One of our friends, K, who lives about 45 minutes south of Umeå, and so nearly 4 hours south of us, had decided she wanted to host a sit down dinner for New Year's Eve. She first considered a potluck, so that no one person would be overburdened with cooking. However, reading my friends' reports on their Thanksgiving dinners had me wanting to cook a ( Read more... )

I have finally finished doing the data entry for how many hours I spent on projects for Nordanil. I will share the list here, because you guys are the only people who will really appreciate it. (This list doesn't count the hours on the things I already had before I signed up for the event, like my tunics and trousers, only one of which was made ( Read more... )

I am just back from Nordanil, the Lajv (LARP) where I got to play a Viking Storman for the weekend. Everyone tells me that with the beard and man muscles I was convincing enough that they never had any difficulties remembering to refer to my character as "he". This pleases me. I was one of three women on site playing male roles, but the other two ( Read more... )

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I am proud of myself--today it was 30 C in the shade, yet I managed to go out and accomplish stuff. lord_kjar and I managed to move the next 6 large rocks into place ready to concrete into the earth cellar walls ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )

This weekend was Spelmansstämman, the big gathering of folk musicians and dancers from all over northern Sweden and further away (including a buss of 20 from Norway, a couple of guys from Germany, one of whom comes every year). It is always a fun event, but this time it was even more fun than usual. A couple of our SCA friends from out of town ( Read more... )

Of course, that could be because I have been doing SCA for... more than 30 years now (is that number really possible?), and this is my first time trying "live-action-role-playing. We chose our character because one of the people in charge of the Calaquendi, the (race? tribe?) of elves that we have joined, expressed a desire to have more music and ( Read more... )

Not that I was without internet, mind you--I have a smart phone, and a tablet (wi-fi only), but I have hardly touched a real computer since my last post, which was sometime before I departed for the conference, so if I am going to try to catch up on what has been happening, I had probably better start with that ( Read more... )