A year ago

A year ago my life changed forever.

PhD

At 15:00 on June the 18'th Jorge Cham is comming to Uppsala to give a talk. If I was there I would not miss it for the world. (registration required before the 10'th)

Number

Number of deer seen on the train ride home from Småland, the train ride that got delayed an hour and then changed into a train and taxi ride at a stop where the train normally does not stop: 7.

Interesting conversation during the ride:
-(the conductor) You will get a taxi from Katrineholm to Eskilstuna.
-(us, with Tage in our lap) Ok, we will need a chair for him in that case.
-(the conductor) Sure, they must have one, I will specifically tell them that you will need one.
-(us) Great.

A little time later, during which the conductor had talked to us and Tage several times:
-(the taxi driver) What? A baby seat? Nobody has mentioned anything about that. I can get one but it will take longer. And I hope you know how to install it cause I have no idea.

It all got sorted out in the end, and we came home only a little over han hour later than what we vere supposed to.

By the way: If you get stuck in Katrineholm, be sure to have a moscito repellent on you, damn it they were hungry.

By the way 2: If you are in Katrineholm and need to go to Stockholm late on a Saturday, make sure you look on the right screen so that you do not wait for the arrivals from Stockholm instead of the departures to Stockholm. (I do hope that the lady who wanted me to help her buy a ticket to said place had some place to spend the night)

Lyxfällan

I think that before a country would be eligible for the huge 'chrisis package' that IMF has put together, the country in question should first have to participate in a Lyxfällan special. That would be a great show. A couple of economists would stand there in front of the budget board and try to make the country realize what their problem is. (The country is silent in the conversation below. It just stands there looking ashamed and tries to hold back its tears)

-So, how much do you spend on the military? On social services? On pensions?
-And what loans do you have? Don't you understand that these sms loans that you took last year have a huge interest?
-Do you save anything for a rainy day? No?  You really should have.
-Ok, so if you sum it all up you see that your income, in form of taxes, is half of your spendings. It does not add up does it? You really need to think this through during the night.

// later in a bar, the economists talking //
-I really do not know if we can save this country.
-No, I agree. They must have seen this coming a long time and just let it happen. I think it might be to late now.
-What we have to do is to sell of any assets that they might have, what can you get for an island on ebay?
-And we have to try to do something about their loan situation. Thirty thousand different sms loans, plus all their credit cards that they have maxed out.. Maybe we can go and see if IMF could do something...

I really think this would be an excellent TV-show.

Wanted

Chipotle paste.  I really miss it, and have searched all over for it without any result. I think it is out of production but there must be a store somewhere that have some left, mustn't it? If you find it, could you please buy a couple of jars for me? I would be forever grateful.

Memory

The other day when I was on my way to the hospital to exchange some blood against two pairs of socks I went down to the bus stop just 100 meters away from here. It is in plain view from our flat and a couple of days before I had noticed that someone had smashed one of the glass walls of the wind shelter. The day I went down there I came around from the back and for some reason I bent down and picked up a shard of glass. With this in my hand I proceeded to walk around and sit down on the bench inside the hut. And then I leant back to rest against the glass wall. The glass wall that had been smashed. The glass wall that I had a piece of in my hand. Can someone please tell me just what the fuck is wrong with my brain.

Abandoned

While on a random walk today we stumbled upon an abandoned flower shop. (Actually I stumbled upon one and deliberately walked past another, but the only nice photos were of the stumbled upon one). The photos could have ended up better I am sure, but Man does Tage hate it when I stop and take out my camera. It is really hard to be creative with groaning kid in the stroller, but I am working on the problem. Any day now either he will realize that groaning is stupid Or I will come to a state were I just do not care. (No, I do not believe any of those things will happen). 

Intellectual challenge

I feel that I need to exercise my brain before it deteriorates. Can't some one throw a 'not to hard but still challenging' problem my way? Math/Physics/Programming/Logical or something else completely. Come on. Put me to the test (or more importantly, excercise my brain!)

