Finland!

It has been extremely hectic around here. Both E and KE started school last Thursday, and then last weekend E came down with a nasty cold. I started school on Monday, so already our first week of having two of us working full time we were in a childcare crisis. It would have been okay except that I had committed to attending a conference in Helsinki Wed-Friday of this week, which left KE in the lurch. Luckily his new boss was very understanding, and he made it work despite me jetting off.

The conference was really interesting. I didn't know any of the other participants, and it had been 15 years since I was last in Finland, so at times it was a little disorienting, though mostly just interesting and enjoyable. It's great to be home though! I'll post more about it with pictures when my energy level is back up.

Vimsete

I got back from Lund late last night. All in all, it was worth the effort, though it was by no means the best conference I've ever been to. It's a little sad that the best connections I made were with the people I already work with, but I suppose it's not a bad idea to strengthen the network I already have. I found out about an absolutely perfect job opening that has unfortunately already been filled: research consultant at the National Library. Apparently it's a 50% research 50% consultant position where you help other people with their research. OMG I would have loved that. But now that I know, I can follow along in case a similar position opens up in the future.

Otherwise, I felt my paper went relatively well. I think a lot of people realized there was a gap in their knowledge regarding the text, period, and themes I talked about, so that was good, but it certainly wasn't anything groundbreaking. The best paper I head was from one of our PhD students, who talked about Lars Ramberg's Liberté, which was selected to decorate the interpretive museum at Eidsvoll (home of the Norwegian constitution). I hadn't heard about the furor that this work produced (it was later deselected), and I found both the work itself and the debate really thought-provoking. But other than that one paper, there was very little else that got me excited.

I almost missed my flight home. I got a late start from Lund (too busy socializing!), then the train I was taking to the Copenhagen airport had technical problems, so we had to get off and wait for a new one. I made it to the airport 30 minutes before the flight, but amazingly was able to check in (hand baggage only, thankfully), make it through security and get a seat at the gate. Yay Copenhagen airport. I could have never done it in the US. When I got off the bus in Oslo and walked to the ferry I was pleasantly surprised to find a huge music festival on the water. It was a little disorienting at first, since nearly all of the hundreds of people milling around were Pakistani, but quite cool. I felt like I'd been transported to Karachi for a moment. It was actually just the MELAfestival, which was something I knew nothing about before stumbling upon it.

This morning E, KE and I walked down to the marina and mucked about in our boat. We had to bail it and scrub it down some and KE tried to get the motor going. It starts, but cuts out pretty randomly, which isn't a good thing when motors are concerned. It was a beautiful summer morning though, and it was fascinating to see all the stinging jelly fish in the water. This is a record year for them.

Hey, have you tried the Battleground God game, which is a test to see if your professed beliefs are consistent? Pretty interesting quiz.

Oooh, I just discovered this site where you can make maps of where you've been:


visited 28 states (56%)
Create your own visited map of The United States


visited 14 states (6.22%)
Create your own visited map of The World

Clearly I need to work on the southern hemisphere!

Av sted

I'm off to the conference in Lund early tomorrow morning. After a last push today at work I finally have my paper pulled together enough that I can present it on Wednesday without cringing too much. This has been a good project for me, as it has forced me to explore the careers of some writers I knew next to nothing about previously. Actually, my summer cold is so horrible right now, I may very well be delusional about the quality of the paper. I think my standards get a lot lower when my head hurts and I can't swallow.

I'm excited to go to the conference and also to explore southern Sweden a bit on the Thursday day-long excursion. A colleague from work is booked on the same flight tomorrow morning, so I'll have someone to help negotiate the transportation from the Copenhagen airport to Lund. It's always a treat to have a traveling companion for navigating, though I have to admit I am also really looking forward to three nights in a hotel alone. I think every mother of a small child feels that way.

I knit and knit and knit on the Multnomah shawl and didn't seem to be making a dent in the yarn at all. After getting almost to the largest size of the shawl (and having used less than a third of my yarn), I decided to rip it all out and knit a top-down raglan sweater, which had in fact been my original plan. My skein winder got some heavy use, as I wanted to wind up all the yarn in double strands rather than knitting from two balls at a time. Love, love, love that skein winder! I figure if I make it sized for E rather than me I'll have enough yarn to do an entire sweater. So far I really like the way it's knitting up in stockinette stitch:

I'll probably pick up the stitches along the neck and make a 2x2 ribbed turtleneck, but I want to wait until the body and sleeves are done to be sure there's enough yarn. I'll do 2x2 ribbing at the cuffs and bottom edge as well. I still can't decide if it's horribly ugly, or very pretty. KE says it's just in between.

Skavsår i Stockholm

I'm just back from my four days at a conference in Stockholm. It would have been a fabulous trip had I not rather inexplicably taken not one but two pairs of shoes that I cannot wear without excruciating pain, and no other foot wear. I can't believe I was that stupid. Within the first couple of hours of the trip I could tell I was getting blisters from the sandals, which meant that the dressier shoes I had brought would be completely impossible. I actually ended up leaving them behind. Luckily I found a pharmacy where I found magic blister plasters, which kept my feet from turning into a bloody pulp. But it still hurt to walk.

Nonetheless, I did have lots of fun. I had three nice dinners out: Indian food at the (wait for it...) Indian Garden (with dear friends from the states), very upscale Italian on the roof of a restaurant called Perlei (with a random assortment of people from the conference), and mid range artsy place called BK Mat (with a colleague and a former student).

