Shop-o-holic

Today Claudia went for a business trip to Germany and I will have to take care of myself for several days. First thing I do is to get out of control when it comes to shopping. I saw an offer with cheap clothes and I went there after work. The result was two new t-shirts and two pair of pants. They were all on sale of course! Sometimes I am just not able to hold back when it comes to shopping. This is one of my weak spots, I am glad that Claudia did not have to witness the event, but she will learn when she comes home again.

I discovered a new attempt to blow up our new mail box. The old one got blasted into pieces during Sylvester by some local hooligans. Luckily the fire cracker did not go off, it was just lying inside the mail box.

This is my first blog from the Mac, we will see what it looks like when I publish it. I also load the iPod with some new podcasts while I filled up and started both the dish washer and the wash machine. When I am lonely I have to occupy myself with all kind of projects, then time passes faster until Thursday when Claudia is back home.

The picture is from Orust, a little stream passing over the cliffs at a sunny (!) moment.

An ancient message

One of the rainy days at Orust we visited the rune stone called Ramunds häll. It is the only rune or picture stone at Orust. On the stone is written a message from the ninth century. The language is the ancient rune language used in Scandinavia back then. The inscription is clearly visible even if it is over a thousand years old. We can not understand it of course. The information sign tells us that the signs mean “Ior in Åm placed this stone on the hill”. It is interesting to imagine what occation caused the erection of the stone.

This is a three meter high stone in the middle of a meadow where cows or sheep are grazing in the summer. The archeologists think it was placed higher up on the hill before where the grave field is. Probably it was moved by some farmers to this location a couple of houndred years ago. They wanted to use it probably, but it was too heavy. At the end of 19th centrury the stone was placed up-right again. The inscription is placed on the side of the stone.

We continue up the hill to the grave field, there are more stones erected in ship formations. This type of formations are very common for Sweden and the Viking era a thousand years ago. The rain is pooring down but we decide to take a walk in the forest. The narrow road is old and muddy. We follow it and once inside the forest we are protected from the wind. We end up walking about five kilometers I guess. In the end we had to cross through the forest back to the car. This was a bit crazy since we have no compass or map with us. We end up more or less where we started and we can finally get out of hour rain gear.

Schneeflöckchen !

Finally it is winter here in Skåne. In the last few days we had some centimeters of white, fluffy snow, it looks wonderful. Of course, the usual chaos on the roads was also there, more than 100 accidents with some dead here in this district alone, because people were unprepared and the roads were icy .
It also is not easy to be prepared when the weather ‘forecast’ is not really forecasting anything …

Anyway, I am home and enjoying my vacation this week, playing games or sleeping or watching TV, some trips to the cities around Helsingborg ( though slowed down now due to weather ). It is nice to relax and do nothing for a change.
Yesterday I went ot the city tourist information, because they had sent a postcard to Kristian , welcoming him to Helsingborg ( he lives here for 3 years now, hehe… ). He was asked to pick up his welcome package, so I picked it up for him, It contained some brochures and a picture book about Helsingborg. A nice gesture, even if it was paid for with my tax money , but hey, no problem 🙂

Farandir and I are working on a conversion of a Battlefield-type map from OFP to Armed Assault. We have already eliminated some errors , but there seem to be so many differences between the games that it is really tricky to even understand the scripts and fix error messages.
I am learning as I go along and it is fun to work with Farandir. He has also finished his first exams at university and has almost finished with his study now. He will become a lawyer.

Finally, here ar some images showing the snow around our house…
it is not really cold, just around -2 to -5 .

Of course CG was very excited to run around in the snow, so I dropped him in the garden 🙂

Visit to the beaver habitat

On one of our walks at the island of Orust we circled around a lake which was nicely located between to ridges. We could see many trees being cut down close to the water. Soon we understood that the trees were not cut for firewood or timber, instead a beaver used it for food. It was not just small trees, huge old trees, 30 cm in diameter were cut down and you could see the branches also cut off and used for food or building the dam at the end of the lake.

