kareina

Today's weather report from the north sucks: it is raining, but the air temperature is -4 C. I tried heading north to work today, left in what would have been good time on normal roads. But it is slippery, so I didn't dare go faster than 60 km/h on the highway (a 110 zone). That would have been fine, we have flextime, and it doesn't really matter what time I arrive, so I could have made my way slowly north and then worked. But then the log trucks started passing me, and it was unpleasant enough that I turned around. Given that Thursday is a holiday I just sent my boss and colleagues an email to let them know I am not coming in this week, and am willing to just take it as "tjänstledig" (off without pay).

However, Keldor is working as normal today and tomorrow, and this evening he will do more prep work for th his Build Your Own Knife throry course over zoom he is teaching tomorrow ( https://www.frostheim.se/program/frostheim-kurs-gor-din-egen-kniv-lektion-1-teori/ ) so we won't be working on the house with this extra time. I could head there on my own, but the half hour drive will take way longer than that on today's roads, and it isn't worth it.

It is hot this week. Even in the north, and I am so grateful that the people who built this house put in a basement. I have spent my day working downstairs (having re-located my work computer yesterday, when I noticed that I wasn't accomplishing anything due to the heat). It is so delightful cool down here that it was necessary to wear a light sweater, or I would get too cold. I just needed to remember to take it off again each time I ventured upstairs in search of food.

But now that it is evening, outside has cooled down to 19 C (I didn't notice myself how hot it reached, but J tells me that it was 29 C at work), so I have opened up some upstairs windows to air it out up there, so it doesn't get any worse tomorrow. Looking at the forecast, I should be able to resume working upstairs again next week.

The garden, on the other hand, seems quite happy with the sun and warmth (since I am getting it water regularly). Today Some of the various garden greens that I planted have finally gotten big enough to spare a leaf or two, so I gathered up a handful for lunch. Since it is too warm upstairs to actually cook I put some cous cous in the microwave with some water I saved after steaming vegetables the other day (and some garlic powder, salt and pepper), and when the water was warm added the greens for another minute, and then stirred in an egg and gave it another minute to cook the egg, then added some toasted sunflower seeds, and made it back downstairs before I felt too hot. No photo--it disappeared far too quickly to have thought of that, and the result wasn't exactly as pretty as it tasted. I also noticed that the first of this year's smultron (wild strawberry) are nearly ripe (I would guess tomorrow), and the strawberries have forgiven me enough for their transplanting ordeal that they have been flowering and putting out little green things that will become berries in due course.

When I heard that the Crown had decided to elevate aryanhwy to the order of the Laurel at Ffair Raglan I wondered what gift I could send that could be accomplished and sent down in the very short amount of time available. Then I remembered that she had once commented to me that she wants my SCA wardrobe, and we have talked about the possibility of making her a bilaut one day. The embroidered belt I wear with mine didn’t take that long to make. Then again, there isn’t much embroidery on it. I always planned to do more stitching, but never got to it. That belt shows fairly well in this photo.

Luckily, that week my friend Villiam posted to the Phire text message group that he wanted some help with sewing his costumes to take to Visby Medieval Week. Several of us had time that Saturday, so we agreed to meet then. In the meantime I went back to look again at photos of the statue that inspired my bliaut. This time I noticed that the pattern appears to be an upright, a diagonal, an upright, another diagonal, with the same slope as the one before… (Mine, on the other hand I did diagonals pointing opposite directions, not in contact with one another, and no uprights, so more like the pattern in the borders of the Bayeux Tapestry than this statue. I don’t remember if that is because I didn’t have a high enough resolution to see the pattern of the belt, or I just didn’t look at it again before stitching, or what.)

Therefore on Saturday 28 July he and Sara came over. She worked on a bit of sewing for the Phire Pavilion that they also needed to take to Visby, and he first did some fitting on his new wool jester outfit, which had already been cut and assembled and just needed a little bit of taking in to fit, and then we cut out a pair of linen shorts for him to wear with his jester costume. Then I started embroidering laurel wreaths, uprights, and diagonals onto the belt fabric, while he sewed the shorts. Every so often I would pause, help him pin the next seam and return to my own stitching. Sara finished her task after a few hours and went home, while he and I kept working till almost midnight. Of course, I have no record of what % of that day was helping him with his project, and what % was working on my own. He returned the next morning and we spent another seven hours sewing (me on the belt, he on a linen under tunic this time). On Monday (30 July) I went to work in the day, and he came back over at 16:00 and we worked till 02:00, when he joined me for yoga before biking home.

