stoff
Maybe I should explain what a “Star Trek”-day is for those that don’t know. It’s when a bunch of us trekkers in Stockholm (also known as “Stockholm Trekkers“) get together in Skarpnäck and some of us watch “Star Trek” or some other science fiction and some of us just sit around talking about what’s new and happening and alot of talk about TV and movies and tech-stuff. It’s a great chance to catch up on what’s happening with alot of my friends that I don’t get to talk to as much as one should. And to see some old classic “Star Trek” episode. And to indulge because we usually end up eating pizza and candy, Coca-cola and alot of other sugary stuff!
And nowadays it’s also a chance for me to get away from home 🙂
This weekend has all the prerequisites to be a really great weekend!
We’re starting off tonight with tacos and hockeygame (Sweden vs France). Then tomorrow we have another Star Trek day in Skarpnäck. And on sunday we’ve got the Formula 1 from Turkey. And all the while the weather is supposed to be extremely good. And we’re gonna fix the concrete slabs for our greenhouse! Throw in some good sex in there and I can’t see hos we can fail to make ot great!!
Every morning on a normal working day at 7 am I hand my son Sam over to a woman I hardly know and everytime I get the feeling that I’m treating him like luggage at an airport – “here, take care of this and I’ll pick it up on the other side”. I hope I’m not the only one that feels like that? Because as we understand things this is what you do after staying home for a year?
Ofcourse we can only blame ourselves – if we had stayed in our old 41 squaremetet apartment we would have afforded being home more. Or if we’d lived closer to my family they’d happily take care of him. Bu we chose to build a house and it made sense giving a child the same comfort of growing up in a house like I did. But considering that choice now means we have to check him in at a kindergarten for 10 hours a day I’m wondering what’s more important for him…
The Internet is great for alot of things. One of those things is when you hear a quote and wanna check it up. Unfortunately, as everyone should know by now, you can’t really trust the results when searching at Google for example.
And when they offed Bin Laden a quote was circulating and attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. It was a good quote (“I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy“) but as it turns out it wasn’t him. Fortunately we still have some real journalists out there who actually do their fact-checks about stuff like this. And unfortunately we still have tabloids like Swedish Aftonbladet that will print anything on their website to make people click it. Like the other day when they said Chuck Lorre called Charlie Sheen a heroic addicted monkey. Had they just checked around they… well they probably would still have printed the story ’cause it’s juicy stuff, just not really good journalism. And that makes me a sad panda.
During my entire childhood my parents listened to “Chess”. ALOT! So much that I think me and my sister could probably “sing” (or whatever you may call it) most of the tracks from memory. But I had never heard the actual performance of it. I knew the recorded album like the wiring in my computer but never heard anything recorded live. And I’ve always looked for a DVD with a recording from that but never found one.
But thanks to Spotify I’ve now listened through the entire performance. After I got over the initial “this doesn’t sound right!” when the lyrics aren’t the ones I know it’s still pretty good. Although Björn Skifs made a better arbiter 🙂
Not sure when I’ll have the opportunity to pump it up on my speakers but looking forward to it.
I’m moving my blog to Blogspot. “Why?”… there are lots of reasons why!
Number one is my ability to update! With blogspot I can just send in a mail on my iPhone on the way to work, while in a meeting or slacking in the couch. I don’t have to log into a computer, find the site, login and browse my way to it.
Number two is the interaction part. You guys and girls can now comment on things here on Blogspot or their affiliates. Not gonna allow anonymoous because if you can’t put your name on what you’re saying maybe you shouldn’t say it.
Then ofcourse there are alot of other benefits too, like the tagging and stuff. I’ll have a huge job ahead of me migrating all of the updates from my database to this one but hopefully won’t be too hard. My photogallery will still be on my own servern though!
What do you think, is this a good thing or am I a sellout? 🙂
Our little boy Sam still isn’t 100% after all these weeks. The burns are almost gone now but he’s still coughing and sliming up the house and last night he even had a slight fever.
