kareina

(cross-posted from FB)

Me, at 23:30 tonight: "I don't need to add jeans over my wool tights, I am just going to run this bag of compost down to the bins--the mosquitoes won't even have time to notice that I am out."

Me at 23:31: "Oh, look, I really should trim the dead branches off of that bush by my bedroom window" (gets pruning scissors from the shed...)

Me at 23:40: "I will just put the shears away and take this little pile of dead branches and grass down the hill to our yard waste pile on the other side of the big spruce tree, the mosquitoes will never have time to notice that I am there"

Me at 23:41: "Oh, look, I really should pull out those plants that are trying to grow under the porch before they really take root and are harder to remove"

Me at 23:50: "I will just carry this pile of plants I ripped out from under the porch down the hill to our yard waste pile on the other side of the big spruce tree, the mosquitoes will never have time to notice that I am there"

Me at 23:51 (safely back in the house): "Where did all of these mosquito bites on my legs come from?"

...and I hope that it will be a decent snow year. I woke up today with plenty of energy, so instead of doing an indoor workout I put on several layers of wool (it was +5 C out, and very gently raining), grabbed a shovel and went to do something about the hill. The new hill, behind the earth cellar, where I want to be able to do sledding this winter. However, when David's brother (and his digger) built that hill by dropping a fair bit of mixed rock, dirt, and whatever else used to be behind the sheds this summer it all got dropped very randomly, which meant that the slope on the field side had many sharp pointy rocks sticking out of it. It was also rather peaked.

Therefore I started at the top, and shoveled the very peak a bit to the side to make a wider, more reasonable to stand on platform, and then started working my way down the slope, digging out the rocks that stuck up, using them to build a bit of a curved bank to the side so that sleds won't go the wrong way and do the abrupt drop over the side into the alleyway that leads to the earth cellar entrance. I managed about 1.5 hours of this before my body decided that I really needed more food, and I went back inside.

While eating I played with my Swedish practice on Duolingo on my phone, which meant I had to be connected to the internet, so I was available when Crian asked me to edit something for him, so I went to the computer and did that fairly quickly, and then wished him a good day and went back to the hill, managing to work my way about two-thirds down the slope. In the process there was one largish rock I really wanted to move a bit up hill, into a spot on the side bank that would have been perfect for it, but to do that I would have had to get it over another rock, and it wasn't cooperating, so, instead, I let it roll down hill. I was working on another large rock, that had been sticking out as quite a prominent bump on the slope, trying to get it to slide backwards into the hill, and off the rock it was sitting upon, when I realized that I was hungry enough that what I probably needed to do was go get more food, and then try again.

Pretty much directly after I got inside and washed the mud off of my gloves and set them on the heater to dry David arrived. He had wanted to start work on the trench we need to dig from the road to the house so that fiber optic internet can be installed in the not too distant future (last winter the company had said that it would come in "next summer", but at this point it counts as "next autumn", and I hope that they get it here before the weather starts freezing and the ground becomes difficult to work).

However, David has been working to many hours this week (Tuesday he went to work at 06:00, and then wound up working all night, too, went home for a nap between 06:00 and noon Wednesday, then returned to work on Wednesday afternoon), so he was content to sit on the couch and relax with me as I ate. We wound up resting a good hour and a half, then decided that it would soon be getting dark (it was 15:00, and sun sets right now at 17:00), so if we were going to do anything else outdoors we had better do it.

We started with my hill--he went straight to the hill to have a look at what I had done, and I went to go get the steel rod which makes moving large rocks so much easier. By the time I had arrived he had already picked up the one largish rock I had let roll down the hill, carried it up, and set it into the side bank where I had wanted it. He is that much stronger than I. (...and he doesn't work out at all; is it cheating to use longer muscles and testosterone?) We spent 25 minutes finishing up the re-arranging of the bottom part of the slope, and now all that is left is to bring over a few wheelbarrows full of dirt to cover the nice arrangement of rocks on the bottom of the slope and I will have a decent sledding hill for this winter.

