New windows

Last week my windows and balcony door were exchanged. A very noisy and dusty job. In order to get the old windows out they had to use a sledge. There are damages from this that will be fixed later. I was at home during the work and it was not so easy to concentrate on the family history research when those guys were working in the same room. I spent three days cleaning afterwards. There was concrete dust all over the apartment, even in the laptop. Everything turned out very well, though. The new windows are air-tight (the old ones were absolutely not), they are easier to clean and there are now Venetian blinds in front of all the windows and also the balcony door.

This week I got a train pass that is valid in the entire province of Skåne. It was expensive, but I think it will be worthwhile, now that I have time to travel. I have been shopping at my favorite mall outside Helsingborg, and also at Ikea (got a freestanding clothes rack – I need more places to hang my clothes). Unfortunately, I had to go to the library one day to take care of some business regarding the social club activities. I try to go there late afternoons or weekends, so that my colleagues will not see me. I have also hidden in the library basement, in the microfilm reading room. I have searched for newspaper obituaries there, for the biography project. Didn’t find all of them, but there was one for Olga herself, luckily.

Today was the first really warm day for the year, about 20 centigrades and very sunny. This weekend is the carnival in Lund, which the students arrange every four years. I usually go to see the parade, and I made it onboard one of the overcrowded trains to go there today. It’s by far the biggest event in this area, about 200 000 people watch the floats moving slowly through town. The floats are pulled by trucks, and everything is decorated in extreme colors. The theme this time was the future and the students had been very inventive, there were references to current events, the upcoming election, the royal family, google, plastic surgery and other modern trends in society. In between the floats there were marching bands, also from other universities. It was fun to watch, but tiring to stand up for so long. Getting out of there was not easy, the number of people heading for the train station at the same time was just ridiculous. It’s not that crowded even in the biggest cities I have visited.

Some family news: my sister was able to get a job close to home, after having been unemployed since last year. My mother has now moved down to the summer house for the season.

Next week there will be a historic event in the Ericsson family – my grandfather turns 100! We are all amazed (including himself). The party will be the following weekend and we are all going, of course.

 

 

Big project

It didn’t take long before I visited my workplace. Just a few days after I went on vacation, a colleague was going to retire and there was a party arranged for her. It was nice to visit, but I realized that I can’t be there during regular work hours. I get stopped in the corridor by colleagues, asking me what I do there. I have a lot of research to do, and I need the databases at the library. I have many of them on my home computer, but not all. I have started the big project of writing my great aunt’s life story. Her name was Olga and she died in 1985. We inherited a box with her almanacs, where she had written every day for seven decades about the daily chores. Very brief notes, but still enough to understand what her life was like. It’s rare to get such a material and I really think she deserves to have her story told, even though she lived a normal, fairly uneventful life. There is lots of research required, because she wrote about people I never knew and she lived in a town I don’t know much about. There are many questions unanswered here, so I wrote to a relative on that side to perhaps learn more. He was very surprised to hear from me (we have never met), but said he had some information about the family to share. I have also looked into Olga’s parents’ aunts, uncles and cousins, to see if some of them emigrated, and there were several. So this project has all the prospects of becoming a huge one.

I have also done something I have been thinking about for quite a while – I went swimming at the indoor pool in Lund. It has a new pool for swimming, which is completely separated from the area where the kids play around in the water slides. It was my first visit since the addition, and it was a good experience. Brand new changing rooms and a hot sauna too.

Apart from this, I have discovered that there is a world going on in the daytime, which I have almost never seen. It’s rather nice to go shopping before 4 pm, there are short lines in the stores then. I have been to several malls and found some small things, a scarf, for instance. Other activities include cooking, doing laundry and watching TV. I also got a new passport. And in relation to this I borrowed four different travel guides for cities in Europe, so maybe I will go on a trip somewhere.

Freedom at last

It turned out to be eleven workdays in a row, so I was pretty brain dead at the end. The last week I attended two meetings and there were many issues to solve. I managed to clear my desk, and many people commented on this, some even said they hadn’t been sure that they would ever see the actual desk. Yes, I kept an enormous amount of stuff there; books, family history papers and other documents. I had to borrow the storage round car to get all of my personal belongings home. There were eight boxes with candy also.

