Codes

Ok, the short brainfreeze that I had that made me forget the password to my laptop now inspires me to write about the fucking amount of codes that we are supposed to keep in our heads all the time. It is just insane. Today I entered maybe 40 different codes as I got into the buildings on the job, and probably I remember some of them (yes I do). But since my code memory was full already some of the codes and passwords that I used to remember had to say goodbye and leave. They now reside on the far side of the moon, living happy lives together with the lost socks and the holes in the cheese.

Anyhow, I got to get this organized. This is going nowhere but down.

Training period is over

After two weeks, minus a couple of days, of training, I am now ready to go out into the world as a full fledged mailman. I just hope that they are in demand of my services. I hope they are, cause I have kind of gotten used to getting up early as hell in the morning and then doing repetitive tasks for three hours (sorting mail) followed by three hours of running up stairs. Oh, and riding along on a bike with 80kg of mail is rather fun as well. I hope that you all don't think that I am being sarcastic cause I am not. Compared to not doing anything at all it is just jolly good. And compared to doing something that makes you feel totally rotten its a bliss.

Now we are going to suomi, Helsinki over the weekend, or not now, but rather tomorrow. It is the first time for both K and me, so its going to be exciting.

Soup #27

Leek and potato. Thats all there was. The name says it all. Would have been better if there was some cream in it, but there wasn't. The grade was very simple to set, one and a half star (out of three).

Manly cold and other tidbits

I know it is a cliché, but men who has a cold are the sorriest excuses of human beings. I spent the whole day yesterday in the sofa feeling rotten, all cause of a little cold. Then I gave up at nine and went to bed, only to wake up at three in the morning. Even if I was feeling a lot better it wasn't so much fun to be awake at that hour when I knew that work started at seven.

There was another first for me this morning on the job. I got to take one of the cars over to the other office. The first was to drive a brittish style car on swedish roads. (The steering-wheel is on the right side of the car).

Oh, lets ramble some of my pet peeves (aka. things I loathe)
-Old rotten cucumbers. I mean, come on, how can something that simple become so horrible??
-Old smelly garbagebags with old diapers in staircases.
-Being ignored by waitresses in restaurants.
-Not getting any money from akassan (since like a long time ago) cause of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. (But I did just put some grease in the large cogs so perhaps perhaps there will be results coming out soon.)
Ok, thats all for now!

Number of deer spotted in a smallish park in Eskilstuna on our walk this saturday: 3

Number of totally uninteresting hill forts (Fornborgar) visited and ridiculed on the same walk: 1

Ok

I have been saying that 'no, the job is not as tiresome as I thought' but that really changed today. Today it was really as tiresome as I imagined it would be. I have been running up endless number of stairs in houses with three floors. When I was 3/4 of the way through, with perhaps 40 gates left, my legs started to protest and I simply could not run on the way up anymore. On top of that my water was out and I was quickly dying of dehydration. This was however rectified as I asked a nice finish chap that I met in a stair for water. He did not live there, but was visiting a friend, a friend that opened the door in his underpants as he was drying his hair in a towel. Due to their help I survived the route.

Today was the first day, öööh, no, wait it was not the first day that I was alone, it was the second day that I was alone. Yesterday I biked around alone in a area with villas, no running what so ever. eazy peacy.

Today was the first day, yes it was, my brain is fried but I know I am right when I say this, on a moped. The first time on one of these for about fourteen years.

Oh, the photo walk yesterday was quite nice, if I am not to tired later tonight I might share some nice photos of a Nuthatch and a Woodpecker.

Hours

Since my work hours are determined by the amount of mail that we have, the hours I work is very varied. This means for example that I am home at one o'clock today and can grab my camera and go out into the beautiful day and continue to work on my tan.

Sorting mail

Sorting mail is very similar to one of the things I did when I worked at Securitas. There I stood at a machine that did a security check on bills, and sorted them and put them in stacks of a hundred. The finished stacks was then taken out of the machine and a paper collar was put around them. The work was totally mind numbing. And sometimes the entire day was spent at that machine. Sorting mail is somewhat the opposite. Stacks of mail is sorted according to the street address in a rack that has about a hundred different compartments. It is a task that quickly becomes a zen thing, the rack is almost memorized and the letters goes into the compartments as soon as the address is read. Luckily the day is not spent doing only that, the mail has to be sorted again according to the order in which the people lives at the individual address, then it is time to get on the bike and start running up stairs. This change of tasks is a really welcomed change compared to the Securitas gig that I once had.

Bed time

The largest change in my life since I started working as a mailman is that now-days I have to go to bed hours before midnight even. I suspect that when I am more accustomed to the work I will go to bed later again, but for now I can not do the work while asleep so I need to sleep, and as this rambling carries on into the night I will brush my teeth, read some pages in 'the kite runner' and then pass out.

The first day on the job

Quite a workout. And even if my legs are not aching as bad as they could have, they still have traveled more stairs today than they are used to and I suspect that tomorrow will be a bit harder.

Got my self a job!

Starting Monday I am mailman! wheeee!!! It will be good to have a reason to get up in the mornings.

Soup #26

So, ok, I found the missing soup. It was made a bit more than a month ago, but I will just enter it as number 26 instead of renumbering them...
// just got a call about a job interview //
White bean soup with roasted garlic and chili. A nice and creamy soup and the roasted garlic was a nice touch.

Soup #25

Oven roasted vegetable soup. And yes, not only are the vegetables roasted in the oven, but so is the soup as well. And it is was good, the roasted taste was well balanced with some nice honey.

