homeownership

A few of the recent pieces I recommend reading: Nina Martin and Renee Montagne for ProPublica and NPR: The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth Elizabeth Dawes Gay at Rewire: Could Increasing the Number of Black Health-Care Providers Fix Our Maternal Health Problem? Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic: The American Health Care Act's Prosperity Gospel Matthew Desmond in The New York Times Magazine: How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Indquality Jay Reeves for the Associated Press (at STAT): Generations later, the effects of the Tuskegee syphilis study linger

Jrette wandering around watching TV on the iPad, overturning and breaking things in the kitchen. *sigh* Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold. Jrette stole my zombie novel -- Carey's 2014 Girl With All The Gifts -- and proclaimed it to be the best book she's read in ages. Now I am bookless. Mistakenly read two global catastrophe novels in a row. Now everything around looks temporary. Jrette is twelve today! I asked her if she doesn't find the Vampire Diaries scary. "I would, only with a dad who's a scientist, I'm not afraid of supernatural things." Pittentian in Perthshire is a fine…

Despite the chaos of our kitchen renovation, I have managed to build myself a little reading nest. Gotta love German. Try saying it out loud: "Die Beobachtung ferner Quasare, das holografische Prinzip und der Quantenschaum der Raumzeit". Resolutely put away my phone in order to read a book instead. Then remembered that the book is in the phone. Ever wonder what the scarf-wearing Somali girls are going to do with their lives? Judging from two of Jr's classmates in junior high, they're going to be software engineers. The question of archaeology's practical usefulness should be treated as an…

Three years ago when we moved into our house, the stones of our patio were newly laid and all level. Since then we have been walking across that surface, usually along the diagonal between the patio entrance + shed door and the front door of the house, sometimes around the corner to the compost container. Every step we've taken has caused a stone to settle infinitesimally into the substratum. Every step the kids have taken has on average made a slightly greater impact as they've grown. And when it rains, you can see that it all adds up. If I had a more volatile psychological constitution,…

Here's what's currently outside my kitchen window. Rosehip in the foreground, rowan berries in the middle, and cloned white brick houses like my own in the background.

Earlier this summer I did some upkeep on the board fence, pergola and yard gate of my house. Swapped some rotten boards and beams, put on some paint, whacked a few nails back in that had crept out. Easy work since I didn't have to design anything: I just measured the original parts and copied them with fresh material. And today I cycled to the builder's store and brought a few short boards home to fix the door of the garden shed. The lower four boards were rotten. Pleasing work, not least because I noted the need myself and did the job in my own good time. What about you, Dear Reader? Done…

Boat Hill, where I live since two years back, is a 70s tract-housing estate where roofs are almost flat. Snow thus tends to build up on them. Of course, pile enough snow onto any structure and it will collapse. But I've come across a curious notion here. Several neighbours have told me to beware wet snow "because it's so heavy". They're not talking about snow that becomes secondarily soaked by rain that adds to its weight. They believe that if I have a tonne of powdery snow at -10 Celsius on my roof, I'm OK, but if that tonne approaches 0 Celsius and compacts down into a thinner, less fluffy…

I once produced a small shell midden in my kitchen. Just now I made a small clearance cairn in the garden. My wife has ordered a peony bush from Gansu in China via a plant dealer in Turku, Finland, and I picked it up at a trucking firm the other day. Now it fell upon me to dig the hole and plant the thing. While digging I set aside all the stones I came upon, as lo-tech farmers have done for millennia, only at a smaller scale. And thus my little cairn. [More about archaeology, gardening; arkeologi, trädgård.]

Last summer I battled with wasps: this years it's ants. Small black ones have underground nests in our yard, and they usually don't bother us much. But a hot and dry summer recently inspired them to investigate our house, where they found two things they really like: sugar and water. When we returned from a trip to the archipelago, a busy ant highway stretched from the side door through a bedroom, a corridor, the dining room and into the kitchen, where the main destinations were our candy cupboard and the sink. Thousands of tiny insects. I bought some insecticide. It looks like pale pink ice-…

My house. It's L-shaped; of its six walls, only these two lack windows. In January, a house near ours caught fire in the middle of the night and was pretty much burned out. A malfunctioning electrical blanket on a couch in the living room was the cause. Nobody got hurt. But it was scary, because Boat Hill is all kedjehus, "chain houses", separate nearly identical brick buildings with narrow roofed spaces between them, forming contiguous blocks. The house that burned was in the block next to ours, a stone's throw away. An identical house seen from the same perspective. This morning they…

