Sommar startar nu

Today is the first day of European Summer Time - we "sprang forward" an hour, although I managed to accidentally spring forward an extra unfortunate hour as well. For some reason my phone doesn't automatically adjust to new time zones - of course it picks up the correct network time but that's not what it actually displays. Slightly bizarre. So last night before I went to sleep I set it forward an hour. I also use it as an alarm clock. When it went off this morning I was really tired but it took me about half an hour to realize that my phone had indeed set itself forward an hour also. So I woke up at 6-something, which was not at all my intention. Even though the time change meant the sun right now rises a little later than it had been rising previously, it's still rising so bloody early that it was completely bright and sunny out so it didn't occur to me that it was so early.

I am pleased that the days here are now longer than they are anywhere in the US, I believe. Dawn began here at 5:38 am, and dusk will end at 8:08. The length of day will increase by approximately six minutes a day for a while. In Berkeley, dawn began at 6:30 and dusk will end at 7:57. The length increases much more slowly, about two or three minutes per day.

One thing I'm disproportionately excited about with moving to Ann Arbor is that since it's on the very edge of the Eastern Time Zone, it stays light until really late in the summer. It's already pretty good right now - dawn doesn't start until 6:52 but dusk ends at 8:28. At the beginning of July it will stay light until nearly 10 pm, compared to New York at the other edge of the time zone where it will only stay light until about 9.

I'm not sure what it is with me and extreme weather/climate/meteorological events. I think it would be safe to say that I don't know anyone else who cares that much about the tiny minutiae of sun path and day length.

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It was the perfect day for the beginning of summer time. It's been beautiful and sunny all day, in a hazy but glaring kind of way, and even though we had our first real snowfall just over a week ago, the temperature was very mild. And fittingly, I had my first trip to the Stockholm archipelago today. P., her friend A. (who is also a doctor), and I went to Sandhamn. The name means "sand harbor." There are 24,000 islands in the Stockholm archipelago and there are extremely different landscapes/topography throughout. Sandhamn, obviously, is sandy. It's also on the outer Eastern edge of the archipelago so a lot of it looks out onto open sea. You can see where it is on the map here.

I'm pleased to say that I got a lingonberry stain on my sneaker. We walked on big boulders and along the sandy beach and along small roads lined with pine trees and through these fields where the entire ground was covered in really thick, squishy moss so your feet would sink in literally almost a foot, and lingonberry patches although there weren't many nice-looking lingonberries left. We ate a picnic lunch sitting on some rocks looking out at the Baltic Sea.

Some things I learned: There is an archipelago doctor, or probably more than one since there's so many islands (and I guess some of the really big islands must have their own doctors if enough people live there year-round), who takes a boat from island to island to see patients. This would be a very cool job. There are elk who live on some of the islands, and reindeer, and foxes, and snakes. Sometimes - rarely, but sometimes! - the elk SWIM from one island to another. P. saw this once. I would do nearly anything in the world to see elk swimming between islands. Somehow we got on the topic of unusual animals and we talked about muskoxen which I guess are starting to pop up again in Sweden, and I told them about manatees, which they had never heard of. Thinking about the manatees swimming in canals and swamps in Florida just kills me. It was surprisingly hard to describe what they're like - I kept trying to describe them as like big, slow, gentle people who look sort of like whales.

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The sad news of the weekend is it looks like our Zurich marathon hopes might be dashed. I battled my recurring shin splints successfully but have managed to develop what I believe is peroneal tendonitis in my left foot. There is terrible pain on the outer part of the arch and it hurts even to walk. I'm going to try to see a sports doctor here this week but the marathon is 3 weeks from today and I have not been able to run at all for the past week, and if it is what I think it is it will take weeks to heal. To say that I'm crushed and devastated would be a huge understatement. The only good thing that might come out of this is more time with Jake in Sweden to take day trips to more islands. At the top of the list, based mostly on P.'s recommendations: Finnhamn, Öland (down south actually, not in the archipelago), Utö...