kareina

Ten years ago, I visited Nordmark for the second time to attend the St. Cecelia’s music and dance themed event, and had no idea how that trip would change my life for the better. I had been living in Italy, and my first post-doc job contract was winding to a close, and, despite many applications, I hadn’t yet lined up a new job. I really didn’t want to go back to the US, and while I had a shiny new Australian Passport, I felt that I would rather go to somewhere with a better winter next. Therefore, I devised Plan A: travel around Scandinavia for the three months an Australian/American can be in Europe without applying for a visa and keep applying for jobs; perhaps something good will come up.

While at the event, I shared this plan with people there, and many of them said “I have crash space, come visit me”, but David said “I have crash space in the north”, which really got my attention. He and I then spent the next month talking over video call for 2 to 5 hours a day (and longer on weekends), and Plan A changed to “move to Luleå and live with David”, which brought about other changes as well.
At St. Cecelia’s I attended all of the dance classes, and tried one of the singing classes, but my inability to control my voice and change tone/pitch appropriately was a bit painful for poor Natfarí, who smiled and encouraged me, even as he winced (and was probably relieved that I could at least manage to remember the words and had good timing. But David sang in a student choir and the university which has only one entrance requirement “you must enjoy singing” and they welcomed me with open arms.

Ten years later my singing is still not up to professional performance levels, but I am singing regularly and often, my pitch/tone is far more reliable, and more often correct, and I have even gotten SCA awards for my bardic contribution. Thank you Natfarí, your event had much further reaching effects than could have been predicted in advance.



At that event, when the choir performed on the stairs I sat at their feet to sew to enjoy the sound. If we were to do it today I would be singing with them (though I might still be sewing as I did).

This weekend we were at an SCA event held in an old village school house not far south of the city of Umeå. It was ever so much fun, and reminds me why, even though I now have many other hobbies to fill in the time between SCA events within a reasonable commute, the SCA really is the hobby of my heart. Höstdansen (The Autumn Dance) is a delightful event, that I have enjoyed every time I have attended (I missed one since moving to Sweden, nearly 4 years ago, the year it had last minute scheduling issues and got moved to the same weekend as the Frostheim Fencing Weekend, at which I had already promised to teach dancing). However, I think this year was even more fun than the other years.

We had a surprisingly balanced group--for all of the day time classes we had the same number of men as women dancing. It was not until the dance set after the feast that we started getting pairs of women dancing with one another as a few of the men were no longer feeling well. We ran one set of dance classes in the morning, with Dis and I taking calling dances from Arbeau to everyone, and then for the next set we split into two groups--she took the beginners downstairs to work with some Playford dances, and she left me the experienced dancers upstairs, where we did lots of Playford dances--just doing the ones we alrady knew, and I introduced them to some of the more complicated ones that they haven't done before, and I hadn't done since moving to Sweden because we hadn't had enough dancers (we had eight, including me, in our group).

In the afternoon we reviewed the morning's dances and tossed in Black Alaman and Saltero as well. And, of course, after the first course of the Banquet in the evening we did more dancing, during which we had live music for a while, before we ran out of songs he knew and we switched back to playing stuff from my phone. (I love today's world--it is lovely to have so much dance music with me at all times, ready to play at a moment's notice. However, Dis and I agree we should set a date to get together, consolidate our music libraries, listen to all of the different versions of the various dances we have and decide which ones we like best and label them, so that when we actually want to dance we don't have to play all four versions of a song before deciding which one we want to use. Pity we didn't think of this while they were still living in Luleå. Oh well, it will give us an excuse to visit Umeå (like we need one, given how many of our close friends live there), or them an excuse to visit Luleå.)

After the second course of the banquet a bunch of us started singing, and I wound up staying up hours later than I would other wise have because it was so much fun. There were a few people who have been in the SCA nearly as long as I have, and they knew songs I haven't heard in years, so we mixed in a fair few SCA traditional songs in English to the standard SCA Swedish song collection. So much fun!

The weekend has been full of acquiring supplies for working on the walk way and earth cellar in progress, and the walk way is now 3/4 of the way complete (it was only 1/3 of the way done when the snow started falling last autumn and we had to stop work for the winter. I truly enjoy working on these project, and finding good stone cheap and free bricks is happy-making. Would love to elaborate on how things are going, but it is pretty much time to get ready for folk dancing tonight, and tomorrow night is nycklharpa, Tuesday is choir, Wednesday is our traditional spring choir performance for spring, Thursday the choir members who feel for it come here to do instrumental music (+/- singing), and I many not get another chance to post with all that going on.

