bildjakt

Jag ordnade en bildjakt idag. Ordet finns inte på svenska. På engelska är det en "photo scavenger hunt". Vi traffades kl 14 och bildade lag. Var lag fick listan innehåller saker att fotografera och jakten började. Två timmar senare återsamlade vi. Laget med den flesta bilder vann. Enkelt, eller hur? För att bli en lite svårare, behövde var lag att ta med en maskot, som ska i var bild. Det fanns tre lag, och maskoterna var en spader dam, en björn, och ett hus.

I arranged a photo scavenger hunt today. There's no direct translation for that in Swedish so use the term "bildjakt" ("photo hunt"). We med at 2pm and formed teams. Each team got the list containing things to photograph and the hunt began. Two hours later we got back together. The team with the most pictures won. Simple, yes? To make it a bit harder, each team needed to carry a mascot that needed to be in every picture. There were three teams and the mascots were the queen of spades, a bear, and a house.

Här står listan och några bilder.

Here's the list and some of the pictures.

Buddha (äkta eller staty) - Buddha (real or statue)
symbolen för planeten Mars -- the symbol for the planet Mars
en kanon kanon (storre än 1,5 meter) -- a good-sized cannon (bigger than 5 feet)
en trähjul -- a wooden wheel
en i laget på en gunga -- someone in the team on a swing
en helikopter -- a helicopter
en segelbåt -- a sailboat
nån som spelar gitar eller trum -- someone playing a guitar or drum
en stor klocka vid kl 14.45 -- a big clock at 2:45pm
buss 18 -- bus number 18
Fibonaccital (minst 10 tal i sekvensen) -- the Fibonacci sequence (at least 10 numbers)
tre vinkande tjejer (inte från laget) -- three waving women (not from the team)
den amerikanska flaggan -- the American flag
en flaska Glenfarclas whiskey (min favorit) -- a bottle of Glenfarclas whiskey (my favorite)
en skylt med orden "Byggd år _____" och året innan 1908 -- a sign with the words "Built in ____" and the year before 1908
en katt (mjau!) -- a cat (meow!)
en väggbonad -- a tapestry
en traditionell norsk kniv så väll som ägaren -- a traditional Norwegian knife as well as the owner
en massa sorts ost -- a large cheese selection
en polishäst -- a police horse
eld -- fire
hallon -- rasberries
en kram från en främling -- a hug from a stranger
en stenlejon -- a stone lion
köttättande växter -- carnivorous plants
en Paddanbåt -- one of the Paddan tourist boats
Centralstationen -- the main train station
grafit -- graphite
kanelbullar -- cinnamon rolls
något på kinesiska -- something in Chinese


Här står några av bilderna från två lag. (Jag kunde inte koppla kameran från den tredje till datorn.)

Here's some of the pictures from two of the teams. (I couldn't connect the camera from the third team to my computer.)

Det fanns en massa Buddhar i Göteborg. There's a huge number of Buddhas in Gothenburg.

Från en staty av solsystemet. From a statue of the solar system.

En kanon kanon! A huge cannon!

Jonatan på en gunga. Jonatan on a swing.

Buss 18. Jag gillar den här bilden. Bus 18. I really like this picture.

Fibonnaci sekvensen på en mur. Konst är ju konstigt. The Fibonacci sequence on a wall. Art is indeed strange.

Kinesiska Generalkonsulatet. (Något på kinesiska.) The Chinese Consulate-General. (Something in Chinese.)

Tre vikande tjejer, på en möhippa. Three waving women, on a bachelorette party. In Sweden they usually go out dressed in funny clothes and do strange things, so it was perfect for this event.

En väggbonad i Domkyrken A tapestry in the cathedral.

Eld! Om jag hade bara fyrverkeri... Fire! Now if I only had some fireworks ..

En grafitpenne. Bra gjort med bilden! A graphite pencil. Nicely done picture!

En kram från en i en annan möhippa. A hug from someone in another bachelorette party.

Kanelbullar från min favorit bakverkförsäljare, i Saluhallen Cinnamon rolls from the woman at my favorite bake shop in Saluhallen.

Bron byggde år 1901. The bridge was build in the year 1901.

Shorts

I've noticed something at the gym. I usually have the shortest shorts of anyone there. I wear swim trunks, and they aren't that short. The bottoms are an inch or two above the knee. When I was in elementary school we had a dress code. Not a dress uniform, mind you, just a dress code. One was that shorts could be no shorter than about an inch from the knee. I remember measuring the gap one morning to check if it was decent. It was - if I stood up.

