You know what job has really gotta suck? Being a politician in the opposition! Because no matter what the other person says, you have to disagree and make them look bad. And women do it really bad and to make it worse, in swedish it doesn’t even just sound lame when the do head-to-head!
Last week there was a debate in swedish TV about the integration of immigrants into swedish society and the oddities that we swedes think are normal. There were two chicks, on being the minister in charge of integration politics in our current government, and one from the opposition. And even though what the first chick said made total sense and was calmly stating facts and figures and stuff the other was doing her best to discredit her and ranting on about the high unemployment that the current government has caused doing the most damage to immigrants and so on and so forth. I don’t know which of them was right and wrong and I’m not sure I care about politics that much to even bother. But I know it’s gotta suck having a job that requires you to disagree what the other person no matter what and to do it in public no less!
Saw “My Sister’s Keeper” yesterday. I know, it’s a “chick-flic” but it’s Helenas birthday so spending two hours in the movies is the least I could do. I mean, she sat through the latest “Star Trek”-movie and “Tron” for me 🙂
Anyway, the movie is about a all american couple who just wants a normal life with a house and happy kids. All goes well until the daughter get’s leukemia. And with lack of donors they create a tailor made daughter that’s completely compatible in every way and use her to make the sister well. Now she’s grown a bit and at 11 the older sister get’s sick again and they need to transplant the younger sister’s kidney and she says “No, no more” and “lawyers up”. There’s a few sidestories (like the neglected son who goes off to do whatever without anyone caring, or the older sister’s lovestory) but it’s mainly about the family and the parents just trying to do what’s right. I though it was gonna be just an emotional piece of garbage that only chicks could like and one year ago I would probably still feel that afterwards. But instead, now that I’m about 4 months away from becoming a father myself, it was difficult not to get emotional and imagine the pain and the struggle of everyone. Because one of this things it did good was to show the story from everyone’s point of view. Although they did their best to make the mother look like the villain at the same time you knew she wasn’t, she was just doing what she thinks is right. And one thing they also did was to go to the extremes – extreme happiness, extreme sorrow, extreme this and that, they really pushed that. And it was hard not to cry at certain things, like the beach-scene! Only one thing I found off was Thomas Dekker and Sofia Vassilieva as a couple knowing age difference (which was only 5, thought it was more)
If you think you can take an emotional roller coaster ride like that and drop a tear or two then go and see it!
Time for halloween again. Still don’t get why it’s so popular in sweden all of a sudden, damn americans and your TV shows! 🙂
And for the first time I have a house that needs to adorned for this weekend too. $40 later at Buttericks and it’s all scary. Unfortunately we won’t be home though but it’s the thought that counts, right 🙂 and in 5-6 years I’ll have a kid myself that’s gonna go trick or treating so need to set a good example on our newly built street!
Have fun!! I will!
The other day I had a terrible revelation – I’m becoming what I hated 15 years ago!!
Wind the clock back to high school. Things sucked bad for me in most ways and like most teens I questioned “why go on?” and if Knut F. hadn’t stepped in I’m not sure I had. Then I happened to see a little movie called “Pump Up The Volume” that really showed me this is what teenage is all about. I totally recognized so much in that movie it was kinda scary. One of the points of the movie is that all parents just want their kids to be normal and go to school, get educated, find a girlfriend and get a job and be normal. Which is really not what the kids wants. And I remember hating all the parents in the movie that told their kids “just be normal”.
Well folks, last week I said “I just hope our son is normal” and it hit me like a blast from a shotgun what I’d just said! Of course in this case I’m more referring to any birth defects or missing toes or something but I do actually just hope our son is normal and goes to school like a normal kid and gets educated, finds a girlfriend and so on. And it sucks that I feel that. Because it’s still very fresh in my mind the fucked up teen years I had when I was anything but normal. But I should take some comfort in the fact that I’m doing ok regardless!
Got everything I need for a kick ass weekend now! It’s friday and the 25th which means pay-day in sweden!