2.885

For more than ten months now I have had only one object in front of my camera, and have had so about 2.885 times. Even if the subject is well worth it I kind of miss the good old days when other things caught my eye. With this in my mind I took my camera, jumped on a bus to a place I had not been before (and then dragged on the stroller with Tage in it). I explored and let my eye wander. And I managed to snap more than 20 shots in a row that did not feature any small human beings at all. I even managed to photograph a bird or two, this was however hard since the little guy gets bored quite easily...

By the way, blogging with the little man in the same room is quite a feat. This post took most of the day to compose, and the prose might have suffered a bit in the process.

Quiz answer #10, and the Proud winner is

Fist of all, here are the answers:
-Who of Marge's sisters has triangular shaped earrings? (1p)
-Selma goes for round earrings mostly, and Patty has triangles.

-Sideshow Bob has a brother. What is his name? (1p)
-Cecil Terwilliger.

-What magazine did Milhouse order when he and Bart took care of the comic book store? (1p)
-He orders a thousand copies of 'Biclops' in the Worst eposide ever, as it is called.

-What crop did the family grow at the farm? (1p)
-It was Tomacco, a tomato/tobacco hybrid that tasted awful but was highly addictive.

-And last but not least: In the movie, Marge makes several variations of 'home sweet home' embroideries. You get 0.5 points for each version you can tell me.
-I have not yet watched the movie so I am not one hundred per cent certain of this, but I know that she makes at least a  'Dome sweet Dome' and a 'Nome sweet Nome' version.


And the winner is.... cmh, who came on the outside in the last curve and overtook m with half a point on the finish line - wheeeee!!!!  And there were much rejoicement. The price was a book was it not? Name your poison and I will see to it that it is sent to a mailbox close to you. If you can not decide I will send you one of my favourites.

That's all for now folks. Maybe there will be a new quiz one day. Thank you for playing, hope you enjoyed it!

A little note on design

One of my big interests in life is design. (I might have written something quite similar to this before, but my memory is poor and I really dig the subject so here goes...). Good design makes me happy and poor design can really make me loose all confidence in the species called Homo sapiens sapiens. Most of the stuff you encounter fall in the huge grey area in-between, they do their job but not with splendour. And I have a hard time figuring out why, it should not be so hard to put in just a little bit more thought and testing before finalizing a product. Some of the things that has occupied my brain recently are:

Plastic CD casings. Who the hell designed the first prototype? The hinges are so fragile that they break if you just breath on them. The plastic nubs in the middle that are supposed to keep the CD secure, they break for no reason at all and then the disk just flaps around in the casing. That problem is multiplied by a thousand if you consider the 2-disk models.  (These are just a couple of my hang-ups). So, who the hell designed the first model? And who the hell thought 'Yes! This is it. This is what the casings should be like for our new music media. They look sturdy and resilient. Or maybe not, but it is not like a lot of drunken people will throw them all over the room at parties'. And How the hell can the design have survived for so long (the design that is, the casings do not survive for very long). I do not get it.

The way that the power cord is connected to a MacBook. A magnet holds the cord in place, so if you stumble upon it it just comes loose instead of sending the computer crashing to the floor.  It is simply beautiful.

The TV image format. I want to see my tv in a format that keeps a square looking like a square. That should be the default setting. If that means that I get black stripes at the sides or over  and under the image, so be it. I absolutely do not want the image to be stretched a little at the sides (and not stretched in the middle) so that the entire screen is filled, it makes me nauseous. (There might be TV's out there that handle this in a good way, but our set does not).

Speaking of TV's, just a word on digital boxes. I want to be able to quickly zapp between channels. Maybe it is stupid, but that is what I like. The boxes that I have so-far encountered takes more than a second to switch between channels. Why the fuck would a digital apparatus made in the year 2010 need that huge amount of time to do something so trivial?

DVD casings. Now as durability goes they are vastly superior to their CD counterparts, but why are they so huge? They must be at least fifty times as large as the disk that they contain. (Compare them to the cardboard boxes that video cassettes comes in).

Various household appliances. How hard can it be to make the controls for microwave-ovens/washers/ovens simple and intuitive to use? Bloody fucking hard it seems.

By the way, why in hell does the stove 'on' light light up when you turn the stove on even if the child-safety switch is on and hence the stove is not on? Why? Why oh why?

