Nik's Saga

Not only is this my thousandth post, but I have also just ordered a lute from the Early Music Shop.

It's going to be delivered to the hotel in Chester where I'll be for Eastercon next weekend, which means that I'll have it for the demo on Monday. If I offset the tuning I'll also have it for the Gytha North Memorial Drunken Rabble filking session, which I fully intend to attend, as I'm sure I'll be able to play some of my guitar stuff on it even if it does have 7 courses rather than 6 strings. It comes in a hard case too, which means that it'll be easy to travel with it in the hold (I checked). As the saying goes: squeee!

I also finally put the grommets in my new corset, and it fits (hurrah!). It's plain black and pleasantly supportive, as ever, and makes me wonder about doing a very quick and dirty red chemise to go with it for Eastercon. I've still got to work out what I need to take with me (and as I'm leaving on Monday I suppose I'd better start thinking about it!) but as I'm doing this demo I know I have to take my armoured shirt but don't quite know what else. Hmm... if I bring the corset and armour then I can pick up my blue Tudor from home (including silly hat) and work with that. Yes, that would make sense. It's not as if I'm unused to fencing in a skirt, is it?
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Normally it's safe to shop in Bónus at 15:00 on a Friday. Not today.

No, today it was full of people shopping for God. Palm Sunday is the day when every Icelandic kid of a certain age goes to church and says Yes I believe in God. Now give me my presents and then return home for the biggest family party they'll have until their wedding. As a result the supermarket was full of parents filling trollies full of party food to the extent that the shelves were emptying faster than they could be filled - and this is a stock 'em high. sell 'em cheap type of store. For those of you in the UK, think Lidl or Netto and you'll get the basic idea (although Netto is a bit more upmarket).

I suspect this means that the church bells will be going all weekend then. Arghh... a fourth, with no fixed intervals between strikings. Arghh! If we're really lucky they'll add in the hour bell as well, which is also not quite in tune. No doubt the churches will be full of people making one of their three annual church attendances. I get the impression that church attendance here isn't too much better than in the UK even though you have to be registered with one of the churches in order to have a funeral over here. It's possible to change it but it takes a lot of paperwork, I'm told. I wonder how they'd react to me writing Orthodox Jedi? :)
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We have a new takeaway in Akureyri.

Ning's, the Chinese from Reykjavík, has opened a branch up here in the north. It's next door to Subway and has tables and chairs in the same way but when I went in tonight it was definitely doing more business as a takeaway than as a café. I wasn't originally planning a takeaway tonight, but I was feeling a bit down after collecting a friend and her daughter from the airport to take them home and then having the journey interrupted as she received an unexpected phone call from her other daughter to tell her that her ex-husband had just died. I didn't really fancy coming back and cooking after that so I decided it was time to try Ning's as it was on the way back.

I really fancied chicken fried rice but didn't have enough time to translate all of the menu to order it. Instead I had chicken chow mein, which was freshly cooked and quite good. While I waited I managed to translate the rest of the menu so next time I'll be able to get my &steikt hrísgrjón og kjúklingur instead.

Steikt. Fried, in English. I wonder if steak is meat that is best cooked by steiksteiking the best way to cook large pieces of meat? Or is that entirely spurious reasoning and just a case of me telling myself a story to make sense of something? Like my view that viðskipti - business - is something that you do with a ship (skip) and that a samskipt - company - are just people in the same ship. I'm very taken with the idea of humans as the chimpanzee that tells stories - blame it on my current reading matter: The Science of Discworld II: The Globe by Pratchett, Cohen and Stewart. An excellent book and well worth a read.
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One visiting lecturer, to Reykjavík.

Via a bus service I'd never heard of but which has a very interesting foyer - it looks like you're inside a giant wooden barrel, as I discovered when I left Michel at the bus station this morning.

I'm now trying to catch up with the rest of my life, which has been on hold for the week. On the other hand, Michel arrived with champagne and chocolates and has introduced me to a new tv station - ARTE, which is a Franco-German collaboration that has subtitles in French. I like this - I can understand what's going on. I may yet improve my French before next year, when it's my turn to go to Brussels. Assuming that I can spare the time, that is.
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So that's a wigeon then.

On Saturday Michel took a photograph of a rather strange-looking duck. It had a red-brown head with a strange yellow stripe on top that looked like it had been applied with a paintbrush. We tried my bird book, but couldn't find it under ducks. With the aid of www.whatbird.com we found the common pochard, the canvasback and the redhead, but none of them were quite right. He sent a copy of the photo back to a friend in Belgium who replied today and informed us it was in fact a Eurasian Wigeon. Ah well, at least we found out what it was eventually.

