kareina: (garden)
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.
kareina: (house)
It has been 295 days since we first lifted up the paving stones that had made up the walkway to our house. That path had several issues which promoted us to want to change it--it was lower on one end than the grass surrounding it, so when it rained it was covered with a puddle, it ran along the edge of the house directly where snow from the roof landed when falling from the roof, meaning either extra work for shoveling, or shoveling a path that didn't have the paving stones there-under, the width of the path wasn't as wide as our nice push-along snow shovel, and it was a boring straight path.

old walkway
So we took it out last June and started the process of setting a new walkway into the ground. We managed to get it about 1/3 of the way set in before winter arrived (in between all of the other outdoor projects we were also working on) and we had to take a 133 day break from the project. However, this spring has been unusually warm and early, so we were able to resume work on the project on April 9th, and today, at long last, the project is done! Granted, the big reason we were able to get it done so quickly this spring is that while it has been warm, it isn't yet consistently warm enough (i.e. above freezing at night, too) to risk playing with concrete to resume work on the earth cellar walls yet).

view from path entrance

view with house

and with shed too

It was necessary to purchase some additional cobblestones--the ones his dad gave us (left over from their own landscaping projects) wasn't enough to finish the job, but we found a cheap source for them very near by. We will also be buying some large building stone that they have that will be nice for use in the earth cellar.

The rest of the afternoon we plan to spend making music with some friends from the choir, and then the mid-week holiday is over (yes, Swedes get 1 May off of work, and a half day on 30 April, too) and we go back to work.

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