kareina

Saturday morning I got up and shovelled snow, then started sewing the replacement edging onto my phone baldric. Then David and Caroline came over, and while they ate the pizza they brought with them I baked some naan filled with spinach and almonds, then I returned to sewing while they did projects of their own (he in the shop, and she on her computer). Then in the evening I put the sewing down and my friend Max came over. We four chatted for a while, then D&C went to her place and Max and I traded massage.
He helped me shovel snow this morning and went home this afternoon (he lives about an hour south of here), after which I resumed sewing. David came back over and returned to his projects, and eventually he pointed out the time and wondered if I were going to dance
He felt for staying at the house, but lent me his car
dance was fun--10 of us tonight, including a couple of new people who are active in the Luleå Bug and Swing dance group (and thus are already quite good at dancing, so it is just a matter of learning how folk dance differs).
Then home and continued sewing till my audio book ran out (it is really nice that 1) I have gotten good enough in Swedish that I understand audio books now without needing to also see the text at the same time and 2)that my new bluetooth hearing aid adapter plus new hearing aids have such good sound that I can enjoy listening to audio books, for the first time in my life), and I realized that it was late enough that I wasn't going to get the project done tonight. So I got onto the computer to buy the next book in the series (Näckrosdammen is the one I bought today; this is a series I read when I did the Swedish for immigrants course years ago--we read the first one in class, and I checked the others out of the library, and I decided it was time to read them again, but given how busy I am, I opted to listen instead so that I can accomplish more with my reading time.)
and decided to post quickly before I hurry off to bed. Tomorrow I try to figure out what is wrong with the ICP-MS now--the plasma wouldn't start for our PhD student this weekend, and gave her a "bad vacuum error", which doesn't sound good.

We have had enough snow that I am finally willing to call it "winter", and so very grateful I am, after a couple of years of no snow till late November or early December. However, I watch the forecast and see that it is supposed to go back up above freezing, and I worry if it will be another of those winters where the temps oscillate back and forth over freezing so that what snow we have melts and refreezes into a thin crust. This strikes me as a much better thing to worry about than politics, though not any easier to solve.

Work has been going well, I had my annual meeting to discuss how I am doing with the job, and thus what amount my annual wage will be, and the review went well. Not only do I love my job, but my colleagues are happy with me and the work I am doing. We have several grant proposals out or in the works that could result in my getting more hours, so that is all good.

Norrskensfesten is next weekend, and I am pretty much on top of what needs doing (though I should have emailed the event schedule by now, so had better do that this weekend). We are at 99 registered just now, and I am good with that. I think it will be a really fun event.

I am currently reading a book in English, despite my "no fiction in English" rule. I had been checking Katherine Kurtz's web page fairly regularly, to see if she had written the final Childe Morgan book, but each time I did there was still no word. Then I forgot to check for a while, and didn't look again till this week. The book is done, and was published in 2014. Oops. I guess "a while" is longer than I thought. However, life has been so busy I have been reading it in small doses, rather than all at once like I used to do. I love having so many hobbies, but my 20-something self wouldn't believe it. However, I hope I can get it done this week, because then I will break that rule again by reading hrj's new book, which is poised to come out, and, since she is good about promoting her book in places I see (like here), I know about it, and will get it straight away. I wonder why none of Katherine's fans bothered to mention it on the email list. Just because no one has posted there in ages is no reason not to mention the book there.

Tonight, after Phire practice we had a fun excursion. Those of us who are new to the group since the last time they had one of these were blindfolded and led from the practice site to the snowy banks of the lake (which isn't quite frozen solid enough to trust it to hold a large group of us, yet), and they welcomed us to the group with a small ceremony, including a dubbing with a fire sword. Then we got to play with the burning toys. Fun. Afterwards we retired to the nearby home of one of the members for pizza and socializing. We played a game wherein we each, in turn told a fact about ourselves which we thought made us unique in the group. Those whose facts were, in fact, unique, got to do another round. I think I could have done quite a few more rounds before I ran out of ways in which I am unique. I was the only one present with three passports, who has lived in 8 different countries (and 6 US states), who has never been drunk, who can remember the moon landing (ok, that was cheating, I was the only one present who was alive then). I was also the only one present with a PhD, but I didn't bother to use that one. However, unlike some of the others, I have never built an electric guitar from scratch (nor any other instrument), I have never crawled under the barb wire to get into a relocation camp, I have no odd growths of bone sticking out from my shoulders where one would expect smooth collarbones, never lived on an Indian Reservation, nor in India. It was an interesting and fun game. Made slightly more challenging as we spoke Swedish most of the evening.