But I am probably soon done with my Swedish for Immigrants Course--my teacher wants me to take the National Exam to end it on 13 and 14 May. I am looking forward to that, since I love tests, and I would like the extra time I will get not going to school, but, on the other hand, I am enjoying the classes, too...

We had a couple of delightful couch surfers the first part of this week. They arrived Tuesday afternoon and stayed through to Friday morning. She is from California (grew up in Santa Cruz, went to UC Berkeley for undergrad, and is now at UCLA for a PhD studying butterflys), and her boyfriend/traveling companion is from Portugal--they met because he wrote some code to make a camera follow a butterfly in a wind tunnel). We brought them with us to Choir on Tuesday, which turned out to be a very good thing, since she since soprano, and if she hadn't been there we would have had only one soprano, and they both had fun. Wednesday they cooked us dinner and we stayed up too late chatting, and Thursday we took them to the Frostheim arts and science night, which they also enjoyed. (He had never heard of the SCA--she had heard of us, but never been to any SCA activities--if any of you know people in her area that might be a good SCA contact let me know and I can forward details to her.)

They left Friday during the day, and Friday night we finally got around to starting dealing with the one major issue with the house that we have known about since the inspection before we bought the place. One of the rooms downstairs has a raised floor, which had mold growing under it. The rest of the basement has painted concrete floors, and no problems. We are fairly certain that the mold under the raised floor didn't start growing till the previous owners switched out the old wood stove heating system for the down hole heat exchange system (which is what wikipedia says is the English term for "bergvärme")--wood stoves dry out the air much better than the mix of electric and geothermal heating we now have. We have been meaning to take out that floor since moving in, but hadn’t gotten to it till now, since there were plenty of other things higher on the priority list.

Friday lord_kjar took off the top layer of that floor—a not too bad looking fake wood floor that is actually only a few millimetres thick, and came off with ease. Under that there is a red fake tile layer that looks like it may well date to 1966, when the house was built. It is harder to pull off, and below that is a layer of plywood held up by boards which have layers of insulation between them. That is where the mold is growing. He got the top layer off and did a bit of removing a corner of the rest, to see how tough it is going to be. It will be doable, but not easy, and it was getting late, so we shut the door to that room and went to sleep. Even with the door shut the rest of downstairs was smelling of mold the next morning, so we opened the window in there (on this occasion it may be a good thing that the winter has been so darned mild—with the temps above zero, again, this week, it isn’t a hardship to leave that window open) and covered the under-door crack with cloth from the rag bag. With luck we will get a chance to finish removing the rest of that stuff and clean the underlying concrete with bleach to get rid of the last of the mold before we paint it.

Saturday morning we went into the city center for the Frostheim annual meeting, where I was disappointed to discover that just because I can understand everything in Swedish at my SFI course does not mean that I can follow everything said in a Shire business meeting. Ah well, I did catch more of it than last year, which was more than the year before. Eventually it will all make sense.

After the meeting we met up with some of the folk from our Choir for some random drive-by performances. We went into one of the malls, found a nice spot near the escalators, and sang a song, then quickly left, went into another mall, found a nice spot and sang a song, and then again at a third mall before deciding we were done for the day. While most people passing through the malls paid us no attention, we were pleased to note that at each stop there were at least a couple of people who paused to listen.

After the performance a number of us went back to our house, where we baked home-made pizza and cookies. Yum! The good news is that the six of us were enough to finish all of the cookies straight away, so I am not tempted to eat left over cookies. The better news is that there was left over pizza, so I didn’t need to cook today.

Saturday evening our next set of couch surfers arrived. These two live in Uppsala, where they are PhD students. She comes from Solvania, and he is French. They have a conference in town this week, and wanted to come early to do some sight-seeing and ice skating. They actually flew in Saturday morning, but wanted to have time for adventures, so they walked from the airport to the city, stopping to play on the ice along the way. Sadly for them, spring is seriously early this year, so the ice was kind of went and not so good for skating, but they did find the kick-sleds the city provides, and enjoyed those.

