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Monday, February 28, 2005
one year ago today (or maybe yesterday, i'm not sure... you can read about it in the archive if you want to know the exact date:) we moved from umeå. maybe that needs to be celebrated? sometime when i'm at home i might invite you for a one year anniversary.
¶ 9:53 PM
tomorrow i'm off again. EARLY! this time to aske, where i'm going to stay until thursday evening. on friday i'll leave (early) and spend the day in ö-vik. then i get to spend the saturday at home, and leave sunday afternoon to go to skåne for two weeks. when all this is over it'll be summer here in nyland...
a good thing about the ö-vik trip is that i might get to see sara over lunch, as she now lives there somewhere. another "good" thing about that particular trip is that i will have to work "for real" for the first time. the people who normally work at the office are going to be at some kind of meating, so we will take over for a while :) so if you're planning to visit the unemployment office in ö-vik the next few days i advice you not to come on friday. i've tried the real working thing a bit allready, though, as my "mentor" let me publish two jobs these last few days. so i'm not a total beginner :)
¶ 8:27 PM
the toyota has got a set of brand new tires since the trip to umeå. he now looks like a new person! tommy is thinking of buying him new hub-caps as well, to draw some attantion from the rusty parts. he's a quite nice person actually, the toyota.
hopefully the saab too will get a makeover soon. the accelerator is still stuck, and i can't get the hood open to look at the wire...
¶ 6:58 PM
marie just pointed out that i've forgotten to write about our short visit to umeå! so, here it goes:
last weekend tommy, bob, the toyota and i went on a short trip to umeå. we left after work on the friday, drove through lots and lots of heavy snow, and borrowed the apartment of jessica who was away for the weekend. when we arrived we got the key from marie, who's both a friend and a neighbour of jessica's, combined in the same person. very clever! everything went fine and we were all happy and slept well, even though our feet were wet after all the snow.
on the saturday tommy was supposed to leave relatively early, to look for new shoes and some other stuff. but the toyota turned out to suffer from a flat tire... fortunately we had a spare tire in the trunk, so tommy could change tires in the middle of the rather thick and very wet layer of snow on the unploughed parking place. and with big wholes in his shoes. i was a bit disappointed with the toyota at first, until i saw the big piece of metal sticking out of the tire... even i can understand it's difficult not to get a puncture from that.
as the toyota is not a very heavy car, and the spare tire was meant to be used on summer roads, it had some difficulties getting out of the parking place. but eventually he and tommy managed to get on their way.
after tommy and the toyota had left, bob and i went for a wet walk with marie and orwhar, and were invited for a home made delicious apple cake and hot tea. tommy joined us after a while, with new shoes but still wet feet.
before we went back home to nyland again we had dinner with tommy's parents and some other relatives.
back in nyland again i can say i have learnt a few things: the roads are in much better shape on the countryside here in sollefteå than in the big city of umeå, there's always room for a spare tire in the trunk, it's nice to have neighbour-friends who invite you for hot tea and apple cake when you're cold and wet, dog walks in wet snow is much nicer if you have company and cars always break down when i'm with them.
oh, i almost forgot to mention: tommy's parents brought us gifts from their trip to china, and i got the cutests little china-shoes! and a special china-shoe-bag to carry them with me in :). unfortunately the shoes leave black marks on the floors, so i can't use them until summer :(
¶ 6:35 PM
tommy, bob and i went on a long ski trip on the lakes today. we went all over the näs-lake, crossed an island and went back over the nordsjö-lake. even though i'm not a big cross-country-skiiing-fan there's one thing about it that i really like: tommy likes it. this means there's no problem getting him to come with me and the bob for "walks", as long as the walks include skis :)
yesterday i went bowling in sollefteå with about 30 colleagues. i wasn't too bad at it, but not good enough to win either. i only managed to get one strike, and a few "spare". just as i had thrown my last ball i noticed that the others used other fingers than me in the wholes, and realised that that was probably much more clever, as they probably were able to steer the ball better that way... i'll have to remember that in case i go bowling again.
when i got home tommy had made me an ice cream cake. very sweet, with my name on it. we had been hoping for my friend sara and her two daughters felicia and angelica to visit us this weekend, and had decided to wait with the cake until they came. but unfortunately the angelica-one had a colic and wasn't very happy, so they decided to postpone the visit. this way there is still ice cream in the freezer, in case anyone else would like to visit us in the near future :)
ps: we've tried the pulka tommy gave me as a birthday present. unfortunately i have to say i'm a bit disapointed... it's very cool-looking (black with silver brakes and a red dragon on the front), but it's very difficult to steer. it's rather comfortable to sit in, which is good, but i guess you'll need a very wide slope with no obstacles to be able to really enjoy it. we fell a lot, and missed the slope a lot, both when we tried it down the mountain and down the hill outside the kitchen window.