Then we went to start that trench. David didn't want to use a shovel, as he thinks it makes more sense to make it as narrow as possible, and he wondered if we could use the pick-axe more like a plow. So we tried it. We took some webbing from a set of tie-downs and fastened it to the handle of the pick, then he sunk one end of the blade into the ground, I grabbed the other end of the pick blade and attempted to hold it down into the ground while he wrapped the other end of the webbing around his waist and pulled. This approach works, but to do the initial tearing through the grass requires frequent backing up and re-sinking of the pick blade as the point tends to work its way back up to the surface fairly quickly when pulled like that (and I do not have the mass to keep it in the ground myself, though it does come back out less rapidly while I hold it). We also tried a more traditional use of the pick, where he simply holds the handle, sinks the blade into the ground and pulls. It is a faster way to do it, but requires much more energy on his part, and given how little energy he has left after this week at work, he didn't do that long. We only used the pick for the part of the yard between our driveway and the place on the wall where we want the cable to enter the house, and called it good.

I will try to make time this week to take the little hand shovel gardening tool to empty the lose dirt out of that trench, and we will wait on the part that goes across the driveway and down the hill to the road until later, when we know when they are doing the actual installation. He is wondering if, perhaps, we can try still using the pick, but instead tie it to the tractor, and let the tractor do the heavy pulling...

Tomorrow is the Frostheim annual meeting during the day (even after seven years in Sweden it still boggles my mind that we have one meeting a year, instead of monthly) so I will make some progress on embroidery for the hood for the Norrskensbågskytt Northern Light's Archer. With luck I will have the energy to go from there to Folk music before dance in the evening. If so, then I will get even more embroidery done.

I have finally gotten photos off of my phone from this summer's major project, and put them in the FB album which has all of the earth cellar and other yard work photos, but I will share a couple here for those of you who can't be bothered clicking through:

Here they are hard at work, from right to left, the oldest brother (Per), David, and the youngest brother (Gustaf)



This terraced area didn't exist before they dug up all the rocks from behind the shed and relocated them here. It will make a lovely bbq area:

Today was reasonably productive--I managed to finish putting away everything from the event, did four loads of laundry, and spent a fair bit of time on projects.

This morning's project was replacing the (somewhat embarrassing) paper and duct tape liner for the nice wooden box in which we keep pins with one made of wool. I had made the paper one right after we bought the box, so that the pins wouldn't scratch up the wood, and to have something between the pins and the hard drive magnets we use to keep them in the box. Now the magnets are sandwiched between two layers of wool, and the box is fully lined. This took just over an hour and was clearly a task that I could have done at any point in the last year or so, but I had so much other stuff that really was more urgent, so I never got to it.

I also put in another hour or so stitching on my beard--the bottom part of my chin is now nicely covered. It is starting to look like it really will be possible to finish this before the event I need it for (just over a month from today).

And this evening I finally managed to start the embroidery part of the embroidered applique that is going onto the sexy viking cloak I started sometime before November of 2012 (I know this because that was the month I mentioned the "cloak in progress" in an email to a friend). I have no idea how many hours the first few steps of the cloak took (basting the lining to the main fabric, sewing the tablet woven trim to the cloak edge, and doing a tipple row of decorative running stitch around the edge of the fabric), but so far I have put in about eight hours into the embellishment, just over three of which were spent embroidering the face onto the cat.

I also watered the berries and ate the 10 or 20 smultrons (wild strawberries) that have ripened in our yard. Yum!

lord_kjar was also productive today. It was his first day back to work after his summer vacation, and while there he got to talking to one of his colleagues, who has been doing a major project in his yard. The colleague has had a problem with deep puddles forming on his yard every time it rains, in part due to the clay rich soil and regolith in his yard. Therefore he has installed a drainage system, and in the progress generated a large pile of dirt, stones, etc. that he wanted to get rid of. He had planned on shoveling it onto his trailer and hauling it to the part of the tip (or "dump" for the Americans who read this) one load at a time. However, that was going to take a long time, since he would need to load the trailer one day after work, haul away that load the next, and then repeat. So lord_kjar said that he would be willing to bring the tractor over and help out, in exchange for being able to take the dirt back to our place instead of sending it to the tip.

