kareina

This weekend (and the week before it, too), have been busy ones on the home improvment front. We have painted one of the walls in the downstairs room a lovely dark blue (and now need to find a source for some silver metalic paint to decorate it, so if you have any suggestions on that part please let me know--bonus points if the source is in Sweden). While at it we also painted the inside of the door to the downstairs water closet the same dark blue, and it looks MUCH better (it had been a dreadful shade of greenish brown before getting scratched up and dammaged looking, and I have been wanting to do something about it since we moved in). That tiny room had been painted a pale baby blue by some previous house owner, and the tiles behind the sink are a similar shade of dark blue, so the blue door looks like it was all meant to go together with a minium of effort on our part. (note: I wouldn't have chose the baby blue, but since the room is only large enough for a sink and a toilet it doesn't look so bad, and I can live with it for however many years elaspe between now and when that room makes it back to the top of the priority list.)

Then we painted the floor of the downstairs room a dark grey, nicely covering all of the white spots from where we had filled in the holes in the concrete where the raised floor (that we took out due to mold) had been attached. Once that dries we can put things back into the room and have it as a useable space again--and more useable than it was before we ripped the floor out, too, since there is no mold left in it.

But most of the weekend was spent outside, enjoying the nice weather and moving strawberries. When we bought the house one of our neighbous had some strawberry patches on our field, and when he heard that we had plans smooth out the field he moved most of them to another property, leaving behind two small patches he didn't want anymore. Since the large rotating tool that we had planed to use on the field was broken last summer those patches were left where they were, and I happily ate (and froze for later enjoyment) strawberries for much of the summer. But this year that tool has been repaired, so when we go fetch the tractor that will come along too, so the berries had to move. Therefore we made a new home for them up on the hill closer to the house, right behind the shed:



Some of the raspberries that surrived winter after their late-autum transplant from a friend's yard to ours are also visible. I suspect that I will like hanging out in this corner of the yard later this summer when the berries are ripe. Must put in a bench...

One can also see the stump of the tree that we had to cut down. Last summer we noticed that it had a few dead branches, which, when we cut them off saw that they were soft and rotted already. Therefore, when none of the branches put out leaves this summer we were not so surprised. When we cut it down we could see that the tree hadn't actually finished dying--there was still water in one small quadrant fo the trunk, but the rest of it was in bad shape. So it is better to have taken it down now, rather than leaving it to fall on its own, especially as it was growing quite close to the shed (which, as you can see, is rather in need of repair and paint, but there are so many other projects on the list we may not get to that this year).

Today and tomorrow lord_kjar is in Stockholm for a class for work, so I have been continuing making progress on the list on my own. Since dropping him off at the airport this morning I fueled the car, washed it and vacumed and cleaned out the interior, did the final coat of paint on the above mentioned floor, spent an hour working on the walkway to the earth cellar, harvested some nettles which were growning too near the smultrons, cooked them up and put them into silicon muffin cups to freeze so that I can add them to recipies later.

As one might expect for a country which extends so far to the north, midsummer is a rather important holiday. The holiday itself was Friday, the 21st, Midsommarafton. We spent it, as we have every year since I arrived in Sweden (this is my third midsummer here!) with the folk music/dance community. The day started with a gathering at the gillestuga in Gammelstad at 10:00 for a quick dance rehearsal, followed by lunch for all the musicians and dancers. Lunch ended just on time to head over to the open air museum in Gammelstad and raise the leaf-and flowered covered cross and lead the children (both large and small) in the traditional dances around the cross, followed by our dance performance. The crowd there to enjoy the beautiful day and the traditional activities was quite large (the number 7000 was mentioned by one of the other dancers, but I am not certain where she got it), yet I saw a few people I know in the crowd. However, I didn't have a chance to speak to any of them, since it was time to hurry over to a park near city center, and do it all again.

The crowd in town was noticeably smaller than the one in Gammelstad, so there was much more room for dancing, which was fun. As he does every year at midsummer lord_kjar didn't dance with us, but instead ran the sound system for the music at the park in town, which he rather enjoys doing. I can't complain about losing my favourite dance partner for the day, since the man I wound up dancing with instead is one who has been a very good dancer since well before either lord_kjar or I were born, and is always a pleasure to dance with.

