Another lovely weekend
I am very, very content with life these days. This weekend included a Swedish folk singing workshop on Saturday. We gathered at 10:00 at the old one-room school house in Gammelstaden ("old town/place) where we do our weekly dancing and folk music) and started the morning with stretching and warming up before singing. The others had been to prior workshops, so the morning was spent just singing, but the songs were easy enough for me to join in on first hearing. Oh, how I love group singing, particularly when everyone is singing the same words and the same tune at the same time. For me there is no greater magic than the sharing that arises when we are all together on the same thing like that. Sure, I do enjoy the choir we sing with on Mondays, it is kind of fun to play the games with sound that happen when different voices sing different notes or words or timing or some combination at once, but for me it is simply not as much fun as is the togetherness of everyone in the group singing the same words at the same time with (more or less) the same tune.
We took a break for lunch and then went for a walk, it being a lovely warm day (which is to say that after a couple of weeks of temps between -20 and -30 C it had warmed up to only just below freezing. The little village consists mostly of a bunch of densely packed little cottages around a very old church. Apparently at one time farmers would travel 50 km to come to church, and the journey on foot (or even using the foot power of an animal) was long enough that they'd make it a two day trip, staying the night in town in one of the tiny cottages before returning home the next day. The village is now a world heritage site, and they have brought in other old buildings from other parts of northern Sweden so that tourists can see a variety of styles on one stop. Apparently the SCA does a medieval week here in the summers.
After lunch the workshop continued with songs that were new to most of us, so we spent more time learning them, and it was still much fun. The workshop ended at 16:00 and archinonlive and I returned home to a relaxing evening of enjoying one another's company, accomplishing useful things around the house, and practice reading aloud to him from Swedish children's books.
Sunday morning was SCA fighter training followed by the SCA annual meeting to decide what is on this year. Everyone present liked the idea of dance practice, so with luck we will start one up soon. The meeting was held in Swedish, so I mostly worked on my sewing and enjoyed it whenever someone used a word I know. There are rather a lot of them these days, but for the most part they aren't the important words in the sentences. After the meeting we visited with folk for a while, and it turns out that, as usual for my experiences in Sweden thus far, everyone is so fluent in English that I don't need to slow down when I speak to them. It would be very easy to go through life here without learning the language. However, "learn another language" has been on my to-do list for many years, and I think that this time I am actually going to be able to cross that one off, thought it will take a while...
Sunday afternoon was the normal Folk music session. Since I don't play an instrument (I still want to learn hammer dulcimer, but need to acquire a new one, first) I spend the time enjoying their music and working on sewing projects. After many months of only sporadic progress I finally have the underdress I started when I was in Vienna for a conference back in May far enough along (all skirt gores attached) that I am able to look at the fitting of the body. I have been wanting to give a try to underdresses that are tight enough to be self-supporting without a bra, and it looks like this one will work. I spent most of the music session alternating between stitching a bit and heading to the other room to try it on, with safety pins inserted as needed to test fitting. Alas, it will take at least another couple of hours of thinking sewing time to get it done, I think.
Normally folk music is followed by folk dance class, but this week it was canceled. It turned out to be a good thing, since I wound up having something else I needed to do: In between the morning SCA stuff and the afternoon music/sewing stuff I did a google search for "geology Luleå", thinking to learn something of the local rock types. Instead I found a job ad for someone to teach geology at the local school, which is a 10 minute walk from home. The application deadline was listed on the page as "tomorrow", so as soon as we got home from music I settled into the computer and put together an application. More details available on my geology blog if you are interested. I finally finished it and got it printed then did my yoga and went to bed at 02:00. This morning I turned in the application and accomplished a couple of loads of laundry.
