366 Challenge 22: Technology

We are finally here (and online again after the move). Last saturday we got up at 3.30am, took the plane to our "new city" and straight to our new house. The house is very spacious, light and I think we are going to have a great time here!!! *Big sigh of relief!*

Just arriving here and starting to unpack would usually be enough to exhaust me for days, but I also had to shock myself with a business trip into the city on Monday. The people I was about to meet had moved to a new location. When I heard the address, I smiled to myself.

I know this is stretching the theme a bit, but here we go:

In a former life (pre-kids), when I had a go at being some sort of high flying business woman, I did my own little fair share of contribution to the techology of the world. I was the project manager of the very genious guys who took part in the invention of bluetooth and infrared technology for mobile phones. As I was going to my meeting (for my current job, not very techy at all!) I passed my "old office" and I couldn't help taking a couple of photos. At this very corner, I had my meetings back in those days.

366 Challenge 121: Alcohol

I took this photo in May and I never ever thought I would post it, but here we go. I was hoping O and I was going to have an evening out and I would drink some gorgeous drink that I would take an amazing photo of, but I am realizing that it might not happen this side of New Year, so I will go for this very natural "whiskey on the fence" shot. :)

I am actually a complete cluts when it comes to alcohol. I have just not ever had the role of buying it. In Sweden it's a whole project as all retail of alcohol is sold by the government *my goodness, it sounds like Russia, thinking of it!*. Anyway, the Alcohol store is only open during "office hours" so you can imagine the queues on a Friday afternoon, everyone trying to get hold of their supply for the weekend. So I have not really bothered about it, having always had friends or boyfriends more interested of going through this hassle for "the perfect bottle of wine".

Since I am at it I can tell you of one of the first impressions I made on O on our first date. We met at university, so we did lab works together for a couple of months (both really interested in that particular course, basically studying together day and night with none of us having the guts to make a move).
Anyway, when we finally realized that we couldn't part *when the course was finished!* and when we were about to have our first romantic night, I was at O's place. I had done myself up (and so had he) and we were both a bit nervous actually. He was just going to fetch something in the other room and asked me to pour the wine. I, who still at 22years of age, still had never opened a wine bottle (not a wine virgin, but just the buying and opening part, I had not done...), thought to myself OK, I can do that!, and simply took out a bottle from the cupboard and poured two big glasses.

When he entered the room, he took a look at the bottle, the glasses and then me, standing there proudly waiting by the wine glasses on the kitchen counter and gave me one of those "you're hopeless, but that only makes me love you even more"-smiles, which I have seen a lot during our (13!!) years together.

Without a seconds though, I had taken a bottle out of the cupboard, screwed the cork off and filled two big wine glasses with whiskey.

Baby fever

My girl, 30 September 2005 (9w old)

I have baby fever. I see little bundles of joy everywhere I go now. A little gurgle, a little sound makes me almost dizzy remembering the baby times.

Today we've been shopping for shoes. Just as we entered the store I whispered to O "does he have matching pair of socks?" When I heard the reply "no, but both are blue.." my heart sank.

Well too late now, we had promised C a pair of sneakers with flashing lights and we were already in the store. Well, if they need to measure, maybe they will only do one foot?, I though. Off course not and the "both are blue" were indeed true, however one dark navy plain sock and another bright blue, black, red sock wouldn't necessarily be described that way by me..

Anyhow, flashing sneakers we bought and C now feels like the coolest guy around. I've been working most of the day and O have been scrubbing all the floors and playing with Lego with the children.

All in all a quite ok Sunday.

My 6 month itch?

I am the first to admit that our current choice of home doesn't really measure up to our expectations. But, if you consider that our inital plan when moving here was to buy a big house in this part of the country and to renovate it and hopefully make some money, so we put an offer in on a gigantic house 1h by car outside our new home town, but we pulled out due to, well basically it was a dump we decided to move here anyway..and we now live in a rental flat on the 2nd floor, still waiting for the key *not passively I might add* to the gorgeous private garden on the other side of the street, 6months after moving in. We are renting unfurnished and the landlord is still using the only large storage space in the flat for himself and since October we live under a partyboy out of any league I've met before. He starts his partying around 1am and usually finish around 5-5.30. He usually doesn't choose his partying nights at weekends, but can just as well be a Sunday or Tuesday. This morning O was up with J who, understandably was up between 3 and 5..