Gonna start tonight with fixing some tacos and TLCing my fiance, see two chick-flix then off to bed (wink wink). Then tomorrow we’re off to visit some friends of Helena’s who just had a baby a few weeks ago so we’re bound to get some tips and tricks there. Then we’re going to my parents for a nice Saturday dinner with the family and the extremely predictable reactions to the ultrasound scans. Then on Sunday gonna do some house cleaning, mow the lawn and then enjoy a nice Formula 1 race from Singapore while enjoying a cold one. Don’t pump up my expectations but this weekend is gonna rock 🙂
I think I set some kind of speedrecord! In less than 18 months I went from being hopelessly single to being engaged, having built a house and now expecting a son in late february!!
That’s right – we’re pregnant 🙂
Last august or something we had the “kids or no kids” discussion, with me being pro and she being against. She wasn’t against having a child, she was just very, very much agsinst actually giving birth! But we both kind agreed that “if it happens it’ll happen” but we were both pretty much in agreement that if it didn’t happen we wouldn’t really lose any sleep over it.
But after about 5 or so months without protection we both were silently realising that it wasn’t gonna happen and we were fine with that. We know plenty of couples that have trouble getting pregnant or staying pregnant so we just assumed we weren’t compatible, I had bad swimmers or something. But we never talked about doing anything about it like see a doctor or something.
Then one day, just a few days after they started putting our house together I realised she wasn’t acting like she should “this time of the month” and joked she might be pregnant. One visit to the bathroom later and yeap, we were pregnant!
We had absolutely no idea what to do. We called our respective families and everything like that. That was in June. We did the ultrasound last Friday and everything is totally ok as far as anyone can tell!! So we’re making it official…
I’m gonna be a dad!!… JIKES!!!!!
Yeah, I’m still alive and I just realised how long it’s been since I wrote things here. But that’s how busy I’ve been. Or we’ve been! For the past weeks we’ve been going to Ikea every other day and hardware stores and all that crap to get the house in order and we are slowly getting there. But every time we say “Done!” something else pop ups. And we spend weekends visiting friends or family. Add to that a busy schedule at work and you realise why I’ve been slacking here.
Anyway, the house is almost “Done!” as is “could pass as a normal house where people live” rather than the mess it’s been in the past few weeks. Really gotta give it up to Helena that’s keeping things tidy around chaotic little me 🙂
Let’s talk about something else than our house… yesterday marked 40 years since the awesome achievement of the Apollo program to walk on the moon. Anyone who have seen the TV series/documentary “From the Earth to the Moon” knows just how advanced it was, and that just scratched the surface.
So when I read the tabloid “Aftonbladet” here in sweden running a poll saying “over 60% of their readers think it was fake” I get upset. It’s a pretty ignorant to discuss it over and over again, cause it does come up now and again ofcourse. And I hate to think what Grissom, White and Chaffee would say about it had they not died in the Apollo 1 fire!
But then I found this nice piece of journalism – “Top 5 proofs it did happen” and it put a smile on my face.
On friday I had the day off from work and I spent it packing everything and transporting as much as I could to our house. But the real action didn’t start until saturday morning!
We went to rent a lorry to handle the big things like our bed. And apparently they don’t like it when you pay in cash! They get nervous that you’ll drive off with it! But I looked trustworthy enough for her to allow it anyway so off we went to Mio to pick up our really, really expensive (10.000 SEK!) diningroom table. Then back to the apartment to fill it up. Helenas mother dropped by and when my family arrived we loaded it up and went to the house and loaded everything off and sat down for a coffee. Then “the men” went off with they lorry to Sureguard to get all my things and then back to the apartment to pick up things that were going to the dump. Add a little time pressure and you have one serious, effective and not so fun Kris!