Tonight we went over to Björk's place for the A&S meeting. We've now got the to-do list sorted, although everyone was a bit surprised to realise that Revel 2 is only nine weeks away. I think we're going to have to have weekly meetings after Easter to make sure that everything is done in time.
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Dinner at Strikið

There's a resteraunt on the fourth floor of one of the buildings in Akureyri town centre that looks out straight over the fjord. it has a fantastic view and very good food, so it's become one of my favourite places to eat if we have visitors. It's a bit expensive and the menu is a little short but the food itself is well worth it.I had steak with lightly roasted vegetables and a rich red wine sauce. They also do a killer French chocolate cake with glazed bananas and vanilla ice cream. Mmm...
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Today we did the tour for foreigners

That's how Björk described what I was doing when I spoke to her on the mobile while standing in the middle of the gift shop at Goðafoss. And she's right - every time anyone comes up here to visit we do what the tour describes as the 'diamond circle' (to differentiate it from the 'glden circle' tour in the south). Okay, so we don't always go up to Húsavík for the Whale Museum but we do Goðafoss, Mývatn and Hveralond, ending up at the Green Lagoon.

Which makes it worth the trip every time. :) I've now come up with the perfect solution to walking around the blue mud zone at Hveralond - a pair of plastic bags for anyone who doesn't have a pair of wellingtons or who doesn't want to get their walking boots covered in blue mud. It does look a little silly, perhaps, as wandering about with a pair of plastic bags on your feet is a little embarrassing, but I take care to make sure that they are at least matching plastic bags. And plastic bags are so much cheaper than new shoes, aren't they? :)
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Russian music is depressing.

That was the thesis discussed over dinner this evening when Michel and I went over to the house of my good friend and colleague Nikolai and his wife Nadia. We had an excellent meal (with some very good wine and a truly stunning wild mushroom sauce made from mushrooms that Nikolai and Nadia had actually picked themselves) and then a long discussion of international music punctuated by a large number of mp3s of assorted popular Russian songs.

I've always been a big fan of Russian as a language for song. I suspect it was seeing too much of the Red Army Choir and Dancers on Blue Peter as a child, but it's one of those langauges which seems to be able to convey power and emotion in the sound alone - German does it well also; French and Italian can get the emotion but not really the power. Some of the music that Nikolai played was very much in this vein although there was a lot which was a bit lighter.

The consensus was that it's not really depressing, just a product of history and vodka. The really fascinating stuff was the Georgian music, which is completely different and far more Turkish. Intellectually I know that what the Cold War conditioned me to think of as 'Russia' is actually a large collection of different nations with different cultures and traditions, but it takes something like this exposure to the different musical traditions to really highlight how large the differences actually are.
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Brains, extra cheese.

Tonight I hosted one of my occasional gaming evenings. When I originally suggested this evening I'd forgotten that Michel would be here and, for a few moments I wondered if I should cancel, but then it occurred to me that one of the aims of the Erasmus student & teacher exchange scheme is to allow people to experience life in another country and these evenings give a fairly good picture of the relaxed and friendly relationship between staff and students over here.

What happens is that I'll invite a few of the students over, we'll play boardgames and then order pizza. Tonight's game was Zombies!!!, a game where you can win in one of two ways: by escaping from the town via the helipad or by killing a large enough number of zombies. And, just to make it a little more vicious, on your turn you not only move your piece but you also move the zombie pieces, causing them to attack other players. It's perfect for (at least some of my) students. :)

It was a good evening. I think that Michel enjoyed himself - he certainly got into the swing of things. It was a little strange for me occasionally - I'd find myself using a strange mixture of English, French and Icelandic words, often all in the same sentence. Confusion - waaah!
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Things are going to be a bit hectic for the next week.

In spite of a half hour delay Michel made it up to Akureyri last night. I was rather worried for a while that he was going to find himself stuck in Reykjavík thanks to high winds. He's staying with me until next Wednesday and we have a busy week ahead of us as, as well as lectures, there's likely to be a certain amount of going to to see various of the local Wonders Of Nature.

Today was mainly introductions and preparing for tomorrow's lectures, but it was still quite an active day. We also had an extra meeting to discuss the new plan for the entire faculty to move into the same building. It's going to be squeeze, and a lot of people aren't going to like it but we don't really have much choice as it's another money-saving measure. The longer-term plan is that once we have the extension to the building finished then we can spread out again, but for the next academic year we're going to be living in each other's pockets. The other aim is to foster a sense of community in the super-faculty as we'll be able to interact more if we're all in the same building, which is a reasonable enough idea.

The actual organisation of the move, though, is going to be one of those common situations: Life is shit - deal with it.
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It's not quite as bad today as it was last year.

