New job for Olle!

Today Olle started his new position at Umeå University. The position will involve development of tools for analysis of physiology and function in dynamic tissue movements in skeletal muscles. This will be quite interesting with my background in signal processing, electrical measurements and some mathematics.

Visit from southern Sweden

Last Wednesday Olle's parents arrived with the morning train. It is always nice to see your relatives, especially since you live that far from most of them these days. We spent most of their time here inside since it was too cold. Surprisingly they told us that there was at least the same amount of snow at their place as here.
During the weekend some other relatives arrived who we had dinner with at Olle's uncle who lives in the city.
Due to the snow chaos, Olle's parents had to take a bus part of the trip back to southern Sweden.

Freezer temperature outdoor

Today we took advantage of the freezer cold temperature outside. It was time to defrost the freezer! We stored the food on the balcony while the ice inside the cabinet dripped into a couple of buckets. We also removed the whole thing in order to clean under it (which hadn't been done by the last tenants for a while).

Time for semla!

Shrove Tuesday means semla :-)
Maria got her first semla of the year at work today. It's tasted delicious.
After a few years abroad, we decided to make our own buns, enjoying semla at home for some evenings in a row (as well as during the nearest weeks).

Ski tour with reindeer audience

After lunch we decided to enjoy the sun and went skiing on a new track (for us). We took the car to the west side of town and soon we saw the signs for "Olles spår". We chose the 10 km track going through the pine forest, without any big hills. Mainly the forest was young and you had untouched snow next to the track. A relaxing feeling being close to the nature (if you exclude the exercise which made you tired).




After a third of the track the snow were not untouched anymore, it was more like if a lot of animals had passed. Next to the track there were also other evidences of animals, even if we had a hard time to fit the larger footmarks (reminded more of moose size) and the small droppings (small like roe deers).






A few minutes later we got the answer; a smaller herd of reindeer lives here among the young trees. Probably they are used to the skiers, since they seemed quite unbothered by all passing people.

At the end of the ski trip the legs and the arms started to be tired and the body in general felt more stiff compared to when we started. When will the body become adapted to skiing?

It's getting brighter!

For long time Maria has been biking both to and from work in dark. This starts to change with sunrise around 7.40 am in mid-February. Sunshine on the treetops met her this morning - there's definitively hope for the bright time again :-)
The disadvantage with clear sky: It's wintercold!

The first tax filing of the year is done!

The American one is the harder and has to be done in two parts - one state and one federal. No prefilled forms sent home to you, as the Swedish, so you have to fill in your wages/taxes payed etc. yourself. Olle worked trying to find the right forms in order to convince the IRS (the U.S. federal government for collecting taxes) that we spent most of last year in Sweden, so that we can be taxed as non-resident aliens... lots of forms to go through.
There are more possible deductions to do here than for the Swedish one; health insurance in the state filing and state taxes payed in the federal filing. We can understand that many people in the US use tax filing programs and/or consultants to do their tax filing.

Downhill skiing at Agnäs

Today we decided to test how much we remembered of skiing downhill (we did it once while we were in Wisconsin, but that ski area was quite flat, not many mountains in that state), the weather seemed promissing. Our goal for today was Agnäsbacken ski area. Not extremely large area that either, but at least it is just about one hour away from Umeå. One thing with the roads up here is that they are quite straight, and the speed limits are a little bit higher than they would be for a similar road in southern Sweden. That is of course due to the much less traffic.
Since we don't own any skis, we rented the whole package when we arrived. We tried to be there in time before they opened, and we managed quite well (later on some of the other guests had trouble finding parking spots).

Our first hill down started as a light slope and then turned into Björnbranten, a more steep slope. Not so good start for Maria the Beginner, she had a hard time to enjoy the landscape view. You could really feel that it was quite some time since last time on a pair of downhill skis.
More of the day was spent in JonErsvängen, a middle-easy slope.







Unfortunately the slopes were facing north, but at least we got some sun shine at the top of the mountain. Being in February the sun actually warmed you a little bit.





We stayed until the lift stopped for the day. Quite in time for the sunset this time of the year.

Two interviews on the same day!