Easter was spent at the summer house, with my mother and two of her friends. It was the annual art fair event, where local artists keep open houses, to show their works. My aunt visited also, and we all had Easter lunch at Furuboda and celebrated her birthday at the same time. Lots of boiled eggs and pickled herring were consumed (very tasty). Apart from that we did mostly garden work. We mowed the lawn and cleared the area for tree branches and pine cones. I returned home Sunday.

At home I have done a lot of organizing. I have tried to file away documents and old genealogy cases into appropriate folders. Still a lot to do there. I brought two bags with clothes and Christmas ornaments to the charity shop. I have been to the recycling place with paper, plastic and metal. It feels rather strange to have this much time off and I think I will end up getting very lazy. However, I wake up at seven every morning when they start working on the buildings and assemble the rest of the scaffolding.

Candy

The week at work was interesting. I usually don’t work seven days in a row, but these are exceptional times. These upcoming days will be my last workdays for several months, so I have to clear my desk and file away documents. I have noticed that I have an incredible amount of private things here also (mostly relating to family history research). We have had several meetings and I have written a few instruction manuals for my colleagues. They have started to show signs of nervousness and ask me a lot of questions. I’m the one who has been in the stacks the longest and has the most knowledge of the old catalogue. We’ll see how it goes without me. (One colleague suggested that they could scan the request slip and mail it to me, if they had problems finding the book)…

The major thing that happened at work was the arrival of a large display case and about 40 kilos of candy! It was the result of my name being drawn as first prize winner in a consumer competition. I understood it would be large box, so I asked to have it delivered to work instead of my apartment. I put the case in the staff lunchroom and poured the candy into the different spaces. It was a huge success, of course. Many of my colleagues took photos and posted on their facebook-pages (even the library boss did that). They were curious, so I explained the concept of consumer competitions and why my family takes an interest in this (it actually goes back to the mid 1980’s when my mother won some candy).

And like it knew I was going on vacation, the old (1955) metal compact shelving system in the lower basement quit working Friday afternoon. It got stuck when the ball bearings broke into pieces (the electrical moving force is so large that they shatter). There are no spare parts, and the janitor couldn’t do anything. The university maintenance sent two guys over, and they said maybe they could fix it next week. Sigh…

At home things have also been a little difficult. They are going to exchange all the windows in the entire apartment block (five houses) and also paint the exterior. There is already scaffolding on my building, so now I can’t have anything on the balcony. The flowers are inside, the furniture is in the attic and I soon have to remove the wooden floor somehow. We also have to clear the area near all the windows, so I have taken down curtains, moved the egg cup collection, lamps and vases. And I finally got to do my laundry on Wednesday.

Birthday and mishap cookies

This past week we had the annual social club meeting. We managed to get through the agenda in 20 minutes (I had to stay on as chairwoman, because no one else wanted to take over). We had invited a scholar who uses our books and other material quite a lot. He gave a speech about his research topic, which is slavery in the Mediterranean area in the 17th century. Very interesting to hear, and we are glad to know that our books come to good use. Buffet style dinner afterwards.

Thursday was a pretty strange day. I left work early to go home and bake cookies. It went really badly. I ruined more than half a packet of butter by accidentally getting water in it, after having melted it. The remaining butter was not enough to start over, so I had to find another recipe. Choosing chocolate cookies, I mixed everything, only to realize that there was not enough baking soda. I couldn't believe my bad luck. It's difficult to replace baking soda in a recipe, so I decided to make the cookies anyway. They turned out to be very flat and oddly shaped.

At the same time as the baking, I was supposed to do laundry. However, someone had (by mistake, it turned out) locked the laundry room door. Very annoying. I figured out who it was and posted a large, angry note on their own door (they were not at home). This didn't help, they came home too late for me to start the laundry. In the middle of all this, another neighbor showed up and suggested dinner in town, and I thought I deserved it after all this mess.

Friday the cookies were a success at work, but then again they would eat any cookie of any shape and form. Saturday was my birthday and my father and his girlfriend came to visit. We followed the usual routine, and went to a mall (in Lund this time, though) to have lunch. We window-shopped and then went on to the nursery to get flowers for my balcony. I got that as a birthday present. We also made a stop at the grocery store, so I could stock up. Afterwards we had coffee and the famous cookies here.

My sister's (and my mother's) efforts trying to win in consumer competitions sometimes yield winnings for me too. They enter my name on the forms occasionally. I recently got a gift certificate for a spa treatment. Also just found out that I will get a large box with candy next week. Looking forward to that.

