Nik's Saga

Yesterday there was snow. It was the first of the year at near-sea-level, three days earlier than the first snow last year. It was quite beautiful to watch - the tiny snowflakes floating gently down, causing a fog-like haze across the valley. I must try to find out if there's an Icelandic word for it, as I can't think of an English one. It's certainly not a blizzard, more an intensification of the greyness caused by a very heavy rainshower although, being snow, there's more light involved.

This morning there was a very hard frost, requiring 15 minutes of ice-scraping and running of the car engine and heater before I could head out to work. It was a good thing I didn't have an 8am lecture today. Once I got in I realised that there had clearly been snow in Akureyri too. Not only were the mountains white to their bases, but there was also some free-lying snow in the grass around the university.

Looking at the sky right now, I suspect that there'll be another hard frost tonight. The sky is very clear, with the promise of excellent seeing once it gets dark. It might be just the night to wrap up warm and take the Galileoscope for a test-viewing.
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... And I finally have a decent set of viking garb.

I know, I properly changed persona from viking to Spanish five years ago, and had been toying with the idea for two years prior to that. But it's only over this last week that I've got around to making a hangarok and an undertunic. It's complete other than the tunic hem, as it's a little tricky to mark the hem myself; that'll have to wait until I have an appropriate visitor, I think. I've actually had the fabric for this for about four years. It'll be acceptable day garb, something I'm lacking beyond a rather velour-y kirtle and a now rather stained saxon tunic dress. Pictures will no doubt be forthcoming once I've done the hems.

My next project will be a set of acceptable day garb for fencing. Fencing in viking garb is Not Done, as far as I'm concerned, so I need something a little later. I have new under-garb armour, which means that I can make something that isn't just a big white shirt. A doublet and skirt is quite tempting, particularly as I already have a dark blue linen skirt and (I think) enough fabric left to make, at the least, a sleeveless doublet. That would mean that I can, for now, decide between my current armoured shirt and making a new unarmoured one. I do have a side of blue leather which would make a very nice jerkin but again, I just haven't got around to it. And, of course, there's still the mandelion to make, and I've no excuse not to get started on that considering that I've got all of the materials for it. Maybe next weekend. Whatever I do, I suspect it'll involve a visit to Calontir Trim's website early next month,

Work continues much as usual. I spent a long day in Reykjavik on Friday, putting together a rather large grant proposal. It may actually be too large for the research council it's being sent to, and once again I raised eyebrows by pointing out that the logical workpackage to cut would be mine. Clearly I'm not cut-throat enough for this business.

SparkPeople continues apace. So far I've dropped half a stone in a fortnight. I expect to slow down very soon. I'm having problems getting my Calorie intake up to their target now that I've cut down on bread, butter and cheese, given that a lot of my meals used to be some combination of bread, butter and cheese with added extras. It appears that I'm going to have to plan my meals not only in advance but in detail - I can no longer say Monday, Tuesday - diy pizza, Wednesday, Thursday - tuna bake as there's this matter of balancing fat, protein and carbohydrates to take into account as well. Still, as it seems to be working I'll put up with the faffing around. :)
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Because if you don't, your shoulders are going to hurt like hell.

Actually the cool-down wasn't the entire problem. Part of the problem is that my weak shoulder really doesn't appreciate doing 60 minutes of point control fencing drills. Although I'm not quite certain whether I should define what we did as fencing drills or abstract art.

Other members of the shire have asked for drills on point control, so I had a think and eventually realised that the problem is not the motion, but rather the visual feedback. The gym we use has nice spotless white walls that are entirely bereft of suitable target marks to act as targets for repeated thrusting drills. How do you know if two hits are 2mm or 2cm apart on a featureless expanse?

You don't. Instead of using the wall, then, I printed out a pile of A4 sheets with a 4cm circle right in the centre and blutaked one for each fencer onto the wall at chest height. Better, in that they provided a distinct target, but not idea. Then I brought out multi-coloured ink pads. By pressing the blunt tip on the rapier into the ink and then doing your point drills you can see exactly how accurate and how consistent you are. 40 reps for each hand, in extend, stretch, lunge and step-lunge, later and we had sore shoulders, a very interesting set of stippled abstract artworks and a very much better idea as to just how accurate and consistent we are.