The entire lake was flooded, not only because of the heavy raining I think, but also from the dam built by the beaver. Some of the forest had died on a part where it had been flooded for a longer period of time. The naked dead trees were standing there looking old and mysterious. These were all spruce which the beaver did not seem to like. We had serious trouble to cross the creek leading from the lake.

We of course looked hard in order to spot the beaver or even his nest. We used the binoculars to look for some movements in the water that could reveal his position and the sides of the lake to see if he was working on some tree on the other side of the lake at this very moment.
This was a nice hike circulating the lake and the beaver will always make this day a very nice memory. It was so peaceful around this lake on this January day, we only heard some birds and the some occasional rain drops. There was a sign saying that one of the paths we walked along was once upon a time one of the major roads across Orust and there were many traces of settlements around the lake. A hundred years ago it was probably a place were many persons lived or visited, today only the two of us and the beaver visited this beautiful place.

A soup for 65 Swedish Crowns. With Bread !

When we were on vacation we tried to escape the weather from time to time by doing little side trips. The area is rich with castles, shopping cities like Uddevalla and Gothenburg and even a zoo, called Nordens Ark, which has tigers now, surely not a native animal of Scandinavia ( at least not in the years since the last ice age…

So, on one day with particulary miserable weather we decided to drive to Gothenburg and visit some museums we had not seen yet, one is the Museum of World Culture and one is called Universeum, a kind of adventure-animal-aquarium-kind of thing. With a bistro, more about that later.
It mostly caters to kids, but they have a nice selection of snakes, among them an Anaconda, and a shark aquarium, so we paid the hefty entrance fee ( hey, it is vacation time .. ) and marched on. Here is a picture of the shark Herrmann, a very lazy shark…
We saw the shark feeding and expected at least some minor ‘JAWS’-like action, but nothing. The lazy shark Herrmann would not even bite into food which was practically stuffed into his mouth. Oh dear…
Here are some snakes ..
And here is something for all those people who believe things are cheap in Sweden.They are not. I honestly have not found anything that is cheaper than in Germany and certainly not than in the USA.
After all the shark feeding we wanted to get some food ourselves, it was lunchtime and in Sweden there is something called Dagens, which is basically a cheaper version of something on the menu served only during lunchtime, often including some extras like a soda or coffee, or bread , salad etc..

A nice example of the outrageous prices which people just accept here and pay, a soup of asparagus, with bread and a salad buffet ( for you US-readers, NOT a real buffet but some bowls with salad stuff from cans … ) for 65 Skr. That would be 6.50 Euros ! Ridiculous… It was also the cheapest item on the menu. I am also almost 100% convinved that the soup came form some can … And, did I mention you had to wait for 15 min ( the bistro people had a little exchangable sign on the wall stating how many minutes you have to wait for warm food. they should really invest in a second microwave … ) to get your 6.50 Euro soup ?
I am not a cheap person and I do spend money if I think it is ok, but this, this was not definitely not ok. I was always wondering how people can live here in Sweden with these low salaries, compared to Germany or the US, but they do get along somehow. Amazing.

Kampfzwerg ? ( a fighter-dwarf ?? )

My clan friend DaddyBear just sent me this picture from our clanparty where we went for a paint ball fight… hehe..

A great cooperative game in Armed Assault ( finally !)

Today ASO decided to have the training on the armed-assault.de server instead of hosting ourselves and to participate in the weekly coop-night there. As a 5-man ASO squad of course, which brought some friendly comments and respect, quite nice.
Visit their website too… I played a medic and healed three soldiers:). Not as easy as it sounds, as you have to make sure you are not in immidiate danger and , even more tricky, you can quickly find the wounded … a lot of challenge and also satisfaction . After almost 2 hours the game unfortunately crashed for me… but still, it felt good to play with normal, calm people a good game
and be successful. Armed Assault is fascinating, a wonderful game idea, despite all the critics….
Do not listen to all the whining, just get a copy and play it. You will not regret it, if you are patient and give yourself time to get accustomed to the game controls and the concept.

Anyway here are the screenshots… keep always in mind that I play with medium settings, a compromise between the graphical quality and the game performance.

