kareina

 Started the day with a quick 25 minutes pilates session, then I had time to start a bread dough and baste the next sleeve of Keldor copper trim tunic to the silk lining, cut the lining, and sew the decorative line along the edge of the cuff before the others got up.

 Today I dropped the Academic terms Swedish class, mostly because I felt I have too much work to do to spare the time, and partly because it didn't feel like it was giving me much info I didn't already have.

Given that our shire hosted Drachenwald's Coronation in January, none of us felt up to also running our normal annual spring event JMB (short for Jungfru Maria Bebådelsedagsgille, which google translates as "Virgin Mary Annunciation Day party"), which typically has 20 to 40 people spending the full weekend at a site a half hour or so inland. But neither did we want to do nothing at all, so Keldor suggested that we do a JMB lite event here at our house, and created a FB event for, it and we even dropped it on the Kingdom Calendar, on the off chance that anyone who isn't on FB might go looking to see if we are doing something.

Between deciding to do that and now I got that tuition bill from the university, which, even though we worked out that I am correct, I do, in fact, have till the end of spring term before my funding runs out, nonetheless put me into panic thesis mode, trying to finish all of my data processing and write all the words for the thesis as fast as possible, so that I don't have to pay £2,500 a term (which, given I have no income just now, is not something I wish to do). Due to the limited amount of funded time available my thesis advisor and I agreed that, rather than doing the degree as the PhD we had originally planned, I should just down-grade to a Master's, which is a more easily achievable thesis format in a short time.

Then I saw that ad for funding, aimed at supporting two individuals who are in their final, otherwise unfunded, year of writing up their PhD results, and I dared to start dreaming again. An entire year to finish up converting all of data to a thesis would make it possible to get that second PhD after all, and would be fun, and, I think, my contribution to the science is worth the higher degree.

The funding application is straight forward: turn in a 2 page CV, a 500-word Thesis Summary, a 750 word General Interest Pitch, and... a three-minute video introducing myself and my research.

I have never edited a video in my life, and have almost never filmed video, so why not try? (I have filmed some acroyoga training, as it is a good way to look at what we are doing, and figure out what is going wrong and what we need to do different to make the pose work, and, when it does work, it is fun to have a record of it.)

Yannick of Normandy, in Insulae Draconis (he who did the wonderful trailers for Drachenwald's On-line Kingdom University Event), was kind enough to give me a two hour zoom call wherein he taught me the basics in using Lightworks, by having me edit together a couple of random segments of two of my acroyoga films, so that I could learn how to add film clips to a project, how to move them, how to select a subset of them, and discard the rest, how to overlay one over the other, with a dissolve transition from one to the next, and how to zoom and pan, and how to add a title. The result was a very short film using all of those skills, but, because it was randomly chosen bits, wasn't worth keeping.

Then I went to Luleå for my last week of work, working long days, so I practiced none of those skills directly after learning them. On my bus ride home, after doing filming of me in front of a greenscreen talking of my thesis reading a script, talking of it without a script, and even reading both the Thesis Summary and the General Interest Pitch (which gave me 45 minutes worth of film, in which I hope I have enough for the three minute film), I started thinking of the whole pan and zoom thing Yannick taught me.

I had always assumed that the panning and zooming in the yoga app videos was done by moving the camera, but, now that I have learned the skill, I understand that it is probably just video editing. However, I felt that this tool much be good to call attention to specific details in graphs or maps in my research. Then I suddenly felt inspired: GoogleEarth! That program has wonderful fly-in to your chosen location feature. But how to get that from that program into the video editing program? So I asked google, and sure enough, there are tutorials to do just that, and, it turns out, I didn't even need to use a third-party software for the screen recording, Windows has a built-in low end model, that works well enough, if you are willing to use the editor's zoom into the part of the screen you want, rather than selecting that portion before recording.

