gothwalk | Reading

I had energy issues in the middle of the day. I blame the long day yesterday. So I took a nap and then painted the cardboard mock up for my Charlemange’s camera holder, black on the inside, gold outside, then painted on “jewels” and “pearls”. If we don’t get the leather version done on time for Crown, this may do the job.

But I managed to find energy in the afternoon and so put in a nearly full work day anyway, by continuing to work for a while after Keldor got home.

By the time I managed to put down the computer, he was downstairs doing the next step on installing the wall between the loo and the laundry room.

So I started sewing the first of the clasps to his Keldor copper trim kaftan, with pauses to help when he needed a third hand.

Here he is adding the last bit of frame holding the insulation in place (and serving as an attachment point for the wall surfaces).

putting up the wall

While the wall surface on the bathroom side of the wall is left over drywall that the contractor left here after putting in the walls for the attic loo, he is covering the insulation on the laundry room side with scrap OSB he took home from work. So when he was done with putting it up on the left side of the door I started covering the surface with spackel. There is more of that to do, but tomorrow is soon enough.

Good zoom training session tonight. Now we should head to bed, I have to go to the office tomorrow.

Today was a crazy busy day at work, with 10 hours elapsed between opening the computer on the bus this morning, and putting it away on the bus as we approached home. The highlight must be meeting colleagues from the library for fika, since Therese made a traditional German rolled cake, filled with cherries and cream. We all took seconds!

From there I went to the sound studio at Humlab to re-record the sound for the the tutorial I made. I only found out this week that we have a sound studio. Gee it gives much better quality than recording on one's phone. Then I used the computer in that room to re-assemble the tutorial using the video screen capture clips I had previously made. Since I had a spreadsheet full of notes as to which clip goes where, and with what bits of the script, I managed to get the whole tutorial assembled on time to catch the 15:30 bus, so only an hour later than my usual bus.

Keldor was just about home from work as the bus dropped me off, and it was raining, so I just waited in the bus station a couple of minutes till he arrived, and then rode home with him. Today is Sweden's waffle day, so we had waffles and a game of Qwirkle before I went upstairs to paint the last layers of paint on the knotwork in the attic. Next time we have time/energy we can put in the floor in that room, and then the plumbers can come back and put in the toilet and sink.

I slept weirdly, having strange dreams wherein I knew that I was dreaming, but I still endeavoured to solve the problem in the dream "just in case I wasn't". However, I woke with enough energy to tidy up the house during our morning phone call, and then mix a new batch of Muesli before work. Perhaps the fact that the flowers behind the house are already waking up helped with having energy for that.

It occurred to me last night that I truly haven’t time/energy to cut leather by hand to cut the leather for my Charlemange’s camera, the leather circlet to hide my new GoPro camera that I want to make for Crown, so I asked Alfarin if he could do it in his laser cutter. He was willing to give it a go, so I spent the day doing design. The original crown has 8 very different panels. It was faster and easier to make the the two side panels the same as one another, and the four small pieces the same as one another. My panels are differently proportioned than the original, in part because (I assume) my head is smaller than Charlemagne’s was, and in part because the height is dictated by the need to cover the GoPro camera. The full design looks like this:

The furthest left panel of the image is the back center panel, and then the panels progress around my head. Note that the colours are likely not what I will go with in the final version, they are just random colours selected to show that the original had lots of different colours gems, and if there was a pattern to the colour placement, it isn’t obvious to my eye.

The coloured bits representing jewels, and the larger arches with my arms and the laurel wreath will be painted silk. All the tiny black dots are holes for either sewing the panels together, or sewing the silk to the leather.

The leather will look more like this when it is first cut out (the black bits are holes):

Then “all” I will need to do is to paint the leather gold (or gold leaf it), and sew the silk in place, sew the panels to the headband, and attach the camera.

We don’t need it for a full week after I will be able to pick the leather bits up from Alfarin, assuming that it even works to print it. What can go wrong?

While I spent the day at the computer working on that Keldor slept in, and then moved to the couch to relax, and then went to the store to buy cat food and orange juice (he is not certain he’s 100% healthy today), and then he relaxed some more (hopefully it won’t develop into being actually sick). Good thing we made good progress yesterday on the house, but it would have been nice to have come even farther.

I knew that Keldor was keen to work on house projects this weekend, but I hadn’t realised he was thinking of the not only Create an attic bedroom, but even the downstairs part of Create extra bathrooms as well as the attic part,

I started my morning with a 25 min pilates session, by which time Keldor was awake, so we played Qwirkle over breakfast then went to the attic, where he resumed putting up insulation in what will be the bedroom, and I began painting the next set of decorative knotwork on the walls

When he ran out of the metal framing pieces he has been using to hold the insulation in place he went into town to make more, and I kept painting:

When he came back he had not only what he needed for the attic, but even frames exactly the right size to hild insulation to make a wall between the downstairs laundry room and loo.

