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.

It has been a busy couple of days of travel prep: packing for SCA event and getting ready for the conference and Durham trip. I finished the poster for the conference on Wednesday and sent it to my advisor, who thought it looked great, but suggested that it would be good to include the Durham logo and sent me a power point poster template that the department (possibly the whole uni?) uses. She will be doing the printing for me, and would happily have accepted the CorelDraw file I already had, but the uni print shop told her they would rather have powerpoint. So I spent three hours today fighting with powerpoint to re-create the same poster by copy-pasting in each text box and each photo and then using the painful ppt interface to get them to be the correct size and shape again. Then, after a break to do more event packing, I went back and spent another couple of hours on tweaks and edits.

Once it was truly done I sent her the file, and then went in to the office, where I had planned to print some flyers for the Uma XXV: Hostdans & Norrskensbard event that the autocrat had sent me (I asked her to, so I could give them out at Cudgel War), pick up the rock samples I want to take to Durham for analysis with the XRD while I am there, and then go to the grocery store to get a few things for the road (especially fresh fruit--I am totally out at home).

However, it took some time to make the printer work (had to re-install the uni printer authentication system and reintroduce my computer to the printer system). Then I decided that rather than taking the samples as they are that it would make sense to cut the bigger ones into two pieces and take only a small one of each with me to Durham (to keep the luggage reasonable in mass). This meant labelling new sample bags for all of those, and taking photos, etc. by which time the store was closed. Therefore I also took the time to enter into the spreadhseet which ones are cut and which ones I am taking the entire sample, and I even re-named all of the photos with their sample number and the word "-cut".

Now I can go get some sleep. David has to work in the morning, and has a few more things he wants to pack into his wooden chests, which need to go in the bottom row in the car, so car loading won't happen till he is home. He hopes to work only a half day, but he is in IT, so it could happen that he gets stuck having to fix something that takes hours... But we will get on the road when we do, and then it is 10 hours driving (plus breaks) to Cudgel War. I don't expect to get another chance to post again till I get to Durham on Friday the 13th, since last I checked it wasn't possible to post from my phone...

Edited to add: just taught the phone my password so I can log into the web page. So not as nice as the LJ app, which doesn't work with DreamWidth...

This evening I heard that there will not be a Höstdansen event in Umeå in October due to scheduling issues. This made me a little sad, as I love that event. Therefore, to cheer myself up, I have booked flights to Helsinki for October Crown. Their web page says that the beds are all reserved already, so I am on a waiting list in case there are cancellations. The page also says that some beds were reserved for fighters and their consorts, so if any of those reserved beds go unclaimed they will open up, so I will probably get a spot. Or, if I am lucky, some fighter will ask to fight for me, and then we would qualify for one of those reserved beds.

I would actually like it if I had a champion, since I grew up in the West, where it is pretty much one's patriotic duty to enter every Crown one is able to attend, so I sort of feel I should enter. However, my fighter authorization isn't current, so that leaves only the possibility of being someone's inspiration. My last champion found himself a girlfriend, which makes me very happy for him, but it means that I am once again without a champion of my own.

Well, not that spur of the moment, since I won't fly till a month from now, but it took perhaps 20 minutes from deciding to go to having the flights booked.

I will be heading south to see my friend M, who lives in Uppsala, the weekend of 12 February. Means I will miss the Frostheim annual meeting, but that was the time that worked for M.

Monday: A walk in the morning, followed by taking the train home from Narvik (seven hours). The first half of the trip I had a delightful conversation with a Scottish woman on her way to Kiruna. Got home just before 18:00 and spent several hours shoveling the snow that had accumulated while we were out of town (lord_kjar was in Göteborg helping C. pack up her stuff for the move up here), and then stayed up way late visiting with O.

Tuesday: Work, followed by Phire practice. (Acroyoga! Including standing on other people's shoulders, and even being a human barbell for our strong man to pick up from the ground and over-head press.) Followed by choir.