The feedback was fantastic. There's always a tendancy to do these drills too fast, because you're going to fence at full speed, right? But when it's clear - not only to you, but to the other fencers around you - just how accurate you're being then you do slow down to try to improve it. I certainly did.

Next week we'll work on lower body rather than upper, but this is definitely a drill I'll be returning to. Apart from anything else there are thrusts to the head and to the knees to do yet. :)

The only problem is that it's a feedback approach that is really tailored to the Italian style of fencing with full frontal attacks from different distances. It's not going to work as well for Spanish, where the attack is at an angle and you don't need all of the stretch/lunge stuff. I'll have to do some experimentation here at home and see what I can do for that.
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When I weighed myself last Sunday my weight was up a whole 0.4 kilos on the previous week. It was depressing, and I was about to abandon the entire diet thing until someone suggested that I join SparkPeople. Which I did, to find some very interesting bits of information and food intake tracking tools. So I though I'd give it a try.

Dieting in Iceland is proving to be more complicated (and expensive!) than I had originally imagined. Part of it is due to the kreppa, but the issue of being on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic that doesn't have a particularly wide range of 'native' produce is definitely an issue.

In the middle of the week I went shopping. It was expensive. Part of this was because I bought a new set of digital kitchen scales, which put me back a painful 9000 kr (in real UK terms that's probably the equivalent of about £75). The rest was because I picked up things like tinned fruit, dried fruit and eggs in the hope of being able to get my calorie intake up the recommended level. It's fortunate that I like pineapple, as it's the only tinned fruit available that comes in anything other than syrup.

The lack of local produce means that almost all fruit and vegetables are expensive - sufficiently so that I tend to look at the prices and rework my plans. I, like many other people up here, tend to stock up on things when they're on special offer and the offer of an individual pizza at 25% off managed to completely disrupt my diet thinking until after I'd got out of the shop! Admittedly, given my current calorie intake I can safely eat it for dinner without going over my target, but it was interesting to note how the desire for a bargain in the current economic situation is so powerful.

Oh well. At least I now have a set of scales that will do tare, which should make life a lot easier for me. It's also large enough that I can weigh my SCA fencing armour tester to make sure that it's spot on its required weight. :) And I ended up eating 2/3 of the kreppa shopper pizza for dinner, to the tune of 600-odd Calories.

Hang on, only 600? According to the nutritional info on the box it's 202 Calories per 100g, and the whole thing is 475g, so 2/3 of it is about 600. This was a bit of a shock to the system. I've had this mental model that said pizzas are thousands of Calories and are, as such, complete anathema to any diet. Similarly the rather wicked chocolate shortbread biscuits (151 Calories) and late-night chocolate butter biscuit (69 Calories) are not the showstoppers I've always imagined them to be.

During the week I'm having huge problems getting my Calorie intake as high as it's supposed to be, and it's still relatively a bit high on the fat intake, but it is certainly educational to be able to precisely track my intake. Particularly as it means that I can see that I am allowed a guilt-free bed-time chocolate biscuit. Over the weekend, however, I've managed to hit the target, mainly thanks to having friends over for dinner on Friday and cooking a large and quite rich curry that I'll finish off tonight.

As well as reshaping my ideas about food, this is in many ways confirming what I've thought for a long time. I actually don't eat much - it's just that the stuff I have been eating is full of fat. It's nice to finally have a reason for why I can eat so little and yet be such a blob. Now all I have to do is to work up the energy to start exercising again.

When I weighed myself this morning I found that I was 1.8kg down on last week. I know that that is mainly going to be the 'first week drop' but it is heartening. It's certainly enough to keep me going on the diet for another week.
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In some ways it's been a busy weekend. I've finished some backlog scrolls, recorded and uploaded the latest podcast, and written a short Mediaeval Destinations piece for Baelfyr. I've also watched a couple of episodes of Torchwood and done a bit of reading. There activities have mostly, but not entirely, distracted me from thinking. Left on the to-do list are applying for jobs, editing an article on Icelandic forms of SCA titles and writing one on Icelandic manuscripts.

So here are the latest scrolls. I've decided I'm going to work on puzzle initials and penwork because it fits with my preferred hand. And because I found lots of inspirational pictures at the British Library website. They're influenced by Arundel 103, Harley 33 f 3 and Arundel 162.



