So we finally got ourselfes one of those robotic lawnmowers – a Husqvarna 308. There was a period in May that I had to mow twice a week so I gave up an ordered one.
This is how I mow the lawn nowadays with my Automower 308
Then I spent a few days of troubleshooting the lawn and everywhere that it got stuck. Had to change the wires a bit and fill up some holes and such but after that it’s been going like clock work all summer long. Surprisingly well as a matter of fact! Except that you still need to cut the edges of your lawn manually since this bounces of things (including the cable) and therefor doesn’t go all the way to the edge. And then I noticed that our grass looks more bent than cut and I checked the blades and they were completely worn down! They do recommend you to change them a few times but I didn’t think it’d be after only about 8 weeks!
Other than that the only issue I have is the surge protection that I bought for it (per Husqvarnas recommendation) that cuts the power a bit too easy, meaning the mower doesn’t start at all and it can be like that until I notice it’s off.
I do regret buying it a bit since the lawn hasn’t really improved at all. Yes, it’s been nice not having to cut the lawn every weekend this summer but I could have used the money more wisely than on this. But that’s the way it is.
Now I’m just slacking! Vacation and everything and not a single update?
Well surprisingly enough, now that I’m on vacation I have the least amount of time to care about this place. You see I have a wife that get’s worked up everytime I sit in front of the computer so I don’t have much opportunity to post things here from home. Yeah, you could call me whipped and you wouldn’t be wrong.
But now I’m back at work so now I have time to post things here. And I have time on the train to get through the rest of SG1 as well and all of that other stuff that I don’t have time to watch at home. And unfortunately F1 is on summer break, and besides, the Ferraris aren’t doing too well this year. Oh well, there’s always next year.
Most of my vacation was spent at home with my family. We tried to do things, we went to Gröna Lund and Skansen but in the end it just costs more than we can afford right now, especially since we bought new phones and we spent alot more money in Crete than we thought we would. “Don’t do the crime …” eh? But this week my parents will take Sam for a few days so we can get a slow weekend. “Slow” as in “celebrating my brothers 30th birtyday this friday”, let’s see how that turns out!
Other than that, I’m chugging along just fine!
I’ve finally upgraded my image gallery and imported it into WordPress with a cool addon. Took me about 3 days of work to get it sorted and adding comments and stuff but it’s been fun going down that memory lane again.
Here are some of my favorite galleries:
As usual the password what the company I work at is know as in Sweden.
I gotta say that 2 games into this years ice hockey world championship that the Swedish team wasn’t going to go very far, because it really didn’t look like it. But somehow they got their shit together and pulled a whole rabbit-clan out of a hat and got the gold!
I love it when my expectations go so low and it all just works out like that. But I can’t really say it was the best of hockey games I’ve seen. But you don’t don’t beat Canada, Finland and win the finals 5-1 with luck so there had to be some skill there somewhere!!
As far as my life goes, me and the wife are counting the days until we’re off to Chania, trying not to worry how Sam will cope with us being gone for so long. And we’re also building a little veranda on the east side of the house for those extreme hot sunny days when you just can’t be on the west side. Yeah, I know, really serious problems we have right?
Oh man I’ve got that “Chuggington”-song playing in my head now! Our son Sam just loves watching trains on YouTube so it’s Thomas The Tank Engine and Chuggington all the time!!
But life is proceeding pretty well. It’s ok at work, I’m having daily battles with Sharepoint 2013 trying to get it to work with an upgrade from our Sharepoint 2010 which isn’t as simple as going from 2007->2010 mostly because of the claims thing. At home I’m having weekly battles with our budget, trying not to spend much for anything ’cause we’re off on vacation in about a month. Finally! And my woman has just recovered from being i’ll for about 2 weeks. For her the worst part is going back to work only to see that noone has done nothing and her mailbox is swamped with stuff and she already had a backlog … she’s what you could call a single point of failure, and if it was a small company there wouldn’t be much fuzz, but this is one of the biggest phone operators in Sweden so they really should know better.
