we had the first strawberry from our very own strawberry field today (i know, it's not a field. but strawberry field sounds so romantic). and all the roses are flowering. and the peony too. and all my seeds are growing and need to move to bigger pots. and the new shovel wants to start shoveling to build the round stony thingy next to the guest house. i need my vacation. i need my vacation. i need my vacation!  ¶ 8:41 PM

  yay! i'm already done working for today!

note to self: see!? that's what happens when i stop complaining and start working seriously instead. now i can relax and have strawberries and look at the view for hours and hours before i have to go to bed.

...and then it starts all over again... i need my vacaaaaation!!!!  ¶ 8:29 PM

    ¶ 7:23 PM

    ¶ 7:41 PM

  fun weekend so far:

yesterday we had a party in the woods with work. good food, nice weather, the sweetest funnest weirdest colleagues i could wish for, great weather, lots of mosquitoes. my shoes were run over by the bv (and now they feel weird). the colleagues decided i have to take a driving license for motorcycles by next year (apparently they can teach me in a week... we'll have to see about that. i can't even keep the balance on a normal bike). several of the colleagues praised me for being so cool about being the only girl at work. i haven't really thought much about it. but now that i did i kind of think that it might be more difficult to work with just women than with just men... but i don't know. could be interesting to find out.

today the husband, the pup and i went to the a-b's. the a-b and i took the dogs for a run in the woods, while the husbands sat in the kitchen and talked about husband-stuff. then we all went to a colleague-slash-nephew's birthday party. he is probably one of the coolest people on the planet :) and the sun was shining. and the cake was delicious.

tomorrow a friend of the husband's will probably come by on his way up north. and i might meet the u and have home made buns.  ¶ 10:42 PM

    ¶ 1:02 PM

  i'm not happy right now. closer to really really pissed off, actually. i'm in märsta. with a head ache. and an enormous road outside my hotel"room". and to make things even worse i probably won't be able to go home tomorrow evening after all.

this is my preliminary schedule for the next two days:
thursday morning: meeting at arlanda.
the rest of thursday: trying to work on a shitty laptop with shitty versions of shitty programs and a tiny (shitty) screan. and a shitty battery.
friday: meeting. maybe in solna. maybe in the morning, or maybe in the afternoon. either way the only plane home leaves at 18.00.

and i can't find a hotelroom closer to solna for tomorrow. i hate solna. and i hate märsta. and i hate headaches.

i am supposed to help a friend with a speech tonight, but i really really feel like going to bed with a new pink pocket book and feel really really miserable all night...  ¶ 8:50 PM

    ¶ 1:50 PM

    ¶ 7:34 PM

    ¶ 5:38 PM

    ¶ 5:14 PM

  i'm in... well... somewhere south of sollefteå. quite a bit south. (but still in sweden). they have weird flowers and enormous trees. i want a garden like these! and the streets are full of cv90's, and the wind is strong, and the hotel is old and shabby and wonderful, and there's lots of angry water right outside my hotelroom, and right now i'm sitting on a porch with big old windows trying to work, but the internet refuses to let me send work mails. gmail, facebook, blogger and other places are no problem though. i like this place :)  ¶ 7:07 PM

  i don't want to go to bed. cause when i do i'll have to get up early to go somewhere i don't even know where it is. hopefully i will be able to come home again on thursday. and hopefully i'll get a lot of work done all nights, so vacation will come sooner.

the snow is almost gone now. and my little gotlandish rose bush is full of sweet pink flowers. and even some of the weird plants that take at least two years to grow their first flowers are full of interesting and longed-for buds. and i'm *so* ready to start building a circle of stones outside the guest house. definitely vacation time!  ¶ 10:11 PM

  apparently the pup has a panicky fear for balls. i didn't know that. i guess he has never seen one before. he was even afraid of the a, after seeing him playing with the football in the garden. we'll have to start him on football-therapy as soon as possible.

apart from the scary ball experience, the midsommar at the å's and the a's new cottage has been great. the pup behaved. the humans had good food (the pup too, he had one of my burgers). the desert was delicious, the place was nice, the evening walk was very wet but nice and midsummerish and we didn't meet any bears. the people were nice, the baby was quiet, the rain only lasted a short while, we only had one spider in our room and there were strawberries left for breakfast. and it turned out the å was crazy about her new garden. which might be great, in case i need a nerdy garden geeky friend. we didn't have a midsommarstång though. what is it about people around here? last year we didn't have one either...  ¶ 5:58 PM

  midsommar!

and the pup and i slept late today. we didn't leave bed until 12 or something :)

soon we're off to the å and the a, to celebrate midsommar in their new old cottage. i hope they like cherry trees.  ¶ 3:38 PM

  i'm working late. right now i'm having a dinner break, to clear my head from DACUS and ACCs and radars that communicate through boxes. i don't like having to work late. i don't mind the extra money, they can't possibly make up for my loss of home-from-work time.

luckily i was wise enough to buy chocolate on my way to work this morning.  ¶ 6:35 PM

  i'm in pyjamas mode. and the sky is turning black. i'm hoping for a heavy rain and a thunder storm (with only the thunder, no lightning).  ¶ 7:55 PM

  i want strawberry ice cream. now!  ¶ 9:45 AM

  yay! i'm on track! i might survive this working week after all :)

next week i'm going to work in a place i didn't even know existed. on a thing i didn't even know existed. maybe i can't think of myself as the expert then...  ¶ 6:58 PM

  this weekend the pup and i have been camping with the i and the smallest little sloughi girl and the smallest little shloughi girl's brother and the smallest little sloughi girl's brother's owner. it was nice, and it didn't start to rain until we were going home.