Therefore, as soon as he finished eating dinner today he attached the giant trailer to the tractor and drove off. He returned a couple of hours later and dumped the dirt (which totally filled the giant trailer!) onto the area that we plan to put the new shed once we re-assemble it. He would have promptly smoothed out that pile, but I noticed that there is a bunch of still green sheets of grass in the pile, and the part of our yard we leveled last autumn still doesn't have much grass growing on it, so I suggested we wait and give me a chance to rescue the newly imported grass and see if it is willing to grow in our yard.

His timing was perfect though--after he dumped the load the storm that had been threatening to arrived started rolling in. I had just enough time to sweep the last traces of dirt from the bed of the trailer before it started raining (with thunder and lightening) hard enough that had the dirt still been in the trailer it would have quickly become mud. So we went inside, and shut off the computers so that any electricity surges from the storm wouldn't be an issue, and he took a nap while I did the above mentioned embroidery.

Now it is way past any reasonable bed time, so I should put down the computer and do my yoga (which will be my first exercise of the day--I appear to have forgotten the plan to go for a walk) so that I can head to bed and get some sleep.

...and this is a good thing, because I have ever so much I need to do for work! I have deadlines of 1 November for both an abstract for a January conference and a grant proposal and I really want to be playing with my 3D models now that I have half again as much data to work with as I had last week AND I finally have the structural geology model for this area working in my modeling program--this means that I can model changes in the rock type due to alteration separately for each fault block and compare that with the models made for all of the blocks as a single package. In addition to all that I also agreed to supervise students taking an exam next week, since many others in the department who would normally do this need to be out of town.

In other news last night we combined dance practice at the uni (which is set to happen alternate Thursdays) with SCA sewing/crafts night (which normally happens on the other Thursdays at a location in the city center). However, their normal site isn't available next week, so they moved that session to this week, and then decided to join us at the uni instead because a couple of the dancers wanted to to both. This went very very well, and I am going to invite the crafts people to join us every time we have dance, if they feel for it.

I am someone who normally longs for winter all summer long--I love snow and crisp cold weather. However, this year, with all of the projects in the yard, I have been hoping for more summer, since we just aren't getting them all accomplished as quickly as I would like, which is not surprising, given how many different outdoor projects we have going at once:

*dig up and replace electric cable to the septic system, since the old one died last winter, and we don't really care for the above-ground extension cord that has been in use ever since. Status: close to done, the digging up and burring of the new cable is done, but we still need to hook it up inside the house so we can get rid of the above ground temporary fix.

*Earth Cellar. status: IN PROGRESS. All the walls are at least thigh high, the concrete rings for the door and interior cabinets are in place, the dirt and gravel fill behind the walls is done to the height of the walls, the inside floor has been covered with gravel and a large concrete slab that was lying in the yard. Sadly, we have to return his dad's tractor at the end of this weekend, so we have only tonight and perhaps Sunday morning (Saturday is fully booked with a mini gaming con and birthday party) available if we want to put any more of the large rocks into the walls. After that we can do only rocks small enough to move by hand, and then only till we start getting freezing weather at night--I don't really want to deal with wet concrete freezing and thawing.

*Stairs to earth cellar. Status: Done and beautiful!

*Terraced garden area beyond the earth cellar. Status: next year's problem, some tractor work to level out the bottom terrace has happened in the early summer (while we were waiting for the delivery of the gravel needed for the earth cellar project). The bare dirt of that level has been completely overgrown, mostly with nettles. Will require work another summer to go anywhere with it.