So, with apologies to the shade of Robert Service, here's something I wrote at this time last year but didn't have the guts to publish:

First Day of Spring, Iceland 2006

The arctic spring's a strange old thing
When the sun's climbing high in the sky,
But it's ten below and the wind-blown snow
Burns your skin like the light burns your eye.
So you run from the door and the ravens caw
As they watch from a frozen spar.
But you struggle through, though your lips are blue,
To the lee of your sheltering car.

Beneath their flight the ice glows bright
In the vale where the river flowed.
The trees are bare, what trees are there,
And snow-devils dance on the road.
But your breath turns white and the wheel's cold bite
Makes you wish for some hot winter rain.
Till the heat cuts in in your box of tin
And you notice the beauty again.
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Or, in other words, tai-fun.

The snow is melting and has been replaced by a very big wind. One of those winds so big that they're cancelling internal flights left, right and centre. Which is slightly worrying as our visiting lecturer is due to arrive in the country tomorrow afternoon and fly up here tomorrow evening. The way the weather and the weather forecast look he may well have to stay overnight in Reykjavík. And all of this after I've had a massive tidying of the flat in preparation to have him stay here for the week. Hopefully even if the wind stays strong it'll clear off the rest of the snow so that we're clear to go off on a blue mud hunt at the weekend.

Gustur is, I'm told, a popular name for a fast Icelandic horse, one that runs as fast as the wind. I would certainly be willing to put money on any horse that ran like this wind.
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It is now rather cold but crystal clear here in the frozen north.

The storm has passed, so for the amateur meteorologists in the British Isles: you should be clear within about 48 hours. It was interesting to walk out of the apartment block through a snowdrift to find that there was no snow on my car - it had all been blown into a snowdrift outside the door. Yes, the weather has been particularly strange over the past couple of days. Today we had blizzards and bright sunlight, alternating every half hour or so. I noticed this as I was gazing vacantly out of my office window while trying to write a lecture on operating systems - not a Mac vs. Windows sort of lecture, more of a 'this is what an OS has to do to be called an OS' type of lecture. I also came across another piece of proof that I'm not a hardware bunny: MMU does not stand for Memory Management Unit, it stands for Manned Manoevering Unit.

Ah well. Tonight I framed one of Mum's finished embroideries and hung it in the bathroom, I finished the handsewing on my new Tudor corset, and I also finished a scissor-keep for me. It's one of the Egyptian set that Gytha gave me a couple of years ago, and I decided that it was time to promote it from UFO to FO. I don't know what happens to my scissors - even the ones with embroidered scissor-keeps on them seem to disappear. I know that I have two others, but I've no idea what's happened to them.

So I suppose it's been a productive day. It just doesn't really feel like one.
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And it's on its way to the UK and Ireland, folks. :)

I noticed on the Sky News weather that my friends in the British Isles are currently enjoying The Winter Strikes Back. Hold in there, folks - the winds are north-westerlies, which means that they're on their way straight from me to you. Right now I can see quite an intense blizzard from my living room window, and it generally takes a couple of days for the weather to make it across the thousand miles of North Atlantic between us. It's due to last until sometime tomorrow up here so you could well be in for another nasty couple of days.

Other than watching the weather I've not done too much today. A little embroidery, a little reading (Phillippa Gregory's The Boleyn Inheritance) and I'm down to the hand-sewing of a new Tudor corset (basic model). I was planning to make myself a new chemise as well in advance of the chemise-making A&S evening a week on Tuesday, but as mine is going to be silk and I couldn't find my ball-point sewing machine needles I haven't. I can't do it next weekend as I've got a visiting lecturer staying with me for a week starting on Wednesday. It's normal, it seems, for Erasmus exchange lecturers to or from Brussels to live with staff for the week rather than stay in a hotel. So I'm giving up the bedroom for a week so that he can stay with me. Fortunately the sofa is quite comfortable. All the same, it's likely to be a busy week and I suspect that I'm going to spend at least one day next weekend driving around northern Iceland showing him the local sights.

Assuming that the blizzard gives up, that is.
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This is not something that I often do.

I now have a number of sports channels through ADSL but generally I manage to completely ignore them. Well... mostly ignore them. Once the BBC gave up showing more than half an hour of showjumping per year I've had to look elsewhere for my bouncy horse fix. It seems to be Eurosport that has it instead, and in far greater volumes than the BBC ever had. Right now we have the first event of the eight-event Global Champions Tour, this time from Palm Beach, Florida. It's rather interesting, as there are many riders I've never heard of, which means I don't have the faintest idea who's going to win which, in turn, means that it's quite exciting.