Then my brother Jocke went off to his girl while me and my dad went back to the house to join Helena, her mother and “uncle Leif”, my mother and sister who had put most of the furniture in order already. Then we had an awesome barbecue and after everything went home we spent the night cleaning up as good as we could and went to bed. Unfortunately it took quite a while for me to fall asleep and I had some nightmares so didn’t sleep very well at all.
But on sunday we went up and started our “list of things to do” but that went out the window when my friend Ricki said “I’ll be there in 30 minutes to hook up your home theater” which wasn’t really what we had expected but it worked out fine anyway. After a small tour of Ikea and Bauhaus we went home and got to work and after about 6 hours of work it was all good to go with “Wall-e” (as sound tests go, you can’t beat animated movies!). Eva dropped by too. And Helena did her thing cleaning out some areas and making sure we were well fed. I hate living up to gender stereotypes but we really did yesterday. Then we went back to the apartment to pick up the cats and boy were they glad to see us again. They still don’t know what to make of the house though…
After driving Ricki home I came home (!) at 23:00 and even though I had a gazillion things to do and wasn’t tired I went to bed and ended one of the busiest weekends of my life!
Now I’m back to work and piling up things to do at home but trying to focus on work. Not going to well to be perfectly honest.
Now it’s really summer time here in Stockholm! It’s wonderful to walk to work nowadays, stopping by Kungsan for a chocolate dipped icecream before work. Think that was one of Gods many plans to be honest!
Our house is almost done. We’re waiting for the electrician and the wallpapers to go up, we’re also having our fireplace mounted this week but it looks like it’s the wrong kind. Won’t know until it’s done and the covers are in place though.
And then, on july 13th we have our big inspection of the house that will either end in such a huge list of negatives that the entrepreneurs will have to redo alot of stuff, or most likely a small list of things that will take them 1-2 days to fix and we should be able to move in that weekend. That’s almost three weeks from now! Can’t wait!
If you live in sweden, go to Livsviktigt.se and sign-up. I have.
And so another awesome weekend ends and the first real week of summer begins!
Me and Helena are keeping ourselves busy wether we like it or not, but on saturday it actually looked like we were gonna have a lazy ass afternoon and evening at home with only the TV as company. But oh no, we were called into Heron City to watch “Angels and Demons” with two friends of ours. It was nice to see them again but the movie could’ve been better. Although I gotta say it’s still fun to see movies from Rome where I can say “been there” (although nowadays I say it quite to myself).
But sunday was the big day for us. My family and some of Helena’s joined us at our building site for a little tour of where everything is going to be becauase in exactly one week the house will be lifted in place. And after that tour we went to a nearby lake and had a picknick/lunch, celebrated my 34th birtday (!) and just enjoyed the kick ass weather! After that we went home to find out noone had showed to check out the apartment so to comfort ourself I got to open my birthday present 2 days too early and we spent the night trying to play Metallica on our Playstation.
Absolutely kick ass weekend!
Back in 2000-2001 I had a friend called Markus. We lived a few kilometer from each other, we both liked “Star Trek”, movies, computer games and the occasional beer (or in his case, bottle of wine). I liked him. But after Eden died and after Markus got married and I did my world tour we kinda lost touch for a long time and what little I heard from him was from my sister who ran into him now and again.
But now we decided that it had definitely been too long so me and my fiance went over to their house for a BBQ, some beers and alot of conversation. And it was good! It was awesome actually. Marcus and his wife now had 2 kids (she was pregnant with the first one last time I saw her!) and he had done so many home improvement I couldn’t believe it was the same Markus! And we had a great time just talking and discussing things about life and stuff. It was great reconnecting and we’re definitely gonna do it more often 🙂
>Went by our new home yesterday to see if there was any progress with the house. And to our surprise there was! The foundation is now in place!! Very surprising how fast that happened actually! We’ve gone from “should we do it” to having a foundation set in stone for us in less than 8 weeks. It’s a bit scary cause thinking back about 14 months (february 2008) I was living in my little rented 2 room apartment and totally happy with that and didn’t see any need to change. Now we’re building a house!!