I knew that I needed to get the belt sent off reasonably early on Tuesday in order for it to get there before the guy who agreed to take it to the event for me was leaving home, so despite my late night on Monday I got up early on Tuesday and spent a few more hours on the belt. I have no idea how many hours total it took, since I did alternate between stitching and helping him with pinning and cutting fabric for most of the project, but I did wind up doing way, way more stitching for her belt than for mine:



I managed to finish the stitching by 14:00 on Tuesday and went in to the grocery store by the uni to post it. The lady there said that while they accept DHL packages for shipping that one needs to go to a computer and fill in the DHL form and pay first, then print out the shipping paperwork and bring it back. She also said that she recommended this approach, since if I went regular Swedish express post the delivery would be “Thursday or Friday”, and my contact needed it by Thursday at the latest. So I went to my office across the street and filled out their form, and got stuck in a loop wherein the web page asked if I wanted someone to come pick up the package, but the drop down menu had only one possible answer (Ja), and didn’t want them to pick it up, I wanted to drop it off. I tired several times, but couldn’t get around that, so I called DHL, and they said just say yes, then in the “instructions to pick up person” box say that you will drop it off yourself. However, don’t take it to the post office at the grocery store by uni, bring it out to the main drop off point by the airport, it will get there much faster. So I called Villiam and asked if he wanted to see how the belt turned out and come along for the ride to the airport. He said yes, so I picked him up, and off we went.

After the package was sent he went back to my place with me and started working on his Visby sewing again, and I returned to my Viking coat in progress, this time working out how I wanted to attach the tablet weaving. It was another hot day, so we worked in the basement, where it was nice and cool, and I was willing to work with wool, and I made good progress in attaching the trim. We once again worked till about midnight, and before he went home.

Wednesday was another day wherein it was too hot to work at the computer, but Thursday I finally passed an intelligence test and moved my computer to the basement, where it is nice and cool. I did manage to pick some red currants on Tuesday and again on Wednesday evening, and put them into the dehydrator, so now I have lots of berries for adding to my muesli. On Friday evening Villiam came back for more sewing, and we had time to do some acroyoga too, since the projects were all getting close to done. He had a gaming convention on the weekend, but on Sunday it was finally cool enough to do some baking, so I baked a red currant cake so that I could re-stock the freezer with yummy snacks. I let him know that I had, and so on Sunday evening he came over after the convention, arriving at 22:00 just before it started raining. He stayed till midnight and then decided to bike home in the rain so that he could finish packing for his flight to Visby the next day. I offered him a ride, but he was happy to bike. Though he tells me that it rained heavy enough that he needed to put his shoes into the dryer for two hours to get them dry again afterwards.

On Monday I took the car to work so that I could take him and all of the Phire equipment (including the new pavilion, juggling clubs, staffs, poi, etc.) to the airport. He had four bags to check, so we went nice and early, dropped them off, then went for a half an hour walk in the forest near the airport before taking him back for the flight. This week my feed has been full of photos from Visby, and from Raglan (and, to a lesser extent, from Pennsic), and I am kinda envious of everyone who is at these events. I have seen one photo of a Phire workshop at Visby which shows Villiam’s new costume (the tall, thin, guy in orange and bright green, wearing the hood).

However, I am making progress on catching on on the work hours I got behind due to the heat (and so glad that the heat has finally eased off here—it is actually cool enough today that I can wear sleeves).

So far the best story I have heard from any of the events that are happening this week is Aryanhwy description of how they surprised her with her laurel. I wish I could have been there to see it myself. However, I suspect that even though express shipping to get that belt there on time was expensive, I would have spent way, way more than that to attend Raglan, and I just don’t have that kind of leeway in my budget right now—I need to save it for trips related to my research.

Speaking of research, it looks like I may get to do my sample collecting trip in September with my cousin Carola, who lives in southern Sweden. I hope that works out, she is delightful, and it would be fun to get to know her better.

...and the only fikabröd (baked good or similar to serve with tea/coffee during fika) in the freezer is this week's Freezer Cookies, which I can't serve when David's brother Gustaf, and his wife Jenny arrive later this afternoon, as she is allergic to nuts.

Therefore today's non-baking adventure is:

Cinnamon Rosehip Oat Balls

1/2 c butter
1/4 c sugar
1/4 c rosehip powder
1 T cinnamon powder
1/4 t ginger powder
1/8 t grains of paradise powder
2 cups rolled oats
1/4 c boiling water

Cream together the butter, sugar, and powders. Blend in the oats. Add just enough boiling water to get it to mostly hold together when pressed. Roll 1 tablespoon at a time into balls. Chill.

