From a friend of ours:
There is actually a lot of Sweden in New York, if you just know where to look. For example, they are now selling the 1970's progressive hippies most loved attribute, the backpack Kånken for $110. I had two when I grew up, both were used so much that they fell apart after years of use. Now they are in fashion on 5th Avenue (and AREA has one, green of course). The company Fjällräven (= the arctic fox) has opened its first store on Manhattan. Unfortunately their fantastic pants are just too expensive for normal people. Do you think any millionaires would wear Fjällräven pants? Maybe.
There is the cafe called FIKA, which we should check out sometime. But, didn't someone tell these guys that white text on devilblack background is very hard to read and doesn't look good? And guys, you are in the US, how about having American spelling and not British? And fix your grammar, it isn't even Swenglish sounding. Whoever made their website gets an F grade in user friendliness, design, and text. Oh, and there is no way to get back to the main menu when you have clicked on About... embarrassing. Oh, their coffee is Löfbergs Lila, which I do not like, it is in my opinion the most overrated Swedish coffee. Tastes burnt. OK, maybe I will go someone else instead, like the NewsBar.
There is even a Swedish bonfire party on April 30 to welcome the sun back (this is called the Valborg festivities in Sweden - a great excuse for lots of college students to get drunk and for many to sing old traditional songs).
And if you read this blog, know Swedish, and have an ipod, I highly recommend that you download free podcasts from the Swedish public radio. Sommar i P1 and Tankar för dagen are my favorites so far.
Finally, it seems like the intra-Atlantic mail is working again, after being stopped due to diabolical ash clouds from the mid-Atlantic ridge island...
Some people pay a lot of money for crap, be it from worms or mammals.... :)
Our big azaela (rhododendron) flowered like never before. It is up above 4 feet now so it is safe from the munching deers.
Seedlings are growing like crazy in our living room window, here are sweet peas (thanks EH!), cucumbers and many kinds of tomatoes. We also got lots of long bamboo poles for free from a local garden and we will use them to construct some new things in the vegetable garden, you will see later.
I sprouted the bean seeds inside for the first time to plant them out after germination, we will see if it works. This is called chitting, and these are Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans (long green beans, 'störböna'). And our Amelanchier ('häggmispel') flowered against a blue spring sky.
The Concord grape sent out fuzzy leafy shoots, and the peach tree also flowered for real the first time. We actually might have peaches for the first time ever, same with the pear tree. Amazing!
The red currant and goose berry bushes also flowered during our spring heat wave and are full of little berries. For once it seems like we will get enough fruits to have more than just one little taste. The raspberries are less happy after the harsh winter, but I know they will come back. I even have rhubarb plants now, they are finally taking off after 4 years of trying. Today is a rainy, rainy day and I had planned to move the last dirt into the moved raised bed for the peppers, and start digging up an area to grow tomatoes in the soil. We will see if I managed to get enough energy to go out and get wet from above and sweaty too.
There are more photos on my Flickr photostream.
VISION
Varje morgon vaknar LIVET
fylld av nya möjligheter
Varje morgon - nya chanser
att lämna det gamla som hindrar oss
Låt oss bejaka nuets gåvor
möta HOPPET, vår inre längtan
Låta LJUSET visa nya vägar
att dela GLÄDJE med varann
Till dig från Karin B Wahlberg
When you have gotten tired of your too colorful and contrasty screen background and need something black to rest your eyes on, try one of these. I love the one with the black labrador and the waterdrop on the chrysantemum petal. I know some readers of this blog probably would pick the black LEGOs :)
This one called leafage is by (matt) on Flickr (creative commons license).
1948_25a-400px.jpg)
A huge ash cloud is moving in over Scandinavia and Britain, and as of Thursday night all air traffic has been canceled in large parts of western Europe. Check it out on this map of flights in the air. See, not one plane over Scandinavia and the British Isles. The airplane's jet engines can get destroyed if they get volcanic ash, consisting of mostly glass, and etc, in them. The sunsets are nice too because of the extra pollutants, here are some photos of the setting sun in Europe from today.
We live in interesting times, indeed.
The volcano under Eyjafjallajökull is erupting on Iceland. Jökull means glacier and the mountain is called Eyjafjall. I found a good site with pictures, here, thanks boston.com, and the picture on top of this post too.
Iceland is a country known to me. Here I have stayed under the shadow of this very volcano, for months I lived there. Some evenings after the sun had set, the ice cap of Eyjafjallajökull seemed to glow with an inner light. I have no other way to describe it. Every morning you looked that way to see if you could see the volcano or if it was hidden in clouds. On the old postcard picture LS published you can see Eyjafjallajökull, the snowcovered mountain on the right.
Volcanos are amazing, and I have never felt more aware of Earth as an everchanging environment than here, in Iceland (Ísland). Here I have swum in hot water in natural basins, under the stars under the volcano Katla and Myrdalsjökull and in deep caves at Myvatn. I have dug my fingers deep into the sand in active areas and felt the soil being warmer in the ground than on the surface (Landmannalaugar). I have walked on 10 year old lava-fields at Krafla, still wenting sulphuric gas (Myvatn) and seen the mud boil (Namafjall) and water gush from geysers ("geysirs"). For a Swede used to old rocks of granite lying apparently unchanged for eternity this is a totally different experience. The ground is alive, and earthquakes is part of normal life.