Today not much has happened, apart from cooking (meat sauce and cauliflower) for future lunch boxes. Not as many as I planned on, because it turned out to be so tasty, I ate too much of it.

And my long leave this fall (August 15 - December 15) has been approved.

Emigrant research lectures

Over the past few weeks I have had quite a lot of pain in my back. I got treatment by the chiropractor twice, but it's still not good. He said that I should walk as much as possible, so I have taken several trips to cities to go shopping..... It requires a lot of walking, so I thought it would count. I have been in Lund to a flea market and had brunch at a restaurant near the city park. I have heard of this restaurant, and I was curious to try the food. It was great, lots of herring, salmon and other things I like. The dessert table was impressive, the chocolate mousse was definitely homemade.

At work I have done a lot of talking lately. I have given four lectures about Swedish American biographical works and how to find lost emigrants in North America. Several of my colleagues have found information about their relatives by using the databases I suggested. It was quite fun to hear about their family histories, and I'm glad they seem to have enjoyed the lectures. After this, there is no doubt in anyone's mind what a nerd I am. I talked non-stop for an hour and a half on this subject and could answer all the questions. My links and booklist are now a part of the staff online resource list.

The library has employed a curator who is an expert on preservation and conservation of books and paper material. She went with me through almost all the floors of the library and also the storage, and I showed her all the collections that need attention for some reason. I explained how we work and what the problem areas are. There has been very little interest in preservation, even though it's our duty. I hope this will change now.

I have moved a book collection to the storage, this time it was very old books, so I had to do the job myself. It wasn't possible to transport them on carts, so I had to use boxes. It was not ideal for my back, it got worse afterwards. The faculties have also sent about 30 boxes with books for me to process. I was able to distribute some of them to other colleagues, but it was still a lot of work. I have to say it's great not to have to drive the storage round anymore, but I somehow end up doing pretty hard work anyway.

Birthday party

Last weekend I was in Borås to attend my sister's big birthday party. She turned 40 and invited a large crowd for an open house. Our mother had made lots of preparations, but the only thing I really did was to peel as few kilos of potatoes. And load the dishwasher a large number of times. The party was great, the kids ran around, the adults were talkative, the food was very tasty (salmon and potato terrine, with homebaked cake for dessert) and my sister seemed to be happy about the presents.

I took two days off from work, so I stayed longer than usual. One of my colleagues had forgotten this and texted me at 8 AM Monday morning. I was not so happy about this. Anyway, my mother and I went to the local swimmingpool, where she exercises twice a week. Nice place. We also went shopping at the mall area and some second hand stores, including the one she works at as a volunteer. Tuesday I had an appointment for massage, where I used yet another gift certificate given to me at Christmas. The train ride home that evening turned out to be longer than expected. Another train driver had damaged a switch, so the trains were cancelled and we had to go by bus part of the way. The journey lasted five and a half hours instead of four. Very boring trip.

One colleague, who has been on paternity leave since June, returned last week, but only part-time. Still, it's a welcome addition. This past week I handed over almost all my regular tasks to other people. I no longer drive the storage round, shelve or sort requests or returned books. It's a test to see if the others manage without me. It's too early to tell if it's going to function. I have started to arrive late for work (at 8 instead of 7) and go home "early" (at 5 PM or so). I will use the last five weeks to clear my desk and finish all the other projects, before I go on my long vacation. I was told that they will actually employ someone else to fill in for me during this absence, and to my knowledge that has never happened before in the library's history. There is no money to pay double salaries, so where they found that resource I don't know.

This past week I started giving another lecture to my colleagues. It's about biographical works (like the previous one), but this time the scope is Swedish-Americans. We have a collection of Swedish American books, and some of them contain interesting information about the emigrants and where they settled in North America. I also included information on how to find lost emigrants, online databases and general family history research techniques. The lecture seems to be popular and I will give it several times the next few weeks, so that everyone gets to hear it.

This Friday I got to go to the new ephemera collection storage. It's in a large house, where we had our Christmas party two years ago. It was then empty, but now it is crammed with compact shelves on two levels, and the material was either on the shelves or on pallets on the floor. The move was recently finished and this was the first time I saw the place with shelves installed. Impressive place. They have lots of work to do, getting the material on pallets up on the shelves. It will take years getting it all in order.