That was in the 1970s, and shorts then could be really short. My swim trunks now would fall within the dress code, assuming scaling since my legs are a bit longer now. But I look around and nearly everyone is wearing shorts that go below the knee. I'm always wearing some sort of loose T-shirt, usually from some conference I've been to. I see again that nearly everyone else wears some sort of close-fitting gym clothes. Which probably do a better job of wicking.

It's the middle of summer here in Sweden. Many people are on vacation. The weather is warm, for Sweden. Nights get down to about 12C/54F which means I can be sitting on the small balcony at night enjoying the cool air, so long as I have a sweater on. A few times it's been warming enough to not need the sweater. It's after the solstice and the days are getting noticeably shorter. Around midsummer even in the darkest of night I could see lightness in the northern sky. Now there's a few hours of real dark. Winter's coming. But not for a while. :)

hardware

I've been looking for a bike. There's some I like which are really expensive. About $1,000. I want something cheap that I don't mind getting stolen. Nearly every place sells only new. I've been asking friends for recommendations, and Claire recommended "Biltema". "Bil" means "car" and I think it started out as a car store, then expanded into boats and hardware and outdoorsy things.

I didn't like the bikes. The prices were right. I'm looking for something with more than 3 gears. I would like only hand brakes, like my old bike had, but most city bikes here are foot breaks, with perhaps also one hand brake. But I've also decided that I want the fuzzy warm feeling of having someone knowledgeable helping me out, and this was a big box store. Yep, Sweden has big box stores. I was about to link to an aerial map but most of the way through figured out that, really, it's an aerial photo of a bunch of big box stores surrounded Christo-like by parking lots.

Tomorrow then (Sunday, but I wrote this on Saturday and didn't post it until Monday) will be another day of walking, walking, walking. Not that I mind overly much, but it is starting to get monotonous. Perhaps that's another reason I should relocate in this town. On the plus side, I've discovered a new way to get to the Linnéplatsen area, so I don't need to move just yet.

Many stores are open on Saturdays but with short hours. I went to one recommended store which might sell used bikes and found it closed at 1pm. I got there at about 2pm. I browsed a bit at Myrorna ("the ants" - it's run by Sweden's Salvation Army. In Swedish you say "busy as an ant", which might explain the expression, or perhaps the old story about the cricket not saying up for the winter while the ants were working. I don't know if that's made it here.). Just looking at what clothes I might want to buy. I really need a new belt and pants.

Then to Biltema, which closed at 4pm, so I had 30 minutes to look around. After decided against the bikes I just looked at what I could buy, and got tool envy. All my tools are in my sister's garage, or given to Geoff. One and the same - I think it's cheaper to buy new tools here than to get them here from the US. Though I'm allowed a one-shot no import tax when importing your living goods shipment, so perhaps that's something to think about.

I grew up a Sears hardware family. My grandfather had Craftsman tools, and my Dad, and I bought them too. Sears died away as the place to go, and I started going elsewhere for tools. I really like this place in Illinois called Black's hardware. I was looking for a router bit and they had a really nice selection. In Santa Fe the best place was Big Jo on Siler. The sort of place where you get that nice, warm, fuzzy help from someone knowledgeable.

Black's, as well Napa auto parts, has a special sort of feel. In some sense they are intimidating. There's a big table, with all the parts and tools and whatnot behind it on the shelves and you have to say "I want a 2 3/4 inch whatzit" as if you know what you're talking about. Whereas sometimes I am just browsing to think how cool it would be if I had a job where I could use all these beautiful tools. Who actually buys the 3" i.d. nuts you can find at these stores?

At the checkout line at Biltema was a set off poor quality box wrenches. They didn't have a good feel to them like Craftsman tools did. What set them off is they were anodized. Each size with its own color. I thought that was cool, but it doesn't fit well with my mental image of what a Serious Mechanic would use. Again, they didn't feel right, so I wouldn't have bought them.

While there are nice aspects to not having much stuff, I do miss the idea that if something breaks, I've got the right tools, or at least close enough, to fix it. Now I don't even have a screwdriver .. no, wait, I do have a small one .. now I don't even have a wrench. I could get one, but I've got no need for it, and I know I'll be moving again within a few months.

190

Some 7 years ago I weighed 225 lbs (that's 102kg to the rest of the world). This was achieved through years of drinking sugared soft drinks/sodas/sody-pops/cool drinks and sitting in front of a computer for 15 hours a day. I did bike places, and in California and New Mexico I would do some hiking, but not much and not intensive. And in both those companies we had access to free candy, pop-tarts, and whatnot.