Wednesday: More snow shoveling, followed by work, followed by meeting my personal trainer at 13:00 to get a new work out, followed by more work, then meeting E. for aerial silk training. We do this at the uni gym, in the room one can book for badminton, and one books for an hour at a time. When our hour was nearly up the people who had booked next started arriving, and they didn't want to play badminton either, they were going to do fencing, and didn't mind us hanging from the ceiling in the corner, so said we could stay. Our choir president, who went with us to Finland for the SCA event last month, was one of the fencers. So, of course, I had to point out to him that there will be SCA fencers at the event in Skellefteå in a couple of weeks, if we wants to join us for that. I wound up staying up too late that evening too, chatting over FB to my friend H. in Umeå about Tolkien's elvish language, which he encourages me to study. (It is, in fact, interesting, but I am not certain when I am going to add in time to study anything just now.)

Thursday: Work, the laser Technician returned to do the other repair he noticed needed to happen when he was last here, but didn't have the parts at the time. He was done around lunch time, so I dropped him in Gammelstad so he could do some sightseeing before his flight, and I went home for a much needed nap. Then shoveled more snow, and then went to the Frostheim Social night, where my apprentices helped me drape a pattern for a set of Thorsbjorg trousers (3685), because I thought they would make good jester trousers for our acroyoga performance at the SCA event in a couple of weeks. (They had been included in the slide show at the talk in Norway, and that inspired me to want a set. Of course I had seen them before, but until I wanted something to wear that would be good for acroyoga, I hadn't thought of making some for me before). Thursday, despite staying up visiting with O. for quite a while, I still managed to get to sleep around 02:30, which was nearly two hours before lord_kjar and C. finally arrived home with the trailer full of everything she owns.

Friday morning we took it easy and had a leisurely breakfast, then around lunch time lord_kjar dropped me and O. at uni so I could work and he could head home. (I normally have Friday's off, but since Monday was a travel day, I needed to work.) After work I went to the gym to do the new workout, which my trainer had finally sent me the pdf for that afternoon, followed by Phire training, including a bit of juggling, some acroyoga, some fan dance, and some aerial silks. It was a great turn out, and the gym was quite full.

Saturday was a laundry day, and I finished up the hardest part of the pattern: the feet. once I was happy with the whole pattern, I cut out the trousers in some blue/black/white/grey striped wool twill I bought years ago (when living in Italy) and started the assembly--three hours of hand sewing was enough to get the seat attached and both legs stitched shut (but not finished). Then I selected some leather from the scrap leather box and cut out the feet bottoms, but by then I was too tired to do more that night.

Today I did a small phone app workout, followed by pinning the leather feet bottoms to the trousers and sewing one of the feet on before it was time to meet E., O., and A. for more practice. She and I did acro yoga, and the boys practiced double staff stuff, taking breaks now and then when she and I wanted to try new/dangerous/tricky stuff and needed spotters to make certain she didn't drop me on my head or something. I need to work on more wrist strength stuff--getting from the bat pose (hanging from my hips from her upraised feet) to the side star (laying horizontally across her upraised feet), requires a fair bit of arm/wrist strength to push myself up into position. But so much fun! We have started deciding which poses we will use for the performance at the SCA event in Skellefteå in a couple of weeks, and my apprentice #2 will play La Belle pavane on her chalumeau (medieval clarinet) for background music.

This evening is folk dance, but we will be there a couple of hours early, because this is the week that we are going to do filming of all of the dances our teacher has choreographed, so that she will have a record, and so that people other places can learn them. For this reason C. won't be coming along, since she hasn't trained in those dances, and she wants to do more organizing of stuff, but she will normally come along to dance, I think.

Next weekend we might head to Umeå for the folk festival, depending on if they have recovered from packing and the road trip up from the south, and the following week I head to Italy for a week. The weekend after that is the event, for which we need the acroyoga routine ready, so we had better find time to practice between now and then.

After leaving the gym today I drove one of the girls over to the larger grocery store near which she lives. I had been considering heading over there anyway, since the little store near the uni does carry Turkish yoghurt, but it doesn't carry the ecological (or organic, if you live in the states) variety. The fact that she would benefit from a lift (since buses don't run very often on Saturdays here) decided me, and off we went.