*cobble stone and cement block walkway to the house. Status: IN PROGRESS: one third totally done. Remaining cement blocks all set in place, and half of them dug in and awaiting their accompanying cobblestones. However, this one is, again, on hold while we try to do a bit more earth cellar work--even after we start getting freezing at night (which will put a stop to playing with wet cement in the earth cellar) it will still be warm enough during the day to dig room for the cobble stones

*Gravel path from the driveway to the bicycle shed. Status: Done! (this week)

*widely spaced cement block walkway going from the main, pretty walkway over to the sheds. Status: IN PROGRESS: cement blocks set in place, but only the two that fall into the gravel path from one shed to the driveway (those stones lead to the other shed) have been dug into place.

*large stones to frame curve of the driveway. Status: Done! Set in place between the lamp post and the house, look beautiful!

*leveling & re-sloping of yard to get rid of mud puddle locations. Status: Done! now we need the grass to grow back.

*re-burring the electric cable to the shed now that the yard has been leveled. Status: mostly done, just need to do the last couple of meters close to the shed, where there is still grass because we never took a tractor to that part (the new burial path is very different from the old one, because we now want it to go to the other shed first, since that is were we will put the split to also run electric to the earth cellar). Needless to say, we also still need to put in that splitter, and we will also put in a light switch to the second shed, so that we don't have to plug in the light every time we want to turn it on.

*raspberry patch. Status: done! canes brought over from the home of a colleague (where they had been growing outside of the box their parent canes lived in) and put into a box here with lots of cord strung between uprights to help them stand up despite the frequent winds we get here.

*smultron (wild strawberry) patch. Status: done! all smultrons which had been growing where the hole for the earth cellar now is were safely transplanted to over by the shed. Those plants forgave us enough to feed us many yummy berries. Those plants that had been growing where the stairs now are have been relocated to places surrounding the stairs. One particularly cute bunch of them now grows in the hollow surrounded by the rocks at the curve of the stairs.

*strawberry patch. Status: next year's problem, still where the neighbour left them when he moved most of his berries out of our yard because we would be taking a tractor to the field. The long term plan is to move them to the above mentioned terraced garden. Someday.

*leveling the field. Status: next year's problem,didn't get so far due to the accessory for the tractor for breaking up soil having turned out to have broken (pulverized) bearings. However, many high spots were scooped up to provide dirt for leveling the upper yard.

*archery range. Status: next year's problem, not even started at all.*

*wider parking area. status: close to done, he used the tractor to bring up some dirt to level out the area to the left of the two car parking area, so we now have a flat space three cars wide for parking, but that part will need gravel, and, some other year, it will be nice to do a ring of large stones around the parking area and add a second pillar to plug cars in during the winter.

Hmm. Looking at the list, and how much more time I have spent outside compared to all the other summers of my life, it is no wonder that I have had more annoying bug bites than ever before. It turns out that while mosquito bites don't bother me for more than 20 minutes max, the tiny little biting gnats leave holes in my skin that get hard, painful lumps under them that bother me for two to three days. Nasty things, that I will be glad to be rid of when the snows come. Have I mentioned how much I love winter? So, I am looking forward to my favourite season, but not looking forward to how many of these projects will need to go on hold till next year. And life won't even slow down when winter comes, as the list of indoor projects we want to get to is just as long...

Oops--more than a week since last I checked in here. I know that I have often thought of typing up our adventures (mostly in the lines of home improvement), during that week, but, somehow, I have been just busy enough that it hasn't happened.

Last week Friday some of our folk dancing friends were holding a garage sale, so we took a long lunch break and dropped by for a cup of tea and to "halsa på" as they say here. However, they had a few things that looked useful, so, for 190 SEK (about €22, or $29 US, or £19 at today's exchange rate), we went home with a pick-axe, a birch bark backpack, lots of crochet hooks, a set of four soup bowls, a sleeve ironing board, and a clear glass solitaire game board with blue marbles. We spent nearly nothing for that pile of loot, and they are rid of some of their grandparent's things they don't need, so everyone is happy.