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Note: this time I was too lazy to open a new pack of regular rolled oats, so I used the "fiber oats" that was already opened. I think that the regular rolled oats would probably have held together better. These took a fair bit of pressure to get them to roll properly.

As many of you know, I take a very northern definition of the seasons, where a "winter day" is any day wherein the temperatures never rose above 0 C, a "summer day" is any day wherein the temperatures never dropped below zero, and a "spring day" (or "autumn day") is any day wherein the temperature was both above and below 0 C during the course of the day. (As to weather a day that crosses 0 C one or more times counts as spring is a matter of debate, that could be resolved based on weather it is before or after the most recent "winter day", or, if one prefers, whether it is between 1 January and 30 June, or between 1 July and 31 December (though in that case one must also take into consideration which half of the planet one is currently in).)

After my first couple of winters in Sweden, when I was so delighted to have proper winter, with real (read: stays on the ground for months, rather than hours) snow again, I started getting frustrated by how often it warmed up to give us spring days in the middle of the winter. Therefore I started keeping track of how many days it a row the temperatures were either above, below, or crossing zero.

The data proved that I wasn't just imagining it, the first three winters in which I kept track the record number of days in a row below zero we had was less than 30, and most of the time there were less than 20 days in a row below zero. This is in direct contrast with the past three summers, which had between 100 and 120 days in a row above zero.

Much to my delight, this winter we actually managed to break the record. Only barely, we did have a day around day 30 where it warmed up *almost* to zero, but then cooled off again. Happened a few more times thereafter, too. However, this year it managed to, just, hold on and we managed 87 days in a row below zero. Until today, when it warmed up to +5 this afternoon, before heading back below zero again this evening. That, my friends, counts as our first day of spring this year.

Spring is even more fickle than winter has been recently, my record number of days in a row in the "crossing zero" category is 13. My phone thinks that tomorrow will be winter again, but Wednesday might be spring, followed by winter for at least a week thereafter (beyond that my phone doesn't make a guess).

This weekend we managed to get caught up on some of the extra snow shoveling--the areas that are good to do, but aren't on the top of the priority list when we get a fresh snow: expanding the cleared area of the parking area a bit, digging out the tractor so that it could be moved, shoveling off the roof of the carport, digging a path to the shire hot tub (which hasn't been touched since we parked it after Norrskensfesten in November). The latter task was a big one--the snow back behind the sheds and next to the tub is almost shoulder deep on me, so while I dug out the area around the tractor, and removed snow from the tractor itself David took a small small snow shovel and loosened the upper layers, letting them fall into the path, then used the snowblower to cast that much away, then used the shovel to move more of the top layers down into the path, etc. It took about 1 hr, 20 minutes for him to get the path all the way to the back side of the tub. Then we took a break for some food, and then took care of the carport roof. That was Saturday's workout (well, that and a short workout before I even went outside).

Today some of the members of Phire came over to help with the hot tub itself. We managed to get the lid off (which took both unscrewing the screws that hold it it place when driving, and using a heat gun to melt some of the ice that was holding it down, and dug the remaining side out so we could get to it, and managed to carefully break out some of the ice from the bottom of the tub and clean it out a bit. Then David arrived and showed us how to get it set up on the wood blocks so that when we fill it with water it won't squish the tires and tip over. To accomplish this we had to dig out the door to the container so that we could get the good car jack out, so yet one more area got cleared.

Once we decided the tub was clean enough we covered it back up, and this time put a tarp over it (which should have happened in November, but somehow we didn't manage to find the energy/time to accomplish that then). Next Friday morning I will start filling the tub, and when it gets about 1/4 full I can start the fire in the stove. They say it takes four hours to fill and six to heat, so if I start it in the morning, make certain that the fire is going well when I leave for Phire practice at 17:00, then it should still be warmish when practice ends and we all head back to my place. It might be needful to re-start the fire at that point, but it shouldn't have had time to get too cold. Then we can cook food and spend the evening relaxing, in the tub for those who wish, and in the house for those who don't.

Folk dance this evening was ever so much fun (as always). Many of our newer people are finally getting it, and thus they are more fun to dance with.