¶ 4:45 PM
yesterday tommy, lina and i went on "before ski" at the spanish restaurant in sollefteå, skiing in the slalom slope (after a while we were all very good skiers :) and had "after ski" with hot chocolate and cinnamon buns in front of the tv.
real skiers have a very beautiful view in the slope, with the lights from the "city" (sollefteå) spreading out beneath it. in the kid slope, which we were using, the view wasn't as spectacular, but nice enough.
after a while i realised that real skiers probably don't think too much about how much it will hurt if they fall, but on how fun it would be if they could go a little bit faster, or turn a little bit tighter or stop a little bit closer to the lift. next time i'll try the real slope!
¶ 12:43 PM
today i had the best stjärtlapping experience i can remember. tommy, bob and i went up the mountain behind our house, and went down again on the stjärtlapps. GREAT fun! the slope was perfect: long, ploughed and with a thin layer of ice on top, to make it faster. bob loved it, and ran beside me looking happy all the way down. my thighs were actually a bit sore when we finally landed, after having held them in the air for a loooong time... i will definitely bring my stjärtlapp on more moutain walks this winter!
¶ 8:36 PM
aske was nice. the food was good (= REALLY good), my room was sweet (even though i didn't get one of the rooms with panorama windows), the surroundings were great, my bed was comfortable and people were nice and happy. we had to spend a total of 7 hours at arlanda airport though, which isn't the best way i can think of spending my life...
yesterday the sun returned to sweden! unfortunately i spent the sunny part of the day at arlanda... but when we returned to sollefteå we were met by a beautiful little moon and dancing northern lights, which was also great.
the sun was still working today, even though it was a little week. tommy, bob and i went for a walk up the mountain behind our house, and afterwards tommy and i went "stjärtlapping" in the hill outside our bedroom window.
on my birthday the sun will rise while i have my breakfast! it says here that the sun will rise at 7.08 in sollefteå on my birthday!
¶ 9:04 PM
tomorrow i'm off again. this time to this place. the taxi comes at 4.25 tomorrow morning, and i'm back home again friday 19.00, if i'm lucky. apparently the food is very good at aske, so i'm trying to look forward to the trip.
¶ 7:13 PM
i'm back! it's really great to be home with my husband, the cats, my bed, the darkness, all the stars, the smell of horseshit and my hand cream.
the saab did (relatively) fine. my brothers changed the fan, after having taken the entire car apart. i'm glad i didn't have to do that myself! apparently when they build a car they start with the fan, and build the car around it... the brothers also started installing a radio, but as the saab's previous owner had cut the cables in not very clever places (according to the brothers) they didn't have time to finish it. so the radio will have to wait until next time.
of course there were some problems driving home(i rarely drive without problems...)...
when leaving the car in my brothers' hands i didn't think of telling them that the saab´s wipers don't work as they should (they don't go back to "scratch" when you turn them off, they just stop wherever they are). in order to change the fan they had to undo the hood and in order to undo the hood they had to undo the wipers. when replacing the wipers they thought they did it in the right position, as they thought they worked as wipers are supposed to work. when i turned on the wipers after about 40 km they moved down instead of up, getting stuck in the hood...
i stopped at an unattended gas station and looked in the trunk, where there were no tools. then i drove to a gas station with a small "shop" where they didn't have any tools. then i walked across the road to another "gas shop", where the tools had been stolen. then i drove to a gas station in the woods, where they didn't have any tools to lend, but where the very nice lady in the shop let me borrow a spanner that was for sale. so then i could finally adjust the wipers so that i could go on driving. i was a bit too fast though, cause they didn't go all the way to the left... but that only caused a problem in left turns :) i'll have to fix it now that i'm home.
unfortunately this wasn't the only problem. when i reached sundsvall the accelerator suddenly got stuck, and i couldn't get it up again. when i changed gear it worked again, but changing gear with the accelerator stuck in the floor is probably not too good for the engine, i guess... this happened a few times, so the last 100 km i didn't want to step the accelerator past the position where i could feel it got stuck. accordingly, whenever there was an uphill slope (which is quite often where we live) the speed dropped. not very much, but still. and a turbo where you can only use half the accelerator is not much fun, i can tell you!
anyway, we got home, and i'm sure the saab did it's best. and somehow i actually like the saab better than the toyota... i'm not used to car you can trust, i guess :)
¶ 5:31 PM
i'm erika, and this is my own little blog. i'm married to tommy, and we have two cats named galdor and kala bhalu, a puppy dog named sasoh and a few chicks. we also have five angels: love, arne, anton, bob and teo.
