kareina

 Several more days have passed as I work as a rock carver at the museum. I wake early, do 12 or 15 minutes gentle workout (DownDog has released their new pilaties app, and I have tested it, and find it a nice wake up and a good combination of movement and effort), spend a half an hour or so on the phone with Keldor as he drives to work, and get myself ready to head up the hill.

[Some mornings I am too early, and housekeeping isn't in sight to get them to let me in to the longhouse,  so I put my bags in the woodshed and take a walk. Others they are, and I go in directly and start carving. I have now put in 37 hours on this stone since arriving, and it really looks like it will be a pot. Perhaps it is even possible to achieve my goal of before I leave on Sunday. We will see. (For photos see my album on FB).

After work I call Keldor and we chat for a bit before evening activities. On Tuesday there was a crafts night at the longhouse for all of us workers, and it was the birthday for Emilia, so there was cheesecake.

So Tuesday I started carving early, carved some hours, went home and baked a plain cake (cut 50 5 flour into 2 c flour and 2 t baking powder. Stir in 3 large eggs, half a cup of greek yoghurt and half a cup of water, bake in a buttered glass pan) which was really yummy. As the only glass baking pan in this house is a casserole dish my cake was thicker in the pan for optimal baking, so in the time it took to be nicely golden on top the middle was still liquidy. However, I love, love, love cake batter (I had already happily licked the bowl), and I was hungry now, so I cut into it anyway, and happily ate several small pieces of cooked cake with warm batter, and loved every bite (which is why I kept going back for more). I then put it back in the oven for a short time as I did a few other things, then took it out still a little soft in the middle, put the casserole dish lid on the pan, and left it on the counter as I went down for a nap.

After my nap I sliced the plain cake, which had finished cooking as it cooled, and filled my wooden box with the slices to bring to the crafts night to share. We had at least 8 people gathered. I started to cut out a new tunic, but then decided I would rather be social, so I packed my fabric back into the basket, got out my nålbinding, and joined the game of Settlers of Catan that was about to begin, where I was lucky enough to get blue, despite being the third to choose my colour.

The bord was terrible this time--all the wheat in a line at one edge next to the desert, all the sheep in a line at the other. I was second to choose my starting places, so while I managed to get myself both a 6 and an 8, my only stone was a 12, and I had no access to wheat at all. Thom, who was third too choose, had placed one of his pieces directly on the oppisite side on the 8 from one of the other pieces (3 road segments away), meaning that there were a variety of potentially good places to build a house that were not possible as they were too close to someone, which frustrated everyone, but he looked pretty pleased with the resulting chaos.

He set the second one of his pieces on an 8-3-3 intersection, it being one of the few places left that complemented what he alread had, and, much to everyone's surprise, 3 rolled often in the first half of the game, and he quickly got to 8 points while the rest of us were still at 2 to 5 points. Then the rest of us finally managed to get our numbers to come up, and we slowly started to amass points.

While we were gathered in the crafts end of the house a bus load of tourists from the cruise ship was enjoying a feast in the feasting all portion of the house. As their feast wound down and it was time for their tour of the rest of the house we set a stool on the table, leaned a spear against it and draped my fabric overall to cover the modern playing board, and we all went into the staff room to hide during the tour (most of us were in modetn clothes, only Jan and I were in viking age clothing).

After the tourists left we resumed play, with Jan taking over for Thom, who had needed to head home early, and someone else (I forget who) taking over for Emilia.  Much to our surprise, while Thom had had a strong lead before the break, we had a few more rounds if play before Jan finally took Thom's start to victory, and had he not won there the next person already had the cards she needed to win, and had it come to me I would have one if I had gotten any resources at all, so the game wound up much closer than expected.

Most nights Keldor and I mert to do yoga over zoom at 21:00, but Tuesday I didn't leave the party till 22:00, at which point he was already asleep, so I did it on my own.

Wednesday evening I finally managed to gather the photos I have taken this trip and put them on FB. This wasn't as easy as it sounds, since the photos I took while driving were taken in FB messenger and sent directly to Keldor, as it was faster to stop and send him a photo message (we were taking on the phone just then, and he wated to see). This meant thay I needed to go download those photos one at a time to the computer before they could be added to the ones I have taken with my camera app and decide whic ones to upload (which was most of them, not counting many more carving progress photos).