In the evening Þórólfr came over for board games. We played Albion Protects Royalty (the Drachenwald version of Cards Against Humanity), using Sven of Reengarda, the toy Sjören, as the 4th player, putting in random cards. The final scores were 28 (Þórólfr), 11 (me), 10 (Sven), and 8 (Keldor).

Then Keldor and Þórólfr played Bradw, a complicated Swedish medieval version of backgammon. During that game I finished the embroidery on the fourth dragon for the Keldor copper trim kaftan

dragon number 4

Then we introduced Þórólfr to Qwirkle, and he won the second game.

After that game I cut a piece of heavy leather to test my calculations for my Charlemange’s camera circlet, and I determined that while it will work as planned to hold the camera, cutting all the pannels by hand in that thickness will take far too long.

So I sent an note to a friend in Luleå to ask if there was a possibility to get the pieces cut in their laser cutter and we could pick it up next weekend when we are there. Alternatively, I could do it in painted cardboard, but a leather version would last longer.

By then it was midnight, so Þórólfr went home, I did my yoga, and we went to bed.

Since I didn’t get the call that the car was done til I was more than an hour into the bus ride home yesterday, we decided to pick up the car today. The shop closes early on Fridays, so I decided to get the car first.

So I took my normal 06:20 bus (the earliest available). I worked on bus ,but only for just over an hour. Then I was feeling too aware that I needed to get off the bus at the first stop after we got to the city, so I packed the computer and got myself ready.

Luckily, the bus I needed to transfer to came pretty quickly, so I was at the shop at 08:00, which meant that I was at the inspection station in Ånäset by about 09:00.

I had planned to work for the 50 minutes before my appointment, but that shop is a “sit in your car and wait for the SMSto tell you to drive into the shop” kinda place, so I just scrilled on the phone, so I would notice the SMS.

It worked. Since they do inspections, which mean looking under cars, they have a valley in the middle of the room, and we are to drive over it, one tire on each side of it. I didn’t know that I have a phobia about driving over a hole in the floor that is wider than half the car, but it turs out that I do. Next time either Keldor takes the car to the inspection, or I drive to the door, and let the inspection people take the risk of needing to keep tires on either side of the hole in the floor.

Luckily, and not particularly surprisingly, given that the csr has just been fixed, it passed inspection.

Around that time I talked to Keldor, who had had such an effective work morning that they had already finished the day’s job. He has been commuting in his work car, so it makes sense that I drive in to get him, so he can leave the work car at work. Besides, we needed to buy more insulation for the Create an attic bedroom project.

So, rather that going home and working, I drove in to town and we bought the insulation, then we went to several second hand stores, finding a variety of useful objects, though not a suitable cabinet for the upstairs loo, which we had hoped to find. The day’s acquisitions included:

a black velor couch pillow

a shirt and a pair of trousers for me, and a pair of jeans for him

a couple of lamps for the upstairs room

a cookie jar

two bentwood boxes

Once we were home I started working on a new project I am calling Charlemange’s camera, and stayed up till 01:00, oops

Just wrote an AH answer for a question that I'd had open in a tab for very nearly two weeks. I love doing that, it feels so much more like an accomplishment if the unanswered question has been bugging me for a while; I get to feel relieved to finally have it off my plate. Hashtag ADHD life.

Likewise trying to organize my writing in terms of plates. The not-Fandom Trumps Hate piece is more than 75% done, so the Regency romance is going to abide for a bit while I just focus on this one thing. And then I will have it done and can stop feeling guilty about it. And then I might celebrate with work on an actual fanfic for a bit, get another chapter in of this very self-indulgent SVSSS genderbend, before going back to work that I intend to sell. (When will I edit Grand and Glorious Feeling? When will I publish Arrow Collar Man? I don't knowwwww, it's scary to put your work out there and depressing to sell like ten copies in six months.)

I will also be mailing out copies of Dandies & Dandyzettes very very soon, and having THAT off my plate and not feeling guilty about it anymore will be incredible. I think it will fix me.

SO many excellent things to watch these days. Serially, I'm most engaged with The Pitt (what a glorious mess!!), but I've been slowly watching the new BBC adaptation of Lord of the Flies, which is really excellent on multiple levels. So well done, strongly recommend it.

Have to go to Philadelphia for work next week. Have to DRIVE AROUND in Philadelphia for work next week. Have to drive around in DOWNTOWN PHILLY AROUND INDEPENDENCE HALL AND THE LIBERTY BELL. I am so pissed off but am coming to a point of resigned acceptance that a) I can't get out of it and b) I may very well cry in front of my deputy on those days. So it goes.

