[ Sorry, no picture this time!]
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
17.04.06
Web blog entry number twenty-four.
So we survived! Moving in between countries is not all that easy. First of all, its really expensive to bring any stuff with you, so for us it was cheaper to sell off most of it...which in turn means that you have to buy all basic things all over again in the new country...and we didn't have any apartment yet here in Germany, only a temporary one, so we had to send all our things to a magazine storage. When we arrived to Dusseldorf on the train, the only things we had were the things we could carry with us, and now after two months have passed it starts to get a bit annoying to say the least! Its incredible how used you get to your things and how little you value them, until you don't have them and you really, really would like to...take clothes for instance. Or shoes. Its nice to have more than one pair of shoes!! Emalda Marcos was right!
One thing I am impressed with however is my shaving machine that still runs even though I forgot to bring the charger. Talk about overspecified battery life length! But now I am slowly starting to get aclimatized to work and life in Germany (kind of shock in the beginning when you realize that Germans cannot speak English and the only way to communicate is in broken swedish/german combination and you feel like a Polish guestworker) and we were able to find this really nice apartment that we will move to in June, and we found a really nice car that I will tell more about later and Freya has a doctor, and we know where the supermarket is...and its spring, and...all things are getting there!Now I can start to relax a bit and focus on the really important questions, like what beer is the best? How to get tickets to the football worldcup? And most importantly: how to become really good in chess! More about that later also :) Great! Or gutchen! as they say down here!
Web blog entry number twenty-three.
Moving is on its way again but this times a bit further away.
All the way to Germany, Düsseldorf where I will begin a new career as
Solution Manager for the local Nokia office (I won't bore you with details).
Leaving from Finland feels really strange after 10 years. Things have been
good for me here despite divorce etc, so I do it with a bit of sorrow. I do
not know much about Germany, but I suspect Germans are more like Swedes than
the Finns, so in a way it should be easy to integrate.
What I don't look forward to is to learn two more languages and try to establish
a new social framework. Luckily of course Amandas whole family are waiting
for us, and they are quite many already...uncountable if I think about it
:)
This time we have expert help with the moving, which makes it a bit more easy.
But still we need to get rid of quite much stuff since we are on a strict
budget.
Being an old collector of "important things", it feels hard to part
from many old objects with emotional value. Like all my nice clothes from
my youth (Amanda has been quite hard on me :-).
We have put up a big sales site,
and if you are interested, go and check it out!
[ Link no longer valid ]
I will write more regularly now after we are down in Düsseldorf and we
are hooked to the net again.
29.10.05
Web blog entry number twenty-two.
Sebastian and Senja had autumnholliday from school and came all the way from Tervola in Northern Finland for a visit. Finally I may say, it is way too long time in between. But when they live so far away its pretty hard to get the travel part arranged. This time my father was kind enough to come over, so he could bring them back in the middle of the week since he is a pensioneer.
We had a lot of fun. We went to the Tampere aquarium, tried all the toys, and spoke a lot. The kids are growing both in size and in person - both of them are getting more independent and they are developing their personalities...Senja is the little "spjuver", tagging after Sebastian and always planning some mild mischief. Sebastian is the "order" person and keeps track of both little sister and us grownups if he gets the chance.
Freya was all big eyes and followed the kids around with her eyes. She seemed to have a lot of fun when they came to give her some attention, but as always with Freya, when there is too much excitement, she gets all tired, so now she has been kind of resting after the kids left.
My father is coming back today for another day with us, and then he goes back to sweden again. Tampere has become more in wintercolors and the first snow came two days ago. Brrrr...
5.09.05
Web blog entry number twenty-one.
The last few weeks have been busy travelling. First I left with my workfriends to Estonia for a boat trip. A few days later I was going on a business trip to Switzerland and now this week we have been down to see Amandas family in the Netherlands. Puh!
Travelling around in middle-
europe you somehow feel that
the people and countries have a lot in common, but there are of course differences. Swiss people really seem to have an obsession with money for instance. The taxi drivers in Zürich were all giving good tips on how to get around for as little money as possible. And in Netherlands, people are incredibly curious about other people. Everyone wants to know as much as possible about everyone else...they even build their houses in such way that its almost impossible not to look in. In fact, you are supposed to look in to people's houses, and if someone is home, they will wave to you and smile...it is somehow a little bit too much aquarium living for my taste :)But now it feels nice that we are home and that there are a few weeks now with no more travelling. Only work and normal life with my family. Great!
10.08.05
Web blog entry number twenty.
Constructing a chess board.
This weekend I started to construct a chess board just for fun. To begin with, I bought two floor boards in oak and birch tree for the white and black squares. Using a precision saw, I could divide them into 32 squares of 5 centimeters each. The squares where then glued together in rows and the rows by column.
There are a number of lessons from this project. The first one is that even a precision saw makes misstakes, and the misstakes propagate. If you have a 1 mm error on 4 of your pieces, it will be noticable.Gluing of a flat low surface made up of many parts is difficult. It easily happens that one of the "joints" will bend up, making the surface uneven. Since I needed to make the board thinner, I had to use a plane machine (hyvel).
3.08.05
Web blog
entry number nineteen.
This is a bit of a golden story:
Making a map for
the kids I beforehand went out and hid a couple of coins in a matchbox.Finding
this "treasure" was fun for Senja but not for my older son Sebastian
that figured out immediately that the whole thing was staged.Instead he drew
his own map and urged us to follow him on a hunt for a real treasure.Said
and done! We took Freya in the pram and followed the map towards promised
gold! And...surprise over surprises: about the same place where sebstian had
marked an 'X' on the map, we did indeed find a treasure!On a tree branch in
the forest someone had hung a bracelet that, considering the moment, became
at least 500 years old and worth a fortune.Its
good that my kids couldn't read the little "made in china" insignia...