I don’t know if we’re just too paranoid or obsessive but it would be such a relief if he could just wake up one day and feel normal. We know it’s probably the normal RS-virus that every kid gets in kindergarten but that doesn’t make it any easier on us or him 🙁
On friday me and Helena decided to have a small BBQ with our small grill. What we didn’t really think about was that our son Sam have on multiple occasions used that BBQ as a tool to stand up. And for a few seconds I took my eyes off him and watching 2 1/2 Men on the TV and when my eyes went back to him he was just reaching for it. I yelled at him and ran as fast as I could but it was too late. He got burnt! At first we didn’t think it was that bad but when the swelling really kicked in we knew we had to see a doctor. So in to the ER where they bandaged it up in a nice neat package and we got an appointment Tuesday morning to see the burn-specialist that’ll take a better look, but they weren’t the least bit worried about it, they said he’d be fine. Unfortunately until then he’ll have a stump at the end of the left arm, as he’d lost his hand in an accident. It looks worse than it is, or so they say.
So those few seconds were all it took. After spending the winter looking after him like a hawk so he wouldn’t get burn on our indoor fireplace only to relax for a few seconds.
And you’d think he might have learnt something? Not, on Saturday morning he was all over that BBQ again (which ofcourse wasn’t lit)!
Sometimes being a parent sucks. Right now it’s trying to comfort our little boy who caught some bug at kindergarten and is now down with a cold. It’s so difficult when he’s to young to understand or to be reasoned with, trying to tell him he just has a cold and it’ll pass in a day or two, all he knows is he doesn’t feel good and he doesn’t like it.
But it’s kinda expected now that he’s in kindergarten. I got a little bit of a cold but not as bad as Helena that was totally out on monday. And ofcourse we didn’t help by exhausting ourselves on saturday..
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 🙁
Hope your Easter weekend was as good as mine!? Playing alot of computer games as always, but I also went out to my parents place to enjoy my mothers awesome cooking and a good old round of Trivial Pursuit (that I won, but granted, my father wasn’t playing) and it also happened to be a Formula 1 weekend but that race could’ve been alot better. Then off to a friend to try to fix her computer problems and just lame about. All in all an awesome weekend!
I also saw “300”. I had no idea about that movie until someone showed me a trailer a few weeks ago and the first thing I said was “that has to be seen on the big screen!” and on Friday I actually went to the cinema again to see it. Back in my teens I was a big fan of Greek mythology and stuff like that, and although this battle doesn’t really qualify as mythology I still remember reading about it. The movie was overall great, and I was right – it had to be seen in the cinema. As always with movies like this they get a few of the things wrong or left out (like the second part of the oracle’s prophecy) but overall a good movie. But one thing that really, really annoyed me all throughout the movie was all the muscles, pex and six-packs wherever you looked. Right away it annoyed me and it kept on annoying me. But I’m still gonna buy the DVD because it was still a great flick.
Ok I’m now the officially worst blogger since I haven’t written anything here in over 2 months now!
But after I’ve gotten back to work it’s all beeen pretty hectic in my life actually, both at home and at work. But I’m gonna have to chance that and make this a daily thing to get on here and make an update or two.
So what’s happening at work right now? Well I’m in the middle of upgrading our Adobe Connect from 7.5 to 8 which is not happening so looking at a fresh install instead, and that means having to do battle with SSLs again. And then we have SharePoint 2010 migration and on top of that we’re rolling out Windows 7 with new office and document management which is huge here.
At home my wonderful fiancé Helena is taking care of Sam and he’s just now begun kindergarten and so far it seems to be ok. Hopefully it’s not only because Helena is still there with him but we’ll see tomorrow when he has to deal with 5 hours there without her. Other than that it’s same old same old – trying to spend time with the love of my life while trying to get time to play some computer games, watching the latest episodes of House/Chuck/Big Bang Theory/SG:U and then there’s F1.