I'm definitely taken with this pergamenta though - as well as the fact that the ink sits well on the surface, the fact that it is semi-transparent means that I can trace those tricky things like dragons. On the subject of translucency, though, although I like the current inks I think I really need a set that are non-translucent to get a better depth of colour. I don't know if I can get anything like that up here - I may have to do the overseas posting thing again.

The podcast for October 4th is now written, recorded, edited and uploaded. I find it very strange editing my own voice material, and more than a little uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I found the topic more interesting than I'd first assumed. It's on how most of our time and date measurements are based upon astronomical phenomena. That bit is pretty mundane, but the interesting bit was that I realised that I could turn it into a convention talk on how aliens might measure time. Mars is the obvious one to start with, and in fact people have already done some work on it (the Darian and related calendars). I was particularly taken by the idea that a Martian calendar might use similar months to those of Earth because the Earth-Moon system is a good medium-term time-keeper in the Martian sky.

Now for dinner. Not sure what I'm going to eat yet - I'll see what's in the cupboard.
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I think. I might have got the endings wrong as I'm really no good with these case things. Ask me to decline things in Icelandic and I'll say nei, takk! But back to business. Friday is ice cream day.

This was a decision made when I went back to work after my summer break in the UK. Before the break I'd been getting dangerously close to near-daily ice creams, there being enough ice cream shops that I could visit a different one every day, but it was comfort eating. So instead I treat myself to an ice cream on Friday afternoons when I leave work, to celebrate the fact that I've got to the end of another week. I go down to the fjörd to watch the waves, listen to the wind and try to think research-related thoughts.

Today, though, I took a bit of a detour and finally visited the town church, Akureyrarkirkja. It's only taken me five years to get around to it and the main reason I've finally done so is because I wanted a photo of the stained glass representation of Þorgeir Þorkelsson about to throw his Norse idols into the waterfall at Goðafoss to illustrate an article I'm writing for the Baelfyr.



I rather like the modernity of the design; I find a lot of more traditional stained glass a bit fussy. And thinking of traditional stained glass, there was a secondary reason for visiting the church - it holds one of the panels of glass from Coventry cathedral, removed for safekeeping at the start of World War II. It was, ah, underwhelming. It looks very much like it's some of the 19th century stuff rather than the interesting mediaeval stuff. They've put it directly above the altar to act as an altarpiece and then filled the windows around with designs that echo elements in the Coventry glass. Unfortunately, it being behind the altar means that it's difficult to get a decent picture of it.
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I've quite fancied having a go at bookbinding for a while now, but my visit to see the Saga manuscripts in early July really got me focussed. Some of the manuscripts are, as you might expect, bound into quite large volumes but others are far smaller, more what I would think of as the size of a girdle book. And, of course, girdle books themselves sounded like a very useful SCA garb accessory, hence the class I did at Raglan. Oh yes, and then there was Laren down under blogging about her own adventures in bookbinding...

So I applied my Google-fu, started reading up a bit (thank you, the Getty) and, while in the UK, picked up some thin birchwood sheets to make book covers. I knew that it would be much easier for me to find the stuff there than over here, and that I could cut it easily to bring it back in my suitcase.

I started work on Friday, cutting and creasing the leaves to the accompaniment of a Blake's Seven DVD and drilling the holes in the birch sheets ready to start the actual construction process. The paper is brilliant white cartridge paper, stuff that I can't use for scrolls due to the colour but which has a decent weight for doing something like this. Each quire is made up of 4 sheets of paper folded in half, providing a total of 64 pages in the final book.



On Saturday I spent several hours actually stitching the quires together. This was a faff. I decided eventually to use multiple perle thread cords to bind the quires, with a simple out, round the cord, back in, down to next hole stitching pattern. The stitching itself was done with waxed heavy linen thread (I had some left from my leatherworking last summer).



Once the quires were all joined together I could add the wooden covers... but not before leaving the joined quires under a large weight overnight to try to flatten them a little. Adding the covers helped to provide pressure to keep them together, but even after adding the covers I had to put it back under the weights overnight again. At this point I could also trim the pages a bit, as although they were all the same size by the time they'd been stacked inside each other to form the quires and then bound they were all rather uneven.



Yesterday I glued a strip of fabric in place to cover the cords and the stitching. Historically this was sometimes done with leather, in which case no further covering was needed, but as I wanted to do a fully-covered book I used an offcut piece of polycotton (it was just lying around so I put it to good use). This not only covers and fixes the cords and stitching in place but also provides a little more stability to the whole book. Then it was back under the weight again.



