summer heat, yet progress
This has been a really weird summer, weather wise. Normally the temperatures in northern Sweden are really quite lovely all summer, with lows around 10 and highs around 18 C (around 50 to 65 F). Nice, civilized, easy to live with, easy to get stuff done. However, this summer it has been in the high 20's even gets over over 30 C (86 F) for three weeks now. Please note that while I have learned skills for coping with the heat when living in hot places, I don't enjoy doing so, and had hoped that moving only about a half an hour drive south of the arctic circle and very near the coast would mean I wouldn't get hot again. To be fair, this is the first summer since moving to Sweden 3.5 years ago that I remember it getting this hot. I recall one hot day the first summer, and we went to the mountains. I don't recall needing to retreat to our basement to escape the heat once last summer (our first in this house), but this week I am doing it daily, for hours at a time.
Needless to say, I am very glad that we finished fixing up the downstairs room and getting all of the moldy floor boards out of there, since I am using that room so much. While hanging out down there I have made good progress on my mustache (done!), and beard (about 1/3 done) for the Nordanil "Lajv" (LARP) next month. I am also nearly done with the lovely Viking coat that will come in handy then too (unless it is still hot!), and I have been doing a fair bit of reading (in Swedish, of course), and have now finished 19 books this year.
It is so nice to be reading again--when I was a kid I read all of the time, and even as recently as the first half of my PhD program (~2005-2007) I was still managing to find time to read 50 to 60 books a year, but then life got busy, and my reading slowed way down (and I got hooked on reading LJ and other social media sites, so a fair few reading hours weren't fiction anymore) and I moved to Sweden (and set that "no fiction in English, unless reading out loud to a loved one" rule), and the last few years I have only managed 13 books a year. Since the year is only half done, it is reasonable to hope I will pull off a number that my younger sell wouldn't have been too embarrassed by (as she would have been with only 13).
But even though it has been hot, I have still managed to keep making some progress outside, by dint of taking advantage of times of day when there is shade. As a result we are making slow progress on the earth cellar, the walkway to the earth cellar, and have even started re-painting the house. Progress would go faster, but lord_kjar's vacation has ended (with the end of the Medieval Days at Hängnan), so he has been (mostly) going to work. ("Mostly", because it is summer in Sweden, and while his company requires that some of the people stay on duty all summer, the various companies for whom they repair and maintain computers, networks, printers, and other useful electronic tools don't actually need much work done compared to the rest of the year, so on slow days he has been able to take an extra half day off here and there.)
We came up with an amusing solution to the house-painting problem (the problem being that humans are too short to paint a house without something to stand on to reach the higher bits, and the basic sort of later (such as we have) that just leans against the wall, is not the best tool for the job, there being nothing to anchor it to, and nothing to set the paint can on. We had discussed renting scaffolding, using some of the scrap lumber we had from his dad to make scaffolding (which is what some of it had been in its last use), buying a different sort of ladder...
But then yesterday evening he suggested "We could use the tractor.", so we did! I sat in the tractor scoop and he drove up to the wall and lifted the scoop till it was high enough I could reach the roof. Then he turned off the tractor, set the ladder next to the scoop, climbed up and joined me, and we scraped and painted a section of wall as wide as the tractor scoop (that wall is about four scoops wide, I would guess). After we had done the part we could reach at that height he climbed back down and lowered the scoop to only just above the ground (since we couldn't quite reach the bottom of the first section by standing on the ground), and we did the bottom part of that section. With luck we will be able to do this again enough times this summer to at least finish this wall (which is the side in the worst shape--it has clearly not been repainted for at least a decade, and since it gets the morning sun and the full force of the prevailing winds, it needed help).
Why not just do the whole wall while at it? Because I refuse to be out there scraping paint while the sun shines on the wall in this heat, which means not starting till after 14:00 on any given day (that wall faces east, and the sun isn't far enough west to provide good working shade till then, or perhaps a bit before), and I can't operate the tractor, which means waiting till he gets home from work (which time is highly variable and unpredictable, especially in the summer--while he has made it home at mid day, he has also gotten a call last week to drive to Skellefteå (two hours south of here) to fix a computer, and not gotten home till 20:00).
Now, we could work well into the night if light were the only issue--while the sun is actually going a noticeable distance under the horizon to the north these days, it is only darkening to twilight levels, so we could see well enough to paint all night long. However, heat or no heat, this is Sweden, and there are insects that like to come out in the evenings. While I don't mind the mosquitoes so much, since their bite only itches for a minute or three, they do get annoying in number, and, far, far worse than them is the gnats. Mercifully, gnats are a late summer pest, so I hadn't seen any yet this year till the day before yesterday, when a couple of them managed to bite me as I was picking strawberries in the evening. Ouch! Not only do those tiny little things leave a hole where they bite (are they carrying away flesh to feast on later?), but something about their bite doesn't agree with me, so the area swells up and hurts/itches for days. Only a little bit of hurt/itch, but it doesn't go away.
Luckily for us, yesterday while painting was windy, so we were able to actually finish the whole section before the bugs started to come flying around, but we so weren't willing to start the next section once they showed up.
In other news, he is healing well from getting that finger caught between the rocks--after a week he is no longer squeezing ick from out from under his nail, and the nail even looks like he might be able to keep it. He still isn't willing to try the violin, since the finger is still tender, but he has managed to play nyckleharpa, by using a lower part of that finger to press the keys than is normally recommended. And my hip has completely forgiven me for letting that log collide with it last week. Yoga was, in fact, interesting the first night, since I couldn't stretch in certain directions without it hurting, but that effect was diminished by the next day, and now it is only noticeable if I stretch really far and then only in one direction (pulling the torso away from the hip).
