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a year's summary
Dec. 11th, 2024 08:20 pmAn old friend, who doesn't use social media, but does use email sent me a "happy birthday" note, and a brief summary of what has happened in his life since last he wrote (which was for my birthday a year ago). Having written him a long reply, summarizing my year, I thought it worth editing a bit and posting here. Not that I think this includes anything I didn't mention at the time.
A year ago I was finishing writing up my Master’s thesis. I managed to submit it on 30 December, which was my deadline to get it in without needing to pay tuition again. That was really quite a relief! However, it took so much time and energy to do that last push to completion that I spent the next several months just relaxing and not even looking at the paper for publication that I should have been also working on.
Well, I should say "relaxing on the research side of things". -I was applying for jobs and being active in the SCA, and spending time with my beloved Keldor, and I even signed up for the local “Folk Högskola”, taking their general studies course, including “Samhällskunskap, Historia och Svenska” That was seriously fun--being a student again, at basically high school level, which means hang out in "Forsämlingshemmet", a wonderful old timber house in the Lövånger Church Village, a short walk from home, working on sewing while listening to lectures, all in Swedish. I could feel myself leveling up in Swedish daily. One of my classmates is Ukrainian in ancestry, but grew up in Russia before moving here a couple of years ago. While he can speak some Swedish, he isn’t really up to the level of the social studies or history class, so I would often translate complicated parts of the lecture to English for him, and he would contribute to the class discussion in English (of course everyone in the room can speak English, but we kept things to Swedish other than that).
Shortly after those classes began I saw an announcement for a part time job cleaning the local health center and apothecary. So I applied with a cover letter saying that it sounded like the perfect job to do while doing the Folk Högskola course, and I got it. My first income in a couple of years (not counting working during the elections, which was a one day job). Seven hours a week didn’t quite cover all the house bills, but it did drastically slow the rate at which my savings was dwindling, and meant that we could use Keldor’s income to pay for SCA travel. Lots and lots and lots of SCA travel.
Ok, not as many events as when I lived in An Tir or the Mists--I just counted, it was only 16 events. However, Two of those were 10 day events. Another was in Ireland, and we spent several days before and after driving all over the country, and during the spring we drove back and forth between southern Sweden, and home, then north to the border with Finland and then back to southern Sweden multiple times. It was seriously fun.
Then, as summer was starting to wind down, I first got a job offer for an eight-month job with the University of Umeå Library in the research support team, and I got a call saying “remember that summer archaeology field work job with the Norrbotten Museum you applied for back in March? We finally got funding approved for a short field season in September, are you still interested?" After a few messages back and forth with both jobs I was able to accept both. The archaeology job was up north, in Kiruna, so I added one more road trip--I went north, to Lofoten, to spend a week as a volunteer at the Lofotr Viking Museum carving soapstone, and then I went to Kiruna for my first archaeology field job.
That job was fun. We were excavating a couple of old hearths that are near enough the highway that they will be impacted when the road is widened. There are hearths in the region that date to the Stone Age, soon after the glacier retreated enough to support plants and animals, so we had hoped that these might also be old. Alas, these were so new that there were nails in every layer of ash in the hearths, right to the bottom. So many that I suspect that they never burned anything but nail-bearing used lumber. So my colleagues were disappointed, but I enjoyed learning all of their routines, and the odds of my being able to land an archaeology field job next summer have gone up.
After we were done with the excavations I went home, and then started commuting to my job in Umeå. I remember years and years ago, when my friend described to me their ~2 hour commute to work, and I thought it sounded terrible. Well, from my home it is 1 hour by car to the university in Umeå, or 1.5 by bus. The first day I drove, so I could bring in glass jars of food staples to keep in my office so I can make lunch on days I don’t have leftovers. That evening I stopped at a grocery store on my way out of town, and then got stuck in traffic at a construction zone, and wound up having to wait through two cycles of the pilot car, which meant that I didn’t get home till two hours after I had left the office. I was quite traumatized by that, and have taken the bus ever since. (Luckily, one can buy a monthly bus pass for cheap enough that as long as I take the bus more than seven days a month, it has paid for itself.)
It turns out that the commute is no problem at all, as the bus has free wifi. So I get up early, and hang out with Keldor for half an hour on the phone as he drives to work. He gets there just before my bus arrives at 06:30 (the earliest bus of the day to stop in Lövånger), I work for 1.5 hours on the bus, then I work five hours on campus and hop on the bus at 14:26 to work for another 1.5 hours. This gets me home just before 16:00, with slightly more than my needed hours for the day accomplished, which means that on days I work from home (pretty much every day I don’t have an in-person meeting (which I have at least two days a week, sometimes four or even five) I can work a shorter day.
This has meant that l have had the energy needed to do my thesis corrections. Normally, when one submits one’s thesis to Durham University one has the “Viva” (thesis defense, which, in the UK, is a closed-room meeting with only the student and the two examiners) within three months of submission. Mine took much longer than that to be scheduled. It was a full three months before I was even contacted by my internal examiner, who just said “I am talking with Richard (external examiner) to find a time that works for us both". I promptly replied with “Great! My time is flexible, except for these dates, when I will be traveling”. Some weeks later he replied to suggest the Friday of Double Wars, Drahenwald’s biggest event, held on a site with crap internet access, and that day was the vigil for my beloved Keldor to become a laurel. So I replied that, as I had told him in my previous email, I would be traveling then, and would not have internet access.
He didn’t reply, and I happily kept focusing on my SCA adventures. It wasn’t till six full months had elapsed with no viva (and our event schedule slowed down again), that I started feeling like “gee, we really should do that”, and started not only poking him, but I also poked my supervisor and the department head. The result was that I did my viva fully nine months after thesis submission! The viva itself was really nice. They both liked my thesis and were impressed with how much I had done for it.
They had, of course, suggestions for improvement, and asked me if I wanted that list to be called “minor corrections”, which comes with a three-month deadline, or “major corrections”, which comes with a six-month deadline. When I explained that I would be starting a full-time job the next day, they decided to call it “major corrections”. I thanked them, and, of course, immediately set myself the goal to finish in three months anyway, but it is nice not to need to.
That goal was achieved. My birthday present to myself was finishing up the last of the corrections and printing the thesis to pdf, including all of the appendices before going to bed the night before my birthday. After I got home from work on my birthday I typed up the list of corrections I had made, and sent it in. I probably should have given it one final read over, but I was feeling impulsive, and liking the thought of a birthday submission. So now I will be able to enjoy my winter vacation without last year’s stress of “can't participate in anything fun, I must finish the thesis”.
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