kareina

...About how life is the process of telling oneself that "after this week things will slow down again", and then repeating it weekly thereafter.

When last I posted I had been home from 12th Night for a week, and only just managed to finish blogging about the event, and should thus have more time...

Have I mentioned that I have enrolled in the Lövånger folkhögskola?  The literal translation for "folkhögskola" is "public high school", but this is not a good translation.  This is a public educational system for adults that is aimed at people who either didn't go to Gymnasium (the Swedish upper secondary school aimed at people who are either going to go on to University, or who are going into a trade, either way it is a focused education on the specific path the student has chosen (e.g. their planned university major, or their prefered trade), or who did, but now want to study something else, perhaps for fun, perhaps as a step to a different career path.  This is the first year they have had a folkhögskola. It is being provided by the Edelviks folkhögskola, 43 km inland from here, and I am delighted that the school popped into existence at the exact time that I had been thinking "when I get my thesis submitted, I should find a Swedish course of the sort that Swedes take in highschool, I think I have gotten good enough at the language that I could manage it".


The program they are offering is the "Almän kurs", which offers the base classes that are offered in gymnasium, but not the speciality-specific ones that one would have had if one actually enrolled in in a gymnasium program.  The package they offered is: Svenska, Engelska, Samhällskunskap, Religionskunskap, Historia (Swedish, English, Community knowledge (or social studies), religion knowledge, and History).  On the first day of class (Monday 15 January, the morning after we returned from 12th Night), the school director came in and had a one-on-one conversation with each student to devise our personal study plan.  When I first applied for the course I wrote that I wanted the Swedish course, but didn't even think of the other options.  After talking to the director I agreed to attend also the social studies and history classes, in a large part because they would require me to actually use my Swedish. This turns out to have been a Very good idea, and I am absolutely loving being a student again!


The program is "half time", which means we meet two days a week. On Mondays there is an hour of Swedish class starting at 10:30, followed by a 20 minute break, after which there is an hour of English class (I sit in the other room and do my Swedish, work on my own, which means that I am available if anyone wants help with their English, as I am the only native speaker of English in the group). Then we get an hour for lunch (I normally stay and keep studying in between eating what I brought with me, or talk with my classmates), then we have an hour of Swedish Literature, and are done for the day.

The morning Swedish class is writing exercises, with a little group discussion, and the after lunch Swedish class is reading aloud as a group and discussing what we are reading.  None of us in this group are native Swedish speakers.  We have one German woman who was sent to Sweden for safety during WWII, arriving when she was 5 years old, and then sent to live with a family in Vebomark,  a village 17 km from here. She lived there for nine years before moving back to Germany to join her surviving parent, their new spouse, and her siblings (including getting a number of younger half siblings over time). Later in life she wound up moving to Denmark for some years, and sometime in the last year or three she got the opportunity to purchase the house in which she lived as a child, and has moved back "home", and is loving it. Despite having learned Swedish as a child, she has a noticeable accent that is both influenced by German and Danish, but isn't so strong as to interfere with understanding her.  She and I are the two strongest Swedish speakers in the group, with different strengths and weaknesses based on the differences in our backgrounds.

Two of the other students, a couple in their 30's (V and M), wince everytime someone asks where they are from, then he explains that "well, we are from Russia, but we are Ukraine", which explains the wincing. They moved to Sweden as refugees, and while they can speak Swedish, their English is still better than their Swedish, so they are really needing to work to understand, and I often serve as an interpreter, especially for Wednesday's class--our Monday teacher is super fluent in English, too, and is the English teacher as well as the Swedish teacher). There are several girls from places in Africa (at least one is from Somalia), but they are all so soft spoken I haven't really caught so much about their background, even though they have participated in the presentation round. They are all in their 20s, I would guess, though it is tough to be certain, as they all wear the hijab.  

