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Yesterday I finally got in the “Star Trek Online” beta! It’s an online roleplaying game in the Star Trek universe. And being a huge trekker and huge Warcraft geek I think I’ll like it. So far I love it! Some parts of the game feels like being in one of the episodes, really well made. Although it’s almost more than what my graphic card can handle!
When creating a character you have to chose name, which was relatively easy. Then you have to name your ship. Which was easier ’cause my first thought went to my best friend Eden who passed away almost 8 years ago. So if you’re in the game and see a ship named USS Eden pass by, that’ll be me 🙂
Since every other site is summoning up the past ten years I thought I’d do the same. Because the past ten years have been completely revolutionary in most ways for me.
10 years ago I was just settling into my rental apartment in south of stockholm, never having set foot in the northern parts of Stockholm. Didn’t have a drivers license, worked at the “customization” department at a computer retailer, didn’t have a girlfriend or even any prospects and was rarely going outside the Stockholm region.
Then I got promoted, lost my job, got a new job, got my drivers license, got to travel the world for the state department, got laid off again and got a job at a former customer. And that was just in the first five years. But then I got so comfortable that I have really no reason to look for any other job!
In 2005 I had my 30 year crisis and was slowly realizing that you really need someone to share your ups and cheer you up in your downs. But it wasnt until 2006 that I really understood just how much I needed that and after “playing the field” for 2 years I was almost ready to give up when I was contacted by Helena through an internet dating site and I realised quickly she was something special! We met for the first time 3/3 in 2008 and by September I was moving in with her. Then in April we signed the papers to have a house built and in June when the house was being built we found out we were pregnant.
So now, 10 years after, I’m living in my own house (north of Stockholm!), have a good job, good friends, awesome fiance and in 7-8 weeks I’m gonna be a dad. So except for still going to “Star Trek” events, watching Formula 1 and playing computer games nothing in my life today is as it was 10 years ago.
Overall the past 10 years have been very good to me. Except one huge thing. 10 years ago my best friend was Eden. I loved that guy and for who he was. In February 2002 he died only 32 years old. That was a huge bummer but taught me a little bit about appreciating live. Still find myself thinking about him.
And now for a very adult comment – I really hope the next 10 years is way less eventful! I don’t want to move and don’t want to lose my job and I don’t want to lose anymore friends. 🙂
Have a great 2010 everyone!
Do you remeber this? My monologue about how terrible “Star Wars Episode I” was and why it sucked so bad? It was written back in 2001 and my english & typing is so bad I’m embarrassed but it was written for fun.
Well this guy here takes it to a whole new dimension! How long did that guy work on this clips? Months probably! And they are hilarious, brilliant and makes so many good points, everything from shallow comments like “what’s that doing there” to downright deep analysis of lightsaber duels! It’s really fun if you have the time (7×10 minutes)
Although it was a hectic few days to get everything ready for our very first Christmas dinner ever it was so worth it! We were about 13 people there over the day, 6 stayed the night so a bit of planning but it was so fun! Helena’s brother with his family and my sister with her kids and my brother, and Helena’s mother, grandmother, it was all fun and most people had a good time. It was a bit tough in the evening trying to make sure people of four generations had a nice time (what can you do when the kids wanna play Guitar Hero and the grandmother wanna watch the news!?).
Then on Christmas day we went home to my parents for a more British christmas with turkey and the crackers and even more fun was had by all.
All in all a very merry christmas! Thanks everybody!!
Some photos can be found here.
It looks like it’s going to be a very, very white Christmas here in Stockholm! It’s been snowing for days now and although the temperature is almost up to 0 again I hope the snow is gonna last atleast a day more so we can all enjoy a white christmas for the first time in I don’t know how long!
My darling Helena has worked her butt off trying to organize the perfect Christmas dinner! We’re having 11 guests over for Christmas eve so it’s gonna be busy! But it’s gonna be a blast I hope but it does hurt when you go to the supermarket and the total is up to $200!
And this winter landscape encouraged me to take out my old camera (since our new one sucks, we sent it back to Canon to have a look at it ’cause it must be something wrong with the optics) to take some “screenshots” of a white christmas. And the best photo of them all is here. I liked that one, alot! 🙂
I’ve added a new album in my image gallery so head over there.
And Merry Christmas if I don’t have time to write something tomorrow!