It's certainly more exciting that BBC Prime. What a brainless channel! It seems to be almost entirely soaps and sitcoms with only the occasional intelligent drama... about as much intelligent drama as RÚV. Very disappointing, in the same way that BBC World is disappointing as a news channel compared to BBC News 24. I've taken to watching Sky News instead and feel a bit of a traitor for doing so. Even so. it's really very nice to be able to listen to the news before I go into work in the mornings. Or at any other time of day for that matter.

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It's not exactly a cheerful thought.

This time last year Mum had just been admitted to hospital so that they could stabilise her type-2 diabetes. I was already planning to fly over to surprise her as she hadn't been too well beforehand so she was surprised but delighted to see me. It was the last time that she was really lucid while I was in the UK.

This weekend is therefore going to be rather subdued. I wondered what I should do about it. Then it occurred to me - why not take the money I would have spent on Mum and spend it on something in memory of her? So that' s what I've done. About six years ago Mum had cataracts removed from both her eyes and at the time I thought that it was wonderful that it was all done by the NHS. My warped logic was that since the NHS had paid for Mum then maybe I could pay for someone else's mum (or dad or whoever) to regain their sight. And there was big Mick on Time Team wearing a SightSavers sweatshirt and hosting a documentary on their work...

Tonight, then, I finally got around to doing something about it. I went to the website and made a donation to pay for a cataract operation for someone who wouldn't otherwise get one. I doubt that it will make me feel better on Sunday, but at least it will make someone else feel good.

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After yesterday's revelation concerning electronic ID cards, today I have another new security development to report.

For the last couple of weeks every time I've logged into my online bank they've told me that I have until mid-April to get my new personalised security device or I won't be able to use the service any longer. Today I went into the bank to deal with something else so I picked up my Todos eCode ezToken while I was there.

This is effectively a one-time pad for generating passwords. Whenever I want to log in to my bank account I now have to put in my username and password, at which point I am then prompted to put in a number generated by my one-time keyring (the thing I collected today). Given a little bit of thought based upon yesterday's announcement of electronic ID cards I have a suspicion that these things are going to be used to provide the private key for electronic signatures when the new smart debit-ID (deb-ID?) cards.

The geek in me thinks cool! gadget! one-time pad! strong cryptography!but my British civil libertarian is less ecstatic about the process. And the fact that I now have to type in an extra 8-digit random number whenever I want to check my balance online is a bit annoying - after all, I know the difference between a good password and a bad one. Unfortunately I suspect that a lot of other people still don't, and that this is the price we have to pay for the ignorance of the masses.

At least it's still a cool geek gadget.
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According to Iceland Review I'm due to get an electronic ID card later this year.

Or possibly next year - I'm not quite sure what the mean by 'next fall', whether they mean the coming autumn season or autumn 2008. The plan is to equip all bank debit cards with smart chips that will store ID information so that they can be used to identify people to public administration. We're going to be able to read our own cards if we buy the special card reader, which is going to make online shopping safer and help us to file our tax returns online and apply electronic signatures to official documents.

I suppose it's a logical extension of the system wherein you never need to fill in your name and address on a form, you just write in your ID number. Yes, I am a number. What is more, if you know someone's birthday then you can work out their ID number. This is very convenient but it does mean that the government can track everything you do. As for the list of advantages that they give... well, I can already file my taxes online, and I'm not entirely sure that I want to buy a bit of expensive hardware just to sign documents electronically. Iceland's small size and Scandinavian philosophy means that there are far fewer problems introducing electronic IDs here than there are in the UK.

And, thankfully, I can't see the Icelandic government just handing over all of the data to the CIA. I wouldn't put that past the UK government at all.
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"A very obedient boy who does well in football."

This was part of a reference I read today while going through the applications of 118 non-EU would-be students. We've got applicants from China, Turkey, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria, which is quite an interesting mix. The deadline for EU would-be students hasn't passed yet, as we've separated the two sets in order to have time to arrange visas for non-EU students. The line about had me laughing aloud as although in context it makes a lot of sense and is very positive, the phrase itself just stuck out as extremely amusing. Not all of the applications were quite so inspiring - there was one in which the student's statement and that of his referee were in exactly the same handwriting but different coloured ink. Naturally that one didn't make the cut.

For the first time ever, I also found myself breaking a wax seal on a serious document. I've received things - birthday cards and the like - which have had decorative wax seals on them before now, but these were simple blobs of red wax clearly being used to prevent someone tampering with the contents of the envelope. The juxtaposition of the ancient security device and the modern technology that the applicants wished to study was quite startling.