Also planning to build a deck on the front of our house. I built a huge one 3 years ago on the back but my woman wants one in the front too so that’s what I’ve got to do. So I’m keeping myself busy all the time 🙂
This weekend it was time for Father’s Day. Since Sam is only 2 3/4 he has no clue what that means so it’s as usual up to us to fix things. Usually we don’t really make that big a deal, but this time my wife had decided that yes we were going to make a big deal. But on Saturday she made us dinner and set a very romantic mood but was very secretive about her plans for the evening. And at 7 pm we got into the car and drove off. I had no idea where but soon realised we were going to her mother’s place. Reason for that was to drop off Sam for the night so we could go out to the movies and basically have a date night. Yeah, that’s pretty ironic, her “father’s day” arrangement had Sam staying at his grandmother, how about that 🙂
After we’d dropped him off as we were driving to Kista we kinda looked at each other, remembering the last time we tried to go there to see a movie, and decided to just go home instead, stopping by Willys for some treats and then got comfortable in our home cinema and watched “Ted”. Then we went to bed and we woke up at 10 am! I have no idea how long ago it was that I woke up that late! I mean I may “get up” at 10 but not actually waking up! That’s exactly what the doctor ordered!
Then we were off to pick up him and do the grocery shopping for the week and resume our normal lifes as homeowner and doing the last bits of tweaking in the garden before calling off the season.
I don’t know if you know this but during the summer I did alot of gardening stuff. The biggest thing I did was dig up some 30 square meters of grass and replanting alot of roses and bushes. And if you know me well enough you know that when I decide to do it I go full throttle with it. And then in August I started getting aches in my right foot when I woke up and went to take a shower. After that it was ok so I didn’t think much of it. Then it got more and more frequent and now it’s aching pretty much the entire day. So I finally called the doctor for an appointment and yesterday I went to see him and he kinda chuckled and said “you have a classic plantar fasciit” (or “hälsporre” if you’re swedish). Come again?
Apparently it’s an infection in my heal which comes from straining the sole of your foot either during a long period of time or short impacts. Say like digging up grass and thumping down the shovel with the sole of you foot over and over again while wearing completely inappropriate shoes? (yeah, 3 years as a homeowner and I still don’t have proper “get dirty and gritty”-shoes!).
“Ok, that sounds bad, what do we do?” … “Nothing! This is the kinda thing that usually heals itself in … oh I don’t know, say 6 months. So buy some comfortable walking shoes that don’t ache much and bu February next year call me if it still bothers you, ok!”
And ofcourse like any normal person on this planet I Google the shit out of that and read horror stories from people who have had aching feet for 2 even 3 years! And there’s even surgery for it! But I’m kinda happy noone said “it could become a chronic thing” meaning it will pass, just a matter of riding it out. He also recommended painkillers but I’m already limping a bit so I don’t wanna be that much like House. And I hate taking pills. ‘Cause if we’re talking 4-5 months and I’m taking painkillers that long I’m afraid they’ll just stop working. Like Clarityn, doesn’t do shit for me anymore, I’ve had to step that up to prescription pills!
And all these things that are wrong with me (like allergies and restless legs) are stuff that are helped by distracting your brain enough. Say playing computer games! Seriously, I’ve never felt like scratching the skin of my face while playing World of Warcraft. And I didn’t feel my heel aching at all when playing XCOM for 3 hours last nigh.
There are a few things I really hate. And two of them happened today.
First one is people who work with customer service without having the least bit of interest in customer service. I’ve worked for years with support and customer service and I may not be the most service oriented person in the world with a constant smile, but I do like to help people and make their day better and I love to make things work like clockwork. In the past 2 weeks since our freezer gave up the go I’ve had to call a few customer service people and only the one guy at Bosch impressed me, but the other 5 people I talked to at Bosch and the people at If weren’t that well trained in customer service. But when we finally did get our payment from the insurance company we ordered a freezer from an internet retailer. Good prices and good service over the web and on tuesday morning I placed the order since they had it in stock. On Thursday it still hadn’t shipped, so I called them and got a complete nonsense reply from someone at their customer service that basically didn’t do anything to help me or anything. And today at lunch they finally upgraded my status to “shipped”.
And that’s when the other thing I hate came into play. I hate when PR people twists and spin things to make it sound better. Because they included a link to the distributor. And according to them they haven’t received the package. Only a notification about the package they are picking up this afternoon. This isn’t uncommon practice, I order on the web frequently so I know the routine. But I get annoyed at some PR person at “trettio.se” who thought it sounds better to print out “Shipped” as status when in fact it hasn’t been shipped, only “Notification sent to distributor”. But that’s confessing that they still haven’t physically sent the package. So now, according to these two websites, our big ass freezer is lost in cyberspace! I hate that. At my old work they instructed us to “spin” our weekly reports about disruptions in the IT systems. And I hated that too.
After the 6th phonecall to Bosch I managed to get someone on the phone who could go on record with a exact figure how much it’d cost to fix our freezer. Fortunately for us it was a big number and once I had that I armed myself for another round with the insurance company. Only to have them say “ok, that’s that, so I’m sending 10 000 SEK your way, should be in your bank account before the weekend. Anything else?” 🙂
So now we ordered a new freezer with the extra service of them taking care of our old one since our car isn’t big enough for it. And money over for a “kräftskiva” this weekend as well. It’s all good right now, on that front anyway. Unfortunately Sam has come down with something so Helena is home with him.
