General update

1) I will be spending two weeks in a cabin in the north of Sweden with my parents over Christmas and New Year's, wish me luck avoiding family quarrels. It'll be good to do some cross-country-skiing, it was far too long ago.

2) I will be working 80% next year! \o/ I am happy to trade some money for free time, so that'll be great. To be honest though, I have not been working 100% in practise this last year. I have 20% research time, but I have not managed to do any research. It's not like I'm trying to exploit the system, I do feel bad about not managing to do research. Still, I'd rather not have that time fill up with more teaching, which is what would happen if I kept not doing research, so I'd rather go down to 80% and spend that time organizing and being outdoors. It's only for a year though, we'll see what happens after that.

3) I checked out the local newly-formed Extinction Rebellion group, and was impressed. They were holding an intro to which about 30 people turned up, which I would say is a lot, and also, the three people sitting near me had no previous experience with environmental organizing. That they're reaching new people like this gives me hope. I've really been missing a radical climate movement in Sweden, and while I probably don't have time to take on an organizing role, I will definitely be part of their action trainings and actions. Do check out their local group if there's one near you.

4) I camped out on the winter solstice like I always do, this time on one of the islands in the archipelago on the west coast of Sweden. I hiked out in the dark but didn't need a flashlight or anything--there was a moon that shone through a thin cloud cover and I could see enough to scramble over rocks and put up the tent on a flat bit of grass. I had my winter sleeping bag so I wasn't cold, though I did forget earplugs and the wind in the tent was a bit distracting when I was trying to sleep.

Recent reading

Adrift: 76 Days Lost At Sea by Steven Callahan (1986, audiobook read by the author)
Recced by rachelmanija. This was quite immersive and suspenseful to listen to as an audiobook, and also included an interesting interview with the author at the end.

A Nun in the Closet by Dorothy Gilman (1975)
Also recced by rachelmanija, and by skygiants! Aww, this was indeed delightful. I liked the nuns bonding with the hippies.

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion (2017) and The Barrow Will Send What It May (2018) by Margaret Killjoy
Novellas about anarchist demon-hunters. Quite enjoyable--for example, there's a demon who kills those who exercise power over others (that's the lamb slaughtering the lion). Although that doesn't exactly go as planned for those who summoned it, because of course they're trying to use the demon for power over others... Looking at photos of the author I have to imagine that the "itinerant anarchist punk" part of the characters (if not the "demon-hunting" part) is a bit autobiographical. I've read one book by Killjoy before; it was a choose-your-own-adventure story about a human getting mixed up in the rebellion of the downtrodden goblins against the gnomes. Sadly I found it less enjoyable than that sounds, but these were better.

Yearly goals for 2018

Here's how I did with my bingo card of yearly goals for 2018!

Things I did:

• Sleep 20 nights outside/in a tent. (22 nights this year.)
• Make a new friend. (I got to know a woman who's on the union board with me, and one woman who I did forest inventories with this summer who I really bonded with.)
• Go swimming in 20 new lakes/places by the sea. (26 this year! It was a really warm summer.)
• Go to one of the Swedish national parks I haven't been to. (Yes, I was in Store Mosse National Park--a friend had her 40th birthday party in a cabin there, but I didn't get as much chance to geek out as I would've liked. It's a large wetland in southern Sweden that somehow escaped being drained out.)
• Change banks. (Yes, finally! I didn't actually leave my old bank, but I moved my savings to two other banks that don't invest in fossil fuels and other bad stuff.)
• Spend 24 hours in a tree. (Yes, I wrote this up here.)
• Do something which sounds interesting but is out of my comfort zone or that I have never done before. (Yes, I rode on a horse!)
• (Re)install Linux on at least one of my computers, hopefully both. (Kind of? I got a new work computer and got them to install Linux on it for me. Still counting it, though.)
• Post 3h of podfic. (Yes, 5 hours and 11 minutes! Note how it's sneakily worded to say "post" rather than "record". This is so I could count an old WIP I finally finished the editing on.)
• Half the books I read should be non-fiction. (Yup.)
• Track the wood-living fungi species (especially polypores and Corticiaceae) I see during the year, and also learn fungi microscopy better. (I went to three different fungi courses/workshops, did a little microscopy on my own, did a lot of forest inventories which always improves my skills, and started work on a reference collection of wood-living fungi that now has about 50 species.)
• Participate in at least one other fic exchange in addition to Yuletide. (Yes, I did Chocolate Box and thought about doing some other exchanges--there are so many multifandom exchanges running during the year!--but ended up not doing more.)
• Go tree climbing at least 8 times. (Yes, I climbed a lot this year, but didn't keep track of how many times after I reached eight. Lots of banner-hanging!)
• Co-organize a forest inventory camp in the summer. (Yes, I did this.)
• Babysit a kid with noone else there. (Two kids, in fact! \o/ They were about five and two years old.)
• Go to the union congress on the national level. (Yes, it was a good experience.)
• Go cross-country skiing a couple of days. (I will be doing this for two weeks now!)
• Organize my moss herbarium properly, with at least 150 species in it. (Woohoo, it now has 250 species, which is about a fourth of all moss species in Sweden.)

Things I did partly:

• Go running 50 times. (I only did 38 times. Fail. /o\ In my defense, the tracks were really icy in the beginning of the year, and then I was sick a lot, with two colds, a sinusitis and a flu, and then during the summer I was doing other outdoorsy stuff, and then I had two other colds in the fall. Will do better next year.)

Things I didn't do:

• Delete my gmail accounts and save the email somewhere else. (No. I ran into trouble when I was backing up the email because Thunderbird froze, possibly because I had too much email. And then I just let it slide. Haven't used them for a long time though, and I don't trust Google to actually delete my data even if I tell them to. : / )
• Perform with my sister or record an album with her. (No. She still has a small kid. We were going to do some sort of Christmas thing but didn't get around to it.)
• Do research of some kind, damn it. (Ha ha, no.)
• Visit exeterlinden and/or my friend Jennie. (Nope. I tried but it didn't happen.)
• Take a dance course and/or go dancing three times. (No, I didn't go dancing even once, if you don't count the department Christmas party, which I don't think I do.)
• Try out Marcq St Hilaire's method of determining one's position with a sextant. (I meant to do this but it never happened--one time I was all set to go out to the archipelago to do it but then it got cloudy...)