed it less and less often. Now I have a hypothesis that it was while that was a problem that I first started using other muscles instead of those.

But back to the present...

The physical therapist gave me a couple of exercises I can do to strengthen those muscles, and he did a pretty intense stretch of my hip for me before I went home. It feels like it will help, and I am seriously motivated to do the exercises--I really don't want a repeat of that hip pain when I travel!

After I got home from my appointment I baked a batch of cookies as a thank you for the PhD student who had driven me home so that I could get there on time. Between that and getting distracted with email/FB I didn't get yoga done till late, and it was, once again midnight before I went to bed.

Which, once again, made me tired for our training at work today. Oops. Tired enough that I got a ride partway home from lord_kjar rather than walking all the way (he happened to be driving home as I was already underway). Once we were home he grabbed some food and went to his computer to relax after a difficult day at work and I grabbed some food and fell into a book (which I finally finished! This makes 28 books read in 2014, which is way more than last year's 13). Then I got inspired and cleaned out the set of wire drawers that had been on the shelf in the corner near lord_kjar's computer desk to free up that space for the new printer (which is sized like the spot had been designed with it in mind) and then spent an hour painting the design onto the first little box.

I considered being smart and putting the painting off for another day, but then realized that I want to bring the box with me to the SCA event on Saturday (since it is such a good size for holding my little embroidery snips, thread, and needle case), and that if I didn't do the painting today it wouldn't be dry enough to use on the weekend.

So, now it is nearly 23:00 and I still have yoga and physical therapy exercises to do before bed, and, even though tomorrow is Friday, which I normally have off, I will be going in to work for one final half day of training before they fly back to Stockholm. Therefore I had better close this here. Hope all of you have had a good week! (and that some of you will post about it)