I went to the fabulous Marias garn yarn shop, which was very close to my lovely 17th century hotel, Hotel Anno 1647. I didn't buy any yarn, but it is a really great source for wonderful yarns, including their own label. Next time I'm in Stockholm it would be great if I can coordinate it so that I actually need to buy some yarn (which I totally don't right now).

My weirdest experience was waiting for my friend and our former student (we both taught him at different times, and now he's planning to apply to grad school. He's been living in Sweden for a couple of years and keeps a very entertaining blog about it). We were supposed to meet up in front of Kulturhuset. I had forgotten what it looks like until I got there, but of course remembered it immediately as one of the most central meeting places in the city. The odd thing is that I kind of freaked out at the scale of the open area and the frenetic human activity that filled it. I had visions of the film Vantage Point. It would be the perfect place for a sniper (here's a link to a nice black and white photograph of it on the Swedish Architecture Museum's website). I more or less hid behind a garbage can on a bench with my back to a wall. I was so relieved when they showed up to rescue me from that place!

The conference itself was worthwhile, and I met my goal of forcing myself to be social and do some networking. I even met someone who had some information that I've been needing for a project that has been stalled for a year now. He encouraged me to email him to get the exact information pinned down. It would be so great to get the project done and under review somewhere. One of the keynote presentations was on films, and the woman showed a clip from what I think was Martin Scorsese's Who's That Knocking at My Door from 1967 (not sure, her accent was hard to understand). I was totally riveted by the clip, not least because the sound track to it was Ray Barretto's "El Watusi" (according to Wikipedia it's from 1961) a song that has to be in my top five of Latin American dance songs. I could barely sit still in my seat during the lecture!

While I was away I knitted about half of a shawl using Inca Alpakka. I decided to use Mustaavillaa's Lacy Baktus variation (Ravelry link) of Strikkelise's now classic Baktus shawl (Ravelry link). I didn't want to take the ski sock along, since that requires a bit more concentration than I can muster during a conference. This pattern was perfect. The increase rows and yarn over rows are just enough to keep it from being boring, while still being mindless enough to take traveling. I'm calling it "Cavity Baktus" on my Ravelry project page, given the reference to Thorbjørn Egner's Karius og Baktus (a Norwegian children's book about dental hygiene) and, well, all those holes.

ETA: Our bed (the one we ordered six weeks ago) arrived while I was away. I am so excited to sleep on a decent mattress for the first time since December!!!

Pure bliss! It's even a Jensen like I wrote about over a year ago, when we were starting to plan our new life here...

Eksperiment

Yesterday in the literary seminar I'm teaching this term I presented a full-on conference paper exactly as I would do it at a real conference. It was an experiment in teaching the culture of academic discourse in the humanities, rather than just the content. I gave the students a listening exercise to work on while I presented, which was intended to help guide them through the paper. It has the following instructions and questions:

In this exercise you will listen to a fairly typical conference paper presentation and attempt to sort out what the argument is based solely on listening (rather than reading). This is exceedingly difficult to do, yet it is the standard format for presenting research in the humanities. (Is that a good thing?)

1. You will need to come up with at least one question to ask the presenter about the content of the paper. Write that question (or those questions) here as it (they) occur to you during the presentation. At the end of the presentation, pose it (them)!
2. What is the thesis for this presentation (what is the problem to be analyzed)? Does the presenter state the thesis outright, or did you just have to infer it? (And in the end, did the presenter actually analyze what she said she was going to analyze?)
3. List the key points that the presenter makes. There should be some. If not, it is a weak paper! There shouldn't be too many, though. Hope for about 3-5.
4. Does the presenter make use of specific theoretical terms or specific theories? If so what are they, and do they work to support the argument being made? Would something else that you know of have worked better?
5. Does the visual material presented help or hinder your understanding of the paper?

Wow. I have never had such an attentive audience at a conference presentation, and I have never had so many questions and comments. The post-paper discussion was really interesting because we focused both on the content of the paper and on the process of presenting. Since this is a split senior/graduate seminar, there were graduate students in the group who may well be presenting papers in the next year or so. As far as I can tell we don't give them any specific training in how to do that at this university, which is why I subjected them to my own research (on a text they had to read for my class). For me it was delightful to know that the audience had read nearly every thing I referenced in the paper, including the theory bits. I would definitely do this again in the future, at least with graduate students. I wonder if other people have done a similar exercise?

And, in other news, a holiday confession: KE and I browbeat my mother into agreeing to have our Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant! I am so utterly relieved. This will be the first time in my entire life that I don't have a home-cooked meal on Thanksgiving, but I just didn't have it in me this year to prepare one. There was just too much else to be thinking about and doing. KE is delighted, and I'm looking forward to being able to either A) trash the restaurant food or B) learn some new dishes and traditions to encorporate in my own Thanksgiving meals (I presume I'll go back to making Thanksgiving dinner starting next year).

Update: The restaurant dinner was fantastic! We ate at Sweetwaters on the Willamette river, then took a short walk along the river after. Wow, I didn't realize what a breeze it is to do a restaurant Thanksgiving! And the best thing of all was that I got to wear my finished (finally!!) rillejakke:

Yay, yay, and double yay! Boy was I tired of that project...