This morning I got up early and walked into uni to do some photocopying. Our couch surfers slept in a bit later, such that they were walking to uni, with the plan to visit Teknikins Hus (the cool science museum on campus) as I was walking home, so we stopped and chatted a bit before heading our separate ways. We met up again in the evening at the Folk Music session in Gammelstad—they enjoyed listening to the music as much as I always do, and they also enjoyed watching a bit of our folk dance class, but they went out and explored Gammelstad for the second half of class and then rode home with us, where they gave us some gifts for hosting them--a photocopy of a book on nålbindning for Uppsala (part of the reason she sent us the request is that she also likes nålbindning) and a wooden needle she had made.

Tomorrow it is back to class and back to work. We don't have any any more couch surfers scheduled--after getting three requests in a row so quickly I have set my status back to "no" so that we can focus on project and work for a bit. But they were all such nice people hopefully I will remember to turn the status back to "maybe" in a few weeks or so.

This past weekend only had one thing on the calender as the weekend approached: a party for out choir on Saturday evening, to be held at our house. He was on call, so when he got the call on Friday evening that he would have to go to Skellefteå on Saturday morning we formulated a plan: He would do the two hour drive south, do the job, then, on his return trip, stop half way and visit his parents, since he had some things he needed to discuss with his mom. In the meantime I would have the whole morning and afternoon to bake bread for the party and clean the house (which needed it, since we have been too busy with both work and projects to keep on top of the basic cleaning). However, on Saturday morning he called a colleague at the Skellefteå office who agreed to go do the computer repair in his own town and save lord_kjar the trip. He then called his mother, who told him we should come over as they were doing are doing a party for the visiting grandkids and your brother in Skellefteå and his wife and son would be there, too.

Therefore we revised the plan: I started the bread rising, and he started housecleaning. While the bread did the first rising I helped with house cleaning, and then I shaped the loaves (one large loaf with chunks of garlic in it, which would roast to tender goodness while the bread baked, one medium cardamom bread, braided, and one filled loaf using the rest of the cardamom bread dough and a filling of almonds and pistachios in a thickened milk sauce) and put them in the fridge. That took the whole morning, and by noon we were on the road south.

We had a delightful visit with his family (he got to discuss the things with his mom that prompted the call--she is a self-employed accountant/tax prep. person, and we wanted an explanation of the paperwork that had been posted to us by the tax office about our property) and, and while we were chatting she pointed out an ad in her local paper for someone selling a timmerlada (wooden barn/shed originally intended for storing hay) who was asking only 10,000 SEK for it (this is the cost of a nyckleharpa, and about 1/4 of what other people have been adverting used timmerlador for). We have been wanting another shed, so he gave them a call, and we agreed to go look at it the next day.

After having cake and cookies with the family soon after we arrived, and then an early dinner with them a bit later we were back on the road to head home around 16:00. This got us home before 17:00, which gave us a bit more than an hour to get the bread baked and create a table out of saw horses and a door and a bench out of a solid plank and some large bricks so that the kids would have somewhere to sit (the choir is a "student choir", so it is mostly undergrads, but since it is open to all and has only one entrance requirement (must love to sing) there are a few of us who are not undergrads) during dinner.
( the choir party itself and the games we played )

The party broke up around 01:00, and we were in bed by 2:30, which gave almost enough sleep before heading out in the morning to go look at that ( timmerlada for sale )

In Sweden, the first of May is a holiday—spring is a big deal in countries where they have real winter. However, Sweden, being Sweden, since the holiday is the 1st, they celebrate on the 30th of April (they do that at Christmas, too—with the parties and Christmas dinner all happening on Christmas Eve). So, how do they celebrate spring here? Bonfires! Lots of them (do an google image search for "valborg"). The official celebration at the university involves a huge bonfire—the stack of wood they had set up and ready to burn was way taller than I am. It also has an official entertainment program. Our choir (which is a “student” choir for the university, but one needn’t be a student to participate) was the opening act.

