Twins

I'm sorry for the lack of updates lately but I have a good excuse. Our twins(boy and girl) were born on July 5. Having twins are not easy and there were a few medical complications along the way. But everybody's home and doing fine right now.

This is my first day at work after my paternity leave so I finally ha time to write a blog post ;-)

My batteries are recharged

I noticed one thing when I wrote my blog post yesterday. It was error free. I even dragged it trough MS Word's spell and grammar checker and it was flawless. I always have the spell checker on in Firefox, to correct my errors, which are plenty. I have at one point even suspected that I'm dyslectic. I can now confirm that's not the case.

But usually I have so much going on in my life (family/work/virtual reality) that I can't really concentrate on how I'm writing when I blog. I do know however what I'm writing about. So having a vacation once a year is a good thing =).

Vacation is over

My four week vacation is over and I'm back at work. I'm doing my first morning shift out of four on Midsummer Day. In this part of the world Midsummer is as big as if not bigger than Christmas. So today, everything is shut down, except us who keep society running when everyone else is out partying in their summer cottages.

The weather is cold and I 'm pretty sure it will rain later today so partying outdoors today wouldn't be much fun. And my fiancée is expecting twins at any moment. Expected date of delivery is the 31st of July but the twin's estimated weights at this point are around 7-8 pounds EACH. If we where expecting just one child he/she would still be considered to be a BIG baby at that weight. We are awaiting c-section within the next two weeks but the doctors haven't set a date yet. Then of course the delivery could start at any moment so I feel slightly nervous sitting here at work, actually more nervous than when Mirelle was born.

During those four weeks of vacation I have also taken a partial vacation from the Internet. No blog writing, no Facebook updates (except mentioning that I'm on vacation). I've played some World of Warcraft, read the news and a few blogs, made a comment or two and logged on to Facebook every now and then to see what's going on. But that's it, no active social networking. It feels good to be offline for a while, to live in reality. But it's good to be back =).

This weekend Vasa is hosting a US Naval visit. The United States Navy guided missile frigate USS Simpson is open to the public between 13.00 and 17.00. I go off work at 15.00 so if it's not raining it should be an interesting ship to see.

Separation anxiety

Six nights ago we began what had worried us for some time. We moved Mirelle to her own room at night. We worried about what happens if she wakes up in the middle of the night and we're not there? Will she cry? Will she feel lonely? What if she suddenly figures out how to climb out of her bed and falls to the floor?

She has never slept better, ever. During those six night she has awoken us once, it was the second night and after a half hour in our big bed she was sleeping again and I carried her back to her own room. She sleeps to around 9:00 every morning. She woke up anywhere between 6.00-10.00 when she was sleeping in our room and usually at least once every night.

So we the parents had some sort of separation anxiety that was uncalled for and Mirelle sleeps much better in her own room.

MSN?

What was once called MSN is now called Windows Live Messenger, although most people still refer it by MSN. It's probably the most popular IM or instant messenger out there. ICQ was once the most popular IM out there, but then it sort of faded away. I'm beginning to suspect that that was a forecall of things to come, the end of IM.

People still like to chat but everyone's got Facebook and Facebook got a chat function. It's not even close to how advanced MSN was about 10 years ago, even further back when it was called Windows Messenger. But that is everything else in Facebook is for.

I log on to MSN every now and then, usually when I'm at work and there are about two people I talk to regularly although I got about 70 people on my contact list and there was a point in time about 5 years ago when I thought the 150 people limit on your contact list was set too low. When I log in there are quite often a couple of bots that has either sent me a message or try do add me to their contact list.

IM isn't dying but it's definitely fading away, and has largely been replaced by Facebook and/or Google...

We don't call ice cream ice cream anymore

The word for ice cream in Swedish is "glass". Unfortunately our daughter knows what glass is and she knows where the freezer is. So we have began talking about "jäätelö" instead. That's ice cream in Finnish. But I think she might be on to us so we might eventually have to begin talking about "ice cream". Being somewhat trilingual have it's benefits but at some point we might have to resort to code words...

Learning the art of photography

A few weeks ago I bought a new camera. Our old digital camera was of the tourist type of camera and our daughter managed to get hold of it and the battery hatch is now kept shut with duct tape. Nina's birthday is also coming up next week so it was definitely time for a new camera.

The camera I bought is a Nikon D3000. I have read trough the manual and I have taken some pictures. But I have realized that I need to sit down with the manual and the camera. Read trough a section of the manual and then try it out with the camera and then read another section and try it out. I have taken some really great pictures, far, far better then our old camera. But then there are a lot of crappy pictures. I realize that an SLR camera is a bit more complex and that I need to learn to master it if I intend to take those really great pictures.