Fortunately I only have to judge between the applicants on academic grounds - once I have come up with the list of accepted students we will send out letters of acceptance and the students will then need to apply to the immigration office for student visas. This is quite a long process as, understandably, the authorities are quite careful about who they let into the country. Apart from anything else you don't need a passport or a visa to get into mainland Europe from here as Iceland is part of Schengen. It will certainly take several months before we know how many of the non-EU students will actually be attending next year, but at least I've now got the process underway and those who do arrive will manage to get here for the beginning of the semester rather than the middle.
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Sorry about the formatting problems - ever since I changed ISP I can't get to a number of websites I used to visit, thanks to some setting problem. I can't even change the modem setup to fix it, as it's locked. The only reason I'm staying with Siminn is because they're the only way to get decent television. Bah.

I'll try to fix the formatting (and dates) from work tomorrow.
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This is a big office-related question.

Amongst the things I did at work today was a session of desk-clearing and 'filing'. Now 'filing' is not something that comes easily to me... which is a little strange given that I'm rather a hoarder. Once I've read something it goes either on to the pile of immediately or regularly useful things, or it sits in an ever-growing pile of things that I feel as if I ought to keep because it's an Official Document but doubt that I'm ever going to touch again. This pile of stuff builds up and builds up until I need to clear the desk to do something important, at which point the pile gets transferred to some empty space elsewhere, such as the bookcase.

It's not helped, I suppose, by the fact that I don't have a filing cabinet. If I had a filing cabinet I could at least throw things in there and forget about them. Maybe I'll fire off an email upwards to see if I can acquire one. Then I could just move the filing cabinet from office to office rather than having to move piles of papers. And I'd probably feel better about never reading them again if I knew that I could if I really, really had to. Hmm.
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I've started the Klakavirki tablecloths.

Amongst the stuff I got from Gytha are two lengths of afgan fabric which were bought in order to make tablecloths for SCA events. As we have an event coming up at the end of May I thought that I should get them done in plenty of time. It probably makes more sense for me to do these than to try to make myself a new gown of some sort, and they're something that can be bundled into a bag and done at A&S nights as well as at home.

So far I've hemmed one of them and have charted out the patterns for the laurel wreath and the drakkar that I'm going to need. OK, so the laurel wreath is actually very similar to the one inThe Knowne Worlde Handbook, but laurels are a swine to design so I don't feel bad about using it. I did do the drakkar though. I also thought that I had the red and white thread I'd need for this - perlé rather than normal thread - but I seem to have run out of red. That's not a major problem, as I'll just pick up some more tomorrow. It gives me the time to hem the second tablecloth in the meantime.
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I'm back from the summerhouse, still in one piece.

This is not quite as lighthearted as it sounds, as I was worried at one point that I wasn't going to make it to the summerhouse at all. The problem is that it's early March. On Wednesday it was a pleasant spring day. On Thursday it rained. Yesterday morning I woke up to find four inches of snow on the ground. This was rather worrying, as to get to the summerhouse at Varmahlíð you have to take the main road west from Akureyri over Öxnadalsheiði, which is not a journey that I like to do before May.

The pass is 540m high and links Eyjafjörður to the east and Skagafjörður to the west. It is part of the main ringroad around Iceland and seems to have a couple of snowploughs and snowblowers assigned permanently to it as soon as the first snows set in. I certainly saw two of each on my way over on Friday. Even so, they're not always enough, and if there's any snow about certain bits of the pass end up with areas of compacted snow surmounted by slush all over the road. Nominally the speed limit is 90kmh, but I certainly don't make it up to that sort of speed.

I've been here for two winters now, and although I've got a lot more experience of snow/slush/ice driving than most Brits I'm certainly still not entirely happy with it. I get anxious driving around town when it's like this, never mind trying to tackle Caradrhas once the snow has arrived. Nonetheless, between Björk's encouragement that it was quite clear, and the fact that the road conditions website had it as slippery in places over the top but basically okay elsewhere, I decided to try it... slowly. In fact, Öxnadalsheiði itself wasn't too bad. It was sufficiently foggy that I didn't have to see the mountains or the sheer drops just off the road. The traffic was also very light so I could take it slowly without inconveniencing too many other people. I got over the pass and was coming down into Skagafjörður on one of the less pleasant sections of the road when a hummer appeared coming towards me. These things take up a huge amount of space, even on the wide Icelandic roads, and it was travelling at a rather high rate of knots. I braked slightly, turning slightly to get well onto the right hand side of my lane when the tyres just started to move across the ice and slush of their own accord. I was very pleased to manage to control the car enough so that I ended up off the road parallel to it rather than perpendicular to it. It would have been very difficult to reverse out of the ditch but I did manage to eventually drive forward out of it. I did the last ten kilometers to the summerhouse before the shaking cut in.