Therefore, after a busy day working from home on my part (and getting caught up on laundry in between doing stuff on the computer) we headed into Uni around 17:00 to join the rest of the choir in one last rehearsal and warm-up session, and just before 18:00 we went outside to perform. Had we done this last week it would have been sunny and warm (daytime temps of +10 C (~ 50 F) or so), but yesterday was rainy during the day, and overcast for the performance, with temps only just above freezing. Despite the less than ideal conditions we still had an audience that was larger than the choir (and since we are up to five to eight people per voice these days, our choir is a fairly decent size), and we all enjoyed it—it was fun to sing, and our friends in the crowd said we sounded good.

After our performance we hung around to chat with folks for a bit, and then we returned home with a couple of friends from choir. They have bikes, so they followed us (we had driven in, since we weren’t done with dinner till after it would have been time to start biking). I also wanted a bit of exercise, but didn’t think I could spare the full 45 minutes it would have taken to walk home, so instead I had him drop me off on the side of the road when we were most of the way home, and did a nice 14 minute walk, which got me there only a minute or two before our friends arrived.

Our left-hand neighbours had their bonfire going when we got home (the right hand neighbours had done theirs before we left to go to uni), so we four went out to join them for a bit. I am pleased to report that I was able to participate in conversations in Swedish, and only had to fall back on English words twice while hanging out with them.

Then we went inside and fed our guests some fika (in this case sandwhiches, fruit, nuts, banana muffins (which I had put in the freezer after baking them as the batch was too big to eat at once) and cookies (which I had baked a week or so back, but which keep well). Since we were sitting around the table chatting, I took that opportunity to make my version of hais, which uses a much lower proportion of bread crumbs than the original (but always home-baked bread for the source of the crumbs), and more different types of nuts and dried fruit in addition to the ones mentioned in the provided link. I also never roll mine in sugar—it is better without.

Neither girl had seen this sort of food before, and they happily helped with the grinding (I used an old fashioned hand-crank meat grinder, since our food processor is broken, and we don’t have a mortar and pestle large enough to make this.) and sampling of the finished product. After that we retired to the basement, where we watched a Monty Python movie I had never heard of before—Yellowbeard, and I made some good progress sewing on my new undertunic. (I am so looking forward to wearing this tunic—it is a very soft white linen woven in a herringbone twill pattern.)


Since I had had such a low energy day on Monday, but felt fairly good when I woke up on Tuesday, I opted to start that day with a quick run. The forest path is still not really a pleasant option, since the snow remaining on it gives it the texture of soft beach sand, but there are wet patches in addition. Therefore I opted to just run to the end of our road (which is a dirt road) and back—only 13 minutes, but since this was the second time I have run at all since autumn, I am ok with that. This morning I woke up thinking of projects, and nearly started my day with sewing. But, when I went to get dressed, I saw yesterday’s running clothes hanging on the hook, and that inspired me to do it again. Today I did it in 12 minutes. Granted, my phone log keeping app doesn’t do fractions of a minute, therefore I have no idea if the change in time from yesterday is 60 seconds, or not quite two minutes (since I don’t know if yesterday was 13 min, 59 seconds, or 13 min zero seconds, or something in between).

Since today is a holiday lord_kjar and I will devote much of our day to projects, but right now "we" are filing my taxes (which are due by tomorrow). Which is to say he is dealing with the Swedish web form on his computer and I am providing moral support sitting next to him and keeping him company. That process is nearly done, so it is time to close this and get going with my day.

I haven't really posted much lately, so I thought I would take the time to type up what I have been up to for the past 9 days since my last update...

The big reason I haven't made time for posting is work. I am enjoying the job. Since it is academia I have a fair bit of flexibility in when I work, but I am trying to make certain I am at the office and working during business hours. What time I actually get there in the morning largely depends on when lord_kjar leaves the house. In theory he is meant to be at work at 08:00 every morning, but what time he actually leaves depends on where he will be working first that morning. On the (thankfully rare) days he has to work in Kiruna (about 4 hours drive north of here) he leaves at 04:00, on the days he has to work at an office next to uni (10 minute walk from here) he sometimes doesn't leave till well after 08:00, because the person he would need to meet won't be in earlier than that. As a result my working day has been starting anywhere between 08:00 and 08:45.

At 09:15 (or so) every morning the geologists gather in the tea room for morning fika, and again at 14:15 for afternoon fika. After forgetting to join them the first day I set an alarm to go off at the same times every day. I still don't always make it downstairs for that break, but when I do I enjoy it. There are enough of us in the department from other countries that English is a fairly normal language to hear, but Swedish is even more common, and I am pleased to report that I am catching more and more words when I listen to Swedish conversations progressing at full speed around me.