I haven’t had many dealings with insurance companies in the past. But now our freezer gave up so it was time to go at them!
Basically 12 days ago when we opened our freezer it wasn’t freezing anymore and everything had thawed up. We had to throw away alot, alot! of food! But after a quick defrosting problem it went back to freeze-mode again. But 2 days later it gave up and decided life as a refrigerator was better and kept a cool +7 degrees Celsius.
At first I called the insurance company wanting money back for the ruined food, something I found out by a colleague that it’s actually covered! I called them up with the aggressive attitude that “they are the enemy and I will have to fight for every crown”. But I was pleasently surprised when the first response was “no problem, this is covered and we’ll sort this out for you”. So I dropped my guard and politely assisted them with their request for information. And when it totally broke down I called them again to upgrade the claim and I was met with the same helpful “we’ll sort this out for you”-response and I gladly assisted with more information about the freezer. Little did I know this was all a part of their evil scheme to give me as little money as possible because now, when it’s close to payout time I am finding myself having to fight for every crown!! Had it been like that from the start I wouldn’t have been surprised or pissed, but I’m pissed at how in two weeks time it’s gone from “no problem, we’re gonna sort this out” to treating me like an enemy! If this goes sour I might not be their customer for long, because as it is we’re only customers because we haven’t bothered to switch. Much like our bank that I’m hoping got something to think about when we fulfilled our ultimatum of switching banks if we didn’t get the interest rate that I wanted.
Right now the ball is in Bosch Home Appliance court coming up with a guestimate how much it’ll cost to fix the freezer.
Wow what a weekend! Surprisingly busy!!
Friday started with a nice calm dinner in front of the TV after Sam had gone to bed. Then we kicked into overdrive going to Ikea and Netonnet and blew almost 10.000 SEK on stuff like a new bed for Sam, new shelves, a TV for our bedroom with an arm so we can yell PIVOT!!! I know we made a promise to each other that we were never gonna have a TV in our bedroom but we needed to relocate our exercise equipment and our bedroom was the only place big enough but then the problem is that it’s oh so boring staring into a wall when exercising so we bought a TV. And to make it so we could lie in bed watching TV as well we had to buy a special mount. Oh and a bluray player because … well surprisingly enough we didn’t have one before. We have the PS3 but that’s to our TV in the livingroom and we needed one for the home theater.
After that we went to Nykvarn (over an hours drive from where we live) to visit som friends and check up on their progress with the house and daughter. Then back home, sleep and on sunday it was time to mount up those shelves, the TV, all the wiring for it, change around the bedroom, move furniture, do the shopping for the week and all of that stuff, all the while Helena was entertaining some guests but once they left we really got going and by 8 pm Sam tried out his new bed which he loved. At first. Unfortunately at around 3 am he fell out of it and hit the floor so he spent the rest of the night in our bed. We went to bed early but not to sleep. Or that other thing. But to watch a movie in bed. Unfortunately it was a pretty lame movie (“Love Birds”) but it was still fun 🙂
So now we’re back to trying to make it to next payday 🙂
Yeah I know I’ve been very quiet here. And that’s actually a good thing because I’ve kept myself busy! Since I’m new here at Thomas Cook I don’t have the full pot of vacation days so I could only take 3 weeks vacation. And I’ve been busy non-stop!
We went to Söderköping for our annual ice-cream binge. Like three years ago we stayed the night so we could enjoy it one more time. But unlike three years ago when we stayed at a local hotel this time we decided to rough it a bit and rented a small cabin at a local campsite. And it was indeed a small cabin, no loo, no kitchen and bunk beds. So after rearranging that so we basically slept on the floor we went for our first taste of ice cream only to be met with a queue we didn’t want to be in. So we walked around town, found a little cafe that sucked big time and then we made our way back and after two hours the queue was still way too long. But the only option was to give up for today and that wasn’t on so I got my ass in the queue and after about an hour we got a table and it was good! Sam enjoyed it too, last time we was there he was like 6 months old so that wasn’t as fun for him as this time around. Then we went back to the campsite and put him to bed and we spent the rest of the evening in bed watching a few episodes of “White Collar” on the laptop. Then we finally fell asleep and on the morning after it was cleaning up, going for a second round of ice cream (this time without the queue) and then going back home. All in all a great little trip.
