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.