Sometime back when regular access to the internet for normal folk was young one of my first cousins, in Wisconsin, received an e-mail from a guy in Sweden with the same last name, wondering if they were related. My cousin didn't know, so referred the question to my mother, who had been updating the family tree. Mom and the guy in Sweden compared notes and determined that their grandfathers had been brothers (which makes them second cousins). Years later mom and my step dad did a round-the-world trip, which included a stop in Sweden to meet that guy and his family (his parents had moved there from Finland in the 1960's), and they really enjoyed the trip. Years thereafter mom came to visit me while I was living in Italy, and we contacted her second cousin to see if they wanted another visit.

He had since moved to Finland, and suggested that we meet at the old family home in northern Finland, so we did, and had a great time. Now (nearly two years later) mom is once again visiting me for a month, so we decided to go back and visit the cousins in Finland once again. This time we were close enough to drive.

Therefore we set out from Luleå on Friday around mid-day, and five hours later we arrived in Oulainen. The couple we stayed with are an aunt and uncle of that first contact person (which makes them first cousins to my grandfather). They used to live in Sweden, so lord_kjar and I spoke to them in Swedish, and mom did her best to use Finnish. Fortunately, two of their daughters also visited, so we had people who could translate Finnish for us. They are all delightful people, and it was a joy to stay with them.

On Saturday we went to the home of another cousin, where we met tons of other relatives and ate lots and lots of good food. On Sunday we went to the home of another cousin, and met more family, and ate more good food. I feel very lucky that we liked everyone we met and had much fun visiting with them.

Both lord_kjar and I made progress on our nålbinding projects, which fascinated our family, none of whom had ever seen it before. One of the cousins (who is the same age as my mom, but is actually her father's first cousin) was so interested that I did my best to teach her how. However, she doesn't speak English or Swedish, so it was a bit of a challenge as I could really only demonstrate (anyone who has links to good Finnish Language web pages on nålbinding are welcome to let me know so that I can send them to her).

Mom enjoyed her visit, so we left her there. We will go back next weekend to collect her. With luck she will be a little better at Finnish than she was when she arrived. (She spoke Finnish as a child, but once her grandparents died when she was 7 years old her family largely quit using that language, so she doesn't remember all that much of it.)

On the drive home I read out loud to lord_kjar from The Wise Man's Fear. This is the first time either of us have read this book, and we haven't had a chance for me to read to him since before mom arrived, since we have been so busy, so it was nice to get a number of chapters in to it. It amused us both that he reduced to a couple of sentences a series of adventures that other authors would have devoted a full novel to. We are looking forward to reading the rest of the book, though we may not have time till we drive back to Finland next weekend...

I am pleased to report that for most of the drive wherein I wasn't reading aloud he and I spoke to one another in Swedish. I am getting better at it...

In addition to taking an intro to Swedish class and learning songs in Swedish I have also started reading children's books. The first one I picked up is one of those with detailed illustrations on every page and not so many words, which meant that I was able to correctly guess the meaning of every word on the first try. Learning to pronounce them, on the other hand, has been a challenge. For the first book I had archinonlivefirst read me the story straight through, then I tried to read it, and he corrected my sounds as needed. This is needed more for some words than for others. The phrase which proved to be hardest for me is "ge mig", which sounds more like what an American would spell "yeayah myuh". The fact that this story has lots and lots of repetition makes it a very good beginner's book.

( The story itself, and the translation thereof )

After spending a couple of days working on how to pronounce the words in that story we started a new children's book last night. This one still has illustrations on every page, but instead of only one new sentence per page it has a couple of actual paragraphs per page. This time the approach was for me to attempt to read it aloud at one go. Then he read it out loud to me so I could hear how it should have sounded. Then I did my best to translate it. This turned out to be far easier for the first page of the book (which was quite enough for one evening!) than I expected it to be. Some words I already knew from my songs, others from the Swedish course, and others I could guess from the similarity to the Norwegian (which I took a class in a decade ago) or to English. There were only a few words I had to ask for help to get the meaning. This pleased me very much. Then we worked through it again, first him pronouncing a phrase, and then my repeating it as often as needed to actually say them more or less correctly. The plan is to work our way through this book one page at a time, then move on to others. Eventually, as my reading level increases we will switch to books aimed at older and older kids...

However, I don't think I'll take the time to type out the paragraphs I'm reading, unless someone asks me to...