Got a bit confused yesterday. I did a count, and it seems that even if I include the recipe for the broths (there are four of them) the total amount of soups is only 83. (The title of the book is 'hot and cold soups, 85 recipes') So where are the two missing once???
Adding to the confusion I did a count of the soups that we have made and it seems that they are 26. I have missed one. Anyhow, I am now doing an inventory to see which one I have missed, and will make up for that.

Book tips

I finished 'the naked and the dead' this morning and now I want to read more great books, so do you have any suggestions?

Trip, Cranes and Deer

Traveled down to see my folks last weekend, and the day before my brother-in-law sent me an email asking if I wanted to rent a car and go via Nyköping and buy a boat engine for him. The confusion started early, by my miss-understanding of the time to pick up the engine. I thought that 8-8:30 would be the time they opened, but it was the time that they were opened. And by 8:30 I was just rolling out of E-tuna. After some calls It was settled that someone would be there by 11 to handle the deal, no real problem, it just meant that I had all the time in the world to get to Nyköping, and that I would arrive in Göteborg later in the day. Hence I had time to stop and take a couple of photos of the Cranes that I saw on the way, which I managed to do before I scared them away. I also took some photos of some deer, just before I scared them away. And of a woodpecker, which I then scared away. I have to improve my sneaking skills if I am to get any better on this animal photography that I spend so much time on now-days. I also have to get a better tripod. I got to Nyköping almost an hour before eleven, so I took a fika and waited. Then I waited by the place for the guy to show, and thought that all men over thirty was the guy, which it was not. So I tried to call him, which I could since I had the number in a sms (my phone is crappy and can not dial 7/8/9's), but the number was not listed anymore. So I called my sister and asked her to call my brother-in-law and tell him to call me. He did and then he got in contact with the first guy who would get in contact with the second guy who got there ten minutes later, handed me the engine and all was well and done. But when I was leaving the place I had been parked in by some dude, Jimmy, who had his phone number on the side of the car. But I could not call him cause of the phone, and nothing happned when I honked my horn, so I asked the man with the engine if he could call, he was parked in as well. He did, but the phone was busy. Half an hour later the parking guard shows up and Jimmy comes running and of to Göteborg I was.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, except that I am now a year older and a set of fly fishing gear richer.

Soup #24

Roasted tomatoes and chili soup with olive creme fraishe
After the total fiasco with the last tomato soup (#18) the hopes for this one might not have been that high. And maybe cause of this I did not pay full attention and hence I did not follow the recipe to the last letter, and used less tomatoes than I was supposed to. (I know, this is bad, but who is going to stop me??? OK OK I will not deviate from the recipe ever again I promise!!). Anyhow, the tomatoes (600g of plum tomatoes) was gutted, put in a pan, sprinkled with some olive oil and some sugar, and then with roasted in the oven together with a red chili (and the garlic which was not supposed to be roasted, but I did it anyway) for 45 minutes (the garlic and chili was only in for about half the time).

One onion was sliced in pieces and set to simmer in olive oil. When the onion is soft (make sure that it does not turn dark) the gut of the tomatoes was added, together with the roasted tomatoes, garlic, skinned and de-seeded chili, 5dl of water. It was then set to simmer for 15 minutes during which the olive creme fraishe was prepared.

The soup was mixed and then sent through a strainer (keep the thing that goes through the strainer, throw away the things that get stuck in it!) back into a saucepan and spiced up with 2 table spoons of lime juice, salt and pepper and a knifes edge of cayenne pepper. Oh, and during the whole procedure I also baked some baguettes.

The result?? Oh yea! This was good. Saligt gott, jättegott.

Oops

Just realized that I have applied for a couple of jobs where I in the letter has misspelled the word noggrann (accurate/careful). That is a couple of jobs that I will not get.

Men det var då faan

Varför har plötsligt alla arbetsgivare en egen websida där man måste registrera sina uppgifter för att söka ett jobb? Och lika dan är den dessutom. Det tar jättemycket tid som man skulle kunna ägna åt simpsons istället!

Nostradamus

Did Nostradamus predict the threat from rising CO2 levels? In that case, why did his followers not warn us? If he did not, why didn't he?

I don't know why

I really don't know why I cant find anything on the box that catches my interest this evening. Have screened all fifteen channels, up and down, for the last hour, and the only thing I have stopped for has been a rerun of a poker game (that I hence have seen before). Oh, now the hunting show has started. They are showing how to skin a deer, that can be good to know.

jogging

About 5km in moderate tempo in beautiful weather. This is becoming a habit.

Coffee

Back from a little walk, during which I finally put the four or five moving cards that I wrote in the mail. If you get one you are in a very exclusive club! If you didn't get one, please don't feel upset about it, I just trust that you keep yourself updated on this blog and hence know that I have moved, and if you would like exactly where to I think you are able to either send me a mail to ask me, or simply look it up on eniro.se.

The weather is fantastic once again, and I would like to have stayed out longer, but I got an incredible craving for a cup of joe, and since I had no money on me (who goes out without his wallet??) and I didn't think that the lady at the library would give me free coffee twice in a row I had to go home to get my fix.

The Naked and the Dead

I bought Norman Mailers novel 'the naked and the dead' on sale some time back and started reading it yesterday, and I must say that I understand completely why it is so highly regarded. After 1/6 of the book I am completely hooked, by the language and the intriguing story that has no dull moments. Yesterday I read until my eyes hurt.

Another thing I did yesterday was to run. The weather was fantastic for the first time in a long time and even if I regretted it the moment the words 'lets go running!' left my lips, it was quite nice. And it was also the first time in a while that training was not a pain. Have been in a bit of a slump lately, hopefully this is a turning point. (Oh, yea, I kind of told CityMail that I train regularly and have great physique in my application for the mailman position today, so if they ask you please pretend that you did not read the above).

Man, I do enjoy sitting in our new couch!