kareina

 I had a wonderful time at Höstdansen, the SCA event held by the Shire of Uma this weekend, at which we spent many hours dancing, and many hours singing, and many hours just enjoying the company of old friends and new.  Therefore I came home inspired to finally write the song to the theme of "Hav" (sea) that I need for next month's Norrskensbard competition.

I decided to write about the event that started the Viking Age:

This is a filk to the song Uti vår hage, a popular folk song known to pretty much every person in Sweden. Therefore, I am hoping that by printing out the lyrics and sheet music to bring to the event I can get people to sing along. Sadly, the original is very likely not at all period (the earliest recorded version dates to the 1800's, so it might be older than that, but I doubt if it is much older, but hopefully the part where everyone knows the tune will help people to enjoy it.

If anyone has any suggestions for improvement for the song, I would love to hear them, but if not, I think it will do just fine. Now I just need to decide which period song to perform, and what I should do for my Piece in a Period style.  

Yesterday evening my friend Kaarina asked me to have a look at her documentation for her 12th Night A&S competition entry. Reading her poem and her write-up on the style she used for it inspired me to also want to enter one of my songs or poems. A reply to my quick note to Kingdom A&S confirmed that I wouldn't need to be present to enter, and it is ok if the piece has been used in a local competition, so long as it hasn't been entered at Kingdom. Therefore I have just spent the evening writing up a first draft of my documentation, during which I discovered that the Harley manuscript 978, in which Summer is icumen in first appears (f. 11v), is available on line. Even better, the song has a text-box insert in latin which explains that it is a round and the fact that the second voice begins at the location of the red cross in the sheet music. So totally cool! And something I never would have known if not for her inspiration to do this. (If anyone wants to see my documentation, leave a comment and I can send you a copy. Mom, I will just send you one anyway, you don't have to ask.)

To make things even better, Kaarina is willing to find some other singers to perform my song as a round at 12th Night. Sadly, I won't be at the event (which is being held in southern Finland the same weekend as I will be attending the wedding of a friend here in northern Sweden), but with luck someone will record it for me. It is a good thing I am not competitive at all, since I am competing against a woman who is so amazingly talented at song writing. She tells me she isn't competitive either, and is just happy to inspire people to do more music.

In other news, work is going well. While we had issues with the ICP-MS earlier in the week, and team viewer session with a tech in the UK sorted them out, and I am once again running trace element composition maps. My colleagues all want to get me to full time, as soon as the budget permits, and now that we are starting to get external users (paying customers) to the lab, the odds of this happening go up. Of course now that we have paying customers, I had to actually look up what my salary comes to by the hour, since our lab price for internal users and others from academia is one rate for the machine time, and the addition of my salary for the time I work on the job. Therefore I sent an email to accounting and asked "just what does it come to by the hour?". She replied by sending me a spreadsheet containing the salaries for everyone in our Division and how those monthly rates translates into hourly cost. This is a fascinating document. I mentioned this to one of my colleagues, and she said "yes, that information isn't secret", but I wouldn't have known where to find it before getting the spreadsheet. So, of course, I have used the filter option to compare people of different rank/job title. There isn't so much variation within a given rank (though, of course, there is some), but the highest paid person in our division (a chaired professor who is Very Good at getting us funding) does make about 2.6 times what I make. I was very pleased to note that there doesn't appear to be any gender-based difference in salary earned in our Division--the variation is totally related to job title, and in the upper levels if there is only one woman in the level she is either the highest or in the upper half of the group for that level (we often have only three our four people at a given level, which is how it happens that there are sometimes only one who happens to be female).

Tomorrow is Friday, which means I get to stay home, do house work, bake myself a birthday cake, and do other prep work for Saturday's party. It will be interesting to see how many people are able to make it to the party on Saturday, and how many of them are there at what times of the day.