Sometimes I really regret that I did not consider studying industrial design when I went to college. I think I would have been good at it. I think I would have enjoyed it. Or maybe I would just have been stressed by the deadlines and money restraints and pushed out poor design that people would loath and that I would have hated myself for. Who knows?

Minne

Sitter på golvet och äter kex med leverpastej. Får mig att minnas tillbaks på lumpen när man åt kex och leverpastej mest hela tiden...

Quiz

A week has passed and I have received far fewer answers on the last question than I expected. And no-one has bothered watching the Simpson movie to get even one of the 'home sweet home' variations (I remember two, but I think that there are more). So, now I am torn between:
1, wait over the Easter weekend and see if anyone else bothers to send in their answers, or
2, saying that the game is over and write out the answers.

Since I don't know all the answers I should perhaps wait over the weekend and then decide if the answers I get are valid or not. Yes. That is a good idea. So: send in your answers and maybe you will get some points when I return from the trip down to Småland.

What happened? (and quiz #10)

I have no idea what happened to me, but suddenly I stopped writing. It is a bit odd since stuff has happened that I usually would write about. Soups for one thing (Just finished a prawn bisque that was rather good if I may say so myself, and that is just one of the three that I have not told you about). Another thing is the move. We packed all our stuff in boxes (and some paper bags), transported them out the door into a car, drove the car 160m, then out of the car they came and up the elevator to the third floor (for which you have to press the button marked 4) and into our new huge (by our standards) three room (almost four since the hallway serves as a room too) apartment. Yet another thing that has happened is that I am now home full time with Tage, and that is really something to write about. And I will. But now I realize why I stopped. It was the last question in the quiz. I just could not come up with a good question. I felt that, as it was supposed to be about Simpsons, and that I am supposed to be a Simpsons nerd, the question had to be really really good. But fuck it, I will just ask about a couple of random facts and get it over with and then finally I might be able to get on with the blogging. So here goes. The last set of questions:

Who of Marge's sisters has triangular shaped earrings? (1p)
Sideshow Bob has a brother. What is his name? (1p)
What magazine did Milhouse order when he and Bart took care of the comic book store? (1p)
What crop did the family grow at the farm? (1p)
And last but not least: In the movie, Marge makes several variations of 'home sweet home' embroideries. You get 0.5 points for each version you can tell me.

(I will give you a week to answer since most of you probably has stopped looking in several times a day to see if I have written something new since I have not written something new in a long long time)

Soup #36, #37 & #38

I am lacking the energy for normal posts and the last quiz question (it will come soon, I promise), but I do feel that I must relate the last couple of soups that has been on the menu.

#36 was an ok dish, but it was more of a starter than a complete meal. Cucumber, mint and green peas. Basically it is what it sounds like, soup based on cucumber, green peas and mint. It also contained a couple of tatoes, butter, chicken broth and a good splash of rich cream. A comment we wrote was that it would have been better to use less water and more cream than the recipe prescribed.

#37 I did on my own when K had left me to see an Opera in the city of our dreams. Cheese soup with bacon and potatoes. It sounds quite good and I really had great hopes for it, but it did not live up the expectations. Bacon (too little), onion, broth and potatoes were cooked in a pot and then thickened by some flour. Then some Emmenthaler, sherry and Worcestershire sauce were added. Maybe it would have been better if I had served it in a hot bowl as it said in the book.

#38 This one we did last night, and I just had the rest for lunch. Prawn and lemon-grass soup. As you might think it is an asian soup, and as such it is a bit hard to make since I am not so sure on how it should taste and how the ingredients should be treated. A good thing was the raw prawns, they turned out great since they were only cooked once (they did not become chewy at all), the bad things were the amount of lime, three of them might have been two to many, and then the lemon-grass. Now I do not know if it is supposed to be like that but since they are so 'woody' they are not all that pleasant to get in your mouth and since you should cut them in 2.5 cm long pieces according to the book, they are not that easy to pick out of the soup either.. A strange thing was the straw mushrooms. A canned mushroom that were, hmm, strange you might say. And then we have the coriander, but that is a story of its own.