Now it is time to head up the hill for another day's carving.

Now that I finally have a chance to do so, I will try to remember the rest of my Trondheim trip. When last I left off typing about itwe were still in Sollefteå, waiting for the car to be fixed. Since I have posted twice since then you have probably guessed that it was, in fact, fixed. They had it done late enough in the day that, even though we departed promptly for Trondheim, it was 23:20 before we arrived at the airbnb we had booked, so we just did yoga and went straight to sleep. The next morning we decided to head straight down the hill and look for adventures. It took about an hour to get from our room to the place where the boat would have departed for the island with the monastery (see above post for link). However, there was a sign saying that the season for it doesn’t open for another few weeks. So instead we went over to the cathedral. They wouldn’t permit photos inside, so Hjalmar took out pencil and paper and drew sketches of patterns in the stone that he liked, thinking that they would make good patterns for embroidery.

From there we went on a quest for lunch, since we hadn’t had time to cook anything before leaving the room, and we had finished the road food, and the food we made at Åsa’s before arriving in Trondheim (three days to do do a 10 hour drive will do that to food supplies). After looking for a while we found an Indian restaurant that had both things I was willing to eat and he was able to eat (he is both gluten/grain intolerant and can’t have milk products). After that we went to the museum associated with the cathedral, and when it closed met my friend Agnes (the geologist I met at an SCA event in Stockholm the year before I moved to Sweden) and her partner at a local restaurant, where they had just finished eating, and walked with them to an ice cream stand over by the harbour. It had been a rather hot day, so I happily ate some raspberry sorbet to help recover from the heat (and, since they had sorbet, Hjalmar could have some, too). We hung out with them till about 19:00, and then they gave us a ride up the hill, for which my toes were very grateful. It was the first time this year that I have worn my sandals, and I managed to raise blisters on my big toes as the straps were too tight.

Once home we rested a bit and then walked back to the nearby grocery store we had passed, to discover that it was closed for the holiday. So we consulted with google and realised that all of the nearby stores were closed, but there was one only a bit further away that was open for another hour. So we got the car and went to get some food. Luckily, google was correct, and that one was open. We had thought to head straight back to the room and cook food for lunch the next day (and Hjalmar’s second dinner). However, as we were in line to pay my phone rang. It was Johannes, my contact at the stone workshop. He and his family had been in town for adventures on the holiday, and he had only just seen my message in reply to his of the day before telling me that he would be in town. He explained that he wasn’t planning on working on Friday, and that he lives 1.5 hours from the city (including time on a ferry), so my only chance to meet him in person was just then. So we stopped by the room long enough to put the frozen blueberries in the freezer and the other food into the fridge (except for the jar of olives, which Hjalmar brought along and then ate for his second dinner), and then drove down the hill, meeting Johannes, his wife, and six year old daughter on the grass between the cathedral and the river. We had a nice visit with them, and then returned up the hill at 22:00, and finally cooked food for Friday’s lunch.

The kitchen that the airbnb was sadly lacking in many things I would consider basic, but it had a rice cooker. Therefore we tossed some rice in to cook, and then poured a bag of frozen mixed veg on top and let it cook while we did yoga. This meant that we made it to bed at just after midnight, which meant that I wasn’t surprised when Hjalmar decided to sleep in when I got up at 06:30. I managed to walk down the hill in only 52 minutes, which put me at the workshop at 08:19. I was met on arrival by Eva, who did her Bachelor’s thesis on: Fra fast fjell til gryte: Å arbeide med kleberstein, - hva skjuler seg i prosessen? (From solid rock to cooking pot: Working with soapstone, - what is hiding in the process?). She also wrote one of the chapters (on how soapstone quarrying was done in the middle ages) in the book on soapstone in the north. I knew who she was, of course, from that chapter but until Johannes had told me the night before to look for Eva, I hadn’t realised she works at the cathedral.

She presented me with a large octagonal block of soapstone, and showed me how to mark lines on it and cut off the corners, using a claw foot chisel for most of the work, then a smooth edge one to flatten off the edges, and a flat headed axe to then gently tap away the last of the raised bit in the middle, before switching to a rasp to file it to a new plane. She told me that I might have time to convert two or three corners into nice smooth planes on that day, and I managed 5.5 of them (see the post from the other day for a photo) before the last person working that day was ready to go home and I had to be done. Hjalmar, who joined me in the workshop about an hour after I arrived, was kind enough to walk back up the hill to get the car, since the block of stone (and the smaller ones they gave him) were too big to carry back up. This meant I had an extra hours I could work.