Today Olle went to two interviews at the university. The first one was at the Department of Chemistry, but the position, if I get it, will not involve that much chemistry; instead it would be somewhat similar to the position I had at my last work place in Sweden. That is, a lot of signal processing, modeling and some mathematics.
After lunch it was time for the next interview, this time at the Department of Social and Economic Geography. My duties for that position would be to administer a large database covering the movement pattern in Sweden; why people are living in certain places, why they move to other places and so on. Perhaps a little less advanced than the other position that I interview for today.

Salt Lake City in May - yeah!

After some revisions during the last days, the abstract was finally submitted today. Maria, another graduate student in the lab group, together with the professor have decided to go to the 58th ASMS (American Society of Mass Spectrometry) conference in the end of May. This year it's in Salt Lake City City in Utah. The conference is quite large, a few thousands of participants usually. Later on Maria will have to prepare a poster were she will present some of her work. A prerequisite if the professor should pay the trip, as well as a contribution from the department.

On the way home a few days in New York City is planned, so finally Maria will visit some of the big cities on the East Coast. A short visit, but staying in Manhattan might help us to be able to see some hot spots.
Maria also decided to take a side trip before the conference, visiting one of her best friends from Madison, who now lives in Houston, Texas. Hopefully it won't be too hot already in May.

Snow day

Today there was a class 2 warning of the snow storm hitting most of Sweden. Here we might get 40 cm of snow, but the wind will probably be the worst part. Hard time to keep the bike paths open, since the wind forms new snowdrifts all over in a short time and make the paths unpassable.
Questions you asked yourself: Will I be snowed in at work today? Or blown a way?

Of course this was a day were you had to go somewhere after work, a planned meeting downtown. Maria biked there from work, but Olle gave up having unplowed bike paths in front of him. On the way home Maria struggled in the snow and had to walk most of the uphill part. Snow-trudging is workout in itself. For the last part she biked on the streets, instead of the snowy bike paths. Probably the cars didn't like it so much.

Thursday morning Maria biked to work as usual, since it take so long time to walk and the bus is probably not trustworthy in time or too overfilled in this weather. She used the street part of the way, before she found a plowed bike path (taking an alternative way to work, but plowed). Within the University area the paths were nicely plowed, as usual.

Additional choir training

Today the tenor voice of Olle's choir had an extra practice session at one of the choir members. After a couple of hours it sounded quite well. We have sung wrong in some of the parts of the tunes, but today we polished these passages.

Orbitrap up for fight!

During three days we had a service engineer working on one of our mass spectrometers, the Orbitrap that Maria is the main user of. Not that anything was broken, but it was time for the yearly service (the instrument was installed 10 months ago). Maria kept following the engineer about all the steps he did. Interesting to see when he took apart some parts of the instrument (liquid pumps, instrument interface etc), and at the meantime try to learn how to do smaller repairs. He didn't do anything with the most advanced/expensive parts, meaning the internal mass analyzers, these you probably you do more harm than good if you touch.
Afterwards we hope the sensitivity will be higher than before. One way to decrease the background noise, would be to clean the solution bottles and put newly prepared solutions.

Our first ski trip

This week we weren't out so much during the weekdays, not when it's -20 - -25C. More or less only during transport to work or short walks, hardly recognizable behind all winter clothes.

But just in time for the weekend the cold weather loosened its grip and today we had around -5C. With some sun shining as well, it was a shame to not be outside. Yesterday we took a walk in the neighborhood, after our standard group exercise hour.

Today we decided it was time to use our skis for the first time, so we walked to Nydalasjön. Surprisingly there wasn't so much snow on the lake as in the landscape around. We followed the perimeter of the lake, in tracks from earlier skiers. Probably the lake wasn't frozen when all the snow fell, since in some places water had pushed through the ice and mixed with the snow, which now had become slush. This kind of surface was hard to ski on, the skis almost got stuck. We arrived back to the apartment 2½ hours later, feeling good about the time outdoors.
Next time we might try the prepared ski tracks around Bräntberget.

Winter vehicles

Olle took a stroll in the neighborhood the day after we came back. It seemed like the amount of snow that had fallen when we were away was about 1/2 m. Some of the bikes/cars in the area don't seem to have been looked after for a couple of weeks...