What does all this have to do with the mini SCA event at our house, you ask? Well, I got home late Thursday evening (where "home" = Keldor's dad's house in Skelleftehamn, since that is MUCH closer to the bus stop than our place is). Friday Keldor went to work, and I set to work transcribing all of my films I had made the day before, including noting where I stuttered, and if I added hand gestures, so that when I get to the part where I add me to the film, I can quickly grab the correct film to pull the words I need from. (In an ideal world I would have had a complete film plan and script done in advance, so I could have just recorded the words that would be used, in several takes, rather than needing to also record lots of additional stuff, as I just don't know yet exactly where the film is going. Apparently, I grow film projects in the same, barely planned organic way I approach most of my sewing and embroidery projects, with a strong "I will figure it out as I go" component).

I got all but one of them transcribed before he finished work for the day, and we packed up the cats and did the 35 minute drive home and got everything unpacked and put away. Then I settled to the computer with that final transcription, till time for the zoom meeting for the Drachenwald 30 Year songbook project, where I confessed that I had accomplished nothing for the project since our last meeting, due to thesis focus mode, and we delegated parts of the things I had hoped to do to others (thanks others!). As I listened to the meeting, I went to the web page where they are collecting the bits that are done, and tested pulling the list into Scrivener, copying in the plain lyrics, and adding clickable links to the various versions of each song (phf, sheet music, with chords, midi) where they exist. The meeting lasted long enough I got as far as the Ms. Then, as the meeting wrapped up, I exported the result to an epub, and sent it to the others, wondering if they think it is worth also doing an epub version of the song book. Then, at events with poor internet access one could still have the songbook in a format that is easy to read on a phone or a tablet, and, if the access is good, one could click through to the web page.

I have been wanting an epub songbook for ages, and haven't taken the time to sit down and do it. It really isn't hard to do, and would be fairly fast to just drop the old word doc for the Oerthan songbook into scrivener and convert it. It is just finding the time. The only reason doing the Drachwneald 30 Year songbook takes longer is the part about coping in the links to the other version. No one has replied to that shared file yet, so I have no idea if it is only me who likes the idea of epub, or if the idea is worth pursuing.

After the meeting I finished my transcription and got ready for bed, glad that we didn't have a normal JMB, as I would have missed all of the Friday night part of the event for work. The event announcement Keldor had done said that the event would start at 10:00 on Saturday, by which time I was sitting at the computer, happily experimenting with recording GoogleEarth fly-in to a quarry location, and fading from there to a photo of the rock from the quarry, fading to a photo of the crystal from the rock that I analysed, fading to the maps for each of the interesting elements for that crystal, one at a time (gee, it is GREAT to see the maps replacing one another like that--one very clearly sees the difference in distribution of each element!!!!).

As a result, when the first guests arrived, I don't know how much time later, I waved hello from the computer, and kept woking. A while later I was hungry, so I went out, chatted briefly with the first two visitors, accompanied them and Keldor on a tour of the house, ate some lunch, and went straight back to the computer to work.

At 15:00, I finished my first short sample film clip, which you can see on google drive here, or on FB here. So I put on some SCA garb, my hearing aids, and went out to the kitchen to discover that a number of others had arrived, so I shared with them my short film, had some dinner, during which I took of the dress I had put on, because it was too warm, and just the linen undertunic, to which I added my cotton flannel Thorsberg trousers, was more comfortable.

But as soon as I had finished eating, I returned to the computer to see how much time film # 2 would take, now that I know how to do it. That first film took five hours, the second, which you can see on google drive here (or on the same fb link, since I just edited the first post to add the next), took only 3, so clearly I am getting faster. Now I wonder how I can automate this? It must be possible to set up a template, and just drop in the sample photos and stuff from a folder, so that every sample has the exact same approach, making it easier to play the films side by side and see the differences.

When I came back out to the kitchen it was full! Well, ok, there were only 9 people, including me, and two dogs (our cats declined to join the party, but stayed hidden in the bedroom), but the kitchen is small, making it seem like a larger event than it really was. I hung out with them, and then gave Helena a tour of the house, then Lena and I did some yoga in the living room, and there was more hanging out and swapping stories.