And a quick summary of the week, working backwards:

Friday's Phire practice was also much fun. Bjorn and Ellinor have been working on a new acroyoga thing, where they stand side by side, holding right hands in the other's left. Then she does a half-cartwheel with her head between the interlinked hands, to come hanging upside down in front of him, facing the same direction he faces. Then she bends her legs, lowers her feet and tucks them under his arms, so that she can wrap her legs around his waist and then sit up, letting go of his hands, and then placing her hands on his shoulders, as he shifts his hands to her hips. Then he bends forward a bit to get some momentum, and stands back up quickly, adding a small hip-thrust to give her a push, while she presses her hands on the back of his shoulders and he over-head presses her up above his head. Or, that is how it is meant to go. At the start of practice they could do some of the steps, but not very smootly, and they hadn't yet achieved that final overhead press. Of course, as soon as I saw what they were working on I wanted to try, so he took turns with us, and, eventually, he and I found the right balance point for him to overhead press me from that position. I am a good 15 kg lighter than she is, and more used to flying, so it might have been easier to find the trick of it with me. (It helped when they showed me the video that inspired it.) However, he hasn't done so much strong man training for nothing, and very soon after he and I made it work he got it to work with her, too. He sounded really surprised when we got it working when he exclaimed "and it is so easy"--with acroyoga technique really matters, as does the fact that both the flyer and the base are working. Yes, he is strong enough to just overhead press us on his own, but then he needs to start in a position where it is possible. When starting from weird positions like this one the flyer really needs to work.

We also had the arieal silks out on Friday. As always, when I tried them early in the evening I simply couldn't climb at all, but I alternated between acroyoga, hand stand training, and trying the silks, and after Bjorn and I got that pose working and I was good and warmed up, then I could easily climb right to the top.

Wednesday-Friday I had Lisa, a couch surfer from Germany staying with me. She tells me that she really felt at home here. She was out for adventures during the day, and we spent part of the evenings visiting with one another, and part of the evenings we spent doing stuff on our own computers (or I was reading or shoveling snow). Note that while I had kinda hurt my arm on Tuesday's Phire practice, by Wednesday evening I was able to shovel snow normally again, and had no troubles with it again.

For much of November we have had lovely winter weather. There were a number of good snow falls. Last weekend we had enough snow that I spent seven hours outside shoveling over the course of the weekend, and it was grand. On Thursday instead of the soft, gentle snowfalls we had been having we had a proper snow storm, with much wind. So much wind that we wound up with waist high snow dunes crossing the yard in some places, while in others the ground was scoured nearly bare of snow. Consequently, I didn't bother trying to do much shoveling on Thursday--only cleared the path between the door and the lamp at the edge of our driveway several times, as the snow dune kept filling it up again. The final time I cleared that path on Thursday was at midnight, when the wind was dying down, which meant that it was still clear when I got up the next morning. Good thing it was, too, since when the wind died down the warm weather swooped in after it, and on Friday we reached highs of +4 C, which meant much melting and the snow drifts turned very wet and slushy.

I am so glad that David and I have a tractor, and that we had no plans for Friday, as that meant after he got home from work we could spend several hours cleaning up all of the wet, slushy snow from the driveway before it froze again on Saturday. He drove the tractor, I used the snowblower to cut through the big drift in front of the doors to the shed in which it lives, and the shovel to clean up the areas that were hard to do with the tractor (like behind my car), and to clean us the stuff that spills out from the side of the tractor scoop. Luckily, we managed to get it all cleaned up before it froze again, and even more luckily, we got a tiny hint of snow today, to cover up the dismal grey of the ice that was left between the dunes. Can we please just stay winter now till spring, and get some nice soft snowfalls, without any rain or melting thereafter?

In other news our folk dance group had our last session of the year tonight, and ended as we always do, by inviting the musicians and everyone else in the local folk dance organization to join us. As a result we had seven musicians and 14 dancers, and it was a delightful evening. While I love all forms of dance, Swedish folk dance is my favourite, and the Swedish folk music played here in Norrbotten is the best music of it all. This is truly one of the biggest reasons I am still in Sweden after 7 years when I usually move every three.

The overwhelming sensation of spring in the north is LIGHT! BRIGHT! Ow! The snow is slowly melting, which means that it is gone right up next to the south sides of the houses (which reflect heat), along the roads and bike paths (which had been kept mostly clear all winter), but everywhere else the snow is still there, but its surface has melted and re-frozen often enough that it is really, really reflective. Add to that the bright sunny days, with every increasing hours of daylight (15 hs, 23 minutes today, and increasing by more than 7 minutes a day) means that the world is so very bright to the point of being overwhelming. These things happen in the spring.

I think I will stay inside and work on projects, now that I am past the worst of the symptoms of being sick. Tomorrow work resumes again.

At the SCA event this weekend I spent the first part of the event wearing a tunic and my new Tjorsberg trousers, with the really comfortable sheepskin feet, but as it came time for the evening feast I decided to change into a dress. Remember how some weeks back I said that I had needed to change out the underarm gores in my 12th century underdress so that the sleeves would fit over my larger arm muscles? Well, this time, when I put on the dress I noticed that the fabric was kind of straining over my lats. (Which explains why I found it so difficult to put on. Yes, it has always been difficult to wriggle into this dress, but I barely managed getting the narrow part of the waist over my shoulders at all this time.) Yet, it was still reasonably comfortable, providing the same really good breast support it always has, so I put on the overdress and enjoyed the evening.