The Wednesday class starts at 08:30 with a one hour, 20 minute social studies session, followed by a break, followed by a second session of social studies, followed by lunch (I stay and do reading or homework), followed by a one hour, 20 minute history session. Guys, I love the Wednesday class so much! This is a larger group, as we have even a few Swedish--two women who are a little older than I am, and have lived in this area all their lives, and one who is in their mid 20's I guess, who let us know the first day that they are autistic.  They are all in the social studies class, which is primarily class discussion supplemented with reading, and some written exercises, and I am loving it. I often need to repeat things for V in English (our Wednesday teacher understands English, but prefers to delegate speaking it to me), and V does his participation in the discussions in English (which, if he starts speaking fast, we need to then translate back to Swedish for our German classmate, but when he remembers to speak slowly she is able to keep up).

The history class is one I am enjoying even more. For that one it is only V and I, but they are running it anyway (apparently there had been three of us who signed up for it, but, so far, the third one hasn't attended, so I  don't know if they will. They aren't running the religious studies course, as only two people had expressed interest in that one, and they didn't think that was enough to pay a teacher, so I am glad they are running history for only us two), so I do a lot more English interpretation, repeating for him what the teacher and I say in Swedish.  We started with pre-history and when humans and other tool-using primates split off from the ape-line primates, then jumped to when the ice melted back from Sweden and the early hunter-gatherer settlement of this area, with people coming in along the coastline from both the north and the south.  

This week it was the Viking Age, which meant no new information for me, who has absorbed a fair bit of general knowledge on the period through both the SCA and my archaeology degree, yet I really love sitting there, working on my sewing, discussing what happened when, and the likely reasons that Scandinavians went a viking in the first place.  Both Mondays and Wednesdays I go home from school in a seriously good mood.

The other three days of the week I have used for doing my obligatory job applications (I really hope that I don't have to start a job till after the term ends, I am loving school so much) and unemployment paperwork (which hasn't yet been processed to the point of receiving benefits--though sometime this week my status for my case changed from "new" to "under processing", so hopefully I will find out soon how much/if I will be getting payments), housework, and projects.  However, now that I have had more than a month to recover from the push to finish my thesis I am also starting to feel like I really ought to take that paper draft that has been sitting mostly done for ages and par it down to the correct word count to submit it to the journal.  So perhaps that will even happen in the next week or so. It would be nice to have it submitted by the time my Viva (thesis defense) happens (which hasn't been scheduled yet).

The other thing that has happened is that we got a housemate for the month. B, an SCA guy from Pennsylvania, has wanted to move to Europe, and ideally Sweden for a while. So some months back he posted to the Drachenwald FB group saying that he does, and asking questions about where are good places to move, and why, etc. He has visited Sweden (and many other places in Europe over the years) before, and has gotten to the point in his moving daydreams that he thought it would be worth testing it. Since we have a guest room, and he likes snow and winter, we decided he would rent our room for a month, and see how it feels to actually live here, as opposed to visiting. Since his job includes a work from home option he came on over. If he works from around 15:00 to 23:00 while here he is on duty at the same time as his colleagues and available for meetings as needed.  This appears to be working for him, as it means that he can get up in the morning and go for a walk while the sun is up, and then settle in to work afterwards.

He flew in on Sunday 28 January (last weekend) and we drove down to Umeå to pick him up, and went straight from the airport to their fighter practice (in fact, I dropped Keldor off at practice on the way to the airport, which is a 9 minute drive from fighter practice site, so he had a chance to start armouring up while I did the pickup). We had planned on my fighting too, but when I woke up on Sunday morning there was something weird going on with my hip. I did my yoga that day directly after getting up, and my hip felt like something was out of adjustment, and it was hard to pull my left leg forward to get from Downward Facing Dog to Low Lunge. This was weird, and annoying.  Sadly, as the day progressed the hip kept getting worse and worse, so we didn't even bring my armour, as it didn't sound fun to try to fight when I don't have proper range of motion with one leg.  Even more sadly, we had planned on going straight from fighter practice to an acroyoga session that was just starting up for the term that day, that a friend of Keldor's had pointed out for us, as he thought we would enjoy it.  We would have, but by the time that session started my hip was really acting up, so it wasn't possible to rotate my left leg outwards at all, and attempting to move it forward (as in walking) wasn't going properly, and sometimes even hurt.  So we didn't go to acroyoga, and I was sad about missing it (but it would have been stupid to try given the way the leg/hip was doing).  Instead we swung by the pet food store, bought some new fish for Keldor's aquarium and some cat food, and then went to the big grocery store and got some stuff (me walking way slower than normal, in my quest to find ways to walk without causing any discomfort, and with a component of forward motion).000