Today's return journey was, thankfully, uneventful. Other than the fact that the fog had lifted so that I could see just how messy things would have been if I'd met that hummer at certain other points in the journey. It's not so much the physical danger - the prospect of death doesn't worry me too much - it's the thought of how ashamed and embarrassed I would be (if I survived) at failing to stay on the road.

In spite of the driving it was a very good evening. We're seriously considering holding Klakavirki's second event this year there, as it would be a great place for an A&S weekend. I just think that we need to make sure that we hold it at a time when I'm going to be less stressed by the journey.
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... And the white wine cow.

These have been important contributors to this evening's merriment out here in Varmahlíð. I've been invited out to a summerhouse for an evening of games and general relaxation to celebrate Björk's birthday. The two cows I mentioned above are actually a pair of wine boxes - I've never heard them described as wine cows before, but it's a wonderfully expressive term. The idea that you squeeze the box and wine flows, milk-like, from its udder amuses me greatly. We've also eaten enough beef to satiate a small dragon, and then rounded the evening off with a midnight soak in the outdoor hot tub. Okay, so ideally it would have been snowing as we lay there talking, but nothing's ever perfect. :)
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There are days so dull I have nothing to write about. Today was one of
them.

I got up. I went to work. I dealt with an action on my crisis management display. Two new ones replaced it. I went shopping. I came home. I made a birthday present for my friend Björk. I went to bed. See what I mean? Utterly, utterly mundane, and not necessarily in a good way. More interesting was watching last night's Sky News coverage of the Commons vote on the reform of the House of Lords. I really wasn't expecting to go to 100% elected - and neither were a lot of the MPs, I suspect. The traditionalist in me rather likes the House of Lords - the idea that these are people who are not beholden to the electorate, who can make decisions without thinking of getting themselves re-elected in four years time. People who can, in theory, take the long term view and throw back to the Commons legislation which is clearly a knee-jerk reaction to some recent 'tragedy' in the hope that it will be given a more considered examination and thereby improved.

My first reaction, then, was of the so we're going to get a Senate then with little enthusiasm and considerably more skepticism. But as I thought more about it I realised that it may be the only way forward. If you have any appointments to the upper house then it becomes, effectively, controlled by the most corrupt group of people in the country - the politicians - who will do anything to keep their people in power. The current investigation into cash for honours - into all of the main parties, not just Labour - has shown that corruption quite clearly. The idea that members of the upper house would serve one term of fifteen years and no more might work, although I'm not entirely convinced that even that would give them the long-term view that's necessary for a revisionary chamber.

Of course, no matter that the Commons have voted for this, I really don't expect to see it in less than ten years. Such are politicians, and with so many of them being lawyers I'm sure they'll find lots of good legal reasons to delay. I really do detest politicians.
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We gained another person at the A&S session last night.

Clearly the corsetry lab is a big success, as several of the corset-makers aren't planning Tudor garb but still want to make the corsets as evening wear. The sessions have clearly turned into lab sessions - it's just that instead of the machines in my lab being computers they are now sewing machines. :) But that's okay, and I suspect the corsetry labs are going to turn into garb labs within the next couple of weeks as people finish the corsets and start on the other layers. I was sufficiently organised today to order a couple more Period Patterns (houpelandes and early Tudor) to act as the basis for a lot of this other garb-making. I know that the PP patterns have some big problems but they're more to act as a basis for generating initial pattern pieces that can then be fitted together properly. Between those and The Tudor Tailor I think we should get all of the female garb done without too much trouble. And most of the male stuff will be t-tunics, so that's hardly going to be a big problem.

Another advantage of holding the corsetry lab here is that it means that I've now got the sewing machine set up on the table once again. This, in turn, means that I'm going to have the impetus to make my new corset and my own new garb (as I'm certainly not going to be able to do it in our garb labs :) - not that that's a problem). Maybe I'll finally get my sideless surcoat made from the heavy black and gold brocade I bought four years ago. And then there's the Moorish stuff I'm going to make up in the silk... No, no... now I'm getting all carried away again. Perhaps I'd better do the tablecloths for Revel first before I get all carried away doing more garb for me. I might be able to do a little bit of those during garb labs after all, so I should probably come up with a couple of designs.

I also have to do tablet weaving and calligraphy labs in the medium term. At least I've managed to hand the dance labs over to Martha! :)
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Here's the recipe I used for the soup. It makes enough for 8-12 people.

0.5 kg / 1 lb cooked chicken
4 l / 8 pints water
1 leek
6 chicken stock cubes (or use chicken stock instead of water)
salt
freshly-ground black pepper

Chop cooked chicken into thin strips or bite-sized pieces. Chop the leek into thin slices. Put chicken and leek into the water in the pan and add the stock cubes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cook on a medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the leek rings are soft and have separated from each other.