I have been making decent progress on tasks necessary for publishing papers on my previous research, and have also been making good progress on reading stuff for my new research. On Monday I had my first meeting with folks at the Mine with whom I shall be working for my research. There are several PhD students in our department who are also working on projects with that mining company, so when they heard I was to make the trip south they asked if they could come along because they had things they needed to do on site. As it turned out we wound up splitting up the drive--the uni rental car was delivered to my door at 07:00 on Monday morning (how civilized that it comes to me!), and I picked up student #1 at her home across town on our way south. This got us to the airport at Skellefteå at 09:20, just as the plane was landing. We picked up my boss from that flight, and off we went to the mine.

My boss and I met with a handful of folk at the mine headquarters, and another geologist joined us via video conference from the south of Sweden. I liked everyone I met, and the project sounds like fun. It will take time before they can get me data, now that we have worked out which of the many regions in the area will be my focus, but I will put that time to good use reading the literature they gave me and learning how to use the programs I will need once the data arrives.

After our meeting my boss and I and student #2, who had gotten another ride south drove back north. We dropped him off at the Luleå airport, where his car had been waiting for him for a week while he was off at a conference in Spain, and she and I returned to Uni. I suspect that the slight sniffles I had yesterday and today were picked up on the drive south--student #1 greeted me with the news that she had come down with a cold on Friday, which had interfered with her plans for the weekend. While I didn't touch her or anything she had touched, we were in the car together breathing the same air for 1 and 3/4 hours...

Last weekend was a local SCA event. It was a very pleasant weekend. One of my friends from gaming had been invited along to the event by some of his friends, and since he is slender we were able to dress him in some of my spare tunics. I enjoyed dancing, ran a discussion on the history of the SCA (including reading aloud a "Once upon a time" story about the first ever SCA event that a friend gave me years ago) on Friday night, and I taught a workshop on wool applique on Saturday. I took a nap during the tournament (we had given a friend a ride, so there was no room in the car for my armour, even if I had practiced at all since I got back from Australia--I really should make more time to practice, but the local practice is Sunday mornings, and in the months since my return either we are out of town, or the shire forum contains a post saying "no practice this week", or, occasionally, we are home, and it is on, but we were up way too late on Saturday to get up that early on Sunday.

In addition to the teaching I also enjoyed plenty of SCA dancing and even some Swedish folk dancing at the event. The other violin player on site started playing some folk dance music so first lord_kjar and I danced, then we taught the Schottish to a couple of ladies (luckily I have been dancing the lead at the folk dance class we taught between Sept and the begining of November). Then one of the ladies wanted to dance with her partner, so I looked around for someone else to dance with. One of the guys watching said that he didn't know this kind of dance, but he can dance. Much to my delight he could, too. It took no time at all to walk him through the steps and have him dancing.

Other highlights of the event include singing and time soaking in the shire hot tub. I even got to eat a little of the feast. The first of the food was served at 18:30, which might have been too late for me to be eating, had I interrupted teaching to go get food from my own stash at 16:00 when I got hungry, but I was busy, so I decided to wait and see if I could manage to eat any of the feast. I pulled it off, but it took some effort to avoid getting grumpy due to hunger by the time it was actually time to eat. Of course the little I ate with the first serving filled me up nicely, and the rest of the feast went by without my tasting a thing, but it was nice to eat with people.

We wound up staying on site till the very end of the event on Sunday. The site was meant to close by 12:00, but with a bunch of us around to clean up things were clean and ready to go well before that time. However, the ride that was meant to pick up a bunch of the young people (including my above mentioned gaming friend) wasn't there yet. We couldn't take them in our car which was too full for their bodies even if seat belt laws didn't apply, but we did stick around to keep them company, and the missing rides did show up right at noon. Since it was only a 20 or 25 minute drive home that meant that we had time to not only unload the car but get things put away and spend a couple of hours relaxing before going out for the Swedish Folk music and dance session at a local cafe.