While I was there I not only got the Turkish yoghurt, filmjölk, and ordinary milk we needed (and some fruit and veg), I also picked up a container of the "traditional", un-homogenized, milk, thinking it might be nice to make some cheese.

Therefore, just after 13:00 today I wandered into the kitchen, set some frozen svartvinbär (black currants) into a pot on the stove with water, and told it to warm up and simmer while I made cheese (since, if I am going to be in the kitchen for quite a while, I may as well accomplish more than one task).

Then I pondered what sort of cheese I wanted to make. Certainly one of the quick varieties--I wanted to be eating it within a couple of hours, not days or even weeks from now. I considered juustoleipä (known in Swedish as kaffe ost because it is a cheese traditionally served with coffee), the yummy Finnish cheese that I learned to make from the recipe my mother's aunt Sally provided, which involves rennet. My family always just called it "juusto", even though that part of the longer name only means "cheese", and applies to everything in the cheese family). I considered a basic soft cheese made by adding lemon juice to warm milk. I considered the Indian cheese paneer, which also uses lemon juice.

All three are good, but they have Very different textures and fill very different niches. I couldn't decide so I asked lord_kjar if he had any input. Nope, none at all, he likes all three.

So I consulted a very old cheese, butter, and yoghurt making book that I inherited from my step father to see if anything in there turned out to be inspiring. Their soft cheeses all required a "starter", which involves heating milk and then leaving it sit for another day before using it. Nope. Not an option. I want my cheese, and I want it now.

However, the book did turn out to be inspiring, since in the section talking about the various ways to get the milk to curdle, it pointed out that liquid rennet loses its effectiveness with time. It has been a long time since I made jussto, so I decided that it might be smart to check and see if the liquid rennet I had in the fridge still works at all. And if it doesn't, we do have lemon juice.

Thus decided I pulled out ( the recipe )

Now, I didn't have 8 quarts of milk, I bought only two liters (which is kinda similar to 2 quarts), and I don't have rennet tablets, only liquid rennet, which, it turns out, has a best by date of January 2013 (which means it has been even longer than I thought since last I made cheese). So I did some modifications. I went to pour in a bit of rennet, and it gushed out of the bottle faster than I expected. I thought out it, and the part about "two years past its best-by date", and poured in a bit more. Since I had only a little milk compared to my great-aunt's recipe, I used only a small amount of cornstarch, even less sugar, and only a bit of salt.

Now, every time I have tried to make juusto before there was never any "press with hands till water comes to top" possible, as the curds were small and scattered--any attempt to press them caused them to separate, and my hands to sink in between them. Therefore I have needed to resort to pouring the liquid through a cheese cloth to catch the cheese. However, it always tasted good, so I just coped. This time, on the other hand, it worked! Very, very soon after stirring suddenly the pot contained a whiteish cohesive blob, which, if gently pressed with hands revealed the whey in which it was floating.

This meant that I didn't need to use a cheese cloth at all. Instead, at first, I just used a ladle to gently push down on the mass of cheese and let the liquid pour into the ladle. Once I had gathered somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of a liter of whey that way it became hard to use the ladle. So at that point we poured everything into a deep baking pan, set a mostly flat (it has a slight rim at the edge) baking pan over it, and gently tipped it to let the liquid pour out of the corner of the pan. This was a kind of slow, and slightly messy process, that involved needing to switch which corner I poured from on a fairly regular basis, as the cheese blob worked its way to the corner and slowed down the pouring. Eventually I had more than a liter of liquid poured off, and the cheese blob was small enough that I could change out the large flatish baking sheet for a small (sandwich size) plate, which I could set only over the cheese and apply a bit of pressure to it, to get the last of the water out.

By the end of the process I think I had about 1.5 liters of whey, and a small blob of cheese the same diameter as the plate (~20 cm) and almost 1 cm thick. At that point I transferred the cheese to the plate long enough to wash the whey off of the deeper pan, then put the cheese onto it and popped it into the broiler.