There was a time in my life when I replied to e-mail so consistantly promptly that my personal in-box was emptied on a daily basis. Then I started the PhD project, and, periodically, I'd get behind on my mail, and then devote some days to clearing it out again, keep it clear for a while, and then get behind again. Then I came down to the final push to finish writing my thesis. Sometime around December of 2008 e-mail became something I'd read each day, and if it were *vital* I reply straight away, I probably would, and if a new message happened to hit the in-box just as I happened to have the correct sort of energy to want to reply just then, it would get a reply, but the vast majority of messages sent to me were things which were set aside to answer "later". This state of affairs continued for months. Once I submitted the thesis in June and boarded that plane I got a bit better about replying to many new messages reasonably promptly, but not all of them due to the random nature of one's internet connection whilst traveling. One side effect of not replying to e-mail, and switching more and more to connecting with people only via LiveJournal and Facebook is that there were fewer new messages in my in-box, and still the backlog didn't really dwindle much, though I'd try to get to one or three old messages a week. Finally, after returning to Milan from my most recent travels I've spent a couple three sessions going through those old messages, sending long over-due replies to many of them, filing the ones that didn't seem to need replies (and, in a couple of cases, sending a reply even though that message didn't need one, just because I wanted the person to know that seeing their name in my in-box made me smile). Today I am delighted to announce that my personal in-box (SCA e-mail address) is empty, for the first time this calendar year! If you think I owe you a letter and you didn't see a reply from me, please re-send, it has been officially lost.

Other bits of good news for the day: It worked! I have successfully welded one end each of three tiny gold capsules (2 mm diameter, just over 6 mm long). The helpful bit of advice I got today was "don't actually try to touch the graphite tip to the gold, just getting it quite close will cause an arc". Tomorrow I can try filling the capsules, and the do the harder weld. It is harder because the contents of the capsule changes the voltage required, *and* it is vital that all of the powder we put into the capsule be cleaned away from the rim before we try to seal it--even a couple of grains caught between the bits of gold will keep it from welding together, which would mean starting over from the beginning (which is why I made three of them today, since I need two full one for the first experiment--well that and there happened to be a 20.5 mm long segment of tubing left, and the capsules are made from ~7mm long bits, so I just divided that part into thirds and put them all to use straight away).

Last night before sleep I started reading my copy of the Deryni Archives Magazine #20, which arrived in the mail last week. The story I was up to was _Vision of a King_ by Linda Epstein. Wow, was that a good story. Had me in tears almost straight way, and I alternated between crying and laughing throughout. It so moved me I put the magazine down thereafter, not wanting to spoil the mood with some other story. I strongly recommend this story to anyone who loved the Kelson-era Deryni books (and there would be no point in reading this story if you haven't read all of the books from that time period--the power of the tale is the way it builds upon what the reader already knows of those people).

This morning clovis_t and I wandered in to town; he dropped me off at uni, and he went to Centerlink to take care of some paperwork. I settled in to work, and met up with him and some friends later in the afternoon. Gave one of them an early birthday gift, since I won't get to see her tomorrow, and I wandered back home again. Took a short nap and settled back into uni work. Took what I'd intended to be a short break around 22:30 to read some more of blamebrampton's fic, enjoyed a handful of very short stories, and then unwittingly followed a link there to some fic by jadzialove (of whose existence I was previously unaware). Enjoyed a couple of the stories I found there, and was surprised to discover that it was 0:58 when I finished reading them. I then saw that a friend on Facebook had done her most recent status update in Latin, so spent some time using on-line dictionaries to craft a reply (since clovis_t has our Latin textbooks with him, I was reduced to using the internet), and it is even later. I think that it is seriously time for me to do yoga and get some sleep so that I can finish what I was working on tomorrow!

Some of my friends challenged themselves last year to the goal of reading 50 books in a year. For most of my life limiting myself to that few would have traumatized me. However, my reading has decreased markedly since starting my PhD project in mid-2005.

My totals:

June-Dec 2005: 37 books. (yup, probably read more than 50 that year)
2006: 55 books. (yup, not very many by my standards, but certainly more than 50)
2007: 60 books. (hey, shouldn't that number go down as the PhD project progresses?)
2008: 28 books. (yikes! That is an amazingly small number!)

( this year's books )
My "normal" ratio of "re-read" to "first time" for books is 3/4. Yup, that's right, I'm so fond of re-reading old favourites that usually I tend to re-read three books for every one new book I pick up. However, last year I read *six* new books. All year. And one of them isn't even fiction.

If anyone had told me years ago that I'd ever see a year with so few books read, I'd not have believed them. I certainly wouldn't have thought it possible to stay sane reading that little. However, what that previous me doesn't know is that I've still been reading. Following livejournal (and to a lesser extent blogs/facebook/myspace) has become an addiction, though, I hope, one upon which I spend less time than I used to spend reading books. But I've also been reading *lots* of geologic literature.