Check out the photo gallery here (or on facebook!)
Also added photos and some captions to the photos from Söderköping. Again I remind you to login as “guest” and password is the company I work for.
This’ll be a quick little update before I head out the door to join my friends and watch the pilot of “Caprica”.
Me and Helena went down to Söderköping again. The ice-cream place had just opened and it was a swedish holiday (valborg) so we figured “what tha heck” and rented a cheap room at a nice hotel so we could stay for two days and have even more ice-cream and maybe see more of this calm, old little town. It was abso-freaking-awesome! 🙂
You can find pictures here and as usual, log in as “guest” to see all pictures.
And today I went out to check up how the work on the house was going. Or maybe I should say the foundation cause that’s what they are working on now. Pictures are here. You might wanna make that into a Favorite since I’ll be updating it alot over the next two months! 🙂
And the summer is finally coming to stockholm so it’s even better going out for a ride today!
Have fun! I will!
Even though it’s been a year now some friends are still surprised that I actually have a girlfriend, that I moved in with, and am now engaged with and building a new house with. I get alot of nice congratulations (like this). But the best compliment have come from three different people (from a family member, a close friend and an estranged friend/former collegue) and that is – “proof that good guys can win”! I like that. I like that people consider me a good guy. I know it’s narcissistic as hell, but it still feels good getting the compliment.
Regarding our house building, everything seems to be set – except for that damn approval from the council that we may actually build the house we want and the way we want it!
Sorry to say but I don’t feel any different today than I did when I woke up on saturday! And I’m pretty sure Helene agrees. Although she was shocked that I actually asked her it’s still a bit of “was that all?” feeling. Hopefully it’ll change when we get our rings, should be friday.
And as always I won’t be doing an update tomorrow for the same reason as last year, and the year before that. But we do have a really good april fools joke planned for NataliePortman.com 🙂
We thought we were ready for bidding on a house but apparently we weren’t. An arrogant real estate agent, some things we knew were wrong with the house but thought “ok, for this price we can fix it” and when the price went above 2.25 million we called it off. We really wanted that house cause it was as perfect as a house can get for us!
But the real estate agent was really sucky, ignored our questions, was promised private showing but that never happened and can’t shake the feeling that we were bidding against something fictional.
Anyway, the search goes on… but we swedes really need to take after the customer care I receive everytime I deal with asians or even americans!
So now I know different foundations to houses. I know about isolation, mortgages, wall-building, roofs, leaks, heating your house and all those other completely irrelevant small things that I one year ago didn’t give a crap about!
One year ago I was living completely happy in my 2 room apartment in Visättra, without a thought in my head about moving anywhere. I’d lived there for 9 years, 9 good years and didn’t see any real reason to move, it’s just a huge hassle. I couldn’t care less about concrete foundations or not.
And here I am. After just one year, one awesome year, I have moved to the complete opposite side of the city, gotten pretty comfortable but now we’re bidding 2.2 million swedish crowns on a house. I have no idea how to maintain a house, all the stuff you need to do with regular intervalls. I’m counting on losing ALOT! of sleep over mortgage rates and leaky roof than I ever did about things I used to lose sleep over…
Damn… I think I just may be growing up now…
GOD DAMNIT!!
I tried golfing last sunday. Just going to a huge simulator that has like 6-7 feet to a huge screen and you hit the ball on the screen and it guestimates and projects how the ball goes. Surprisingly accurate, as long as you actually hit the screen! When we were putting we sometimes hit the ball so lame that it didn’t get to the screen so it didn’t count! Fortunately it had 2 meter “giving” distance (if you got within 2 meters of the hole you were in).
I did surprisingly well I think although I still don’t feel like I can say I have control of where the ball is going! Really when I swing that huge driver I really feel I have no control what so ever and just happy if I hit near where I was looking!
Not sure if it’s a sport worth investing alot of money in, cause it sure as hell aint cheap!!