*My itch to go has started again*

Next move would be to buy something, but our months of city living (and C starting a good school) has made us realize out of town is out. Having started a company we are not exactly swamped with mortgage lenders throwing offers at us, so ideally we should be staying put for for another year, but..well,we have started thinking of our next move and we are not exactly known for miss an opportunity.

So, I have been thinking today of all our homes and here it is. In 12years we have been living:

Ok, my house wasn't this picture post card, but it's similar. I lived on top of a tobacco store and my brother next door on top of pet store.

My first flat, a 1bed 1st floor flat of 49sqm in western Gothenburgh, Sweden.
Reason to move: Getting something together.

Our first flat together, 3bed top floor beautiful flat of 105sqm in central Gothenburgh*although a tad expensive..* I have been missing this flat a lot during the years to come. It was being refurbished and I got to choose all the wallpaper and styles and it was all included in the rent.
Reason to move: A bit too expensive.

Not our house, but the same street

A dormer (vindsvaning) 1bed flat of 92kvm in eastern Gothenburgh.
Reason to move: I got a job on the other side of town, however having lived in Big City it feels a bit riciulous to find that kind of distans an obsticle. plus we realized that we wanted to go abroad and didn't have to hang onto a first hand rental contract.

A 2bed strangely patched styled flat in central in Gothenburgh 80kvm. 3minutes walk from work. That was nice. We also had a very nice Christmas in that flat.
Reason to move: After some half hearted jobhunting in San Francisco, we decided Stockholm was the correct move for us. I got a got a job there.

Studio Flat of 30kvm in central Stockholm on the fourth floor without lift with shower in the basement! This was a temporary solution as we were going to sub-let a 3bed flat, but the owners had not gone on their trip yet..
Reason to move: We were told by all our fellow Stockholmers that we were crazy to pass on a first hand flat, so we gave up on the beautiful sublet (mistake)

2floored flat in large villa in very nice area of SW Stockholm.
*Reason to leave: Horrible landlord who constantly walked into our flat whenever we weren't home. They lived in the house as well and his wife threw a tantrum *this still scared me to this day thinking of that absurd moment* when I couldn't attend their barbeque because of a very bad migraine *truthfully I had one...*

Googling on the area, the first picture I found was actually of the house we lived in, it was just behind the tree on the 1st floor.

1bed flat of 50kvm in very small village in the country side north of Stockholm. A very standard flat by Swedish standards, I cannot begin to tell you how booring it was to live there. We didn't live in the idyllic village, but outside. The little community of houses had their own news paper and if you entered the communal laundrette without taking your shoes off, chances were high you would get some bashing in the local paper..
Reason for leaving: Moving to Big City abroad

Not our house, but same street

2bed flat 1st floor flat of ca 40sqm in very hip part of City. We didn't have a clue of what was hip or not when moving there, it was simply the only area we knew. All Swedish tourists come to this area. I walked to work and we enjoyed all the take aways, shops and cinemas of the area. We loved this flat and the area.
Reason for leaving: My brother joined us and we decided to try some co-living.

3bed flat in the Western part of the Big City. 1st floor, ca not sure of size it felt very small, maybe 70sqm? A bomb went off 2 blocks from our flat.
Reason for leaving: I was pregnant.

3bed flat Garden Flat with own studio flat thing (120sqm), in SW part of Big City. This is were C was born (well not in the flat, but we lived there when he was born). This is also one of my favorites.
Reason for leaving: Thinking we should live in the country side now that we were parents. So, SO wrong!! Also we bought our first home and since money wasn't exactly flowing we ended up 60miles outside of Big City. Why, we LOVED it there!

Our mini living room. We installed the wood burner, laid the floor, repainted. It was small, I hated the town but it was ours.

3bed semi of 69kvm in small town where they generally didn't like people from other parts of the country. Imaging how nicely we melted in there.. Longest stay in history, 3 years. We started our company and J was born while living there. We changed every inch of this house.
Reason for leaving. 1 million, I can now say I know what racism is like. It was terrible there.

4bed house of 160sqm with annex, playroom, own driveway lovely garden in favorite outskirt area of Big City. Reason for being able to rent it, they were building a house next door....
*Reason for leaving: Well, the patio and utility room flooded everytime a little rain fell. After this rental experience I am also now a firm believer of ghosts.

5bed superexpensive house down the road from the earlier one, of 180sqm on private road with a football pitch sized garden. We cried every time the rent was to be paid, so we started looking to buy again and that's when we got the idea of moving north

...and here we are.

So..should we stay or should we go?

