kareina

 I have been so busy working on my thesis that I had forgotten that my many weeks ago past self had sent in an abstract for a conference. In Gothenburg, in January. Past me was thinking "by then my thesis will be done, so I can go present my work, and, since it is halfway to Drachenwald Coronation in Germany from here, I can just keep on going to the event".

Even though I know and believe that I will be happy with either path--either the interview for the PhD position in Medieval Archaeology at the University of Bergen will lead to a job offer and I will move, or I get to stay here, in a place I love, still the background stress of not knowing if I will be moving in October seems to be effecting my ability to focus on work in the meantime. I know what the source is, I know it shouldn't be an issue, but still my log of work hours and list of work accomplishments makes it clear that I am not as productive just now as I would like to be.

They told me at the interview that it could be "at least two weeks" (at one point in the conversation) or "two or three weeks" more (at another point in a conversation) before things progressed to the job offer stage. Monday will have been three weeks, and I hadn't heard anything as of the end of the business day on Friday, so I will try to just enjoy the weekend and not think too much about it.

This is in total contrast to my reaction to my other job application that is still outstanding. Just before I went to Bergen for the interview I saw an ad for exactly what I am doing now, except full time, with a better base rate of pay, in a part of Canada where there is snow on the ground six months of the year (and since I love snow better than any other possible weather conditions, I applied, pointing out in my cover letter what a good match my CV was to what they are looking for). They sent a prompt "thanks, we received your application packet" note, and I hadn't heard anything further from them, and I pretty much even forgot about having sent it. However, yesterday I got a note asking me to please let them know my citizenship and/or permanent residence status. I wrote back promptly saying that I hold citizenship in three countries, Sweden, Australia, and USA, and that of these, I felt that Australia would be the most useful passport for a move to Canada, and sent them a photo copy of the Australian passport. So, clearly, they agreed enough with my assessment of the CV match to think it worth asking. Now, if I were them, and I had two candidates who are qualified for the position, and one of them is already legal to work in Canada, and the other would need immigration paperwork, I would choose the one who didn't need immigration paperwork, even if the other were otherwise a stronger candidate. Therefore I am not necessarily expecting that application to lead to an interview, but, on the other hand, neither would it surprise me if they did want to have at least a chat over skype. Either way, there is no sense of this one contributing to my stress levels.

On the other hand, my personal life has some nice highlights recently. Since last I posted we had the performance of the Kadrilj från Sörbyn, the 16 person dance that was traditional at weddings in this area a century and more ago. We did that at the Spelmansstämman held in Boden in conjunction with the town's 100'th birthday celebration. This is the first time that I have been to a Spelmansstämman in Boden, but during the event I found out why--it has been 30 years since the last time they had one! It was a lovely, fairly small, Spelmansstämman. I recognised a high percentage of the folk in the audience as being active in the local folk music and dance scene (Boden is a half an hour drive inland from Luleå, close enough that the two cities share a hospital half way between them. There is a small village near the hospital, but nothing else in the way of city development in the area--just a huge building not far from the highway sticking up out of fields and forest).

Since neither of our cars were working I got a ride out to the event with the lovely couple who organised our dance performance. They have both been doing folk and other dance in the Luleå area pretty much all of their lives--and I attended his 80'th Birthday party some years back, so he may well have met some of the people who did the Kadrilj från Sörbyn at the wedding in Boden 100 years ago--it was the fact that the dance got mentioned in the newspaper as part of the wedding festivities at the time that prompted us to choose that dance for the performance, and before we did the dance he gave a short lecture on the dance customs back then. They opted to head back to Luleå directly after the last of the day time performance and not stay for the evening dances, and I didn't have the motivation to ask after other possible rides home, so I went home too.

Much of that week David spent trying to fix my car. When I had taken it in for the annual inspection the week before I went to my job interview they said that it needed a new spring for the left front tire, and the extra break lights above the back window were working. We were given the deadline of the weekend I was in Bergen to have it done, and if not, then we wouldn't be permitted to drive it till it was fixed.