Today, then, I could finally add the outer cover. I acquired some very soft leather last year with which I eventually plan to make court gloves, but there's plenty spare so I opted to use that. The leather is turned over onto the inside of the covers in order to produce a nicely smoothed edge. The top edges of the spine of the book are turned over into the gap between the fabric-covered spine and the outer cover, also for neatness.



The only thing left to do was to put cover pieces over the inside covers, and voila! - one leather-bound hardbacked book. The final book is about 8cm by 10cm.



I'm quite pleased with this. It's another tester piece, as I've got another couple of bookbinding projects lined up. It's good to know that pasteboard is an acceptable alternative to wood, as it's much easier to get hold of that. It'll be much easier (and cheaper) to make larger books using that. The corners are a little uneven, but the cover pieces hide most of that.

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Last week I did, as a practice piece and a bit of fun, and version of Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat updated for the Apollo era. The aim of that piece was for me to try a whole selection of new things - working on pergamenta, using a dip-pen and non-abstract illumination.

It worked well enough, although working with the dip-pen was hard work - not because of the continuously having to re-dip it but rather because of the problems getting a consistent flow that doesn't blot when you first put the refilled pen to paper. I also wasn't too happy with the detailing on the illuminations in that the black pen I used is not only too thick but also the black ink was too harsh.

So here's version 2:



So what changed? Firstly, I used my 1.1mm italic nib Lamy Safari cartridge pen. Until now I've done all of my SCA calligraphy with the 1.5mm version of this pen, but needed something with which I can get more letters to a page. This has a nice consistency of flow and gives good sharp edges to blackletter forms (which has always been my favourite hand). The problem I came across here is that the pergamenta is a bit uneven in its surface texture, with the result that there are some parts of the sheet on which I got a nice rich black on the first stroke, but in other areas I had to go back and ink over the letters in order to get the necessary depth of colour. I don't know whether changing the ink would fix this problem, so as I have a fountain pen attachment for the pen I think I'll try that next.

Another change was in how I did the detailing on the figures. After a bit of a hunt around my box of assorted nibs I discovered a very fine drawing nib and used that with a dip-pen holder and coloured inks. I like the result far more than I liked the black version, but I think I need to extend my ink collection a bit. I have a decent set of Winsor&Newton artist inks (I keep wanting to call them Pratt&Whitney inks because I know it's an X&Y where one of the words starts with W) but need more of their calligraphy inks for long-term light fastness.

I also need a lot more practice with the drawing nib (dip-pen issues again), in particular because I'd like to be able to use it for the whitework. At present I use a white gel pen because it's the only thing I've found that will let me do narrow white lines. I have a couple of other white pens that work nicely for slightly thicker lines, but narrow lines have always been a problem. Actually, part of the problem is that I hate having to go over lines more than once, which is something else I need to work on.

And, of course, I added the third illumination. The Aberdeen Bestiary doesn't have a pig, but it does have a boar. Oh, the problems with shading this produced! That's somewhere else I need more practice.,, actually I think I need more practice in the whole matter of drawing things. Once I get back to the UK I might see if I can take some art classes to help with this.

Overall I'm fairly happy with it. I think it's about as good as I could manage with my current skill level.
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Hill-fogg bringeth snew.

Or words to that effect. We've had the first snow on the mountains, which may have been last night but could just as easily have been two days ago when the hill-fog first settled onto them. It's back again, but not quite as low, so I can see that the mountains behind the town are dusted with snow from about 750m upwards. This is about two and a half weeks earlier than last year, when it was September 18th before we got the first hints of white.

The semester is now officially under way, as I've given my first lectures of the academic year. I've got two modules this semester; Practical Computing, an introductory course for the biotechnology and energy/environment students, and my main Human-Computer Interaction module for the usual suspects plus five exchange students. Not all of the exchange students are computer science students, but as the university offers so few modules in English we tend to get one or two others each year.

I'm in the process of updating lab notes from Office 2003 to Office 2007. Last time I taught the Practical Computing module there was a roughly 50-50 split between 2003 and 2007, but now I suspect that it'll all be 2007... which is a bit of a pain in some respects, as there are some things that are trickier to do with the new version. Anything that requires you to switch into 'developer mode', for instance. Ah well. Such is progress.
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