Tags:

job,
writing

It has been a while since I had time to copy my blog posts over here, so here are links to them, for anyone who may want to know what I have been up to. Many of these have photos, some more than others.

2026-03-04 beginning to add some colour
2026-03-05 a day on the ice
2026-03-06 loveable art
2026-03-07 errands accomplished, only a week late
2026-03-08 lots of progress
2026-03-09 slipping through the day
2026-03-10 a productive morning
2026-03-11 stumbled upon a choir, might keep it
2026-03-12 usch!
2026-03-13 JMBards day 1
2026-03-14 JMBards day 2
2026-03-15 JMBards clean up
2026-03-16 a Monday after an event
2026-03-17 a date at a museum

While on the bus home today the shop called—they have now fixed the car. Since I was mostly home, there was no possibility to get there to pick it up today, so it will have to be tomorrow. Since it broke the day before we were to do our annual inspection (which we obviously cancelled), the first thing we have to do upon picking it up is to get it inspected. I opted to use the station closest to my house, in Ånäset (since it is legal to drive to the inspection place if you have time booked and paid for). They are part of a national chain, but I got to their web page from clicking on their entry on Google Maps. When the page opened, it clearly stated on the first page that it was Opus Ånäset. I wrote by licence plate number in the box, pressed “Inspection” chose a suitable time tomorrow, paid, and started copying information into the calendar. When I went to copy the address it looked strange. Looked closer. It turns out that the web page changed the location when I wasn’t looking, and I was booked to a workshop in Stockholm! So I found their customer service number, called them straight away and she re-booked me to Ånäset for tomorrow, and I got a new email straight away showing the new time. It arrived even before we hung up the phone. Yay for real customer service that can solve a problem so easily!

Now I just need to take my normal bus in in the morning, then catch the bus to the other side of Umeå, and drive to Ånäset.

In other news, it was a very pleasant day at work. The electrician finally had time to come do wiring in the attic, so I caught a later bus than usual, so I could show him all the places we want outlets etc up there. This meant that I arrived at work at 09:20. Fika is normally 09:30, but I thought, nah, I will do some work before the Archaeology Subject meeting at 10:00. But first I needed to re-fill my water bottle, so I grabbed the bottle, locked my office door, and started walking towards the stairs. Ran into a handful of our PhD students, who were on their way to fika, so I joined them.

We had a pleasant chat, and then went to the meeting, where we had cake, to celebrate a handful of published papers by a couple of people in the department.

cake

Between both fika and the meeting, I got lots of embroidery done on the Keldor copper trim tunic. The meeting ended in time for lunch, so I joined colleagues for lunch, and had a pleasant time explaining to Sofie about the SCA and the embroidery on Keldor’s kaftan. Then I returned to my office to work, realised that I had left my water bottle in the fika room (having set it down before washing my dishes), so I went back for it, and got into another conversation with another colleague, largely about medieval stone churches in Sweden.

I had never really thought about the fact that there was no pre-existing stone building tradition in this region, so when it became necessary for all of the Swedish churches to suddenly build in stone, they needed to import lots of expertise, and, up here, they even had to import the lime to make the mortar, as there is none. All this meant that it was after 13:00 before I finally started working, and had only till time to leave to catch the 14:30 bus for work in my office. I did keep working on the bus, of course, till the shop called to say that the car was ready, so I called Keldor to let him know, and chatted till I was nearly home.

He stayed late to work on some projects for the house, one of which was making a cover extension for the laundry room threshold, which meant we could swap the places of the washer and drying on their shelf, so now their doors open out away from one another, so it will be much easier to transfer stuff from one to the other. Then we replaced the old, short hose with a new, longer one, which we ran up against the threshold, with the new cover extension over it, so that no one will trip on the hose.

Then we checked the attic and the progress up there. Yay! Now we have a light switch also at the top of the stairs, there is a small wall mounted electric heater in the bathroom, there is a working outlet just outside the bathroom by the door, and one on the other side of the bathroom in the cold side of the attic, so we can have light over there, too. The electrician has also drawn wires and set in the plastic boxes where the outlets will be in the walls we haven’t finished building, so now we can finish putting up the last of the insulation and make the walls themselves. The Create an attic bedroom and Create extra bathrooms projects are really moving forward!

Duke Street Alley

We did it all for the Glory of Love

looking like it will be a wall

a busy day

yup, it is spring

now I have a good design to work with

progress in more directions than I had anticipated

lots of unplanned errands

A rare public entry

lots of posts

yay for customer service that really helps

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