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...

New Year on an island

On New Year's Eve we were eight of us (us two, Olle's parents and an uncle and an aunt with companies) who took a boat taxi to the cottage house off the coast of Östergötland. It wasn't warmer than -10 C in the houses when we arrived, but later in the evening we managed to get around 25 C in the larger cabin and about 18-20 C where we slept for the night. The water in the faucet was frozen so we had to connect directly on top of the water pump in order to get fresh water. You have to put up with some more work if you want to stay at the cottage even off season.

We had a nice dinner with champagne shaped ice cream as dessert.

During the next evening the snow started to fall, so the morning of January 2nd we had to shovel for easier access between the houses.

On Sunday the 3rd we drove back north again. This time the roads was more winter like. Not much of cars in our direction, it seemed more like most people were driving south from a trip to the Swedish mountains. Sometimes it is good to live in this part of the country :-).