New Year Tears

Feeling really blue and "deja vu" today. After making it through Christmas on some left over pain killers from my surgery in February (did sinus surgery) today it really hit me big times.

It's happening all over again. Here I am, new city, new outlook on life, new opportunities around the corner, still here I am stairing at the ceiling trying to cope with pain, alone, while my husband and beautiful children are out on a family day out of fun.

Without me.

It was such a reality check I just lay there crying, wondering in how many bedrooms this has repeated itself. I HATE missing out, I cannot begin to tell you how it wears you out not being able to be with your children, not being able to do fun things together, always have to tell them, no sorry mummy can't, mummy is not well.

So I have emailed my new GP on holiday to see if he knows any good speicalist I could turn to on New Year's Eve, because I have to find someone tomorrow. I definitely have a cyst again, I shouldn't complain, the risk of it being life threatening is minimal, but sometimes I wonder. Is it so bad to live a healthy life only to drop dead all of a sudden, rather than not being able to live your life year in and year out because you are not all rather well? Every year lost is a year of your children's childhood lost. It is a very painful realization.

With the pain and the realization comes the thoughts. What are we doing here? Why are we not together ever day? What have I done? If we would have stayed, C would have gone to a familiar school, where they don't wear shorts. *I know it's propbably pathetic, but it feels unbearable big and ..just to much at the moment*.

To have O here every day have made me loose my guard and I am really afraid of putting it up again.

I don't want to start a new year, I want to hide.

PS. Not me in picture above, my eyes are all red a swollen, but I thought my depressing text was sort of enough..besides the beauty of internet is that you can project a certain image of yourself, so anyone out there who don't know what I look like all red-eyed from one day of sobbing, feel free to believe this is how graceful I look in my worst of moments..

The Christmas Card

For being a day completely dominated by the 3rd wave of migraine this week, I shouldn't be to disappointed that I wasn't able to check more items on my todo-list last night.

I packed the *hopefully* last mountain of workrelated parcels this time of Christmas. We now have all furniture up in the bedroom and the Christmas flowers ordered for Christmas.

Crille and Eva stop reading here! Off you go to Aftonbladet, eller nat..

We also washed J's hair (she absolutely hates it!) and afterwards, I managed to cut her hair, then the children jumped in some nice clothes and I tried to take a picture to put in our Christmas Cards (and a Calendar we are giving our family). Here are the calendar pictures, enjoy:

January

February

Mars

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

One year on

I just realized that we didn't carve the pumpkins this year. The children have been playing with them, rolling on them, carrying them and..dropping them, so one of them cracked and with the whole steam train thing, it must have slipped my mind.

Maybe we should have a go at the remaining one today, C loved doing this last year.

Comment of the day: Yesterday I took a look around the living room, especially all the toys on the floor and gave C a look which meant *boy are your toys everywhere* and said: "Ok, we definitely have to have a tidy up day today!"
C looked away, thinking, then he fixed my gaze and said: "Shall we go and have a look if mum and dad's room is messy?.." *we sleep in a storage come laundry room*

*Suits me right..*

I have found one thing

that makes me feel at home.

Not living on the ground.

I was just reminded today as I was checking the mail. There was a note at our door. Someone further down the street had had an attempted burglary. When living in our last house, one night I sat up in bed wondering what had woken me up. Then I heard it clearly. Steps, slowly, below our bedroom windows. I woke O up and as I went to the window I heard someone running on the driveway gravel. After that several neighboring houses were burglared and my sleeping troubles started. Looking back I have always felt uneased in a house on my own, even in my parents house where I grew up. But not in a flat, away from the ground. Nope.


I don't miss the ground one bit.

The *gaaah* of the day: Just received a letter from our bank in Sweden. They had managed to address the letter to an address we had in 2001, even though we opened the account with them earlier this year *thank you Skatteverket*. It also had a stamped note on it saying: "Missent to Iran"

Mission for today..

..watch my children as much as I can.

Breath in and out.

Think about this August morning by the Orsa Lake in Sweden.

5 things I miss from my former life..

1. My American style washing machine and dryer.
2. Luciane, never able to arrive on time and always full of the most complex stories on why she was late, but boy did she make my life a lot easier.
3. Cobham, *why on earth would I miss that place now?* Maybe it was the anticipation of a weekend of leisure that always made me feel very good there. (We usually did our weekend shopping there as well as renting films from Blockbusters.)
   
4. My GP *how sad is that??*
5. My good friend C, I miss you and the girls tremendously!