When I took the milk off of the heat the second time I decided that since the front burner is so much better than the back one that I would move that svartvinbärsylt in progress to the front burner. However, once the cheese was in the oven I realized that while I had done the transfer, I had also turned the wrong knobs, so the berries were sitting and waiting on an off burner, while the other back burner was happily warming the room. Oops. Though, in hind sight, that was probably a very good thing, since I didn't have berries being done and wanting attention at the same time as I was dealing with the cheese. So I re-started the heat under the fruit, and then sat on the floor to watch the cheese so that it didn't over cook. As soon as it developed a few of the characteristic brown spots I pulled out the pan, set that flatish baking dish on top and flipped them over to transfer the cheese to it so I could broil the other side.

When it was done I transferred it to another plate, and set that outside on the porch (inside the wooden box we keep out there just so we can let food cool without being eaten by the neighbourhood cats or wild critters. By this time the berries were boiling again, so I stirred them (pausing only a couple of times to go get another bite of juusto, which is every bit as yummy, and squeaky, as it is supposed to be) and waited till enough water had cooked off.

As I was cooking the berries I considered the whey. I normally bake it into bread (and really yummy bread it is, too), but this time I am also considering making the Norwegian brown cheese from it. I looked on line, and it is made only by heating whey for a long time so that it caramelizes and the liquid cooks off, and then, when it is getting kind of thick, string in cream and continuing to cook till it reaches the desired consistency.

This is really tempting. However, most sources say that this process takes 4 to 6 (or sometimes even 12) hours to accomplish, and I had just spent 4 hours standing in the kitchen, and my legs were stiff enough. Besides I didn't think of this while in the store, so I don't have any cream in the house. Tomorrow is soon enough to decide if the whey wants to be bread or brown cheese (or both).

Tomorrow I need to head to uni to pick up a friend from the Student Choir Aurora around 13:00. We will first go purchase a second hand electric keyboard so that Aurora will have a keyboard of its own, which can live at uni, and we won't have to bring ours any more on the nights that the Uni one has been checked out by one of the other clubs (which happens fairly often). Then I will bring him back here so he can try on costumes before he travels with my apprentice #2 and I to the SCA event in Finland next weekend. That event is being held in conjunction with the Finnish Early music society, which is why the three of us are interested in attending. This will be his first SCA event, I hope he enjoys it.

But, since I will be out during the day, that means I have the option of buying cream on that trip, though when I would have time to use it thereafter, I am not certain.

Thursday: Attend the normal SCA/Frostheim gathering at the university campus at 18:00. Leave there and drive to K & H's house just south of Umeå (a nearly 4 hour drive, so we will be getting there kind of late).

Friday: Drive from there to Sundsvall, stopping at Skulleberget along the High Coast for a short adventure. We need to be in Sundsvall by 13:00, but from K & H's house it should only be a 2.5 hour drive, so even with the adventure it should be doable.

Saturday: Teach embroidery workshop at the SCA Glöta Gillet event.

Sunday: return home, with stops along the way at Skulleberget (because, mountain!) and K & H's house (because she probably wants to go home, and she is coming with us to the event).

Work this week wasn't expected to be easy--lasers, at least the kind we have, are meant to be used regularly, and really need to be fired every two weeks in order to stay in prime working condition. I have just had two weeks off of work, which means that the laser wasn't fired during that time. So it wasn't surprising that I needed to do a gas exchange first thing on Monday, because the old ArF gas that has been siting in the chamber ready to fire the laser has gotten stale, or whatever happens to it to make the laser need a lot more power put into it to generate the same amount of laser energy. Neither was it surprising that even after the gas exchange I couldn't get a good performance report on Monday, or even Tuesday. However, by Wednesday morning things had settled in, and I got a passing performance report and ran our "check standards" lab book, just to get more data points as to how our system is performing.