ASO squad of rangers getting ready to clean the city.

And after the battle….

Vacation is about avoiding the crowds

Some like to spend their vacation together with many other people, some do not. Some want to have the nicest possible weather, some do not.

Orust is a perfect target for a vacation in January if you can be without the tourist crowds and are not afraid of some rain.

The picture is from our visit to Mollösund on the south side of the island Orust last Sunday. It was raining heavily and the wind from the sea did not give any good opportunity for photos. Mollösund is an old fisherman´s village, a lot of small houses, all made of wood and painted white, placed closely together on the dark gray rocks. I can imagine that here is lot´s of activity in the summer, but now the feeling you get when walking the narrow streets is almost ghostlike.

Back at our house it is good to boil some hot tea and read a book, eat some chocolate biscuits that we bought at the Göteborg kex biscuit factory shop in Kungälv (a whole plastic bag full). If you sit quiet, you can here the mice running inside the walls of this old farm house.

We discovered a new hiking trail right outside our house, called Kuststigen. We followed it for a while but since we did not have any map we turned back after a while. One day we visited the tourist information office in main village Henån on the north side of the island. The tourist office is actually open all year round, but only for a couple of hours per day in the winter. We asked the nice lady there about the new Kuststigen hiking trail, she had heard of it but did not know any more. She actually offered to do some research and call me back, she was probably bored and needed something to keep her occupied. I guess there are not that many visitors at here information office in January. She called back after a couple of hours, but unfortunately she could not offer any information or map. The trail is still under construction. During our week we encountered the Kuststigen trail two more times, we will come back to these events later.

Back from vacation

It has been some time since I posted last and we have just returned from a 1-week vacation on Orust island in Sweden’s westcoast. Although the weather initially was rainy and windy we still had some great hikes and enjoyed the days off work. We had rented a little cottage, in Swedish called stuga, although it was more of a house, with floor heating and satellite TV ( which did not work .. ). I will write about our time there now every day, there is not much else to write about otherwise, as it is stormy again in Helsingborg, no snow and rain all the time. Here is a picture of the rented cottage to start with:
On Saturday, 6-JAN-2007, we drove from Helsingborg to Orust. This day is a public holiday in Sweden, the so called Trettondagjul. It marks the end of the Christmas holiday, ‘Epiphany’ in British English . Anyway, we arrived early and it started to rain :(, so we decided to stay indoors and enjoy the house and the TV. It was only the first day and there was still hope it would be better weather for the rest of the week. How wrong you can be …

A stormy welcome to 2007 !

Still no snow in southern Sweden, but during the first day of the new year 2007 we got a nice storm with wind velocities of 33 m per second.
All the trash from the new year’s night celebration was flying around when we had a walk today. However, we found an unopened Carlsberg beer can ( !!), and we got pleasantly wet and miserable. Not a good weather to be outside. Here is a screenshot from Xmas day, when we went to the coast at Rydebäck near Helsingborg ( weather being much better ) . The sunshine soon turned to fog coming in from the sea… we had to shortcut over a golf course back to the car. To be honest we were lost totally in the fog actually, it came in fast…But it looked very nice. 🙂 As I had phone duty again I have also played a little over the holidays, but to be honest, it wasn’t too exicting, crashes to desktop, game slow, and most of all the bugs. Players joining later and into my own avatar… it is not fun like it was before. The feeling to play for hours and hours is gone. I am a little sad about it, but that is how it is . Maybe I am getting old too.

Some more images from yesterday when we went to Råå beach, an old fisher cillage, now a part of Helsingborg. It was already very windy… here is Kristian . And here am I, well wrapped in clothing and ‘blowing in the wind’ …
View towards Helsingborg, the KEMIRA chemical plant ( very nice by the way, haha.. ) in the background. In the foreground one of the many bunkers which are everywhere on the coast here, parts of Swedish fortifications to protect against a possible German attack in WWII. The beach was full of shells from the storm. I wonder how it will look tomorrow, more storms and more stuff drifting in the from the North Sea….