kareina

When last I posted I had just completed a Thursday that was nice, but so full I hadn't managed to get to any of my uni work. That Friday wasn't much better, with only 44 minutes uni work accomplished, but I did spend a half an hour playing on the sledding hill, which is both fun and counts as exercise.

That Saturday (30 Jan) was the Around The Known Bardic, which ran for 24 hours, starting at ~01:00 my time. I was wise enough NOT to try joining then. Instead I went to sleep just before midnight, slept till 07:30, and managed to join the bardic by 07:40. I then spent the rest of the day in the zoom meeting, and enjoyed every minute of it. Well, I did switch my hearing aids over to the telephone for one 40 minute call with E., but I didn't disconnect from the bardic to do that--I just didn't hear whatever was sung then. It was really a lot of fun. Sure, I would prefer an in-person bardic and the possibility to sing together. However, living where I do I wouldn't be able to sing with the people who attended this one anyway, since Sweden is rather far from the US, Canada, Australia, and even the UK. I made some great progress on my sexy viking cloak during the bardic.

Sunday I decided to spend the day doing useful stuff, including lots of loads of laundry, and some cooking and didn't touch the computer again after the bardic ended. My acroyoga partner came over for some sledding on my hill--the first time we had seen one another since the second wave of the pandemic started, but they say outdoor activities are safer, so we decided it would be fun. It was! We even tried a little outdoor acroyoga. Yes, it does work to balance upon winter boots instead of bare feet. It isn't quite as comfortable, but the thick winter coat provides enough padding that it is much more comfortable than I had expected. Eventually he decided it was time to head home, and eyed the snowy field, saying that it looked fun to cross. I pointed out that if he did cross the deep snow across the field he could pick up the snowmachine tracks on the ice and take that all the way to his place, thereby cutting about half a km from the trip (comparing with going around by the road).

He thought that sounded like fun, and I decided to go part way with him. At first he lead, and I just followed along in his footprints. Eventually he got tired of breaking the path, and I switched to leading. At that point I decided that walking through that deep of snow was too much work, and I switched to crawling. J. reports that my crawling broke the path enough that he had no difficulties walking behind me. Once we reached the snow-machine super-highway that is the wetlands between my house and the nature reserve the walking was easy, and I followed him about half way home before deciding that I was tired and should return home.

Before J. departed we agreed that since we aren't meeting for acroyoga, and we still need to do something in the way of exercise, we would meet every weekday morning over zoom, at 06:00, and do both a DownDog HIT and a DownDog Yoga app workout.

The next week (also known as last week, I only had to go to the archives Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. Wednesday and thursday I attended a conference for work (from home, of course, there being a pandemic on).
Some of those evenings I spent doing stuff for Coronation and never got to Uni work, but others I made good progress on my data reduction. I did, however, need a nap after getting home from the archives most days, to make up for getting up on time for that workout.

On Saturday E. got out of the hospital, so I picked her up, and we went to Gammalstad for a picnic. I had baked a really yummy treat for the occasion:

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68 g butter
2 c oats
0.5 c almonds
1 T rosehip powder
2 T Norlandsbär powder
1 t sugar
Dash each of cardamom, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon
0.25 c yoghurt
2 c grated carrot
1 c grated apple
1 c frozen raspberries
1 egg

Mix butter and oats and powders, spices and sugar till everything is completely blended.

Grate the apple and carrot

Mix everything together, bake in a buttered pan at 160 C
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After our picnic we strolled around Hängnan a bit, looking at the old houses, and then went past the paddock with sheep and ponies. The biggest pony came over to say hello, and was really friendly. So friendly that it started licking my hand. When it started gently nibbling I said no and took my hand away. Silly pony--the sign says we aren't supposed to feed you, that includes not feeding you the body parts we want to use later.

That evening my friend M. came over with my birthday present--a stack of beautiful hard-bound Folk Stories collection (in Swedish), we fed him dinner, and then he took E. back to his place, where she can enjoy the healing attentions of his two dogs and one cat.

This week we are still managing to meet for that morning workout each day, and both Monday and Tuesday I needed naps after getting home from the archives, but, both days I managed to do uni work in the evenings. Today after work, on the other hand, I had the energy to run errands. Back in December my former boss at LTU let me know that even though my job had ended, the university was still giving me a Christmas gift, and how should she give it to me. I suggested that N. could pick it up when he was next in the building, and he could pass it to D, who he sees regularly, and D could bring it here when next he was as the house. This form of delivery worked well, though some time elapsed, and I finally got the card on Monday.