Then we teamed up with Helenas friend, her husband and their 2 year old daughter for a 24 hour cruise. As I’ve stated before about these cruises it’s mostly about getting drunk or laid than to actually go someplace but this time it was actually a very kids-friendly cruise. They had converted their entire conference deck to rooms with different activities for the kids. One had a ball-pit, the other videogames etc. and Sam really enjoyed that ball-pit! The two departure times we had to chose from was either 7 am or 7 pm . If we’d gone 7 pm we’d barely be able to get onboard and get comfortable before Sam had to go to bed and that meant one of us had to stay in the cabin for the rest of the evening. So we chose 7 am and not sure that was a good choice cause we had to go up at 4:30 am and leave at 5:15 so Sam was really cranky all through the breakfast buffet but after going back to the cabin and sleep for two hours he was ready to deal with it. It was a lot of eating, some tax-free shopping and some beer. Also got to see the F1 qualifying at a bar on the boat! Overall he totally enjoyed that trip and so did we, probably gonna do it again (next year will probably be for free thanks to American Express rewards).
And fortunately thanks to my sister me and H got atleast one day for each other when she took Sam to Skansen (a zoo in Stockholm). Unfortunately he didn’t care much for the animals there but he got to “drive” the cars on rails so he was pretty happy!
Other than that we mostly spent the the vacation working on the garden and home improvements or having guests over and a day welcoming my sister with her family who flew in from Scotland last Tuesday. So yeah, it’s been busy and I haven’t take the time to update this here place but here I am 🙂
Life proceeding as normal here. Getting into how things are done at work. Trying to do house improvements. Trying to be a good husband and father. Just the normal stuff!
But yesterday we broke the routines and went all the way down to Södertälje for a night out with my brother, his girlfriend, my sister AC with her boyfriend. Although “night out” is overstating it quite a bit because we headed back home before 10 pm, but it was still fun to get out of the house and not have another night of slacking in the sofa watching some TV show you never had any interest in before!
Oh and Sam got an outbreak of chickenpox starting last Thursday but it’s already calming down and the fun thing is, he never really noticed it as far as we can tell. He didn’t spike a fever, didn’t have uncontrollable itching or anything, it was pretty smooth sailing. Or maybe that’s because Helena “vacation” started this week and she’s been home with him and he’s gotten almost anything he wants so far. Me, I’m working another week and then have a three week vacation which is fine for me! (since I’m still on an trial-employee status here I only get half the vacation days for now but once I’m made a full employee I’ll get the rest in time for Christmas!)
Here’s the story of when we (or rather I) bought a new projector.
After looking around the web for “what’s the best projector I can get for under 10.000 SEK” (which was the approved budget) I found the answer – Epson TW3200. It had gotten great reviews from reviewers and consumers and it was going down in price. So on Saturday before we went to a 2 year old’s birthday party and then my own birthday party we stopped by one of my favorite stores in the whole world – Netonnet. They have good electronic products for good prices, good internet store and a “no bullshit, no fanciness, no flashy stores, just the products”-attitude I love. And they had just lowered the price of it to from 8.300 to 8.000 SEK so I was happy camper. When we got home on Sunday (yeah, I managed to wait a whole day!) I mounted it in my universal ceiling mount and turned it on. I guess I should have turned it on first because I was met with a “Auto iris error, please contact Epson support”… tried the old “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” and it started up without the error. Did some quick calibation and tested a bit of Star Wars Episode III (the opening space battle is pretty sweet) and it looked decent. Turned it off again, did what a husband, father and homeowner does on a Sunday (which included mowing the lawn).
On the evening my sister came by for the F1 race from Canada. Turned on the projector .. same error. Turned it off and on and it worked. But I don’t want to have to turn it off and on again until the error message goes away, especially not on a newly bought product for 8.000! So I called Epson who simply said “return it for a new one”. Called Netonnet customer service who agreed, no questions asked. So after I got home from work on Monday evening I took a 20 minute drive to Netonnet to have it replace, making sure they had one in stock. I turned it in and no questions asked, money back or buy a new one. So I went to pick up a new one … and no, as I’d feared they didn’t have any. According to their inventory they were suppose to have one, but reality said otherwise. But their other store in Slagsta on the wrong side of town had one, or I could get my money back. More than that, I noticed on their computer screens it cost 8.500 now! Yeah, for some reason it had gone from 8.300 on friday, to 8.000 on saturday to 8.500 on monday? But I argued against that since “there’s no reasons I should pay 500 more today for something I bought on Saturday just because I had to return it” and they agreed. Also I could have bought it anywhere else cause 8.500 was the price it was going for everywhere else!