Yesterday I was flipping through our channels and actually stopped on National Geographic. They were showing a 2 hours documentary called “Six Degrees Could Change The World“. And it’s just what it sounds like – a documentary with scientists and sociologists going through what would happend if the earth got one, two, three, four, five or god forbid six degrees hotter. The conclusions were not pretty. At two degrees it’d start spiraling away beyond what we could control and at 6 it’d be game over. And when it was produced we were at 0.8. And at the same time all the world leaders can’t unite in Copenhagen (which in itself is a huge CO2 fest flying in all the people all over the world)! And this morning in Metro they said behind each kilo of ham on the dinner table at christmas is atleast 10 kilos of CO2.
If that doesn’t kill the christmas spirit I dunno what does!
Hey everyone. As I mentioned in the update a few days ago I was working to get a new imagegallery up and running. It’s based on “ImageVue” which has some really cool things going for it but it lacked any form of password protection which made it impossible for me to use. Publishing pictures of me or my family has never been a problem but now when more than half of the pictures I take feature Helena or a member of her family I’ve had to have a password so noone can google their way there. For some reason Helena have been very good at keeping herself off the grid!
Anyway, here it is!
As before the username is “friend” and the password is the name of the company I work for, with a capital first letter. I know it’s easy to figure out but it’s good enough to keep it off Google anyway!!
I haven’t had the time to tag and put captions on all of the photos yet but the albums themselves should be tagged. I had to put the years 1975 to 2005 into a sub-album because otherwise the menu would’ve gone on forever!
I hope you like it. I do!
One of the things I had fixed for Helena’s birthday was to prepare a romantic weekend at Villa Fridhem in Norrköping for us in December so we could just get away and enjoy ourselves. And my family chipped in and set her up with a massage at the spa!
So on saturday we were off. After driving for two hours we checked in and the champagne was on ice! Ofcourse it was alcohol-free but that didn’t matter, the chocolate and strawberries still made it perfect! Then we had our first disappointment – the afternoon tea. It was just 3 cakes and one was just finished so we had two cakes and neither of them was any good. No cookies, nothing. Ok, we didn’t pay any extra for it but we were spoilt rotten the last time we did this in Söderfors Herrgård! After that we walked around abit and the feeling that hit me was “if I was in charge of this place I really would fix these million small things that they are missing”. Like when a horse pooped right in front of the entrance, took them hours to clean up!
Anyway, after that it was time for Helena’s massage – and it was good and went on for over an hour! Meantime I was enjoying myself in the swimmingpool with a cold beer! And as I was floating around I had one of those perfect moments when everything is good, no worries, no problems, nothing, cause everything is good! It sured helped that the day before we had gotten all of the assurances in the world that our baby was ok, and that one week before we had frozen two of our three mortgages for the house for 2 years and making sure that interest wouldn’t run away, and everything else was just good!
After that we had a shower and was off to the typical swedish “Julbord” (a buffet of traditional christmas-type food). And I kept eating and eating and at around 9 pm we were both so stuffed that we couldn’t do more than go to our rooms and watch some TV and talk and then go to sleep! It was ridiculous really. And we woke up the next morning still feeling pretty full but then it was time for breakfast which was pretty good but again, small things they should’ve changed to make it better. Like the waffles, took 10 minutes to cook a waffle!
After that we walked around a bit, took another dip in the pool and then we were off going back home. And then we stopped by the christmas market in stockholm city and bought some candy and sausages.
All in all a kick ass weekend! But I can’t help to shake the feeling that life is going a bit too good right now… just praying nothing kicks me down to reality!
And if you want photos they are located here in my new gallery.
Btw, you’ll need a logon for the ew gallery. The username is “friend” and the password is the name of the company I work for, with a capital first letter.
No updates must mean everything is going well. Right?
Well pretty well! We’ve taken our first “becoming a parent”-course which was mostly about the delivery and all of that, expect alot more next time. Today we listened to the heartbeat and Helena had all the measurements and samples taken and everything is super fine according to our nurse.
But tomorrow is a big day! Tomorrow we are gonna do a 4d ultrasound so we can actually see the baby’s face and feet kicking and all of that, really excited over that. We did it with her brother’s kid last year and it was exciting enough but not it’s our kid!!! 🙂
Will probably post pictures of it later!
Yeap, you read that right – I officially regret buying our house. It’s not due to any problems with the house or the building of it. Or the worth versus cost. Because it’s a good house and definitely worth what we paid for it. No, the reason I regret it is that I gave this guy our money!
To summarize – it’s our version of “CBS 60 Minutes” who try to nail “the powers that be” and this time they were after “Älvsbyhus” which is the company building the most houses in sweden per year. And they had 3 families who had their dreams turned into nightmares because of leaky roofs and heavy rain on the day of the assembly but most of all because of “Älvsbyhus” poor post-building customer service. Or lack thereof. When we got into this whole thing we quickly realised one key factor was if it was gonna rain on the day they’d be putting the house together, then we’d be in for a nightmare trip. And we also knew that you get what you pay for and “Älvsbyhus” is the cheapest option out there. But we also figured if they build 1.000 houses per year they kinda must know what they are doing. And we haven’t had any major problems (although we still have four outstanding issues after our inspection but they have promised to take care of it).
