kareina

The conference in Denmark this weekend went well, though it seems perhaps a bit silly to spend so much time in transit for such a short time on site. Ah well, that is as much time as I was willing to spend away from home.

It was good to spend time with my cousins, who I haven't seen since mom and I visited them a bit more than a year and a half ago. When last I was there their young son (who is now 11 years old, and speaking much better English than last I saw him) proudly showed off the small treasure chest he had with rocks. Therefore this time I brought him the last of the pretty rocks I had collected on the trip to Cyprus two years ago (the rest went to my nieces in Seattle). He was very enthusiastic about receiving them, correctly identified the pyrite in about 1/10 of a second of looking at it (which is all one needs if one has ever seen it before), and then happily got out his collection, which had grown enough since my last visit that he now has three large plastic boxes with individual cubby holes for each rock, and a bit of paper towel in each to cushion them.

On the way home I finished the book I had brought with me, and I had plenty of time to change planes in Stockholm, so I stuck my nose into a bookstore, and walked out with four books in Swedish. The three books of the EarthSea trilogy, and a copy of Neil Gaiman's "Odd och frostjattarna". I had never read the latter before, and found it delightful. I managed to finish it before landing in Luleå, and it was so nice to read a book in a single day again (that used to be normal, but, other than books written for very little children, it hasn't happened since I switched to reading in Swedish). Granted, it is so short that it took only 2 hours, but still...

There was more, but it is way past my bedtime, and I get to play with building the earth cellar tomorrow...

...and this is a good thing, because I have ever so much I need to do for work! I have deadlines of 1 November for both an abstract for a January conference and a grant proposal and I really want to be playing with my 3D models now that I have half again as much data to work with as I had last week AND I finally have the structural geology model for this area working in my modeling program--this means that I can model changes in the rock type due to alteration separately for each fault block and compare that with the models made for all of the blocks as a single package. In addition to all that I also agreed to supervise students taking an exam next week, since many others in the department who would normally do this need to be out of town.

In other news last night we combined dance practice at the uni (which is set to happen alternate Thursdays) with SCA sewing/crafts night (which normally happens on the other Thursdays at a location in the city center). However, their normal site isn't available next week, so they moved that session to this week, and then decided to join us at the uni instead because a couple of the dancers wanted to to both. This went very very well, and I am going to invite the crafts people to join us every time we have dance, if they feel for it.

I am someone who normally longs for winter all summer long--I love snow and crisp cold weather. However, this year, with all of the projects in the yard, I have been hoping for more summer, since we just aren't getting them all accomplished as quickly as I would like, which is not surprising, given how many different outdoor projects we have going at once:

*dig up and replace electric cable to the septic system, since the old one died last winter, and we don't really care for the above-ground extension cord that has been in use ever since. Status: close to done, the digging up and burring of the new cable is done, but we still need to hook it up inside the house so we can get rid of the above ground temporary fix.

*Earth Cellar. status: IN PROGRESS. All the walls are at least thigh high, the concrete rings for the door and interior cabinets are in place, the dirt and gravel fill behind the walls is done to the height of the walls, the inside floor has been covered with gravel and a large concrete slab that was lying in the yard. Sadly, we have to return his dad's tractor at the end of this weekend, so we have only tonight and perhaps Sunday morning (Saturday is fully booked with a mini gaming con and birthday party) available if we want to put any more of the large rocks into the walls. After that we can do only rocks small enough to move by hand, and then only till we start getting freezing weather at night--I don't really want to deal with wet concrete freezing and thawing.

*Stairs to earth cellar. Status: Done and beautiful!

*Terraced garden area beyond the earth cellar. Status: next year's problem, some tractor work to level out the bottom terrace has happened in the early summer (while we were waiting for the delivery of the gravel needed for the earth cellar project). The bare dirt of that level has been completely overgrown, mostly with nettles. Will require work another summer to go anywhere with it.

*cobble stone and cement block walkway to the house. Status: IN PROGRESS: one third totally done. Remaining cement blocks all set in place, and half of them dug in and awaiting their accompanying cobblestones. However, this one is, again, on hold while we try to do a bit more earth cellar work--even after we start getting freezing at night (which will put a stop to playing with wet cement in the earth cellar) it will still be warm enough during the day to dig room for the cobble stones

*Gravel path from the driveway to the bicycle shed. Status: Done! (this week)

*widely spaced cement block walkway going from the main, pretty walkway over to the sheds. Status: IN PROGRESS: cement blocks set in place, but only the two that fall into the gravel path from one shed to the driveway (those stones lead to the other shed) have been dug into place.

*large stones to frame curve of the driveway. Status: Done! Set in place between the lamp post and the house, look beautiful!

*leveling & re-sloping of yard to get rid of mud puddle locations. Status: Done! now we need the grass to grow back.

*re-burring the electric cable to the shed now that the yard has been leveled. Status: mostly done, just need to do the last couple of meters close to the shed, where there is still grass because we never took a tractor to that part (the new burial path is very different from the old one, because we now want it to go to the other shed first, since that is were we will put the split to also run electric to the earth cellar). Needless to say, we also still need to put in that splitter, and we will also put in a light switch to the second shed, so that we don't have to plug in the light every time we want to turn it on.

*raspberry patch. Status: done! canes brought over from the home of a colleague (where they had been growing outside of the box their parent canes lived in) and put into a box here with lots of cord strung between uprights to help them stand up despite the frequent winds we get here.

*smultron (wild strawberry) patch. Status: done! all smultrons which had been growing where the hole for the earth cellar now is were safely transplanted to over by the shed. Those plants forgave us enough to feed us many yummy berries. Those plants that had been growing where the stairs now are have been relocated to places surrounding the stairs. One particularly cute bunch of them now grows in the hollow surrounded by the rocks at the curve of the stairs.

*strawberry patch. Status: next year's problem, still where the neighbour left them when he moved most of his berries out of our yard because we would be taking a tractor to the field. The long term plan is to move them to the above mentioned terraced garden. Someday.

*leveling the field. Status: next year's problem,didn't get so far due to the accessory for the tractor for breaking up soil having turned out to have broken (pulverized) bearings. However, many high spots were scooped up to provide dirt for leveling the upper yard.

*archery range. Status: next year's problem, not even started at all.*

*wider parking area. status: close to done, he used the tractor to bring up some dirt to level out the area to the left of the two car parking area, so we now have a flat space three cars wide for parking, but that part will need gravel, and, some other year, it will be nice to do a ring of large stones around the parking area and add a second pillar to plug cars in during the winter.

Hmm. Looking at the list, and how much more time I have spent outside compared to all the other summers of my life, it is no wonder that I have had more annoying bug bites than ever before. It turns out that while mosquito bites don't bother me for more than 20 minutes max, the tiny little biting gnats leave holes in my skin that get hard, painful lumps under them that bother me for two to three days. Nasty things, that I will be glad to be rid of when the snows come. Have I mentioned how much I love winter? So, I am looking forward to my favourite season, but not looking forward to how many of these projects will need to go on hold till next year. And life won't even slow down when winter comes, as the list of indoor projects we want to get to is just as long...

One of the Geology blogs I read has a disturbing post about a weird bill going through your government. You may want to check it out and add your comments.