I am anything but bored 🙂
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 🙂
My life has turned into a series of routines as it is right now when I’m on parental leave. It’s just a matter of keeping the son happy, well fed and.. well that’s all really, everything else is a bonus! And I get about 1-2 hours of “else” every day which right now goes to “Starcraft 2”. Yeap, I finally gave up on “World of Warcraft”, it just wasn’t as rewarding continuing on lvl 85 as I’d hope. “Starcraft 2” is still challenging, I have a 50% win rate which I guess is as it was meant to be played (because the more you win, the higher rank you are and the better your opposition is so when you’re ranked perfectly I guess 50% is just the way it’s supposed to be).
ANYWAY, I’m going back to work in 4 weeks time, probably gonna spend the first week just catching up to what’s new and even what’s old since I haven’t been there for 6 months! Other than that everything is good, we’re still waiting for a place at some daycare so we can both work full time, not sure how that’s gonna work out otherwise!
Also trying to catchup with movies since we have missed alot since Sam was born. So far the best one has been “Tron 2” that we actually saw at the movies in 3D. But then again, you’d expect nothing else from a computer geek, right 🙂
Also updated alot in my photo album so check it out. You should know the password by now!
I’ve finally fixed the image album! So now you can all check the latest pictures of my son Sam 🙂 The password is still the name of my employer, all in lower case letters.
Here is the link to the image gallery.
Here is the direct link to the “best of Sam” album.
You know the old saying about the cobbler’s kid having no shoes? Well I again managed to prove that one.
At work we have one of the best redundancy/backup systems I’ve seen and we’re proud of it. But on the webserver running this website and more importantly NataliePortman.com I’ve totally ignored that part especially since my son was born. So two weeks ago we had someone hacking into the site and completely wiped the server for us. And unfortunately the last backup I had was back in march and april! So that’s why there’ll be several months missing here.
Yeah you can blame me for being really terrible at taking backups, but I really didn’t think anyone would hack the server and erase everything just for fun. I mean what’s up with that? :/
And this is the reason why there are hardly any entries for 2010.
This is the real first day of my parental leave! Helena has gone back to work now and I’m left solo with Sam, looking after, stimulating and feeding him as best I can and taking care of the household.
I’ve been way too busy in the past weeks to call this a vacation! My sister Amy with her family of four very well behaved kids and a hilarious husband was here in Sweden for a few weeks and I got to see them quite a few times, including a 20 hour cruise we took again (this time without the bad food that had me in bed by 20:30 last time!).
All in all, life is good right now 🙂
I’m officially on vacation right? I certainly haven’t noticed since I’ve been busy doing all those things I never had time for. Some of those things have been caught on camera and I’ve done some updating of my photo gallery.
1 – Midsummer Weekend with Helena’s brother and his family.
2 – Putting our pontoon back into the lake.
3 – Taking a stroll in Lövhagen with my family.
4 – Going to Kolmården with our neighbours and then a visit to the icecream restaurant in Söderköping.
And ofcourse some updates to my gallery dedicated to my son Sam.
Here’s hoping next week will be a little less eventfull!
Today is day 4 (of what, 190?) at home with my family. Although it’s been a weekend so it doesn’t feel as strange yet. Maybe it’ll hit next week when I haven’t logged in and checked the status of my Sharepoint farm at work 🙂
Biggest problem so far has actually been the heat! Our son really doesn’t like the heat we’re having now! He can’t sleep and is just grumpy all the time. So we’re thinking of a small air conditioner unit here if this goes on. Which based in the weather reports it will.
Other than that, we’re BBQing, watching movies, doing some home improvements and in 3 hours we have the Formula 1 race from Silversone (been there!).
And now I’ve finally worked my last shift at work for all year. No more work for me! Now it’s all about Sam!.. and Helena. And the house. And then me 🙂 And it’s gonna be good!
One thing I’m hoping to do is redesign this place again, it’s been a while. And I’ve had to transfer the site back to our NP.com server. The photo-section will probably be offline for a while but should be ok in a few days.
Take care!