But then when you see the segment in “Kalla Fakta” and when they interview Donald Johansson, the CEO of “Älvsbyhus” and the entire thing gave me a terrible feeling of being ripped off. I actually gave my money to this guy!? They make some 150 million swedish crowns per year but his ego and “we are never wrong” mentality stops them from the goodwill factor of fixing these three families nightmares that would’ve cost them a maximum of 1.2 million swedish crowns and saved them from being blacklisted and that PR nightmare that was shown on the TV?! The arrogance, the condescending “you don’t know what you are talking about little girl” towards the journalist.. That f*cking old fart made Göran Persson look like a big care-bear!!
If I had seen this before we signed on I’d never have bought it and I sincerly hope they get alot of “we changed our minds” calls today ’cause a company that has a CEO like that deserves to go out of business. In my opinion.
Then again, if we hadn’t bought that house we wouldn’t be friends with Hanna, Micke and the Westbergs 🙂
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!
Had a very slow, relaxed weekend with alot of movies. Ended with a Christmassy market, overall a very good weekend!
Saw “District 9”. Not sure what to say about it or how I feel… it was an ok story, but a bit even and very graphical and very greasy and dirty. “My Life in Ruins” was the complete opposite, nice, sweet clean fun movie without any major thinking required to understand and appreciate. Then “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”. Had no idea what kinda movie it was, except it was kinda obvious it would be a version of “A Christmas Carol” and it was. Some funny moments and sweet but oh so predictable and cliche. Had it not been for Michael Douglas and his Hefner-clone character it’d been a waste of time.
And to finish it off we saw “The Hangover”. Best movie of all weekend. Hilarious as hell. No major thinking here either but that’s not a requirement 🙂
Did you see the new “V” series that just got started in the states? I was a big fan of the original when I was a kid because “look at the lasers man!” but even later when I grew up and saw it on DVD and when I got it! I got the reference to nazi germany complete with jugend, the resistance and collaborators and everything. I totally loved it and understood what Kenneth Johnsson was trying to do. And I even saw how it was turned commercial and why he bailed out on the show when it got serialized.
– ANYWAY – he’s back for another attempt! It’s only been one 44 minute episode but so far I don’t like it. I like it as a sci-fi show, definitely, but it has lost the historical references and all of that stuff. Instead we are told (and skip this part if you don’t wanna know, but this is said in the first episode!) that the aliens have always been here and they are the ones to blame for the state of the planet. The idea is that the aliens come here incognito and ruin the planet so when the real spaceships come people see them as saviors because “it can’t get much worse”. Isn’t that a huge let down, blaming aliens for the state of the world today? I thought that was a bit too easy, especially for the americans that again refuse to go along with the eco-treaties with the rest of the western world!! I way prefered the historical references and reminders like that…
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!
One thing I take some pride in is that I pay attention to and appreciate the small things in life and the small gestures in a relationship.
Today that backfired.
Everytime I leave for work I kiss my sweetheart, who is usually sleeping, goodbye. Today for some reason I missed that little thing for the first time as far as I know. 30 minutes later she texted me “are you angry at me?”.
Which ofcourse I’m not, I just this once missed 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!
You may have noticed this site is a bit faster now?.. that’s because I’ve setup a webserver at home that is hosting this site, so you no longer have to go through the states and it doesn’t share the server with NataliePortman.com. So it’s all good for everyone. Except my electric bill 🙂
I saw “G.I Joe” the other day. From what I could tell by the trailer it was gonna be one good actionride from start to end. But ofcourse the trailers doesn’t really tell you everything!
Because it was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. After about 10 minutes me and my fiance looked at eachother and said “is this a kids movie or for growups”. And after thinking about it, it should be for kids since it’s based on the toys. But did they have to make it THAT childish! Everything is over the top, from the cliches, the characters, the action, everything is amplified just so the kids get it while the grownups are asking “why are we watching this crap??”. After about 50 minutes I wanted to turn it off but she wouldn’t let me and forced me to watch the rest. And the only one plot twist was oh so very predictable! Can’t believe Jonathan Price agreed to this crap! And can’t believe Brendan Frasier agreed to it and was only in it for like 2 minutes!
This kind of movie is why people rather download than spend $20 going to the movies – ’cause you never know what movie is gonna be so bad that you’ll feel ripped off!
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!