But I was really set on this projector so I took another 30 minute drive to Slagsta and eventually found the one TW3200 projector they had in stock (which wasn’t where it was supposed to be). Went to the cashier who played the “I’m just a blonde girl at the checkout counter I can’t authorize this reduced prize, I have to call my manager”. Fortunately for me he had the very good service mind I had hoped for and I ended up paying 7800 for it after a 200 reduction for mileage and fueld for the car since I had to drive all the way there! And another 45 minute car trip home, tested it quickly to see I didn’t get the same message and mounted it.
That’s then the other setback hit. I had measured and mounted everything in my home theater, most importantly the ceiling mount, after my old projector. And the lens on this projector was about 4 inches off. Had it been more towards the center it’d been easy fix but this was more away from the center. And this very specific projector doesn’t have a digital compensator for keystone effects like my old one had, which means when it’s that high and that much to one side the image if projected in a straight line is skewed. The way this projector compensates for it is optically, which when it comes to the final image the result is better than digital compensation. And because it’s not only to the side it’s also mounted in the ceiling which means I needed to compensate both vertically and horizontally for it. What this meant is I had to mount my projector so that if the image would be projected in a straight line it would end up in the upper left corner of the room. But when adjusting the lens the image ends up where it should be and with straight lines (or more accurately, “right angles” i.e the corners are 90 degrees). But it took aloooot of fine tuning and with my ceiling mount it was way too much precision for it to be fun or challenging, it was just annoying. Why didn’t they have a digital compensator AND optical compensator for it like my old Panasonic projector had? It was so much easier to sit in the couch and adjust the screen with the push of a button than trying to find that sweet spot where everything lined up! .. but for now the deed is done and it’s sweet as hell!
Nothing really exciting to report.
Sam is doing very well at kindergarten. Surprisingly well I think! I drop him off at 7 am and H picks him up at 5 pm so that’s a full 10 hours he’s there. But by the time I get home and dinner is over with he’s pretty much ready for bed. And then he sleeps 12 hours until it’s time to do it all over again. But tomorrow will be different ’cause he’ll sleep until he wakes up himself whenever that is nowadays. He definitely sleeps longer in the mornings now than he usually does.
And this weekend we don’t have much planned actually. Neighbors coming over for a quick visit bit that’s pretty much all we have planned. And the F1 race from Monaco of course! And put up the doors for the greenhouse so I can finally say “Done!”.
Really good weekend there. Our “Star Trek” day was everything it was supposed to be – good episodes, good company and good calories! The F1 was pretty ok, could’ve been better since Ferrari didn’t win.
And we also got alot, and I do mean ALOT, of work done around the house. The greenhouse we’re building is now cemented in place and it’s time to fit the glass. That’ll take alot of weeks to sort out but I’m not in any rush. Helena unfortunately is since the stuff she’s already growing needs to move out of the house and into the greenhouse before it takes over our bedroom! It’s pretty amazing how I’ve gone from spending a sunday morning/afternoon in the World of Warcraft to spending it building a greenhouse and still being happy about it!
I have no ideas what’s gonna happen this weekend, remains to see if we’re gonna have another couples dinner with Helenas friends or just the two of us. Maybe we can make a breake for it and catch “Thor” in the movies somehow … anyone willing to step in and take care of Sam a few hours ? 🙂
Been busy as always the past week – working and taking care of stuff at home. Now that it’s getting warm and sunny outside all of a sudden we have to take care of the house. And the big project this year is to fix a greenhouse for the love of my life. We’ve only done the prepwork for it and it’s already tiresome to even think about! We spent all saturday transporting stuff to or from our house, exhausting. Guess that’s the life of a homeowner 🙁
This house-searching thing took an interesting turn last week when we were tipped off about a building project going on now that we could buy a finished brand new house customized to our needs and most of all, our wallets. Only problem is it’s a bit far away (not as far as I used to be though). And 2.6 million crowns, that’s alot of money I’ll never earn… And we’re still looking for old houses. Not sure how this will end, but as long as it ends with me and Helena ending up in bed together, I really don’t care if it’s old or new 🙂
So now I’m 35 years old. I dunno why but that most definitely feels like a limit where you can blame “immaturity” anymore without sounding silly 🙁
But as far as my life goes, it’s certainly picked up in the past 2 years going from “sitting home alone (but far from lonely) playing my computer games and watching my movies” to “sitting on the terrace of our lovely house with my lovely fiancé listning to our lovely boy not wanting to sleep”.
Life is pretty good to me at the moment. Unfortunately it’s not as good for everyone 🙁