That evening, after we got home, I spent some time laying on the floor, trying to find a way to self-adjust or stretch out whatever was wrong, and in the process something happened, and suddenly I couldn't really move my leg at all, but just lay there on my back on the carpet, legs bent, and called for Keldor to come help. He managed to help me get turned over to try to stand, and I quickly gave up, so he carried me to bed, undressed me, rubbed my hip with both voltaren (a topical pain reliever for muscles) and some liniment (which warms the muscles), and I took an alvadon (both pain relief and muscle relaxant--it is mostly the latter I needed it for--whatever was going on didn't hurt at all, if I didn't try to move the leg, but some directions of movement did hurt) then he used the massage pistol on my legs and hips and things relaxed enough that I was able to walk to the loo on my own (and did so the normal several times during the night). Before I went to sleep that night I scheduled a physical therapist appointment, but the earliest option was Tuesday during the day.

Monday morning I was able to walk, but things were still a little weird with the hip, so I got B's help carrying our "spark" (kicksled) up from the basement, figuring that at least having the handles for support would be a good thing (one sees old people using kicksleds as winter walking aids all the time up here), and it might be that standing one leg on the runners and kicking with the other would be nicer on the leg/hip than walking. I don't know if that theory was correct, or if the underlying problem had solved itself, but either way it went ok to "kick" to school, and by Tuesday morning my leg was doing much better. I took the spark again to the health center, which made the hip feel a little uncomfortable, as the last bit of the trip was uphill, but when she did the exam there was no observable issue, and while a few movements and poking at it created "sensation", they didn't hurt the way they had on Sunday, and I had full range of motion back.

So she said that I should just keep doing my normal physical therapy for hips from my older hip problem (which does NOT present like Sunday's issue, but which might be related), and that it should continue to get better on its own, but if not, schedule a new visit in three weeks. She considered and rejected sending me for x-rays, saying that it probably isn't the kind of problem that will show up on x-rays, but if it doesn't clear up on its own that might be worth trying. On Wednesday my hip felt totally normally, and I even did handstands a number of times during breaks in class. I still took the spark, as we have had temperatures flipping back and forth just over and under freezing, so it is icy out, and thus the spark is safter. However they have spread gravel on the ice, which means that there are a number of areas where they sled doesn't glide, and I have to try to take some of its weight and push it carefully over the gravel. We need it to cool back down below freezing, stay there, and add a layer of snow to cover the gravel, which the predictions say might happen starting Monday, but in the mealtime it will still be warm (up to +4 C) and melty this weekend.

If my hip continues to be good we will head to Umeå on Sunday for both fighter practice and acroyoga, and I really hope this happens!

One of my favourite books growing up was Anne of Green Gables; I have read it many, quite probably literally hundreds of, times in my life. Therefore it was one of the first books I obtained translated into Swedish, since I know the story so well even in my first year in Sweden I didn't have to pause while reading it to look up words, I could tell from context plus my own memory of the story what everything meant.

Now that I am making it a habit of reading books at the same time as I listen to the audio version I have purchased an audio version of this book, and am enjoying listening to/reading it. Until I hit places where the translator completely left behind the words of the original and put in something totally new. Just now a chapter ended by deleting one of my favorite quotes in the book and putting in new word that are completely out of character.

At the end of the chapter En storm i ett vattenglas (originally "A tempest in the school teapot"), when Marilla finds Anne crying because she has been busy imagining how, when she and Dianna grow up, Dianna will get married and the two girls will be parted forever Marilla first tries to hide her amused reaction, then laughs outright, then (when she recovers enough to speak) says "Well, Anne Shirley, if you must borrow trouble, for pity's sake, borrow it handier home. I should think you had an imagination, sure enough."