Then I felt inspired to finally cut the fabric for a much lighter weight pair of Thorsberg trousers. I have a really light weight white cotton fabric, with a blue print that looks rather 12th Century in motief, that we found at a second hand store ages ago, and I thought at the time it would make some lovely Thorsberg trousers for wearing under a split-skirt bliaut, but I hadn't gotten around to doing anything with it. Because the fabric is so thin I wanted to line at least the square but panel and crotch rectangle with another fabric, but I didn't have anything in my stash that was an appropriate weight. So I looked in the mending pile, and saw an old light weight black cotton skirt that has been languishing waiting for someone to sew shut the rip in the fabric for ages, and saw that it was exactly the same weight as the blue printed white cotton fabric. Having survived for months without the skirt, I decided that it would make a great lining, so, since the party was just in the kitchen at that time, I claimed the living room floor for fabric cutting (and was able to cut out all the pieces without help from the cats, who were still keeping to the bedroom for reasons of people, and probably especially, dogs, in the house).

I got the pieces cut, and, since the fabric piece wasn't, quite, long enough to go from waist to ankle, but was wide enough to have extra fabric over in the middle after removing the butt and crotch pieces, I added an extra wide waist band. That chunk of extra fabric was wide enough to line up the pattern exactly, so at any distance at all, one won't see that there is even a seam there. So I started sewing the first waist band to the first leg, and left the other pieces spread out over the floor, so I wouldn't loose track of which side was up for the other leg and waist extension, and took my sewing to the next room to be sociable again.

Of course, this was around the time that some people were deciding to head home, so instead of joining folk in the kitchen, I stood, stitching in hand, talking in the entry area, as they got ready to go (and shouted twice "don't step on the sewing project on the floor!" to Keldor and the guy he was showing off all of the swords, spears, and axes that line the living room wall with. (Really, with no one, not even cats, in the room at all, it had felt safe to leave it spread out during the short time I sewed those two pieces together. Nope.)

I got the first two bits sewed together during the time we were doing goodbyes with the first group departing, and started the next set as we hung out with the last couple of folk. After they, too, left, I put down my sewing, and did a bit more tidying up after company (the guests had helped with dishwashing before departing, which was truly appreciated), crawling into bed just after 01:00. As I was setting the dawn light to get up at 06:00 for my fortnightly call with my sisters, Keldor reminded me that it was the night for the change to daylight savings, so we would soon "spring forward" an hour. So I reset the clock on the dawn light to show that it was already 02:00, and went to sleep.

When dawn went off I might have considered sleeping, but Skaði wanted breakfast, so I got up, fed her, and sat down at the computer, where I had a great time catching up with my sisters, sharing my videos with them, and getting some edits for the funding application text, as well as working on my new sewing project and hearing what they are up to.

Then I went back to bed, and slept for three more hours, which was seriously needed, during which time Keldor took this cute photo of Skaði and I:

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.

Yesterday I dropped by my friend Wilhelm's for a short visit, and he took a decent portrait of me. This is the first one I have had done since 2008, so it was kinda time to update the icon of "me". What do you think?

After that I went over to Eva's house and we figured out how to correctly attach the sleeves to her dress in the style of 1795. We'd made the pattern some time back, and and I gave her some striped linen for it. Since then she has used her sewing machine to do red embroidery up some of the stripes, which used up an entire kilometer of red thread! At the time we did the pattern I marked where I thought the sleeve seam should intersect with the arm hole based on where mine does. However, her pattern was just different enough from mine, since we are shaped differently, that we needed to rotate the sleeve nearly two cm around, and then it fit nicely.

Today, despite having nine UFO's on my project list (plus however many more languishing in the cupboard without yet having a card on that list), I started a a new project. A sleeveless under tunic from my final large scrap of the yummy white herringbone linen twill, with hopes to have it done before Hostdansen in 12 days. This project brought to life by the inspiration that strikes when one inventories one's fabric stash and discovers that one didn't use up all of the really good stuff on the last undertunic.