Volcanoes are also scaring, they can overtake a lush country with thick ash layers. I have walked and ridden through ash-covered barren lands, where nothing but a few bushes and grasses can live. The southern coast of Iceland is covered in mile by mile of black volcanic sand.
I want to go there again, and experience nature in constant change. I wish I had been there overlooking the volcanic eruption as shown on the pictures. Instead I follow the events on the internet, like at the Volcanism Blog.
I am sitting here at home with a sinus infection and in between doing work work, gardening, and walking on the road to get fresh air, doing dishes and drinking tea, and sleeping and sniffling with a headache, I find little gems online.
How about this modelmaker, using body parts as backgrounds: ski slope, paint job, and bee keeper?
And this old photo of a combined beer garden, barbeque joint and gas station from 1940's Louisiana? I bet that bbq was good, not so sure about the beer :).
The Gods must have gone crazy. First we have two giant storms and hundreds, maybe thousands of trees fall down and most people get flooded, and a week later or so, we have 98 degree heat (that is 37 degrees Celsius). It has cooled down since then, but the spring took off with an explosion. My photos are still in the camera, so you just have to imagine green trees, purple lilacs, daffodils and cherry trees, all at once. We have already cut the lawn (with a mower that started on the first try after the winter rest, that was a record too!). A new fence is up around the garden, photos will come later. Inside, all my tomato seedlings are up, as are onion shoots and cucumbers. There is still lots to do before they can go outside, and the last frost date hasn't been yet. If we get snow now, a lot of plants would be really, really unhappy. And people too.
I have a somewhat adventurous cousin who lives in Tromso (Tromsø), the northernmost part of Norway. If you want to see how spring windsurfing is in a place where the snow never leaves and the ocean is ice cold year round, look below. This is filmed in March, a month ago, when they average about 4 hours of sunshine per day:
Windsurfing season opening, Tromsø 2010_03_07 from O Bra on Vimeo.
(Oh, you want to know what it is? I went to New York and had to go to the bathroom at Penn Station, and in the booth one tile was removed at eye height, and instead was this... about 150 chewing gums I think, all pressed in. You could get some good fingerprints here I think!)
This video made me suddenly love classical music a hundred times more...
(Thanks to OK for sharing)
Protons are colliding under the Alps and making small big bangs! Read more in this New York Times article that explains it.
Why You Can’t Work at Work. "With its constant commotion, unnecessary meetings, and infuriating wastes of time, the modern workplace optimizes interruptions and makes us all work longer, less focused hours." So true. Here is a video with Jason Fried to watch if you like. I agree with so much of this. I went to a talk about how to deal with too much e-mail last week, and will blog about it soon. Work is becoming chopped liver-time, not a place to think and make things. Guess why I try to work at home one day a week just to get peace and quiet and get writing done? And I don't even have a manager. But I get sometimes 100 e-mails in a day.
Strychnine, anyone? I want to read this book.
And then just for fun...
We got our antipasto, which probably was the best antipasto I have ever had. Especially the grilled eggplant. Wonderful food, really worth the money. The bread wasn't anything special I thought... Dry dinner rolls with whole wheat in them. Our pasta arrived, I hade seafood Fra Diavolo (seafood in spciy tomato sauce), and PP had pasta with prosciutti and peas in a creamsauce. His dish was fantastic, mine was OK. It was missing something, I am not sure what. But the whole time we ate the music was there gnawing in our ears, and we couldn't have a normal conversation... it was jsut awful. When we were done with dinner, I told PP - "lets go and have dessert at another restaurant, I just want to LEAVE". We paid and left, just a little more than an hour before we got there, which is not like us at all. 
A friend of mine says that the Peeps are best when you let them sit out of the box overnight so they develop a nice dry crust - then you bit into the hard shell and a soft, chewy middle.
The first Peeps where made in the 1940s. I bet you can grill them and make s'mores, but I have never tried.
Then came the competitions and challenges of the Peepshi. How to make a nicelooking sushi out of all junk food: Peeps, fruit by the foot (long bands of colored tough fruity things), and Rice Krispies treats, all things that my kids are familiar with. The competition spread to Flickr, where people started to add their home-designed junky sushi :) Enjoy! more photos here!
... is a great day for the local news media in Sweden. They get to write any stories they want to try to fool the people. I still remember the one in the early 1970s: "If you have a black and white TV and pull a nylon stocking over the front of it, it turns into color." Apparently many many Swedes tried this. And on April 1, 1950, the news was that new trolley airplanes would provide commuting options for the people in Stockholm. :) Imaging that someone must have sat and cut out and assembled this photo by hand with a scalpel from three original photos. There was no cut-and-paste Photoshop back then. The statue is the one of the former king Karl XII, I think.