This morning I expected I might try running some other sort of analysis, but it wasn't meant to be--the vacuum pump in the next room was off, which meant that there was no vacuum in the ICP unit, which meant that the plasma wouldn't turn on. We have no idea why it was off--as far as my colleague B and I know, no one turned the pump off. When we tried turning it on with the switch on the side of the pump nothing happened. So we went back into the lab itself and turned off the main power switch on ICP-MS unit (into which the vacuum pump is plugged). After waiting 20 to 30 seconds we turned it back on, and this time the vacuum pump started up. After a bit of a wait it did its job enough that the green light came on, saying that the system had achieved the vacuum and was good to start.

Sure enough, at that point the plasma started just fine, but when I tried to run a performance report I got a new error message "Analyzer Pressure too high". Not having seen this one before I promptly wrote an email to the service people explaining all of the above, and asking what we need to do next, and spent the rest of the work day trying to catch up on the various emails sent to me while I was on vacation.

On the bike ride home I was delighted to see a work crew out, removing the curb from the center portion of the road which the bike path has been meant to cross. We cyclists have been having to drive around those curbs ever since they got the path mostly in last autumn. They were taking out the one closest to Uni as I went past, so I paused to express my appreciation, and I asked if this meant that the path itself would soon be paved. The guy who spoke to me didn't know the schedule for the paving, but I still think it is a good sign. They had already done the one where the path crosses a road just before the turn off to my neighbourhood, and it was a pleasure to just pedal straight across that road, rather than having to detour around the curb.

Since the paint is now dry on the upstairs shed window frame I had taken down to re-paint I tried to put the window back. Since I was working on my own I got it out by unscrewing the hinges with one hand, whilst holding the window (which was open and hanging out over the drop to the ground) with the other. Luckily, the hinges sat fairly tightly into their carved recess in the frame, so the window didn't try to fall while I was still dealing with the screws, but instead had to be plucked out of the groves when the last screw was out. However, I knew that putting it back wouldn't be so easy. Therefore I decided that it might be smarter to first screw back the part of the hinges that attach to the window frame, and then put the window onto the hinges. However, I failed to take into consideration the fact that once on the hinge the window exactly fits into the opening. Therefore it isn't actually possible to lift the window high enough to put the hinge back together when half of it is on the window, and the other half in the frame. Oops. And I had come up with such a good idea of wrapping a length of nylon webbing around the window to give me a good handle and make it less likely to be dropped in the process. At that point I gave up, left the hinge half screwed to the window frame till lord_kjar gets back and there is one person to hold the window and another to drive the screw driver.

I have spent most of the evening getting ready for tomorrow's journey to Norway. I had packed clothes and dance shoes on Monday, but tonight I did more food prep of things to take with me, packed toiletries, do laundry and other house work so that the place will be nice to come home to, etc. Since I had just enough yoghurt left for one serving of muesli I decided to pick some smultrons (wild strawberry) to go with it, and I would have one extra yummy breakfast ready to eat on the road tomorrow (and the others will be my normal water on the muesli). However, this time, whilst picking the berries I was inspired to actually rip away the tall grass and other plants that have been growing over the rest of the smultrons (I had gotten the part that is easy to reach from the alleyway to the earth cellar a couple of weeks ago, just as the berries were first starting to come in). Today's reward was way more berries than I expected to find under all that growth--nearly a full cup of tiny, sweet berries! Yum!

It isn't yet 8pm, but I probably ought to do my yoga so that it is done when the last load of laundry comes out of the machine, then I can go to bed early--I have my alarm set for 03:30 so that I will have time to do my morning work out before I go, and actually get the food out of freezer and fridge and into the soft ice-chest before my taxi arrives at 05:20. The bus doesn't actually depart till 06:00, and it shouldn't be more than 5 or 10 minutes from here to the meeting point, but I didn't want to be late, which is why I gave it a full 40 minutes. Then I can sleep on the first part of the drive, so that I wake up on time to enjoy the mountains as we get to Norway. Have I mentioned recently how much I miss mountains? They are really the only thing that Luleå lacks to be perfect.