Among other things, I saw a picture of myself and decided that it was too much. One of the reasons I quite working for companies and started consulting was that I could work less. Yes, I'm one of the few people who works less as an independent than when employed. I started dancing, and going hiking more often, and to the gym. I managed to get down to about 193 (87 kg). For reasons I won't get into here, I stopped doing some of that for nearly a year and got up to around 200 (91 kg).

I've stayed around that for a few years. Before leaving Santa Fe I found a gym I really liked, Carl and Sandra's gym in the DeVargas mall. It was much better than Santa Fe Spa, which seemed mostly full of anonymous people on their bikes and treadmills. C&S stressed weight training, and I found that my body reacts amazingly well to that. A few months before is when I started really being a dancer, meaning that I was going to clubs and lessons for about 22 hours a week. I wanted to learn to do dips and other tricks and figured that the strength would be helpful for that.

In reality it isn't as important as I thought. The dips and such I do are dependent on the woman keeping her own weight. But many women don't know how to do it, so as a consequence they feel very secure with me. And then there's the waitress at Buena Vista Social Cafe in Cape Town who loves being dipped so much she throws herself backwards and expects you to catch her.

With all my travels I stopped going to the gym, and I've not been dancing as much. Only about 11 hours a week, and more of it is tango. I have a very intense, energetic tango style, but it's not salsa. I've been walking more, but burgers and fries, and yummy chocolate bars, and kebabs all are so delicious.

In the back of my mind I wanted to get back to the gym, and lose more weight. Now that I have an income, and am sure I'll be here for a while more, and because of this wonderful spring feeling, and for other reasons in my life, I felt like it was time to do that.

I started about 6 weeks ago, again with an emphasis in weight training. I like Markus' phrase "explosive power." The gym also does group classes, and I've enjoyed a few of those. One is "funk," which is more choreographed, and uses a lot of moves and feelings that I don't have from my other dances. It's an hour every Monday evening. Another is "core", which stresses the core muscles. There's still a ways to go before I'll be able to do that 30 minutes without having to take a breather part-way through. Following that is African dance, which is mostly fun. Again, new moves, but that one's not so hard, although I don't have the feeling down.

Not quite two weeks ago there was actually another guy in the funk class. I'm otherwise the lone male representation, and I put in a good showing. He was lost in the moves, and in the locker room afterwards asked me how long I had been dancing. Sometimes I forget that I really am a dancer.

I also tried out a new dance style, contact improvisation. Åsa (one of the several tango dancers I know named Åsa) suggested it to me last year. I have a very engaged style in my dance. Women like to dance with me because they feel safe even when I ask them to do new, steps they didn't know they could do. If it doesn't work out, I recover nicely too, because I pay close attention to my partner.

Contact improv stresses that connection. Not all dancers have it. Kartar, back in Santa Fe years ago, was a great help in my early years of social dance, and she's just a nice person too. She among other things helped me get over my initial worries about dancing close to a woman - the tango term is on-body - when we danced merengue. She also taught me a technique of dancing salsa with only a forehead-to-forehead connection. I practiced it and got decent at it, but don't use it much. The last time it worked out well was a couple months ago when I visited Santa Fe again and danced with Corinna. That went amazingly well. I tried it again here Wednesday last week with a woman who is a great salsa dancer, but she couldn't keep the connection going.

By now you're probably curious on what this dance looks like. There are various movies on YouTube, like this one. But it doesn't do justice. It really is the contact between the people that's key, and unless you've had a lot of practice in dance you follow it in the video. It just looks like some sort of weird post-modern art form. Which, umm, it is. You're also probably thinking it's not something you could do, because it intrudes into your personal space, or you don't know how to move like that, or it just plain looks weird. I agree. It's not something I could have done, say, 5 years ago, and for those reasons. I am a dancer now, and I know how to move a lot better than I did then, and how to be close to people, and how to keep personal space even when close. Sara says I'm always the gentleman when I'm dancing. Apparently there are some pretty nefarious people on the floor. I wonder how the contact improve people handle those cases.

Anyway, today news was that I weight myself and I'm 190 lbs (86.2 kilos). It's the first time I've been this light since the early 1990s. The next threshold will be 180 (81.5kg), which is what I was about the time I started college. I figure for now my target is 175 (79kg). There's still a ways to go for that. I've been looking at weight charts to see what a good goal is for my height but most of the ones have warnings that they are not for athletes. When do I count as an athlete? Which is another weird way for me to think of myself, just like saying "I am a dancer" once was.

Next, I need to get a bike. I had a one year pass for the tram which expired last weekend. There's great mass transit here, but to get to where I do most of my dancing requires two or sometimes three connections, and a bike would make things so much more convenient.