I am particularly fond of those nights, especially as the first one I attended was right after I moved here--that evening was such a fun night I got hooked on Swedish folk dance in addition to being smitten with the wonderful man I had moved here to be with. As we do every time we attend these I dance all night, but he spends part of the time dancing with me and part of the time playing violin with the other musicians. I mostly dance by myself when he isn't available, but this time I did get one of the other musicians to dance one dance with me after he finished his cinnamon roll (that the cafe provided for all musicians) and before he returned to playing.

In other news this week at choir I learned something that will be really, really helpful. Our teacher stayed after choir to work a bit with me to help me with my singing. She explained to me that the lower notes on the standard lines of sheet music (E and F), which is where most of the songs start for the altos, are higher and brighter in sound than my normal speaking voice, while the middle note (B) is well higher than that, and it is only when we drop a couple of lines below the bottom line that we get to notes wherein I need to sing lower than my normal speaking voice. She suggests that I can use this information to help me start looking for notes in the correct range based on where the dots on the page are, and it will be easier to match what I am singing to what my neighbours are singing.

I think that this will be very, very helpful information--I knew that the altos sing lower (generally) than the sopranos, and since I am meant to be singing with the altos I have been trying (when I think about it at all) to sing low--which generally means lower than my speaking voice. Which is not the direction I should have been going at all. No wonder I have such problems. In addition to not being able to tell if the note I am singing is the same as the note someone else is singing at the same time, I was also not even aiming in the correct direction. (Please note that even though I can't tell, I do, often, get the right notes anyway, or so I am told by the others, and I am told that I have gotten much better in the months since moving to Sweden.)

Last night lord_kjar and I made the drive down to Piteå (not quite an hour south) to visit his dad. I am pleased to report that I was able to follow much more of the conversation than last time we visited (his dad doesn't really speak English), and I was able to say some things to him in Swedish. He was quite pleased at my progress. It may be slower than I would like, but it is still noticeable.

But this catch-up has gotten long enough--he is asleep in his chair at the other computer, and I have yoga to do before bed, and tomorrow is a work day. This weekend a friend is coming to visit for the weekend, it will be good to see her again, and on Sunday our choir has a performance in town.

One of the nice things about moving in with someone who has been living in the same community for many years is that it makes developing a local social life very effortless, so long as your interests overlap, which, in this case they do. The first two weeks I was here I went along with archinonlive to his choir practice and sat in the corner and listed to them rehearse for their upcoming performance. Now that the performance has happened and the new term has started the choir is open to new members, and this one has only one entrance requirement "must enjoy singing/want to sing". I easily meet that requirement! Therefore this week instead of sitting in the corner I participated in the singing. Luckily they continued to work on the songs that I'd heard during the practice and performance I'd already heard. Therefore it was reasonably easy for me to join in.

However, one of the songs, in Swedish, has sheet music which is written in the space-saving format of a single line for both altos and sopranos and a second line for both tenors and bases. This is all well and fine for those who are good at reading music. Since I don't fall into that category I spent a number of hours yesterday and today typing up the tune into noteworthy composer with each voice on their very own line so that I can mute the other voices and listen to just the part I need to learn (yet still listen to all of them, too, to see how mine relates to the others). Next I'll translate the words as part of my quest to learn Swedish one song at a time. Alas, the time I spent on this project is time I didn't spend working on finishing up my research from Italy. Why then, am I doing this when it is Very Important (TM) for me to finish that project and get published? Because we have a mini-performance on Friday, and it would be nice to have heard my part before then! Besides, my predecessor in this research project took about 10 years before publishing the results of his experiments. If I can get mine written up within a couple of months of leaving I'll feel good about it. Therefore, if I'm not posting progress reports at least weekly saying that I am working on that goal, please poke me.

Other social activities I'm enjoying include role-playing games, SCA meetings, and jodo & iaido (Japanese sword and staff martial arts I'd never heard of before, but the group welcomes beginners, too, so I went along).

This morning, on the other hand, I went to Oertha for a bardic. Love my internet connection--Skype is my friend. I really enjoyed getting to spend a couple of hours hanging out with friends in Alaska and sing with them, and was more than worth getting up at 05:00 to manage it (that is 19:00 there). archinonlive had to get up for work before the bardic ended, so they got to meet them and he sang them a song in Swedish (not one of the ones I've learned, yet).

I am enjoying my Swedish for Beginners class--I am a bit ahead of my classmates in terms of pronunciation and understanding, due to the extra work on the topic I've been doing with the songs and children's books.