Since I was focused on preparing for the interview I decided not to worry about it till we got back, and David, who, having talked with his brother, who fixes up old cars for a hobby, felt that he would be able to fix it himself, was also busy just then, so he ignored it. However, his car had had a warning light for some important issue of the sort that doesn't make it impossible to drive, but if you don't do something about it there will be consequences later, so he booked time in the shop for that car. Then, while I was in Boden one day as he was driving between the house and the apartment there was a clunk, after which he could only put the car into certain gears, so he quit driving his car, other than to drop it off at the shop a few days early for its appointment.

This suddenly pushed fixing my car a bit higher on his priority list. Sadly, my car is old enough that pretty much everything that can rust shut had, so he spent one 13 hour day just trying to get the spring out, gradually opening up more and more things in hopes that one of the possible access points would work. A day or two later he tried again, and this time managed to get to it. However, in the process one of the bolts holding the wheel to the axel broke, and the shaft needed to be drilled out. While working on that he noticed that there was another part that was in bad enough shape that it needed replacing too, so the next day I did the bike ride out to pick up that part (half an hour each way), and the following day I biked back out to get the bolt and nut needed to put the tire back on the axel. He got everything back together on Thursday, and it started on the first try (yay!), and then we found the place where the wire to that break light had broken and he soldered it back together. The next day I took it back to the inspection place, arriving 5 minutes early. They looked at it directly, and I was out with the piece of paper saying we are good to drive for another year one minute before my appointment time.

Then I celebrated having a car by doing a largish grocery shopping trip, went home and cooked a bunch of yummy food. Linda, who is back in Sweden for a couple of weeks visit came over and helped me eat it and has been staying for a couple of days. She and I are heading south with Oscar later today for a birthday party of mythological proportions in Umeå (three hours south of here), which leaves my car free for David to use tomorrow for going to help his brother butcher the moose he got.

In my dream last night I had flown into a major airport, where I met up with linda_linsefors and we proceeded to walk through the airport, till we went through a door beyond which we were to show our passports in preparation to go through security on our way to our next flight. I was very aware in the dream that this was one of those airports in which this was a "point of no return", that once we had gone through this checkpoint we couldn't go back again. Suddenly I looked down at the little black pull along carry-on sized suitcase I was dragging, and realized that it wasn't mine, that someone I was dragging her bag, and that we had left all of my luggage behind. So, rather than taking my passport out I asked the guy at the desk if we could go back and get my stuff. The next thing I knew we were at the customer service desk for my airlines, and they were fetching me out my little black little black pull along carry-on sized suitcase, which looked different from linda_linsefors. At that point we started to turn to go, when I realized that, actually, I had checked that bag on the last flight, but I also needed my littler bag to be carried from my shoulder that I had used on a carry on (Note: both suitcases also exist in the real world, one is the one I use these days when I travel, the other is an older one I used to use, but I gave to linda_linsefors when she needed a bag of that type for conference travel. However, the little shoulder bag I had as a carry on bag I don't recognize at all, and I wonder why I wasn't using my every day backpack, which has many advantages over the open-topped bag in the dream?)

After the customer service agent fetched me the littlest bag, too, linda_linsefors then spent some time trying to reorganize all of our stuff, because we now also had a bunch of loose stuff that needed to be packed, and we were worried we had too much to take with us based on luggage allowances, so we needed to make it all fit, and the pair of scissors I had in my hand had to be packed into the bag we were going to check, since we can't carry it on the next flight. Through this part of the dream I was feeling stressed and worried about getting everything packed so we could continue our journey, since we still needed to walk back to the passport guy, and then go through security, find our gate, and board the plane before it takes off.

At this stage I woke up, not feeling any where near as rested as one would hope after nearly eight hours of sleep.

