I'm just sorting through the very small number of photos I actually got round to taking when we were exploring the far north of Sweden. They are mostly not very good, which is partly because I haven't quite picked up the knack of photographing endless landscapes, and partly because Kiruna itself honestly isn't that photogenic. Anyway, here's a small selection of snaps of Kiruna (the last few are of the cultural museums at Jukkasjärvi).

I did manage to get one good shot of a reindeer (in a fairly small enclosure in the Sami cultural museum), though:

For cartesiandaemon who blogged about it and redaloud whose curiosity was piqued:

( worksafe Amsterdam public art )

This is what I saw from my front window a few minutes ago:



I grabbed a snap of them in the last 30 seconds before my camera batteries (which I haven't charged in months) gave up. It came out better than most of my attempts to photograph the deer that periodically visit, but it's not exactly brilliant either. The deer usually try to run away if you take photos of them, so by the time I got the shot they were the other side of the garden and not keeping very still. But hey.

Other than that, I have just realized that the file I need for my work was saved on the network, not on the work laptop which I cunningly brought home. So I shall either brave the snow and the Sunday transport and go into the lab, or see if I can work from a slightly older version.

I enjoyed seeing squee posts one after the other on my flist when it snowed in England this week. But I have to show off because here, we have proper snow. It snowed heavily last weekend, about 25cm in a few hours. And since then the temperature has been hovering between -5 and -10, so the snow has stayed. And it is very, very pretty!

A lot of this is new to me on a very physical level. The sensation of almost painfully cold air on my skin, and trying to cover up well enough that the minimum of skin is exposed to that. Whole new ways of feeling cold. Which kinds of snow and ice are safe to walk on or run on, new gaits to keep from falling over and to make motion less gruelling from using my muscles differently. I've been in weather like this a couple of times before, but in Britain this kind of thing would kill the infrastructure so it ends up being a free holiday. But here life goes on as normal, so I'm not playing in the snow, just adjusting my normal routine to a new climate.

Anyway, everywhere looks like a chocolate box so I've attempted to take some pictures. It's surprisingly hard to get good ones, because my camera's light meter is overwhelmed by all the reflected light and it's hard to get a camera-friendly composition when everything is white white white.

( yay snow! )

It's colder than before
The seaons took all they had come for
Now winter dances here
It seems so fitting don't you think to dress the ground in white and grey...

My Beloved do you know
How many times I stared at clouds thinking that I saw you there?
These are feelings that do not pass so easily
I can't forget what we claimed as ours

Various stuff worth recording this week. Besides which, a few lovely concerned people worry about me if I go for ages without posting anything, so here's an update.

( diary stuff, with a few pics )
Two annoying things, though. Firstly, my phone is being unreliable again; it's giving an engaged tone to people who try to call me, when to me it seems fine and is not at all engaged. This has caused me to miss calls from people I really wanted to talk to, pseudomonas and compilerbitch in particular. So if you've been trying to get hold of me and not managed to get through, that's why. I suggest writing me an email and asking me to call you if you want to speak to me, just to be sure.

The more serious negative is that Lyndon LaRouche's evil "Novelle Solidarité" group, the people responsible for the anti-semitic murder of my brother's friend in 2003, have set up a stall in the station just outside the campus where I work. They look like your standard lefty student protest group, with posters about how evil Bush is and protesting about the Iraq War, maybe just a smidge more glossy and professional than some. I don't even know what they're doing in Sweden. I guess looking for more naive students with lefty, anti-authoritarian views to sucker into their scary cult. They have no way of knowing that I'm Jewish, of course, but I'm really concerned about seeing them here.

I have finally got round to processing some of the photos I've was taking the first couple of months after I moved here. (There are some excuses, because I needed a bunch of things I didn't have like an adapter for my camera, a non-work computer and an internet connection, but also I've been disorganized.)

I'm not particularly proud of most of these, but they do show some bits of Stockholm, some of the fun celebrations I went to in June, and there are some reasonably nice wildlife shots including one of the deer that visit my garden quite regularly.

Here are the best of the photos I took in Edinburgh last week:
( thumbnails only; click for full version )

Today I gave a talk to my department (about 40 people whom I know more or less well). I summarized the main thread of my PhD work, and it went really well. People asked good questions and were complimentary about the presentation, and I'm generally really happy about it. It's not news to me that I'm good at public speaking, but I'm proud of today, and that's making me feel good about my thesis work in general. Yay.

(Boss S said that if it were up to her, on the basis of that talk I should be a doctor already. Which is rather sweet.)

And it snowed heavily this morning and continued on and off throughout the day, so by the time I got home Dundee was looking exceptionally pretty in the twilight. I decided to skive off my thesis briefly and went out with my camera to take photos.

( snoooow! )

I thought I'd post the best of the crop my attempts at taking photos of sunsets and other interesting lighting conditions when I was in England mid-December:



I've included with this lot, though it doesn't quite fit, a photo I took of Dundee when lethargic_man was here in November:



Also, a couple of photos of my parents' place:



Theoretically, you should only be able to see those if you're on my friends list, but I'm not sure how well the security is working. Anyway, the main claim to fame of that house is that Rupert Brooke (who was a regular visitor) described it in his diary as a "castellated mansion", and I think these photos show that quite well. Well, the other claim to fame is that the Macaulays lived there, but they are quite limitedly famous compared to Brooke!