the pup and the others slept in the caravan, and i slept in a teeny weeny smelly cabin togheter with a lady and her two little daughters and their two little dogs. in case you didn't know it little daughters can snore in a very peculiar way that almost sounds like crying. these daughters did. and then they woke up at 6 in the morning. which meant i didn't get to sleep very much. the second night the water heater broke and started sounding like an aero plane. which actually made it easier to sleep, as it drowned all the weird little girl sounds :)

yesterday we met the j and the a-b and their girls. nice. today the pup won a prize for being the best looking young boy of his breed. they all say he's masculine. i think that's fun. i think he looks like a frog. a baby frog.

now we're home and tired and out of coca cola.  ¶ 7:50 PM

  Prio 1   ¶ 5:01 PM

  finally. i'm starting to feel like a real person again. professionally, i mean. at home i'm (almost) always a real person :)

had a meeting with a new client today, and i was referred to as "the expert". which felt great. and the job is going to be fun and interesting, and i'm probaby going to feel like an expert too. very good for my self esteem. being an expert suits me much better than being a clown

hopefully the boss will realise it soon too :P

on my way home from the teeny weeny little airport i passed the princess house. you know, the pale pink one with the pale blue guest house? and a romantic wonderful garden with waist high grass and wild bushy bushes and ghostly paths leading to the fields and a weird homemade viking ship that looked about to fall apart and a greenhouse with a golden knob on the roof. there was a sad romantic reason for it to be for sale too. we didn't buy it though, as it was too close to the road and we don't like dead cats.

now the sweet little princess house and the sweet little guest-prince-house are both a very loud screaming yellow. and the garden is flat. i almost wanted to cry. but then we met cows. and baby cows. lots of them. and i remembered i need to live around cows. which i don't. there's not a single cow on solbacken. i'll have to at least get a goat before it's too late.  ¶ 9:49 PM

  i saw another goal!! i can feel i'm pretty close to becoming a football nerd now. or maybe not :)

...i wonder what they did the first 60 minutes?  ¶ 10:14 PM

  i saw the goal. i've watched 6 minutes of football. a personal record. it saved me 60 minutes of boring football watching. now it's time to go to bed. olé olé olé olé  ¶ 10:10 PM

  the wonderful week of vacation is over, and i've had my head full of weird signaling devices, net barriers and disappeared pictures today. getting out of bed this morning was a struggle. i'm not made for early mornings. and tomorrow will be even worse - a colleague is picking me up at 7 to go to östersund. he said i'd have to drive so he could sleep. in his dreams! the day after that the taxi will pick me up at 6 to go to the teeny weeny little airport, and a teeny weeny little plane will take me to a meeting in the royal capital (or somewhere around).

now i've watered the plants. with my home made fertilizer. i'm so good! and i made two (or three (or even four!) depending on how you count) new flower beds yesterday. i really should be a gardener instead of a sitting-still-in-front-of-a-computer-person.  ¶ 8:27 PM

  lesson recently learned: it is never safe to paint your furniture in the garden.

even if the sun has been shining for days. and it hasn't rained for weeks.

now i have two rain-striped chairs outside the kitchen window. and all the clothes that were hanging to dry are wetter than ever. but hopefully the roses are happy :)  ¶ 4:14 PM

    ¶ 11:22 PM

  oooooh i love being on vacation! the pup doesn't like the heat, though. he is running around with panic in his eyes, trying to find a cool spot. i've opened the door to the cellar, but so far his fear of being left alone seems bigger than his fear of being fried.

i've had ice cream for breakfast and lunch today. and i've made a cirle of stones. and i'm making fertiliser liquid out of water and nettles (feels better than to just kill the poor nettles. this way they will live forever, in the form of energy to the lovely roses :). now i'm giving the ugly half dead ölandstokar new hair cuts. i can't decide whether to just let them die in peace, of if i should do my best to keep them alive. i don't really like ölandstokar... but it feels wrong to watch them suffer.

have to get back out there again. this is life!

and another thing: something seems to have happened to the neighbour lady. she has never talked to me properly, just yelled obscenities and insults. until now. both yesterday and today she has talked to me like a normal person. she even smiled! and when they left to go their cottage today she asked me to look after their house and call them if any vandals should show up :)  ¶ 1:58 PM

  i'm back home. at last. the pup and i packed our things and a load of stones and started driving home sunday (the husband is staying the entire week). after 10 km the car broke a spark plug and had to be parked at the closed camping place in fällfors and we had to walk back to the cottage in the warm shiny sun. the husband and his father spent the entire monday finding someone to fix it again. and today it was fixed so the pup and i could drive home tonight.

we've had a nice weekend at the cottage.
* we found two dead birds and buried them in the river.
* the pup rolled in the smelly liquid from a fermented herring tin. so we had to wash him with washing-up liquid and river water. he is still shinier than ever. i wonder if it was the fermented herring or the washing-up liquid that did it...
* the husband and the father in law took off the old roof of our cottage and then it started to rain.
* driving home i was tired and wanted to sleep before i had even reached umeå, so i stopped at at little gas station to go for a walk and buy coca cola and chocolate and a cd with music i could sing along to (the radio doesn't work). they only had opera and old peoples' music and a triple box with hits from the 90´s. so i've been screaming "nono nononono nononono nono there's no limit!" and whispered "ice ice baby" to keep me awake :)

now i'm in the sofa with the cats purring around me. we had left them at home, as i was only supposed to be away two days...  ¶ 10:33 PM