If ever a dream was a clear message from one's subconscious, this one is. It wants me to take the time of finishing up everything that isn't done from the last stage of the journey before embarking on the next stage, and it wonders if there is time to do this. Given that I do have a report and paper to finish up for my research project, the contract for which is ending with the end of this month, and starting starting in January I go on 1/4 time at work with some new duties plus the huge list of projects I have been waiting to start "once this job ends", the message from my subconscious is not news at all. Why is it that dream messages rarely have anything new to impart, but so often just emphasize what we already know with our waking minds?

In other news, I had lots of fun at the Frostheim Jul event last night--it was a lovely, low key event wherein I got to chat one on one with most of the (about 20 to 25?) people there, did a bit of singing, and actually got to eat food because the potluck started early enough in the evening. I also tried skyr for the first time, and found out that it is available in local grocery stores. Will so be looking for it when we go grocery shopping later this afternoon! Yum!

This afternoon we are finally going to see the Hobbit. It will be interesting to see if I can manage to keep from twitching about differences between the book and the film, given that I have read the book so many times since I was a kid, and the most recent reading was in Swedish the first half of this year, and I also read it out loud to lord_kjar the summer of 2012, so it is all quite fresh in my mind.

The dream: I had been visiting a friend of mine (who in reality lives here in Milan) in Germany, about a 30 minute short flight north of Seattle. The day had arrived that I was due to fly back to Seattle, where mom would pick me up from the airport. Suddenly I realized that since I was flying RyanAir I needed to print my boarding pass, but my friend didn't have a printer. So we decided to go out looking for a print shop, figuring that it would be cheaper to pay the cost of printing at a print shop than to pay the €40 the airlines would charge to print the boarding pass at the airport. We left his house (which, incidentally looked *nothing* like the apartment he lives in here in Milan) and got into a small (4 seater) plane and took the five minute flight over the water to a city in Russia. The tiny airport terminal (about the size of the airport in Kotzebue, Alaska) we arrived at had an internet connection, so I checked in for my flight and created the boarding pass. Then someone asked when my flight was going to depart, and I managed to actually focus on the writing on the boarding pass (does anyone else have problems reading in their dreams? It seems like it is always difficult to get my eyes to focus on text when I am dreaming) which said that my flight was departing at 15:00, but it was already 17:00, and I was a bit confused, because I thought that I was supposed to fly in the evening, not during the day. So then I started trying to find a good deal on another flight to Seattle, this time from Russia, knowing that with the change in location it would be a 40 minute flight instead of a 30 minute one. I woke up before finding the next flight, but I did have the sense that it wasn't a real problem (other than mom likely being annoyed to have gone to the airport to fetch someone who wasn't there) because I could just do this other thing instead.

I think perhaps, it might be time to check all of the various deadlines I've got on my plate, to see if I'm forgetting anything I should be doing...

I spent the morning and afternoon trying some more calculations which, as it turns out, simply didn't work. Sigh. Therefore of the 6 1/2 hours of Uni work I did today, 4 hours, 40 minutes turned out to be a waste of time. However, after I gave up on that attempt and went for a walk I suddenly started being productive--this evening I managed to write an additional 759 words and completed another 6 figures and tables for the thesis, and there was much rejoicing!

And my advisor has finally returned the chapter he looking at, so as soon as I get this one done (soon, I hope!) I've got plenty to do for the next.


I have also determined that we control freaks don't like letting others do for us. With the date of our move starting to loom closer clovis_t has started the process of packing our books. My did I have a reaction to that--I am *not* accustomed to anyone other than me packing my books, and whilst he is keeping an inventory of which books are going into which box, still I'm a twitching for not doing it myself. I so need to learn to delegate! And since I *can* let him do the books, and he can't do my thesis, I'll learn to cope, but still! And knowing that I won't be unpacking them when we move in with his parents doesn't help. I am normally a unpack everything and have all the books on the shelves and everything else put away within two weeks of moving into a place, but we don't know how long we will be here or how much notice we will have before moving, and there isn't much room in the one room we will have at their house, so it *does* make more sense to pack things well enough to ship them, and leave them packed while we stay there. But darn it, those are my books, I love them. Even when I don't have time to read them, I still want to be able to gaze upon their spines and marvel upon them...