i've got freckles!
the sun has been shining the entire day, and as soon as work was over a colleague and i rushed out to find a sunny spot to spend the afternoon. most sunny spots were allready occupied with young people with beer and pimples, but finally we found a church that had a sunny step without youngsters. it was freezing cold, but there was a feeling of spring in the air.

talked to tommy a little while ago, and apparently the feeling of spring is even stronger at home: he had spent the afternoon in t-shirt on our porch... i hope i hope i hope i hope the sun will stay for the weekend!  ¶ 6:56 PM

  i'm in luleå, together with 27 colleagues from sollefteå. finally i got a hotel room with a bathtub!! i'm going to spend every night in the tub on this trip :)

we arrived yesterday, and we're leaving friday afternoon. not a very long stay, in other words.

tommy, bob, the cats and i spent the easter holiday in jörn with my parents in law. we also met tommy's broter, the brother's girlfriend and their son oscar.

sunday and monday tommy, bob, i and the parents in law went skiing for hours. bob ran around as if he was much younger than 12 years old (which he actually is, he doesn't turn 12 until the beginning of june), and i was both proud, happy and a liiiittle bit afraid he would get a heart attack.

after "class" today me and my sollefteå colleagues had a guided tour at the luleå office. ours is much nicer, of course. :)

i've also had some time to go shopping in the city today. luleå seems to be a rather nice city, allthough this is probably not the best time of the year to see it.

right now i'm in the "business service center" at the hotel. "business service center" turned out to mean "closet with old computer, a plastic plant in a corner and a chair that's too low for the table" :) quite cute. as a guest at the hotel i'm allowed to use the centre for half an hour. and in a few minute's time i have...  ¶ 8:01 PM

  we just got a phone call from sollefteå-international-something. we have won a prize on a lottery ticket we bought at an international-anti-racist-something-event that we visited sometime last year (i think i blogged about it, but it was so long ago and i'm so old i can't remember).
i wonder if they've had lots and lots to do since then, or maybe they just forgot about it? anyhow, i won, and that's all that matters :)  ¶ 9:48 PM

  spring is in the air! (i think)
we just came in from a dog walk, with a new but somehow well-known smell in the air. tommy and i both walked with our noses in the air, sniffing like bloodhounds (although i guess they mostly sniff on the ground...), trying to figure out what the smell might come from. there was something very familiar about it, and we tried wet rain jackets, rot and mould among other things. finally we got it: it must be spring. we're not completely sure (mainly as there was nothing else spring like about the walk: there's a thick layer of snow all over nyland and more snow was falling), but the more i sniffed the more sure i got. and the temperature was actually above freezing for a while today, even though it was -18,5 this morning. it might very well be +18 tomorrow, if the temperature contines to rise in this speed :)  ¶ 9:26 PM

  home sweet home...

i love our home! stepping over the threshold yesterday evening, after three weeks (more or less) away from home, was wonderful. i love the high ceilings! and i love the big windows. it's as if there's much more air than in normal houses. my parents' kitchen feels like a midget-kitchen now that i'm used to all the space in ours. i've always thought my parents' kitchen to be enormous, but now it's small and cosy...

it's going to be great to have a few days at home now! i'm enjoying every second :)  ¶ 6:15 PM

  i'm home and it's great!  ¶ 9:38 PM

  the snow/rain is pouring down. how great to be indoors!

my colleague cecilia and i have an agreement only to say positive things today... this agreement came up yesterday evening, when we realised how much we complain about everything and how annoying we must be to the people in our surroundings. (to our defence i have to inform you that most of the time we do the complaining while laughing like mad children on drugs, which might give people the impression we're not really as pesimistic as we actually are. in fact: right after we had entered our "positive pact" the cleaning lady at the hotel asked us if we were always so happy, and said that she was in a good mood for listening to our giggles - and those giggles came about as we complained about the hotel:)

anyway, today we're only allowed to say positive things. breakfast and lunch are positiveness-free-zones, though (we figured it wouldn't be good to overdo it). so far it hasn't been easy, but cecilia soon figured out that as long as you say things in a happy voice it might not even count as complaining. that sounds quite clever to me.  ¶ 9:25 AM

  there's a curly haired witch working at the office today! fortunately she's out of sight at the moment... i bet she eats children and drinks blood.  ¶ 3:54 PM

  my second week in kristianstad has just begun. we're working a lot. there's no spring in sight. my hotel room is so small it's almost invisible. the hotel is so big i get lost everytime i try to find my room. people are nice but weird. the city is nice and bigger than i though (even though half of it was burnt down when we got here).  ¶ 9:24 AM

  as i finally managed to get the hood open on the saab yesterday evening we gave him a makeover today. he got some new radiator- and windscreen washer fluid, the windscreen wipers were adjusted and i think i even managed to fix the accelerator.

before the saab makeover we went skiing on the lake and tommy and i both found our dreamhouse. not the same house, but they were only a few hundred metres apart, so we decided we could buy both :)

today has been a very beautiful day. the sun was shining and it was only -2 degrees. these last two weeks we've had between -20 and -32. even at aske (close to stockholm) we had -30!  ¶ 5:08 PM

  i had a very beautiful ride to sollefteå this morning. it was -20 degrees, so the treas were white, the sky was grey and the snow was blue with cold. behind the mountains in front of långsele the sun started to colour the sky pink and orange.

i left at 6.30, and at about 7.10 i left sollefteå in a rented ugly car with two of my colleagues. we've spent the day in ö-vik, taking care of their office for the day. quite interesting. it turned out i know more than i knew :)

i met my friends sara and felicia and the new baby angelica for lunch. i have only seen angelica once before, when she was a very small and new baby. now she had turned into a funny-looking person, who was sweet and thoughtful and had a real neck and a real nose and could talk like a bird. she looked a bit like den vilda bebin. she's my favourite-baby at the moment. she didn't even throw up on me, and i held her the entire lunch. felicia was an energetic, happy busunge. and she likes chocolate! extremely good taste :)

when i came home tommy, bob and the cats all seemed happy to see me. they only met me for a while yesterday evening, when i came home from three days at aske. tommy is now frying salmon and boiling rice, and he had even bought a cute bottle of whine to celebrate my first "real" workday :) i don't really like the taste of whine, but it looks rather grown-up and cosy...

now i'm going to sleep as much as possible these next two days, and on sunday afternoon i'm heading for skåne.  ¶ 6:20 PM