For reasons I cannot understand the translator (Karin Lidforss Jensen), chose not to translate the bit about borrowing trouble at all, and instead the text says:

--Kära barn, pustade Marilla så fort hon kunde tala, så du kan sitta och göra upp saker och ting! Men det kanske ändå för säkerhets skull vore skäl att du började med skolan igen, så du ändå hinner vara tillsammans med henne en liten rid innan hon gifter sig och du börjar hata hennes stackars man. Vad säger om mitt förslag? (Dear child, panted Marilla, as soon as she could speak, you can certainly sit and make things up! But, perhaps, for safety's sake it would be better to go back to school again, so that you have a chance to spend time with her before she gets married and you start hating her poor husband. What do you say about my suggestion?)

This departure from the original annoys me not only because it skips the fun quote about borrowing trouble, but because it had only been a couple of pages since Marilla resolved to follow Mrs. Lynde's advice about not mentioning School to Anne again till Anne mentioned it herself. There is no way Marilla would have ever said the bit about going back to school here!

(Edited to add, I can't even complain to the translator--according to Wikipedia she died 4 years before my father was born...)

Very soon after moving to Sweden they explained to me that in Swedish vowels are either long or short, depending on if they are next to a single or double consonant. For example: väg (road) vs vägg (wall). This is a concept I have had problems with ever since. In part because I don't really hear much difference between them, and in part because I have a bitch of a time remembering which is which, since they look and sound so much alike to me.

This morning lord_kjar finally helped me to distinguish these two words from one another. Now there are just all of the other 100s (or 1000?) of pairs to learn to tell apart.

The useful clue here is that while the vowels are, supposedly, short vs long, in reality most Swedes use pretty much the same number of beats per second to pronounce both of them, unless they are emphasizing the difference for non-Swedes, so "length" as I understand the word, doesn't really come into play. However, they do, in fact, change their pronunciation.

In this case the "ä" in vägg is pronounced nearly the same as the "e" in the American pronunciation of the English words "egg" and "elephant". This can be remembered because walls are convenient places to attach hooks to, and one normally needs more than one hook on a wall, so, just like the elephant's two tusks (which are also convenient hooks upon which to hang things) the word needs both "g"s (and their descending hooks) to show that this is the word for wall and not the word for road (in which the "ä" is pronounced more like the "a" in the American pronunciation of the English word "apple" (which, not surprisingly, is not at all pronounced like as the "ä" in the Swedish word "äpple", which, since it has two "p"s next to it, takes the same pronunciation as "vägg").

Now, if I can only remember this long enough to use the correct one, with the correct pronunciation, in casual conversation, and correctly recognize them if someone else happens to use them...

Today we went to a gathering of musicians, held at the home of the couple who teach the nyckleharpa course. Theirs is a lovely old farm house on the Luleå river, about half way between the cities of Luleå and Boden (so about 20 or 30 minutes drive from our place). I always love visiting them, since their house and property are so beautiful, and it is even more fun when they host one of these gatherings.

Picture, if you will, a beautiful summer day with one group of five to ten musicians gathered at the porch to the house, all playing, another group of 4 to 8 musician a short way across the yard, under the trellis, also playing, another small group gathered inside the house to play, in the room that is furnished authentically for when the house was built, sometime in the 1800's, and other small groups scattered here and there for conversation or yet more music.

I set my hammer dulcimer up inside, in that beautiful old fashioned room, and spent a the first couple of hours after we arrived with it, either playing or, more often, showing it to others and encouraging them to try playing it. Most people had never seen one before, and it was fun to share it with them. Not everyone was willing to try, but most of them were. I taught one friend, who had come out with us, how to play a simple waltz on it (with the ironic name of Svara valsen). Another guy is one of those confidant musicians who knows he can play anything, and he did--I think he was making up the tune as he went, but he sat down and just started playing with confidence, and it sounded great.

I took a break from demo mode when food was served, and then spent most of the rest of the afternoon relaxing and occasionally chatting with people (and still, sometimes, taking them in to see the dulcimer and try it), and also spent a bit of time reading, and even got in a half an hour nap on a couch listening to the musicians on the porch. All and all a wonderful, relaxing day.