That evening we drove down to his parent's house, and returned the huge yellow jordfras (rotary cultivator) that we had hoped to use to smooth out our field. However, at some point before we borrowed it someone had failed to oil it. When he went to use it he added oil, and it just poured back out. So he took it apart and discovered that one of the sets of bearings had been destroyed--instead of having round steel balls in that casing there was just steel powder and chips. I didn't know that was possible, so it was fascinating to see. However, after consulting with his dad they derided that rather than us trying to find parts and fix it we should take it back to him and he will decide after he looks if he wants to fix it or not.

So, after work we rented a trailer (picked it up just after 19:00) and did the 45 minute drive south with the cultivator. They used the tractor to lift it onto the trailer, and at the other end they just tied it to the roof of the shed, and then hoisted it up and drove the trailer out from under it, while I sat inside and visited with his mother (I am pleased to report that my Swedish is getting good enough that I can now converse with her when he isn't around to help with translations). Then we drove with the trailer another 30 minutes south to their property in Hemmingsmark, where they have some storage containers (and where we went for the wood cutting adventure. There we loaded the trailer up with the cement mixer and a bunch of solid lumber boards that will be useful for lots of outdoor construction projects at our place, since they have been stored outside, and are already quite grey with age. We didn't arrive at Hemmingsmark till around midnight, and thus didn't get home until 03:00. Needless to say, we did NOT unload the trailer that night! (Luckily we'd rented it for 24 hours, so we didn't need to.) Instead we just did yoga/stretching and went to sleep.

Saturday we slept in (duh!) and then unloaded the trailer, returned it, and then organized the lumber (and the last load we had brought back some weeks before) and built a shelf to hold much of it over the wood pile. We still need to do another shelf to hold the rest, but that can wait.

Once that was done we returned to the yard-work in progress--I took up the rest of the old walkway (I had started that a few days before) and he used the tractor to do some sculpting in the yard--raising areas that were too low and lowering areas that were too high so that instead of getting puddles when it drains the water should just run away. We rescued some of the grass from the areas he was changing by putting it down in chunks where the walkway had been. It is kind of lumpy just now, but it may well get moved again before the project is done, so we aren't being too fussy yet.

On Sunday we rented a trailer again and drove back to his dad's house, where we loaded a bunch of wood that his dad had left over from building the new shed onto the trailer and hauled it away for him--this pleased him as he now has room to put the motor home back into the garage and he didn't need to drive it the 30 minutes south to their property in Hemmingsmark, and it pleased us as we have more wood for projects we want to do, nice new, fresh clean boards this time, suitable for indoor projects we have in mind, and we didn't have to drive the extra 30 minutes south to Hemmingsmark to get it from there.

The week slipped by quickly between work during the day and more progress on the yard work in the evenings. We couldn't do anything further with the earth cellar because we were awaiting the delivery of a load of gravel. That was finally delivered by our neighbour with the tractor on Wednesday evening. Thursday evening we were too tired from a week of yard work to do anything with it, so we didn't start work on the next stage of the earth cellar till tonight after work.

Therefore we haven't gotten very far with it, but we have spread gravel in a thick layer across the bottom and then he used the tractor to bring in some large rocks and medium sized rocks to build the walls out of. We have started the building part and now have part of the first row of rocks for the back wall in place and cemented together with small rocks tucked into the gaps between to fill out the cement. We worked till we had used up the first batch of cement (two 25 kg bags, to which we added a scoop or two of gravel), and then decided we were done with that part for the day. However, it is Sweden in the summer, so, of course, daylight was still good, so we also took the time to use some of those old boards we got from his dad's property to build an A-frame roof to put over the earth cellar and we covered that with a couple of large tarps. It has been raining fairly regularly recently, and we had noticed that some of the dirt sides to the hole where the earth cellar is going had started to wash down small bits of mud and earth. Neither of us wishes to see that actually give way and fall into the hole, so we are hoping that covering it will be enough to prevent that till we finish building the walls and filling in the space between the walls and the edges of the hole in the ground.

