wise words from far away friends

my friend, in between long rants of nonsense, sometimes says wise things:

no, I am not in a hurry ’cause I don’t know what time it is!

wise words bob, wise words indeed... read more from this strange but wonderful man here.

let me see your trash

who knew it could be so hard to arrange a study visit to a water treatment plant or to see where our trash goes? good thing i live in the capital city, as at least there is more than one place to ask! all i'm getting is no's. how exactly do they expect to have any new engineers to run the place when they retire if they refuse to help train them?

so we joined a gym

okay, so everyone who knows me knows that this is not my favourite time of year in sweden. it is grey and cold and i don't exactly want to get outside and move. so, yesterday krister and i joined a gym, sats, the biggest gym-chain in sweden. they're building a new sats in the centrum near our house. until our gym opens, we can work out at three others in town. as we wanted to actually use the membership we wetre paying for, we figured location was everything and the closer and easier to get to the better.

yesterday we went to check out one of the other locations we could use temporarily. we got there at about three and there wasn't a whole lot of people there. the guy behind the desk was friendly and let us borrow a lock as we didn't have one with us. we walked around, checking out the strength training machines, the rock climbing wall (sadly, you need your own equiptment to use it), the weights (and the huge guys using them), the treadmills and other machines, the locker room and the rooms where they have classes. i was impressed by how average most of the people looked. very few were how i pictured the people to be, as sats is on the expensive end of the gym spectrum. there was a sign on the wall saying 'the most important thing about your clothes is that you feel comfortable in them'.

one of the perks of membership, along with newer machines that work, a sauna and a clean locker room/showers, is that you get a personal trainer to work out a work out plan with you. she showed us a lot of the machines and how to adjust them for short people like me. after we were done, krister and i decided to do the workout we had set up and it was surprisingly fun even though i was pretty sire today. so yeah, we did it. its a huge cost for us but it felt like a good thing to invest in taking care of our bodies a bit. so, wish us luck!

reasons to celebrate and other assorted nonlinear thoughts

today i have been married for five years and two days. strange how time flies. 18 years from now i will have been married for as many years as i have been single. it seems distant but at the same time inevitable. it is only a matter of time before i will completely forget what it was like to not be married. which, by the way, is more difficult by the day.

i often meet this man by the allotments that i enjoy chatting to. he knows many things about 18th century gardening techniques, thai cooking and the swedish history of executions. he once startled me by revealing that his girlfriend had ruined his life. the confused frown on my face made him go on to explain all his former plans of traveling, writing and living life to the full (at least his definition of it). then the woman he now lives with, and who is the mother of his child, came along and changed the course his life. to his joy and distress.

it was strange because i could and couldn't relate. commitment scares me. to not be committed scares me. in some ways i can't do whatever i wish because of resa, as i have to consider her in the choices i make. yet, i can't imagine not being married to her. to my surprise i found myself thinking this even in the middle of our most vicious fights.

for our anniversary i was planning to take resa to an art exhibition of Caspar David Friedrich (i'm very fond of the romantics, i confess), but managed to befuddle the times, so we went straight to the movies and watched UP 3D. i'm not usually a big fan of cartoons, but i really enjoyed this one. especially, there were scenes that depicted that the adventure the main character was looking for already had happened, hidden in the clutter and mundaneness of everyday life.
i'm not sure...
perhaps.
what do you think?

happy halloween

both sunny and gray (and cold)

the weather has been gray. finally, almost a week later i saw the sun, only for a few minutes but it was there and that makes me smile.

the usage of the word 'both' in swedish drives me crazy. it grates on me like the language equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. 'both' is the word 'både' and instead of saying, 'the weather today was both gray and sunny', the way to use it in swedish is something like this. 'today i went to h&m and i bought both the grey sweater, the hat and the scarf.'
nope, thats three. not two. both is two.
drives me crazy everytime.