I have been meaning to mention the civilized way the laundry room works here. The use of the machines is free (or rather paid for as part of rent), and time is reserved in 4 hour blocks. Each apartment has a key with a special lock thingie which fits into either the laundry room door, or a calender on the way showing the available times. If you want to do laundry at a specific day/time you insert your lock into the appropriate slot on the calender and no one else will use it then. When it is your turn you start your washing, then use your lock to lock the door and no one messes with your clothes in progress. Very convenient--one still has to walk over there to see if there is a free machine at the moment or to reserve one for later, but one can clearly tell when later it will be free if now isn't a good time. Not as nice as having ones own washer and dryer, but way, way better than the shared coin-op laundry room I had to use when in was in Mountainview California.
We took a break for lunch and then went for a walk, it being a lovely warm day (which is to say that after a couple of weeks of temps between -20 and -30 C it had warmed up to only just below freezing. The little village consists mostly of a bunch of densely packed little cottages around a very old church. Apparently at one time farmers would travel 50 km to come to church, and the journey on foot (or even using the foot power of an animal) was long enough that they'd make it a two day trip, staying the night in town in one of the tiny cottages before returning home the next day. The village is now a world heritage site, and they have brought in other old buildings from other parts of northern Sweden so that tourists can see a variety of styles on one stop. Apparently the SCA does a medieval week here in the summers.
After lunch the workshop continued with songs that were new to most of us, so we spent more time learning them, and it was still much fun. The workshop ended at 16:00 and archinonlive and I returned home to a relaxing evening of enjoying one another's company, accomplishing useful things around the house, and practice reading aloud to him from Swedish children's books.
Sunday morning was SCA fighter training followed by the SCA annual meeting to decide what is on this year. Everyone present liked the idea of dance practice, so with luck we will start one up soon. The meeting was held in Swedish, so I mostly worked on my sewing and enjoyed it whenever someone used a word I know. There are rather a lot of them these days, but for the most part they aren't the important words in the sentences. After the meeting we visited with folk for a while, and it turns out that, as usual for my experiences in Sweden thus far, everyone is so fluent in English that I don't need to slow down when I speak to them. It would be very easy to go through life here without learning the language. However, "learn another language" has been on my to-do list for many years, and I think that this time I am actually going to be able to cross that one off, thought it will take a while...
Sunday afternoon was the normal Folk music session. Since I don't play an instrument (I still want to learn hammer dulcimer, but need to acquire a new one, first) I spend the time enjoying their music and working on sewing projects. After many months of only sporadic progress I finally have the underdress I started when I was in Vienna for a conference back in May far enough along (all skirt gores attached) that I am able to look at the fitting of the body. I have been wanting to give a try to underdresses that are tight enough to be self-supporting without a bra, and it looks like this one will work. I spent most of the music session alternating between stitching a bit and heading to the other room to try it on, with safety pins inserted as needed to test fitting. Alas, it will take at least another couple of hours of thinking sewing time to get it done, I think.
Normally folk music is followed by folk dance class, but this week it was canceled. It turned out to be a good thing, since I wound up having something else I needed to do: In between the morning SCA stuff and the afternoon music/sewing stuff I did a google search for "geology Luleå", thinking to learn something of the local rock types. Instead I found a job ad for someone to teach geology at the local school, which is a 10 minute walk from home. The application deadline was listed on the page as "tomorrow", so as soon as we got home from music I settled into the computer and put together an application. More details available on my geology blog if you are interested. I finally finished it and got it printed then did my yoga and went to bed at 02:00. This morning I turned in the application and accomplished a couple of loads of laundry.
I have been meaning to mention the civilized way the laundry room works here. The use of the machines is free (or rather paid for as part of rent), and time is reserved in 4 hour blocks. Each apartment has a key with a special lock thingie which fits into either the laundry room door, or a calender on the way showing the available times. If you want to do laundry at a specific day/time you insert your lock into the appropriate slot on the calender and no one else will use it then. When it is your turn you start your washing, then use your lock to lock the door and no one messes with your clothes in progress. Very convenient--one still has to walk over there to see if there is a free machine at the moment or to reserve one for later, but one can clearly tell when later it will be free if now isn't a good time. Not as nice as having ones own washer and dryer, but way, way better than the shared coin-op laundry room I had to use when in was in Mountainview California.