The bedrock under our neighbourhood contains small amounts of uranium. It's an unstable chemical element that is subject to radioactive decay. The amounts are small and it wouldn't be a problem but for the fact that one of the decay products is a gas at room temperature - a radioactive gas, radon. It seeps up through cracks in the rock and disperses into the atmosphere, unless it happens upon an enclosed space, such as a building, where it will accumulate. When radon decays it produces solid particles of radioactive polonium, bismuth and lead. These tend to cling to particles of dust and…

Scandinavians generally speak pretty good English. But every now and then you come across reminders that they are still very far from being native speakers. Witness this pail of wall-paper glue that I bought earlier today. Dear Swedish glue-maker, "hernia" means brock and is defined as "the protrusion of an organ or the fascia of an organ through the wall of the cavity that normally contains it". Wikipedia continues, "By far the most common herniae develop in the abdomen, when a weakness in the abdominal wall evolves into a localized hole, or 'defect', through which adipose tissue, or…

Sunday, 07:53 Sunday, 11:13

There was a lot more ice in the heat-pump box than I had thought, a 10 cm cake covering its floor, but getting rid of it proved easy. All I needed was a screwdriver and a small axe. The hot air gun wasn't much use. I turned off the power feed, took the hood off the thing, removed the rotor and hacked away the ice, taking care not to bash the fine heat-exchange lamelles lining the walls. The ice was laminated from the many defrosting cycles that had built it up, and it fractured into large easily manageable chunks. After reassembling the box I hacked away most of the remaining ice on the…

This morning when I got my bike out of the yard to take Juniorette to school, I heard a loud clattering noise from the box-like outdoor part of our air source heat pump. At first I thought the ball bearing on the rotor had crapped out. But the guy who installed it explained over the phone that the problem was most likely not as severe as that. A heat pump like ours dribbles condensation water through a spigot on the under side. It's been an unusually cold winter, and so the water has collected as ice on the ground beneath the box, building up layer by layer until it made contact with the…

Last year my wife and I bought a house. Since then we have been tenants of Nacka municipality who owned the land the house sits on. It's a tiny plot, hardly larger than the house itself, and surrounded by communal land. But the interest on a mortgage loan is quite a bit less than the land rent, and over time the real value of the interest payments shrinks through inflation while the rent is adjusted upwards. So today we bought the land plot as well, which means that I now own a piece of Sweden. Or rather, that the bank owns it and lets it to us as long as we pay the interest. The Swedish word…

I lost the battle against the wasp nest: no matter how many workers I vacuumed, it still hung on. And now our house is full of groggy young queen wasps. It seems that the last thing a wasp nest does before shutting down for good is discharge a bunch of queens who will hibernate and then start new nests come spring. But these queens are racing into a trap. The nest has two main exits. One out into the chilly open air. The other into the comfy warmth of the Rundkvist household. And we haven't been able to locate and stop up the latter opening. So when one of these young ladies is set to leave…

Dear Reader, if you are a wasp, do not attempt to nest in my house. You will only Release the Fucking Fury, said with a bad Swedish accent. I will plug your nest's entries and vacuum your workers as they return from foraging. Do not sting my chin, the only bit protruding from my raincoat. Do not nest in my house. That is all. Thank you. Update next day: Dear Reader, if you are a mouse, do not attempt to forage for food behind Samarkeolog's fridge.

I'm now in that state of summer leisure mixed with the responsibility of providing entertainment for the kids that causes a man to forget what day it is of the week. And so a week's fun is no longer restricted to its last two days. But I have done nothing grandiose lately: mainly pottered about and enjoyed being reunited with my lady wife after her recent visit to the in-laws. Anyway, Friday and Saturday were largely taken up by housework of the interior decoration kind. My dad likes to suggest grandiose changes to our house and incite my wife into supporting his ideas, but as he also…

Moving into a house has conferred a number of unforeseen advantages. The first one I discovered was that I now have a continuing relationship with the sky again, something I really only had before during my scant two years in student housing during my late teens. I see the stars and moon in the evenings, I see the sunset, I perceive the weather much more clearly. I'm looking forward to borrowing a telescope from Jonathan or Pat, come autumn. The second advantage is a closer relationship with the vegetation. There is now fresh greenery outside the windows where recently I saw only bare…