This will, of course, reduce a bit in the cooking, but I found that it comfortably served 7 people with enough for seconds for a couple and has left me with two portions left to freeze for myself. You could, of course, add a second leek for bulk but one leek worked fine.
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Or perhaps, more accurately, the stór potta. As opposed to the Harry Potta. :)

Given that I'm hosting a Klakavirki A&S evening tonight, with anywhere between about three and eight people, I realised yesterday that I don't have a cooking pot large enough to make soup or stew for eight. This was a bit of a problem as we're having a pot luck supper and I was planning to do a pot of cock-a-leekie soup. So today I went out to my favourite non-craft shop, Húsasmiðjan - purveyor of continental cookware - and invested in what is to me a medium size camping dixie. Yes, it doesn't matter how long it is since you last went to Guide camp, you never quite get it out of your system.

It's a 12.5 litre German-manufactured thing that looks like it'll also do great service for our forthcoming SCA event. The label in the shop claimed it was a 12L potta. Reasonable enough. In other words it is a Big Pot. Or, (roughly) in Icelandic, a stór potta. Naturally this has been shortened and anglicised to storepot. Even as I type the storepot is now sitting on the cooker with the soup simmering away inside it.

It also occurred to me that being a very single person I didn't actually have soupbowls for eight either, not even including my SCA feast gear (most of which is in the UK) so I had to acquire more bowls from Tiger (running close to Húsasmiðjan in the favourite shop stakes). Now, at last, I feel that I can comfortably feed an SCA A&S evening.

I realised too that I'm suddenly doing a lot more in the way of 'traditional' British cooking nowadays. When I've got friends coming over for dinner (or an evening like this) I find that I'm cooking some very traditional dishes - cottage pie, cock-a-leekie soup, kedgeree, trifle, that sort of thing. This is nice as I wouldn't normally go to that sort of an effort for myself, although I really ought to make cottage pie more often as I'm very fond of it myself.

Now all I have to do is finish tidying the flat and clear some surfaces for people to work on!
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Today I really didn't want to go back to work.

But I did, and I even got some stuff done. My office whiteboard now has sections labelled Situation, Focus and Actions, and I even managed to update it at the end of the day. It's still quite difficult to concentrate on just one thing, but at least I'm only having stress headaches once every couple of weeks so it could be much worse.

I decided that the new television really requires a new television stand and I managed to find one today that not only matches the other pale furniture I've bought but was also conveniently small for transporting back to the flat. Then I started assembling it and have realised that I've put the dowels in the wrong holes so I'm going to have to do something creative to extract them. And of course I'd put glue in the holes... I think that's going to be a project for Wednesday as it's Klakavirki A&S night tomorrow and I need to do some tidying up first.

In the meantime I must go and seriously condition my hair again. I didn't have conditioner with me when I went to the Blue Lagoon so the water stripped all of the oils from my it and it currently feels like straw. Still, after conditioning it later. Maybe another couple of heavy-duty conditionings and it'll come back to normal.
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For once the skies were clear enough to see last night's eclipse.

I was a bit worried for some time, particularly as I arrived from Reykjavík as it was ten-tenths obscured with the occasional flurry of snow but it cleared up later in the evening. In fact I almost missed it entirely as I'd assumed that we were going to have the usual cloud cover but just before midnight I wandered out onto the balcony and had a look around. The eclipse was in the last moments of totality and as I watched for a few minutes the brilliance of the umbra began to reappear. During totality it was a burnished copper colour and was quite impressive.

No photos, I'm afraid, as I really haven't got the hang of astrophotography, even with a digital camera. It's one of those things I'm going to have to work on if I want to get any aurora photos while I'm out here. We get aurorae quite regularly, but not as regularly as we get rainbows. It's quite impressive, the number of rainbows we get up here. As I drove from the Blue Lagoon to Reykjavík we had a spectacular double rainbow, and we often get rainbows appearing to rise out of the fjord up here in Akureyri. It is no vague romantic ideal that the university had a rainbow as its logo, nor that one of the artworks outside Leifur Eirikssonar airport at Keflavík is also a rainbow arc.

Terra Iridum. Now that would be a far more welcoming name than Iceland. Maybe the Icelandic Tourist Board ought to consider it.
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I have returned to the flat and have already had a relaxing snooze.

As usual I got into Reykjavík at a ludicrous time and found myself only one of about a dozen people heading for the Hótel Cabin, where I slept very well and followed this up with a good, if continental, breakfast. There had been something of a toss-up between a very cheap internal flight that didn't leave until 15:30 or a more expensive one earlier in the day, and I'd decided that I was sure that I could amuse myself in Reykjaví for the morning so I had some time to kill. Sitting on the hotel desk was an ad for the Blue Lagoon bus which decided things for me.