However, late in the evening I managed to move my arms and flex my shoulder muscles in such a way that I heard a ripping sound, followed by several other ripping sounds. We looked, but saw no damage to the over dress (which laces up the sides, so better handles the larger muscles), so suspected that it was the underdress. Sure enough, when I finally took it off that evening I saw several rips in the part of the dress that falls between the shoulder blades--a long one pretty much dead center, and a few smaller ones parallel to it between the mid point and my left shoulder blade. Sigh. Luckily, none of them extended low enough to compromise the breast support the dress provides, since that mostly comes from the fact that the dress diameter just under the bust is exactly the same as the circumference of my ribs at that point, and that point is all ribs--it is just under the newly bulging lats.

Therefore today after work I cut out a diamond-shaped hole from the back of the dress and sewed in a diamond shaped replacement, cut on the bias, so it is a bit stretchier, though the same size (after finishing the seams) as the shredded part which I removed. Then I opened up the seam between my back and the underarm gore from the bottom of my lats to where the underarm gore hits the sleeve, and added an insert there. I used the original square underarm gores for this--sewing one straight side to the bottom edge of the underarm gore, one straight side from that point along the body rectangle to the point at the bottom of my lats, and then sewed along the hypotenuse of the triangular gap to let third the edge of the new gore curve to fill the space. Then I trimmed off all of the square that wasn't needed and finished the seam. This adds about 2 cm at the widest point, which takes the strain off of the fabric over my back. With luck I won't grow so much more in the way of muscle bulk, even though I have every intention of continuing to train and get stronger. But the new underdress in progress will be cut a bit loose over the shoulders, just in case.

Other than damaging the dress (which was fun when it happened), the event was a good one. I did much crafts, got to visit with many delightful people, did some dancing, some singing, and even took a short walk. I should have brought my fur hood and muff though. I hadn't expected to go outside, but I did try to watch the fighting, both the torchlight tourney Friday night (where my poor champion took a cup shot :-( and the day time tourney on Saturday. I didn't stay out long for either of them--while the weekend weather was generally warm and sunny, there was also an icy breeze, which I wouldn't have noticed if I had brought the fur.

It must have been sunny and warm at home over the weekend, too, since the bike path between here and uni has pretty much had all of the snow and ice melted away from it since last I took it. Only places which are shady still have some ice. I noticed when dropping O. off at home after the event that the part of the path I can see from the road was clear, so I opted to take my trike in this morning, and was pleased that my 45 minute walk was thus shortened into a 26 minute pedal. (good thing, too, since the above mentioned repairs to the dress took nearly 4 hours!)

My apprentice was supposed to do her analysis of the Roman coins today, but we are nearly out of the Argon gas needed for the ICP-MS, so instead we just set up the experiment, polished the coins, and took photos of them under the laser camera--it will automatically stitch together as many as 7 x 7 photos (which measures about 4 mm wide and 3 mm tall), and it took six sets of 7 x 7 photos to get the entire coin cross section photographed. But it makes sense to get good photos of "before" we fire on it with the laser.

So the plan is (assuming that the gas arrives on time) to run her analyses as the demo experiment on Wednesday during our lab demo day. Hopefully my colleagues will be ok with this.

Some time back one of you (I think it was hrj) shared some of the signs of fall in her area, and asked what were the signs of fall where the rest of us are. I didn't reply, as it happened to be on a day I didn't have time, but when she asked we had already lost most of our leaves, and some nights were dipping below freezing, and then warming back up to a few degrees above during the day. In the weeks since winter has crept gradually closer, and for the past several days we have enjoyed temperatures which stay below 0 C. When I got home from Finland we had had our first snow--a cute little dusting just enough to fill much of the space between the blades of grass, but not actually hide all of it. This, of course made me happy, as I love snow.

This weekend lord_kjar and C. did the 2.5 hour drive down to Bureå to attend a party at his little brother's house, but I stayed home, as the trip to Finland was quite enough time away from home for me for one week, so instead O. and I worked on some projects. However, when they got home they told me that in Bureå there is half a meeter of snow, and now I am so jealous. Why did that cloud have to drop it all down there, why couldn't it have moved just a bit further north? Why didn't I go along (and bring snow pants) so that I could play in it. Not that I didn't enjoy being at home, of course I did, and it was nice to make progress on projects.