Life is mellow now, and we have pretty much nothing on the calender between now and Nordanil, but there is plenty to do before then to be ready for that event, in addition to the many house projects in progress.
Needless to say, I am very glad that we finished fixing up the downstairs room and getting all of the moldy floor boards out of there, since I am using that room so much. While hanging out down there I have made good progress on my mustache (done!), and beard (about 1/3 done) for the Nordanil "Lajv" (LARP) next month. I am also nearly done with the lovely Viking coat that will come in handy then too (unless it is still hot!), and I have been doing a fair bit of reading (in Swedish, of course), and have now finished 19 books this year.
It is so nice to be reading again--when I was a kid I read all of the time, and even as recently as the first half of my PhD program (~2005-2007) I was still managing to find time to read 50 to 60 books a year, but then life got busy, and my reading slowed way down (and I got hooked on reading LJ and other social media sites, so a fair few reading hours weren't fiction anymore) and I moved to Sweden (and set that "no fiction in English, unless reading out loud to a loved one" rule), and the last few years I have only managed 13 books a year. Since the year is only half done, it is reasonable to hope I will pull off a number that my younger sell wouldn't have been too embarrassed by (as she would have been with only 13).
But even though it has been hot, I have still managed to keep making some progress outside, by dint of taking advantage of times of day when there is shade. As a result we are making slow progress on the earth cellar, the walkway to the earth cellar, and have even started re-painting the house. Progress would go faster, but lord_kjar's vacation has ended (with the end of the Medieval Days at Hängnan), so he has been (mostly) going to work. ("Mostly", because it is summer in Sweden, and while his company requires that some of the people stay on duty all summer, the various companies for whom they repair and maintain computers, networks, printers, and other useful electronic tools don't actually need much work done compared to the rest of the year, so on slow days he has been able to take an extra half day off here and there.)
We came up with an amusing solution to the house-painting problem (the problem being that humans are too short to paint a house without something to stand on to reach the higher bits, and the basic sort of later (such as we have) that just leans against the wall, is not the best tool for the job, there being nothing to anchor it to, and nothing to set the paint can on. We had discussed renting scaffolding, using some of the scrap lumber we had from his dad to make scaffolding (which is what some of it had been in its last use), buying a different sort of ladder...
But then yesterday evening he suggested "We could use the tractor.", so we did! I sat in the tractor scoop and he drove up to the wall and lifted the scoop till it was high enough I could reach the roof. Then he turned off the tractor, set the ladder next to the scoop, climbed up and joined me, and we scraped and painted a section of wall as wide as the tractor scoop (that wall is about four scoops wide, I would guess). After we had done the part we could reach at that height he climbed back down and lowered the scoop to only just above the ground (since we couldn't quite reach the bottom of the first section by standing on the ground), and we did the bottom part of that section. With luck we will be able to do this again enough times this summer to at least finish this wall (which is the side in the worst shape--it has clearly not been repainted for at least a decade, and since it gets the morning sun and the full force of the prevailing winds, it needed help).
Why not just do the whole wall while at it? Because I refuse to be out there scraping paint while the sun shines on the wall in this heat, which means not starting till after 14:00 on any given day (that wall faces east, and the sun isn't far enough west to provide good working shade till then, or perhaps a bit before), and I can't operate the tractor, which means waiting till he gets home from work (which time is highly variable and unpredictable, especially in the summer--while he has made it home at mid day, he has also gotten a call last week to drive to Skellefteå (two hours south of here) to fix a computer, and not gotten home till 20:00).
Now, we could work well into the night if light were the only issue--while the sun is actually going a noticeable distance under the horizon to the north these days, it is only darkening to twilight levels, so we could see well enough to paint all night long. However, heat or no heat, this is Sweden, and there are insects that like to come out in the evenings. While I don't mind the mosquitoes so much, since their bite only itches for a minute or three, they do get annoying in number, and, far, far worse than them is the gnats. Mercifully, gnats are a late summer pest, so I hadn't seen any yet this year till the day before yesterday, when a couple of them managed to bite me as I was picking strawberries in the evening. Ouch! Not only do those tiny little things leave a hole where they bite (are they carrying away flesh to feast on later?), but something about their bite doesn't agree with me, so the area swells up and hurts/itches for days. Only a little bit of hurt/itch, but it doesn't go away.
Luckily for us, yesterday while painting was windy, so we were able to actually finish the whole section before the bugs started to come flying around, but we so weren't willing to start the next section once they showed up.
In other news, he is healing well from getting that finger caught between the rocks--after a week he is no longer squeezing ick from out from under his nail, and the nail even looks like he might be able to keep it. He still isn't willing to try the violin, since the finger is still tender, but he has managed to play nyckleharpa, by using a lower part of that finger to press the keys than is normally recommended. And my hip has completely forgiven me for letting that log collide with it last week. Yoga was, in fact, interesting the first night, since I couldn't stretch in certain directions without it hurting, but that effect was diminished by the next day, and now it is only noticeable if I stretch really far and then only in one direction (pulling the torso away from the hip).
Life is mellow now, and we have pretty much nothing on the calender between now and Nordanil, but there is plenty to do before then to be ready for that event, in addition to the many house projects in progress.