Back at work

My vacation is officially over. I'm back at work. It feels good and it will feel even better when they get the elevator working again, hopefully tomorrow. I like a soft start after my vacation and running up and down four stairs once an hour can be exhausting.

Well the vacation was great too. We saw a Madonna concert and spent a week camping in the Northern part of our country, complete with a visit to Santa Claus Office, a zoo and Ikea. There where also a few museums in arctic and Sámi style along the way. Other than that there have been some yard work and the yard is almost 100 % child safe, she's not far away from walking without support.

I was filmed by Google

Today was a fairly interesting day. We are a group of people that go for lunch once a week or should, lately it's been at best once a month. We meet trough a web community set up by a radio station and this week that same radio station is broadcasting live from the town square and they offered free lunch for our lunch group nearby.

After the lunch we spent a few hours window shopping, well I was mostly dragged along. Anyway when we got home I went by the mail boxes and picked up our mail. That when I saw it, the Google car. It was a white station wagon driving by. It had a three foot steel pole painted in black on top of it and on top of the pole was a octagonal box covered with glass all around it. And on the side of the car you could read "Google". I was just staring and thought "WTF is that???" and when it had passed by I realized what it was. You know the street wiew finction in Google Maps? Well they were filming our street for street wiev on Google maps. Inside the octagonal box was 8 cameras and I can be seen staring like an idiot at two or three of the cameras...

I'm Home

We're home again from our camping trip. It was fun but I've still got one week of vacation left which means I'm still a week away from any serious blogging. But don't worry I'll write more about my vacation after my vacation ;-P

I'm on vacation

I'm on my vacation. We've already been to a Madonna concert and next week we'll go camping to northern Finland which is sparsely populated and the same goes for the northern parts of neighboring Norway and Sweden. This is the place to go in Europe if you want to experience the great wilderness. In short Internet cafes can be hard to find. But I'll write longer posts after my vacation...

Short update

It's been a long and busy day but also a good day. I got only three hours of sleep this morning due to a baby appointment. Then we did some errands around town. I think I was sort of lost after my night shift and too little sleep today. Anyway I managed to get a few hours sleep after town before tonights big event, the barbecue party.

Well it was actually the people in Nina's baby group ( and the guys) so it was good food and I found out that baby karaoke can be really fun. Social life isn't more difficult when children become involved but it changes for good and for worse. It goes trough huge changes. Some of the people that always been there stays there but some just quietly disappear. And then you meet new people, people that are in the same situation as you and you make new friends among them.

This short update got a bit longer than intended but I sometimes get lost in my own words. Anyway it's 19 hours since my 4 week vacation started and I'm going to catch some sleep after my last night shifts and a fun night. A sleep well needed =).

Brilliant

I came to work tonight and the TV was on. As I sat down and started doing the things I do when I arrive at work I heard a TV show starting. It's called Being Human and what I later found out was episode 5. I heard the intro and I thought it was brilliant. It's a bit sad but a very honest and accurate description of a human love life. Here it comes:

“We meet people and fall in love and when we part they leave marks for us to remember them by. Our lovers sculpt us. They define us, for better or worse. Like a pinball, we slam into them and rebound in a different direction, propelled by the contact. And after the parting, we might be scared. But stronger. Or more fragile, or needy, or angry, or guilty. It’s never unchanged. Our lovers linger inside us like ghosts… haunting the corridors and deserted rooms. Sometimes whispering. Sometimes screaming. Invisible, but… always there. Waiting”.

However wrote the script to this episode should seriously consider becoming a poet or a novelist if she/he is not that allready because that is really good...

We forgot

It just dawned on my girlfriend today that we forgot our engagement anniversary that was 4 weeks ago. We got engaged the 7th of July 2007 and we just forgot our second anniversary. Well when we went shopping earlier today we bought some barbecued chicken and we have a few leftover bottles of champagne from Nina's 40th birthday party in April. We only opened one ;-P. So it was sandwiches with barbecued chicken and champagne. It was well ahead before my night shift began although technically you could still drive legally after drinking a half bottle of champagne but I don't drive under the influence of alcohol even if I would be under the legal limit.

Anyway forgetting one's engagement anniversary can get you into alot of trouble unless your partner also have forgotten it. My excuses or our excuses is that it was a heat wave in early July and your mind was set on finding a cool spot to rest in and those days where pretty busy otherwise. Well there's a new anniversary next year...

Magic mornings

My vacation starts in a week and I almost think it's the wrong time but only almost. You see now begins the time of the year when early mornings are foggy, quiet and a bit chilly. I have 2 morning shifts and 4 night shifts left so I'll still get to see few magic mornings. When I return to work in late August there's still a month worth of magic mornings.

An early morning in late summer or early fall brings a kind of weather I find beautiful beyond words. The temperature is just a few degrees above freezing point, there's a dense fog covering the ground and everything is wet. It's also very quiet, you can hear everything from miles away but everyone who's awake at that time are quiet admiring the same silence you are admiring. You can also see the sun just starting to rise above the horizon.

It is at that moment when the sun lights up the dense fog just before that same sun light starts clearing the fog I feel more alive and awake than ever before and it's also in that moment I feel absolute peace with myself and the world. It's that moment in my life I wish could last forever. It's magic...

3 out of 4

I'm doing my third evening shift out of four. We actually did some biking in the early afternoon. Maybe 6-7 kilometers and a stop at the beach. It was warm but somewhat cloudy so Mirelle didn't get too much sun...

Open minded

Our world can be a strange place sometimes. People who believe in things out of the ordinary often tell people who don't believe that they should keep an open mind. What the believers is telling the realists in reality is that they should believe too. Because when you keep an open mind you are also open to the possibility that the strange phenomena you have just seen is something completely normal or that the story you've heard from someone who claimed to have seen a strange phenomena are nothing but lies. That is what called having an open mind, not believing anything out of the ordinary you see, hear or read about, that is called gullible.

I would call myself an open minded realist. I need to see to believe. I'm an agnostic. I have seen and heard strange phenomenas, most of which could be explained and a few that I'll never know if it was for real or just something completely normal. And one that defies all known laws of physics. I've heard and read even more stories. Some by serious people that can be taken seriously and that I more or less believe in. Then there are a number of stories told by people I just wanted to say to but I have resisted the temptation so far: "You know that LSD stuff you're taking isn't good for you. It's like you're living in a fantasy world. If you can't stay off the drugs you should stick to ganja, it just makes you mellow." ;-)

9 months

It's been 6 days since I last wrote something in this blog. I've been quite active in my Swedish blog in the last few so it's about time I turn my attention here. Anyways yesterday Mirelle turned 9 months old and she's too young to have a cake but she sort of solved that problem herself. Apparently one of the dogs had decided to take a dump inside when we where gone because we changed the dog food this week and some dogs have sensitive stomachs. I cleaned it up but I had missed some that was under the stairs. Guess who found it? Our 9 month old daughter and by the look on her face she thought it was yummy. We didn't think it was yummy.

After a quick clean up and change of clothes I googled on the subject and basically every kid out there have at some point eaten shit. Cat shit, dog shit, their own shit or all of them. I didn't find any testimony that any child ever had become sick or ill due to consumed shit. But I did find some advice that if her stomach becomes upset, probably in the form of a light diarrhea it would be a good idea the avoid wholegrain gruel and stick to corn gruel as long as her stomach is upset. So no visit to the emergency room this time.

Lazy

I've been a lazy blogger lately. I think it's because it's summer right now =).