Swedish spring

I moved to Sweden a bit over a year ago, on the evening of April 30th. That means I came here at after the start of the Swedish spring. In my many visits here I've sampled the different seasons, but never lived through the transitions. Now I can say that I have. The only time I haven't been here is for Easter, when the witches are in their way to Blåkulla.

There's an expression that Swedes survive winter because they know that summer is coming. I now completely understand that. It's been amazing the last few weeks watching life explode. I joked that the flowers were stampeding. The changes were visible almost hourly! People have been sitting outside, and enjoying the sun, and friends are getting more and more freckled every day. I'm sitting on the small balcony enjoying the late evening sun (it's 8:30pm) set over the buildings that I almost can no longer see through the trees that so recently were bare.

It's been close, but I haven't quite dared to go out without at least an overshirt. (Geoff's old one, for those in the know.) but I've seen others stretched out on the lush grass in shorts, enjoying the day. Mmmm...

I can vote!

I went back to my old home town of Santa Fe, New Mexico to attend the OpenEye conference. Afterwards I stayed for a while to dance, visit friends, eat green chile, enjoy seeing mountains, and things like that. Got a bit of a sun tan too, that a lot of people remarked about when I got back to Sweden.

One of my errands was to get registered as an overseas voter. All I can vote for are federal elections, but I do so based on my last residency, so I'll be able to vote for representative and senator this year. (Domenici is quitting - yeah! - and my rep, Tom Udall, is going for the seat.) Oh yes, and president.

From what I can tell, the City of Santa Fe (full name in its lovely glory is: La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís) is well run. The few times I've dealt with them has been enjoyable. Once was when I went to the neighborhood association meeting, and people from the city came by in their off-hours to tell us about the long term plans for the area and hear grievances. One of the neighborhood people had sent a multiple page listing of all the problems he had spotted, like problems with drains and walkways and things like that. To me I thought he was a bit petty, but the city guy said he had gotten it, checked it out, about half were real problems, and they would schedule them to be fixed.

Another time was when I wandered about City Hall wondering if I could get a map of the neighborhood. I met the GIS guy and he was very helpful and friendly.

This time I again wandered about, asked a woman at a desk that looked like it was a "ask me questions" sort of place. She said to go to another building, and with a bit of clarification I knew which one that was. Went there, walked in the door, first left and I was in the correct office. There was a bit of confusion as I explained myself, but a phone call cleared up what they needed from me. I filled out a form, made a mistake, got another form, and get it to the helpful guy behind the desk.

Just made me feel all happy about my government.

I haven't missed a federal election since I gained suffrage.

phone go bye-bye

There I was in Chicago walking around downtown with Evelyn and someone else from the conference. We had visited the Mac Mothership store where I bought a new iPod, and a replacement power cord for the one I left in Sweden. Well, it was frayed and I had meant to buy a new one anyway. We were crossing the State Street bridge (just next to Marina City - the twin corncobs) going south.

One of my irrationalities is a fear of heights. I have made it to the top of the Washington Monument and looked out through the windows, but I was bodily leaning inwards the whole time, just to make sure the offset weight didn't topple the structure. Yes, I know it's irrational. So crossing a drawbridge isn't as bad, but I'm thinking "okay, I'm just walking, nothing dangerous here, don't look down, don't think about it."

While distracted that way I didn't think of the fact that I was, indeed, walking across a bridge. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to see what time it was. I dropped it. It clattered on the sidewalk and over directly into the gap in the middle. I'm thinking that perhaps it was stuck some place where I could reach it ... moved over to look down through the gap ... which framed the splash very nicely. I wonder if the phone-using fishes know enough Swedish to figure it out.

Looks like I've ruined another phone. My first two went bye-bye in the wash. Not the same wash. I didn't learn the first time. I had a rest-of-the-world phone, a Nokia 1100 which was a great little phone. It's designed for developing countries, and also for people who don't use the phone much. But it was stolen from my house in Santa Fe. Good luck thieves - it don't work in the US. I got rid of my old Motorola when I left the US. And now this one. So a MTBF of about 2 years per phone. Not so good.

Better than my record with PDAs.

The phone I dropped in the Chicago river was a cheapish one, and one I didn't like. It has a color screen that's almost impossible to read in daylight - luckily not a big problem in Sweden - and no flashlight. I miss that Nokia flashlight. I also got a pay-as-you-go SIM card that I never registered, so I've also lost my phone number, the saved numbers of my friends, and the $40 or so of time on the account. I think I'll get a real account when I return to Sweden.