Tonight David made it to folk dance, for the first time in ages. It was fun to dance with him again, and fun to dance with everyone else, too.

But as fun as all of that was, the highlight of the weekend has to have been Friday evening, when my friend Villiam called to say "are you inside right now? Yes? Go outside, the northern lights are amazing". And they were, too! We spent several minutes together (about 4 km apart) admiring the heavens dancing and showing off for us. I love living far enough north to get to see such displays now and then. Now, if I remembered to keep my eye on the aurora forecast I could see them more often. One of the guys in our shire posts photos of them regularly to FB, because he loves doing photography, so he checks the forecast often, and it out there pretty much every night they are visible.

On Wednesday Josie was flying in from the Seattle area for a visit. I also had an appointment to go get blood drawn so they would have current numbers on whatever they check for before surgery next week. My appointment was 11:20, and when I was done I still had a full hour before the flight was due to land at 12:45. One hour didn't seem long enough to be worth heading back to the office, so I went to a second hand store on the way to the airport. They were having a 50% off of everything sale, which meant that I paid only 50 SEK for a knee-length button up sweater of purple/grey 100% linen.

Like many modern sweaters it was designed for use by someone who never lifts their arms. Therefore, when I bought it I first double checked that it was wide enough that if I were to cut the upper part down to fit my tiny shoulders and waist that it would leave enough scrap to put in an underarm gore. I wasn't certain if I would bother altering it, or just use it as is.

Josie went to sleep around 19:30, having had a long flight and not so much sleep on the plane. I thought of going to sleep early myself, but then I did a few useful things around then house, then tried on the sweater again, and decided the way the arms attach really is too uncomfortable, and I started taking off the left sleeve. The next thing I knew it was nearly 01:30, and I had nearly completed altering the left side--only the second pass of the long side seam left to do (I was sewing bias tape over the raw edges of the seams to keep it from fraying).

Tonight I went back and finished that, and realized that the rest of the bit I had cut off the sides was big enough to make a pocket (it had none to begin with). So now I am wearing the sweater, with its left half altered, and its right half still original. While typing this is fine--but if I move much then the right side sleeve attachment is annoying. But it is after 01:00, and I am not going to start taking apart that side today. besides, if I leave it then I can get Josie to take some photos by the light of the day to show the difference in before and after.

Monday I was in the office from 08:15 to 14:15, and at the ore geology seminar from 15:00 to 17:00, did the Phire bbq in the evening, then stayed up till just after midnight.

Tuesday I was in the office from 07:55 to 16:25 and then went to Phire practice followed by choir, then went home and did uni work for a couple of hours, getting to bed about 01:30. Phire was extra fun—the first “open training” of the new term, and we had some new students, one of whom is a gymnast, so she was pretty quick to learn some of the acroyoga stuff. She will have a bit of a learning curve in how to balance on a shaky base, but she has the strength to do the poses. Choir was also fun because there were 20 of us. How nice to have a decent number of people again. Hope it lasts.

Wednesday I was in the office from 08:00 to 16:40, then went to the Phire parkour and aerial silks training (one of the new students has done areial silks before, so we were comparing notes—we are both beginners, but know different stuff), followed by Herrksapsdans class (always fun!), and then flaffled around on line, getting to bed a bit before 01:00