With luck we will have time and energy to make good progress on wall building the rest of the weekend, so if you don't hear from me the next few days, you will know what I am up to...

In other news, I managed to get a good draft for the poster I am presenting at a conference in early August done, and sent it off to my colleagues for comment. That eases a fair bit of work stress, so I am free to focus on the projects at home. speaking of which, when we haven't been doing yard work or fetching supplies for projects I have also made time to do other projects. I managed to finish up a small tablet weaving project that I started at the European Textile Forum in 2010! A UFO no more--it is now complete! No idea what I will do with it--it is a short length suitable for a learning project, and it has a fair few mistakes in it that I opted to live with, rather than undoing, but boy it feels good to have gotten that one done.

In fact, it felt so good that I was inspired to start a new tablet weaving project, and chose project number 3 from the book Applesies and Fox Noses: Finnish Tablet Woven Bands, which has a much easier turning pattern than the project I just finished, but takes way more cards. In fact, when I checked my card stash I didn't really have a good option for that project--I have a dozen small horn tablets, and 8 even smaller and much thinner wooden ones, and the eight largish cardboard ones that came with the just completed project. That pattern needs 22 tablets, which would mean mixing them up.

But then I remembered that when I was in Tassie I started a set of wooden tablets while visiting a friend's woodworking shop. We got as far as using his power tools to cut the blanks and drill the holes, but I never did the sanding and finishing. So I checked that UFO, and it turns out that we made 24 tablets, which is more than enough for the weaving I want to do next. Therefore, instead of working on weaving I am now doing a little sanding each day. Will take weeks at this week to get them all smooth enough to work with, and really, the wood is nice enough I kind of want to make them perfect, instead of just smooth enough, but, then again, I also want to do the weaving, so perhaps not...

One of the nice things about home ownership is the part about "do whatever you want". Granted, sometimes, for budget reasons, one chooses a slightly different "want" that choice #1. I would love a hobbit hole. But I don't need one. But I think round doors into the side of a hill are totally cool. Root cellars are cool too (literally, also). When one hopes to hold SCA camping events on one's land root cellars are also useful--how nice would it be if people on site could keep food cool in an underground room, instead of in an ice chest?

Another thing on our wish list is a slight hill in front of our house to disrupt the wind flow. Right now (well, in the winter) the wind comes from the south east, rushes across the field, slips up the rise to the house, and creates snow-dunes that crawl across the paths we shovel, filling them, and requiring us to re-shovel the same path over and over again, even when no new snow has fallen from the sky.

Therefore we are combining these goals. We are using the tractor we borrowed from lord_kjar's father to dig a large hole in the slope in front of the house. However, before we did that it was totally necessary to rescue the smultron that were growing right were we wanted to dig. That went well, and the berries seem to be happy in their new location. The digging is also going well. Some times I am busy, and he does the tractor work on his own, but on those occasions it is sometimes necessary for him to get out of the tractor and do things by hand to make it easier for the tractor scoop to lift the rocks and carry them away. Therefore, as often as I am not too busy with something higher on the priority list, I am out there working with him. While he drives away the last tractor load to the ever growing piles of dirt and rocks, I am in the hole, loosening up the large rocks, brushing dirt off of them so that he can see if he can use the scoop, or has to switch to the forks to carry them away.

Needless to say, between the transplanting and rock-loosening, I am getting a decent workout!

But, sometimes thigns are higher on my priority list. Like today's furniture re-arranging. Anyone who has read my journal for long knows that I love re-arranging furniture. Today's episode was even better than normal. I have taken the rocking chair, which I have been using as a computer chair, downstairs, and we have brought up the recliner couch. I am now happily reclined in the office, typing on my computer, and loving it. And there is room for someone to sit next to me, too.

However, I have just noticed it is 03:00, and while it is a weekend, I should probably get some sleep anyway...