It turned out that the summer timing is better than the winter timing so I only got about 45 minutes in the pool itself, but this was enough to let me unwind a little. It was a little cooler than usual and you could comfortably access the whole pool without feeling that you were going to cook if you went too far in certain directions. It was enough to inspire me to try my hand at an Icelandic verse form about which my colleague Rafn had told me after a meeting which I summed up (rather succinctly I feel) as life is shit; deal with it. It's one of those forms with complex internal rhyme and stress that's so much easier in an inflected language, but here's my first attempt in English:

See the milky seawater steaming
Seeping through the broken land.
Wise the man who, while he swims, knows
Why the water hides his hand.

The return bus normally ends at the BSÍ bus station but the driver very kindly dropped me off at the domestic airport. I suspect it might be because I tried to explain to him in slightly fragmented Icelandic where I was going when he asked me - normally people just give him the hotel name. He seemed quite amused as I thanked him when he extracted my suitcase from the hold.

Now, though, I'm back and have had a quick snooze. It's been a very good week but I feel that I haven't stopped the entire time. I'm looking forward to a very lazy day tomorrow.
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Manchester airport really does leave a lot to be desired.

For instance, all of the shops other than the main duty-free, WHSmith and Boots close at 19:00 or 19:30. Dixons claims that it closes at 19:30 but actually closes at 19:00. Which is rather annoying when you have a 21:00 flight and get past security just in time to watch them close up. I'm particularly irked this time as I needed to get a new data transfer cable for my Palm and although we found one at home (from my original Palm) I left it for Kayte because a) she's having problems charging her Palm and b) I thought I could get one in Dixons. Which I could have if it had stayed open until the 19:30 it advertises as its closing time. Seemingly the staff in the main duty-free regularly get people screaming at them that this is a crap airport because everything closes at 19:30... I did find something useful in the main duty-free though - they had an offer on some very big, very vulgar (i.e. 'bling') rings which are perfect to go with Tudor garb.

Pah. On top of the girl in the food hall being less than pleasant, it appears that they've let their B&J tubs partially thaw and then refreeze. Bah.

At least I was prepared for the one bag rule at security so everything went smoothly there. I had already been pleasantly surprised that my luggage was only 15.6 kg - clearly only using the Samsonite suitcase was a good idea, even if squashing all of the stuff I've acquired over the last week into it was a bit of a squeeze. It's the three tablecloths for the shire that have really eaten up the space, and I hope that I'll have time to do some quick embroidery on at least two of them before the event in May.

Now that I think about it, the best shopping seems to be at Heathrow and Stanstead. Last time I came through Glasgow it was locked down for security reasons. Charles de Gaule was a complete wash-out. Copenhagen was okay but had everything twice and was a bit arty, like Keflavík. Liverpool is small but reasonably well stocked. I seem to remember that Amsterdam was fantastic, and Budapest was quite exciting too. Schipol had a shop that sold airline t-shirts for all of the airlines that went through it.

No, Manchester is definitely close to, if not at the bottom of, my personal airport list.
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I think I'm thinking too much.

I'm sitting in the front room (that's the lounge according to the legend on the servants' bells) and Mum is sitting on top of the grog locker (that's the drinks cabinet to those of a non-nautical disposition). Or at least part of her is - there used to be a big artificial flower arrangement on top of the grog locker, but Dad has replaced it with a limited edition honeypot in browns and oranges, decorated with the silhouette of MS Murex, the very first Shell tanker. A significant portion of Mum's ashes are in a bag inside the honeypot.

It's rather unsettling. The logical part of my mind looks at the pot and thinks most of the ash isn't actually going to be Mum, and what there is are just random atoms but the less logical part is trying to come to terms with it as slightly strange. The plan is that when Dad pops off we mix the two of them together and scatter them somewhere on a mountain top a long way from the sea. Dad has threatened to haunt us if we bury him at sea as he's spent too many years trying to stay out of it to want to spend eternity there.

Some of the ashes have already been scattered in the garden of remembrance at St. Michael's in Garston. Some more has been scattered in the garden in an area destined to become a rose garden. I can handle that, the recycling of matter that occurs at all scales. But the idea of keeping it just sitting there in a honeypot on the grog locker is less than comfortable. I prefer the idea of being made into jewellery - not that I'm going to have anyone to give myself to in the end anyway. I think I'm going to have to stick with the idea of becoming fertiliser for a plum or peach tree... unless we get the star-orbit burial system working soon.
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