This morning (Thursday), I didn’t make it to the office till 08:30, and by 11:00 I was feeling like I was coming down with a bit of a cold, so I went home and slept for four hours, getting up on time to eat a little something before heading in to the Frostheim meeting on campus (the original plan had been to just stay at work being productive till the meeting). At the meeting I started cutting out another linen underlayer like the one I did for my jester costume, only longer this time. The other one is really comfortable in that it is nicely supportive (being laced up rather tightly across the chest), and since I adapted the Eura dress pattern it moves well—I can stand on my hands without the fabric at the waist moving at all. This new one will be even better as it is a much nicer linen (the jester group ordered some pretty cheap/coarse linen for our jester costumes) that I found for sale at the folk costume table at Spelmansstamman the summer before last. It will also be almost knee length (the other one goes just to my bottom, for easier acroyoga), and so will be a better under layer for my tunics. I also plan to fit it all the way to my waist. The short one is fitted to half way down the ribs, and then the hip gores start already. I think it will be even more comfortable to fit it to the bottom of my ribs, and then start the side gores. No idea when I will have time to sew it though. I would love to have it ready to wear already next weekend at the Gyllengran event, but I don’t know that I can spare the sewing time. Indeed, it is a shame didn’t work today though, I have a grant proposal that needs progress and some data reduction to do.

However, the long nap must have helped, as I don’t feel any worse than I did this afternoon, so, with luck, I will be spared being really sick.

My car’s ABS warning light had been shining for a while, so I finally made time to take it in and have it looked at last week Monday. They found some problems, kept it over night, fixed them, and I paid them not quite 6000 SEK for doing so. Yesterday (Wednesday) another warning lamp came on, this time saying “check break pads”. Since I will be heading to Norway for a week, leaving on Saturday, I promptly took the car back to the shop this morning and asked them to have a look, as one wants working breaks for a road trip, especially one which will involve mountains. An hour or so later they emailed me to say that they found more problems (I can’t be bothered translating from Swedish), and it would be ~5000 SEK to get it fixed, but I could have it back tomorrow. Here’s hoping that this really does it for a while.

Since I didn’t know when I left the house this morning how long they would need to keep the car I was smart enough to bring along my sewing basket. I then spent all day in the office (other than the lunch time acroyoga session with Johan) till it was time for the Frostheim crafts night, then I walked over. We have only been doing them once a month this term, and tonight was an espeically nice turn out—we had 11 of us, many of whom were working on sewing projects, others had nålbinding, another was doing illumination, another polished some wire for making spirals for a Finnish Iron Age costume. It was a delightful evening.

Now I am tired and should go do my yoga and get to sleep. I will be working in the office tomorrow morning and then meeting Johan for acroyoga, and then will work more in the office till the car place says I can come get it.

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).

When I started work on the half-round gymnastics matt/block project the goal was a finished product that stands 72 cm high, and has a base that is 90 x 60 cm. I started the work by making the side pieces 90 cm wide, 72 cm tall, and with a reasonable curve from the peak to the sides. Then I started sewing a 60 cm wide foam over the top of the curve, to make a shell. Once I had the shell together I saw that the pile of foam we had wasn't big enough, so today I went and bought 2 more cheap foam mattresses that measure 200 cm by 90 cm (I thought one might be enough, but it might not, so I grabbed the spare).

Today I managed to finish assembling the bits, measured the base and saw that I needed rectangles 90 x 55 cm to fit inside the two layers thick of the camping mat frame from which I have done the shell, so I cut them and determined that I did, in fact, need some, but not all, of the second mat. I put them into place, set the one last bit of camping matt foam over it, sewed it shut, pulled the fabric shell over all, and pinned it shut, and started sewing it shut. Then I decided to give the matt a try, and was surprised to discover that it is too big, that when I do the fall over it from the handstand I wind up perched on top, rather than having my feet come to the other side.

So I grabbed the meter stick and checked it, and discovered that I had wound up with something that was 95 x 75 x 60 cm. In other words, too big by the layer of foam I wrapped around the sides. I forgot that I would need to subtract those from the sides, since I wanted the sides sitting under the top curve, to give it better support.

Sigh. So I have started taking it back apart, so that I can make it smaller. But if it is worth doing, it is worth doing over correctly if one makes such an easily avoidable mistake. Luckily, I have also learned a few other things doing this project, and I think it will be an overall better result from having to do it over. But, darn it, I wanted to be able to play with it already, and to have the sewing mess cleaned up before house guests arrive on boxing day. Now I am not so certain I will accomplish that goal, since I plan to go visiting tomorrow, and this is not a good take-with sewing project.