The gift turned out to be a present card, good at a large variety of shops in the area. I am not much of a shopper, but I logged in to see which shops are participating, and one of them was the Shop in Lapland--the high end gift shop in Gammelstad from which my mother bought me a really pretty snowflake necklace when she was last here on a visit, and which, sadly, vanished entirely too soon thereafter. Their web page said that they are closed due to the pandemic, but anyone who has ordered something to be picked up can drop by in the afternoons of Monday, Wednesday, or Friday and knock loudly on the door. So I sent them a quick email asking if I could come by and use that present card to get the snowflake necklace, and they said yes.

Therefore, after work today, instead of going straight home for a nap, I did the 7 km detour and got the necklace (for which I needed to pay 180 SEK over and above the amount on the card). Since it was a beautiful day I took a short walk, and stopped by the paddock with the sheep and ponies, but they had recently been given fresh food, and showed zero interest in saying hello. Since it was a little on the cold side I just returned to the car and came home.

Now I need to decide if I have enough energy to do some uni work, or if I need a nap...

Last weekend's home improvements included starting to fix the entryway to the shed in which we keep my tricycle, the ride-on lawnmower, the rock moving cart, and other things with wheels. The floor of the shed is a very thick layer of fine gravel, and there is a slight slope leading to the door. Consequently, when we moved in the gravel was gradually working its way out the door and blending with the coarser gravel of the walkway. Therefore, when we obtained a bunch of used curbstones cheaply some years back, we put one across the entryway to keep the gravel in, and then placed a board in front of it, at an angle, to make it possible to roll things up and over the large bump of the stone threshold. This worked, but there was always a fair bit of effort involved,to get the heavier items over the bump. Then on Friday evening, when I wondered aloud if perhaps I should re-do the raspberry patch with a stone edge the same way I did the strawberries, Kjartan suggested that perhaps a better use of energy would be to use some of the large old cobble stones we have to make an entry ramp for the shed. This sounded like a brilliant idea, so Saturday I started digging in the first row of them. Over the course of the weekend I did 5 hrs and 40 minutes worth of work on that project, which was enough to get half of the ramp done, and oh, is it ever so much nicer to roll things in and out!




Monday through Wednesday I started each day with meeting Johan for about a half an hour of acroyoga before heading to the archives, where I sorted and inventoried the papers turned in for the Gammelstad Lions Club for the time period 2013 to 2018 (after which the club disbanded due to having only a small core of older members remaining, who no longer had the energy to keep it going). They had previously archived their club records on two other occasions, so I needed to print out the list of the previous inventories to compare the codes used then for various topics so as to be certain to be reasonably consistent. I had pulled that set from the "to do" shelves because it looked small enough, and already well organised enough, to complete during my final week on the job, and it was, just. I wound up leaving work early on Wednesday to run some errands, and stayed 1.5 hours extra on Thursday to finish it up. Well, everything besides actually putting it onto the "done" shelves and adding the shelf number to its database entry--one of my colleagues, who has a key to the archives, said he would do that step.

Then I said goodbye to my boss (no hugs nor even handshake, because pandemic), and agreed that I would be in touch later this summer to determine when I should start my next short contract with them. I could have started already in June, but my garden needs some attention, and I need a break from working two half time jobs at once.

Wednesday's errands included a stop by the tip shop to get more decorative pots in which to put indoor house plants, and whilst there I found a small wooden chest, tall enough for our ceramic water jug, for only 150 SEK. While we could certainly make a nicer chest for feast gear, that would take time, and we couldn't do it for so little money!




Therefore that evening's Frostheim Zoom craftsnight hangout I started sewing a wool lining for the box, and now, that done, I am also making a nålbinded cover for the jug, which I started Saturday morning during my Sister's Zooom Happy Hour, and continued during Crafternoon. I have wanted to attend fjorlief's Crafternoons since first she mentioned them, but now that they have gone virtual, I can! So nice to get to see her and other friends from An Tir, and to meet new people.

Yesterday I managed to get some seeds and the seedlings that my friend Barbara gave me into two of the three planting boxes by the house, and need to go buy more dirt for the third today (we had thought that two bags each would do it, but it turns out they need three). So in a bit I will head to the store to get more dirt, and another water hose, since Kjartan has planted potatoes on the field (having borrowed fro his dad a tilling tool to drag behind the tractor to prepare the ground), and it would be nice to be able to water them, and our hose just doesn't reach that far.

Tomorrow I need to get productive on LTU work, and start doing Durham research again, now that the archive job is done for the spring.