After the second dance performance ended we took the sound equipment back to Gammelstad, and joined some of the other dancers and musicians for a dinner of leftovers from lunch (I had, of course, brought some food with me to eat between the provided lunch and dinner) and then we finally returned home some eight hours after leaving the house.

Soon after we arrived home liadethornegge arrived. She had spend the day in the area, and was going to spend the night at our place, to save having to drive back and forth two days in a row. It was lovely getting a chance to visit with her--we both tend to be too busy at events to slow down and talk much.

Our event started around mid-day on Saturday. I got up early enough to bake a large loaf of garlic bread (of the sort where one puts in many whole (or half, depending on how big they are) cloves of garlic into the bread so that they roast and become soft pockets of yumminess within the bread) that came out of the oven around the time the first of the other guests started arriving.

It was a lovely, low-key SCA event. We danced a little, sang some songs, worked on handicrafts, chatted, ate yummy food, and in the evening soaked in the shire hot tub (which we had fetched last week so that it would be available). We had around a dozen people, and a good mix of long time SCA people, people new to the SCA, and some friends from choir and folk music, too. Some are local, and some drove from as far away as Skellefteå (two hours south of here). One of the guys who came up from Piteå is merchant, from whom I had purchased some yarn at an event sometime in the last year or so. I am currently using that yarn to nålbind some socks, and they are about half as tall as I want them to be, but I am running low of yarn. So I emailed him this week and asked if he could bring me more. He did, and the price was so reasonable I bought another six skeins--so I should be able to make a few more things from it when this project ends. I love not needing to actually go shopping, but just have what I need show up when I need it, ready to purchase with no effort on my part.

We did wind up spending the day inside (except for hottubbing and using the bbq to cook), since it was a rainy & blustery day, but we had enough fun that I don't think anyone minded (well, save for the one friend who couldn't stay due to an allergy to the visiting dog. I had told another friend last week that he could bring his old, small, and well behaved dog with him to the event, since we had planned to be outside all day, and his dog is too old to be left home alone all day. However, when I woke up to the rain I had forgotten that the dog was coming too, and when they arrived I didn't feel I could ask him to leave the dog outside in the rain and wind, so I let him in (but insisted that the dog stay on the floor, which is easily cleaned later, and not the nice wool rug I use for a yoga mat). The dog was quiet and well behaved, so I didn't mind having him there, until a friend arrived who couldn't risk staying, since she is allergic to dogs. Sigh. I would have loved to have had her company, too, but she said she was content to go visit her grandchildren instead.

People wandered home early enough that we had the kitchen cleaned back up by midnight, and got to sleep at a reasonable hour. Today we started the part of the yard work we have been putting off till after the event--the root cellar! The area we want to build the root cellar happened to already have some of the lovely, tiny, strawberries that the Swedes call smultron growing on it, so I moved them (and the dirt they were growing on) over to the area next to the shed, while lord_kjar used the tractor to do a bit more work on the lower part of our field. Once I had rescued most of the berries he brought the tractor up and started the digging, which involved alternating between using the forklift point to loosen and carry away single large rocks, and using the large scoop to carry away bunches of small stones and earth. I helped for part of this by using the huge steel rod to loosen up some of the medium sized stones to make them easier for the tractor to scoop up. Other bits of the project I was inside the house working on organizing stuff there. His dad's tractor isn't a huge one, so this process takes rather longer to do than it does to describe, so I had plenty of time to be useful in both ways.

We managed to do what is likely to be about half of the digging for the root cellar, and after that was done we also made time to bring in the ladder and finally hang the light above the stairs that has been sitting on the floor under the kitchen shelves for six months waiting for us to put it up. Granted, we still need to actually run electricity to that light, but that is progress, nonetheless.

Now I am curled up at my computer--first time I have touched it all weekend, and he is watching the Lord of the Rings on his, which, I must point, is somewhat distracting. I started typing at the opening prologue began, and now Frodo is waking up in Rivendel after his near death experience at Weathertop. Somehow I doubt that it would have taken me so long to type if he had chosen a less interesting way to relax....