So I'm slowly learning the art of photography picture by picture. It's spring here and soon nature will become green again and I'll have many opportunities to practice.

MySpace isn't Facebook isn't Blogspot

I think three of my top favorite out there are MySpace, Facebook and Blogspot. In a sort of way they are all social networking websites. Blogspot used to be a a dedicated blogging service but with Google Friend Connect and Followers it's slipping into the world of social networking.

MySpace and Facebook has been the most similar but they have never been the same. Similar interfaces and content but while Facebook had wrapped their users experience around the people you know MySpace's thing is cultural exchange.

Facebook's popularity has grown past MySpace's. But I think Facebook will never replace MySpace. They each have their own niche. MySpace blogging was also quite popular, for a while. Then most MySpace bloggers moved their blogs to Blogspot for various reasons.

I'm still at MySpace although I prefer communicating with my friends on Facebook and blogging at Blogspot. MySpace was everything for a few years until your grandma created a profile on Facebook and opened a blog at Blogspot. MySpace was and still is one of the biggest players out there but it is a tool for more artistically inclined people, people who like having a cool nick instead of their real name and well, trolls...

First look

I'm somewhat of a video game fan and I've probably seen 95 % of Star Trek television series and movies ever produced. I wouldn't call myself a Trekkie. There have been a number of video games made under the Star Trek franchise and unfortunately none of them have been any good according to player reviews. None the less I decided to try their latest game Star Trek Online. There's was a t-shirt in the box so if it is a total failure at least I got a somewhat expensivet-shirt for 49,95 €.

When it comes to MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing games)  or MMO (massively multiplayer online games) games the benchmark is World of Warcraft. WoW was launched 5 years ago and they have never lost it's momentum, their player base are 11 million players. Contenders like Warhammer Online and Age of Conan got great reviews and got a large fan base, around a million players for each game, in the beginning. Today they're almost dead. Numbers are uncertain but is definitely below 100 000.

Star Trek Online didn't get great reviews. But they've are constantly patching and updating it so it might be a great game yet. Unfortunately Cryptic(the game developer) have to work fast while they still have momentum, while still being in the launch phase. If they loose momentum while having a game that the players don't like the will face the same fate that Age of Conan and Warhammer Online is slowly dying of. Trekkies my be compassionate about their Star Trek but even they won't play a bad game.

Those of you that played WoW 5 years ago might remeber what it was like then and what it's like now. It too sucked in the beginning, but on the other it had no real competition and people realized it's enormous potential, and in the end it proved to become much larger than it's potential...

We gave up the aquarium

We have read books about aquariums,we feed our fishes, we clean the pump every now and then, we have a working thermostat/heater , we refill the water, we buy new fishes, we have had plants there and at some point we even took a water sample to the pet store for analyzing, it was fine.

The fishes die and the plants rotten. It's as simple as that. So we gave away the last 5 living fishes to my fiancée's brother's family. They have an aquarium and it looks great with plenty of living fish and green plants.

So the aquarium with accessories is going into the storage room (part of the garage) once I get it properly cleaned and dried up.5-10 years from now someone will probably think it would be a great idea to set up an aquarium and we will have all forgotten about the fact aquariums in our family is not a place for the living but for the undead ;-P

Summer time isn't here yet

We will switch to summer time on Sunday. I think it's more problematic then useful but a worked in system is difficult o change.

I'm working the mornings shift  this week, actually four days of it. I have noticed that the sun has risen when I start driving to work 6:40 (AM). Next week it will rise around 5:30 (AM). I'm still sleeping then.

I write about those things since the snow layer has gotten so thick that one of our dogs walked over (notice that I didn't use the word jump) over our 120 cm (4 feet) high dog fence the other day. But the snow has begun melting in the spring sun, that's why the surface of the snow are hard enough for dogs to walk on. Not hard enough for me to walk on with a snow shovel...

It's official

Some of my regular readers are probably aware of this fact due to various reasons. But we have decided to make it official now. The fact is that my fiancée is pregnant and the expected date of birth is 30 July. And not only that, we are having twins =). Well it's really not official until I announce it on Facebook and I haven't yet ;-P. Nina did has but she did it in a cryptic way and then someone asked if she was pregnant and she had to answer yes.

You don't want to be overconfident in cases of pregnancy, especially in the case of a high risk pregnancy such a twin pregnancy. I can do that when we are a family of five.I've heard of people who have denied everything to everyone until they sent out the invitations to the baby shower, but that is just mean ;-P.