The only people I spoke English with all day was David and the two friends we drove out there with, and only rarely had to ask people to repeat themselves, so, clearly, my Swedish is getting better. However, my accent must still be strong, since pretty much everyone I spoke with asked me where I come from and how long I have been in Sweden. However, by the time we got back in the car to head home I was really ready for English again. I look forward to the time when it is as easy to speak Swedish as English, and wonder when it will happen. No doubt sooner if I keep making the effort.

Next weekend is the big Spelmansstämman event where our folk music group will be performing, and there will be dances in the evening. After that we only have Midsummer's dance performance, and the folk music season will be done and we can focus on the Earth Cellar. (Hopefully lord_kjar will have time to go fetch his dad's tractor sometime between now and then.)

The weekend has been full of acquiring supplies for working on the walk way and earth cellar in progress, and the walk way is now 3/4 of the way complete (it was only 1/3 of the way done when the snow started falling last autumn and we had to stop work for the winter. I truly enjoy working on these project, and finding good stone cheap and free bricks is happy-making. Would love to elaborate on how things are going, but it is pretty much time to get ready for folk dancing tonight, and tomorrow night is nycklharpa, Tuesday is choir, Wednesday is our traditional spring choir performance for spring, Thursday the choir members who feel for it come here to do instrumental music (+/- singing), and I many not get another chance to post with all that going on.

But I am probably soon done with my Swedish for Immigrants Course--my teacher wants me to take the National Exam to end it on 13 and 14 May. I am looking forward to that, since I love tests, and I would like the extra time I will get not going to school, but, on the other hand, I am enjoying the classes, too...

Yesterday evening lord_kjar found an ad on line for a one year old washing machine that they only wanted 800 SEK for (£74.31, or, $123 US). To which I said "what is wrong with it?". So he called them, and told them that he saw the ad and then he said words which literally translates to "that is a very good price", and I realized that was Swedish for "what is wrong with it?". Clearly the guy on the other end of the phone understood that too, since his reply was "We bought a bigger one and this one is in the way".

The timing of this find is perfect, since we had only just noticed the day before that the washer which came with the house has started leaking. Not much, but it is clearly a "needs maintenance" sign, and the bearings were starting to sound like they needed more oil. Not only that, but yesterday evening was the day his dad came round to our place with the workbench that his brother didn't want anymore but will be a welcome addition to our shop, so after unhooking the trailer (he plans to leave it here while he heads to the mountains for a few days, during which time we can unload the work bench, and then fill the trailer with the debris from tearing out the floor from the downstairs room and he will haul it off to the tip for us when he gets back, since neither of us have the correct sort of driver's licence to haul such a large trailer) they took dad's jeep to fetch the new washer (which wouldn't have fit into our car), and I celebrated by washing a load of laundry.

I wound up staying home from school most of this week--I came down with a cold on Monday morning. Not a serious one--I had a slight sore throat for a couple of days and a bit of the sniffles, but I was low energy and it is kinder to my classmates not to share the virus--just because it didn't cause me major problems doesn't mean that the next person would be so lucky. Luckily I was feeling better today, because Thursdays are reading class. Our current book is one that is needed for more than one class, and there are only a few copies of it available, so she isn't letting us keep them after class so we can read ahead. Instead we only have the time during class when we take turns reading out loud, with pauses in between to answer questions about words we don't understand and discussing the plot twists as they occur. Clearly this is not a class I want to miss! It would be painful to show up next week and jump into the story a chapter or three after I left off and not know what happened.

Despite the cold (he got it too, but kept going to work all week anyway), we still managed to finish ripping out the floor and started the process of cleaning out the mold from the concrete under it. Eventually, that room will be usable again.

Today I listened to 05:05:55 of the audio book, which leaves me ready to continue from the second to bottom paragraph on page 139 of Gösta Berling's saga. I am not certain I will ever *like* audio books (growing up with a hearing problem means that I *want* to see the speaker and read their lips), I think that it is totally worth doing this in terms of my actually learning how the sounds of Swedish relate to the printed words...

