Well it’s safe to say February was a great month. Particularly memorable because I recently become an uncle – I now have a little niece named Blythe who I’ll get to visit in a few weeks time.
Also an excellent month thanks to constant sub-zero temperatures. As a result I’ve spent a significant amount of time enjoying the frozen sea. I’ve even been able to skate to school on a regular basis, which is pretty handy when you live on an island. I can now say I’ve experienced the full gamut of outdoor skating conditions, ranging from terrible (thick frost layer with hard caked snow) to utterly sublime (pure black ice with a smoothness rivalling the oval’s skating surface).
Re-learning how to skate
All this ice is pure luck, when I wrote my last post I sure didn’t think it would last. According to the locals it’s rare to get any ice at all this far south in Sweden, so clearly everyone is taking advantage of it. Not just for hockey as you might suspect, but also for less conventional activities like ice-yachting and ice-motor-biking. There’s even one guy who regularly rigs himself to a kite and gets whisked along at tremendous speeds.
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In thesis-land things are coming along nicely. We just gave our first set of presentations, and we’re working on sorting out our methods. The exact scope of our project is still an ever-evolving beast that seems to lunge in different directions depending on the day, but it’s early stages still, I’m confident we’ll tame the beast soon.
Sunset on Saltö
Congratulations, Uncle Maarten. We are thrilled, too.
Wow, that ice looks amazing! You are so lucky. Looks like good skating is like riding a bike – nice technique