I have a copy of Eva’s thesis, which includes photos of the process, and I took photos of the various tools. Now I need to make time to assemble some scrap wood into a trough to hold the pot in progress (one fills the trough with soapstone sand (I brought some with me, and they had plenty to spare, creating more on a daily basis as they do) and then sets the pot in it, and it stays where one wants it to while working) so that I can get back to work on it.

After we were done in the workshop I was tired and just wanted to head back to the room, but Hjalmar, who had much less time carving stone than I (he also spent more time during the lunch break talking to people, while I returned promptly to carving), wanted to do more exploring Trondheim. So I left him in town and drove the car home and spent the evening happily relaxing with my computer and cooking more food for the trip home. I wanted to make some naan, but after I got the dough mixed I realised that the oven, which I had turned on when I started, hadn’t actually gotten warm at all. So I buttered each piece, cooked the butter side on a frying pan, buttered the other side, cooked that one on the frying pan, and then put it into the microwave for a bit to get the middle bit, while I started the next piece. It worked. I can’t say that it was the best naan I had ever had, but it worked, and it gave me some bread for road food. A bit later I saw the owner of the place, and told him that the oven wasn’t working, and he told me I could use his kitchen upstairs. I asked how late that offer was open, as we also wanted to bake some cookies. He said any time, so I took him at his word, and when Hjalmar got home at 22:10 we went up stairs and invented another gluten-free, milk-free cookie:

Blueberry cookies with almond meal and rice flour

1 bag of frozen blueberries (minus the handful I had had with my muesli that morning)
1 T coconut oil
The rest of the almond meal we had (~1/2 cup? 1 cup?)
Some rice flour (add it last, in small amounts, till it feels right).

Partially thaw berries in the microwave and mash. Mix in the rest of the ingredients (it would be wise to blend the oil with the flours first, instead of putting it directly into the still cold berries like we did) till it forms a wet but coherent dough. Drop by spoonfuls onto a baking tray and bake till they are solid and the bottoms start to brown.

These were quite yummy. Very mild, not so sweet, but very delightful (and purple!) road food.

However, we stayed up late enough baking that I didn’t even start yoga that night till 01:12 on Saturday morning, which meant that I slept in, not getting up till after 10:00. I took my time getting ready that morning, packed up the food, loaded the car, and we were finally ready to start driving at about 13:00. On the advice of Agnes and her partner our first stop was to see the long house at the Stiklestad fold museum. From their we continued north on the E6, with the plan of staying in Norway till Mo i Rana, where we would turn east to cross into Sweden and then work our way north east back to Luleå. Therefore we asked the GPS for Mo i Rana. While the phone GPS is easier to use (especially if one wants to see the full suggested route at once), using the actual GPS means that it will constantly tell us what speed we are going, what the current speed limit it, and how many hours to the destination. After some hours of driving the GPS told us to exit the E6 to #73 and continue on our way another hour or two to the destination. So we took the exit, drove past a really pretty mountain in the Hattfjelldal area (there were, sadly, no parking areas anywhere along that road from which one could see that mountain). Some time later we found a parking area with very pretty views in all directions, so we stopped there for yoga (see my FB cover photo), after which I lay down on the mattress in the car for a 20 minute nap while he had some food, and then we resumed driving.

Not so very long thereafter we saw a sign announcing that we had reached the Swedish border, which really surprised us, since the GPS said it was still an hour and a half or so to Mo i Rana. So checked the map, and we realised that the computer had decided to send us an odd way to Mo I Rana, and if we followed its instructions it would tell us to turn north again at Tärnaby and then head back towards Norway again. That didn’t make much sense in terms of heading home, so instead we cancelled that destination, and suggested that the GPS just guide us home instead. Which it did, with no further weird routes. We had originally planned to sleep somewhere on the way and make it a two day trip home, since when we had asked google in advance it told us that Trondheim-Luleå by way of Mo i Rana would be 14 hours of driving time. However, due to the different path we wound up taking, we spent only 15 hours total, including all of the stops for adventures, toilets (or road side), and petrol, arriving at my place at 04:00 Sunday morning.