However, I am not certain I will ever get used to the fact that the two letter word "De" is pronounced as though it contained all three of these letters: "Dom"

( some highlights of our story so far )
This is where I paused the book today, grateful that my dad wasn't mad like hers is, and grateful that I do not live in a time when women are property and men are the only ones with any rights.

I have now listened to 01:08:26 on the audio book of Gösta Berlings saga while reading along in the book to the bottom of page 34. ( our story so far )

The lovely snow (mostly blown in drifts, not so much fresh fall, mind you) of the weekend was doomed. Monday the temperatures went above zero. Exactly how high isn't certain (though my car claimed +8 on the start of the drive home from my Swedish class), but high enough for there to be deep puddles on all the roads and slush or ice, or both, on all the walkways. This not-so-lovely set of conditions has lasted all week--this morning was the coldest day all week, with temps of +2 when I woke up.

The one real downside of this weird months-too-early to be spring weather is that while I have been good about waking up early enough so that I can go for a decent walk before my morning class starts, I have only been going for short walks, because the icy pathways and roads are just no fun for walking.

The upside of that is that instead I have done extra sessions on the SFI computers playing with the program wherein it says a word and I am supposed to spell it. I am pleased to report that I am finding spelling in Swedish to be easier than in English--while there are a few weird sounds I just can't pronounce yet, compared to English the letters (or, in many cases pairs or triplets of letters, since changing the vowel which follows a consonant can have profound effects on the way the consonant is pronounced) are remarkably consistent in how they sound, so that one really can "sound out words", like they used to tell me to do in school when I was little, but which never worked for me. Now, in Swedish, it does.

I continue to be very happy that I am able to take advantage of the SFI program--yes, it takes a huge chunk of time, but it is making such a difference in my ability to converse and write in Swedish.

I am also enjoying working with my Master's student. We have been looking at his rock samples this week--my they are pretty! I love garnets.

In other news, we have finally, once again, decided which settings to go with for my modeling, and I have begun re-doing all of the figures showing the results. Hopefully that will be done soon and I will be able to return, again, to the writing part. The end of this project is in sight. Blurry from where I stand, but I can see it.

Thanks to a conversation I had a 12th Night, where I found out that the Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) course that the government offers is actually a much better an more intensive course than the Swedish for Beginners course the Uni offers (and which I have taken), I have actually made the effort to track down the (SFI). (I tried sending an email (in English) asking about it back in August of 2011, when I first got a resident visa to live in Sweden, but never got a reply, and, as it turned out, I wouldn't have been able to make time in my schedule then for the course due to other obligations.) This time I found the same pdf document on SFI on line as I had discovered back in 2011, but this time I decided to send my email of inquiry as to when and where the course meets in Swedish, and I got a reply!

After exchanging a number of emails (all in Swedish) I am registered to take the next course, and just awaiting an opportunity to take the diagnostic test, so that they can determine which level course I should attend. I was slightly disappointed when she said that the next chance for the diagnostic test was next Tuesday, since I am also taking a GIS course this semester (since it wasn't an option for me to take such a course when I was a student, and the class was under-enrolled compared to what they were hoping for, so they are happy for post docs to sit in, too), and that class meets at the same time (and very different location) as that diagnostic test. However, the woman I have been corresponding with about the SFI course said that it wasn't a problem and that there would be other opportunities to take the test in February and she would get back to me to let me know when they were.

Then, this morning, I got an email from the GIS teacher letting me know that he has had a schedule conflict come up, and that Tuesday's course has been rescheduled. So I promptly forwarded the message to my contact for the Swedish course and asked if it was too late to sign up for the diagnostic test on Tuesday. She wrote back and said that it will be fine, so in just a few more days I will learn just how much Swedish I have really managed to absorb in three years living in this country. It will be interesting to see how I go with the course--four hours a day is way more time/effort than I have ever put into learning Swedish; I bet that after the first session my poor brain will be full, but I also suspect/hope that it will become easier with practice.