May 14

...is the date of the Eurovision Song contest, and long-time watchers will know it's fairly early this year. Typically, it's the last Saturday in May. It was moved up this year because the Champion's League final is on May 28, which is the second most-watched television event in Europe! So Eurovision had to move.

The final is at Wembley Stadium in London, and there's a rule that the field can't be used for a minimum of two weeks before the final. This has caused the English Football Association to move up the date of their FA Cup final from its traditional late May to the 14th as well.

And the reason I mention that date change is that it's suddenly become important to me. My beloved Manchester City are in the final and will be playing for their first Cup victory in 42 years.

May 14 has the potential to be a very good day for me!

We're getting closer!

Not just in the sense that it's now less than three weeks until we leave for Sweden, but also because I just received the 2011 Aspö Sommarguide. This is put out each year by the island's bryggeförening, which translates literally as 'bridge club', but I think it more as the island's resident's association.

The bryggeförening organizes summer activities, including two 'work days' in which residents jointly maintain the path and other common facilities; the big trash pickup days with the recycling boat; the yearly meeting; football matches and sailing lessons, and especially the midsummer celebration itself.

This year, midsummer is exactly on my birthday, a fact of which I plan to remind everyone. The recycling boat arrives on June 18, which is also the day I arrive, but I'll get to Aspö later, after the boat, so Sooz and Grant will be responsible for hauling trash that day. However, I will arrive by that evening's inauguration of the dansbanan, or dance floor, at the big midsummer meadow. After traveling straight in from Texas, I'm not sure what shape my dancing legs will be in, but I'll probably give it a try anyways. Especially if Akvavit is involved.

The other good bit of news is the big island meeting is on July 3; I've missed it the past few years and Sooz has by all accounts been very charming in representing us. This year I get to be there myself. I'll try to keep up the family reputation!

Grant's Blog

Grant is keeping a blog of his own as an assignment for one of his classes this semester.

He's not quite up the standard of his old man just yet, but it's a good read nevertheless.

A weather aside

Ollie experienced his first real thunderstorm last night. We had to fish him out from under the bed this morning.

And a clarification from my previous post: Sooz is attending the royal wedding in the stand-in-the-street-waving-a-Union-Jack sense, not in the seat-in-Westminster-Abbey sense.

Four weeks from today!

I'll be flying off to Sweden. Sooz will already be in London, attending the Royal Wedding.

As we get closer, I'll be posting more about our plans and logistics for our trip.... and maybe a bit about Eurovision as well!

UK Eurovision is Blue

No, I'm not describing the color or the mood; I'm referring to the boy band 'Blue', who are performing the UK's entry for Eurovision this year.

Blue were very popular in the UK from 2001-2005, split up, and reunited last year. There's a bit of debate in the country over the question of performing for Eurovision: would it help or hurt a 'serious' artist's career?

In the rest of Europe, it's not a critical question, but being from a country that produced the likes of the Beatles, the Stones, the Clash, and Radiohead...well, let's just say that puts a lot of pressure on the boys from Blue. I think they'll be OK if they get a respectable score in the contest. But if it's nul points, then I think it's bad news for their comeback.

Extremes of weather

One thing I've noticed living in Texas is the huge swings in temperature. Over the past two months, we've had a low of 15ºF and a high of 85ºF, making a swing of 70 degrees.

Looking at the same time period for Stockholm, the lowest temperature was a chilly -13ºF, with the warmest being 44º, making a swing of 57 degrees.

It's no surprise that London was the most temperate, with a high of 59º and a low of 26º, making a difference of only of 33 degrees.

I have to say, living in London all these years, I'm not used to overcoats on Tuesday and shorts on Thursday. I think the cycle of warm and cold (and this summer, just blazing hot) takes its toll on a building. I've actually run heat in our house at night and the air-conditioning in the afternoon! It seems to me the more gradual cycles of hot and cold are easier for a structure to deal with, and I haven't even mentioned hairstorms or tornadoes yet!

Pay-as-you-throw

One of the things I notice in the USA is the amount of garbage I see being put out in my neighborhood. In London, we had two wheelie bins, one for trash, the other, recycling. Each was picked up every other week, along with food waste which was picked up for composting weekly. We did fine with that, in fact, even with Grant in the house generating lots of food waste, we rarely filled either bin.

In my new neighborhood, however, the trash is picked up twice a week, and there is an amazing array of refuse out of the curb on pickup days. Selfishly, I don't mind that because I have a lot of moving trash to get rid of right now, and there's no financial penalty to me if I leave a huge pile of boxes and broken junk out on the curb. All of that is paid for in my monthly municipal fee.

There's a move afoot in more liberal (or landfill-strapped) parts of the US to something called 'pay-as-you-throw'. The idea is that the average family's garbage would cost them about what they pay today. If you throw away less, you pay less; big trash producers would get hit in the pocketbook. Having a direct link between actions and costs is Economics 101. The EPA has a good webpage about the concept.

The same applies out on Aspö, with a bit of a twist. The island residents pay into a fund to the Värmdö municipality for trash pickup at the big dock during the peak summer months. So there's a financial contribution, but almost the bigger cost is the effort required to wheelbarrow stuff to and from one's house.

The solution is called 'precycling'; reducing waste by thinking about our purchases holistically. Recycling is good, but there's still energy required to sort and reprocess materials (and, on a very local level, to carry them down to the dock). Precycling tries to avoid excess stuff to begin with, to eliminate trash and recycling materials at the time of purchase. Good examples of this are box wine, rechargeable batteries, or UHT milk, all of which are island staples.

When one has a high cost to throw away something, either a fee from the local government, or the hassle of carting it a kilometer to the dock, it's a great incentive to avoid having those things to get rid of in the first place!

Eric Saade wins!

I'm intensely jealous of Marcia, Rutger, and Camille because they went to the Globe yesterday and were in the sold-out audience for the dress rehearsal of the melodifestival final.

The winner, as I had pretty much expected, was Eric Saade with Popular:


It was popular among the Globe's crowd, too, but as Marcia put it, 11-year old girls with their cell phones put Eric over the top. Not that sure how well he'll do in the big show, however.

But my favorite part—in fact, one of my favorite bits of television in a long time—was a performance by Nanne Grönwall, Christer Sjögren, The Ark, and the gorgeous Lena Ph performing the Scorpion's "Rock You Like A Hurricane". Check it out: 

We're only 2 months from the big show in Düsseldorf. I can't wait!

Mold

When I was at the house last Christmas, I pried off a few of the darkest slivers of its exterior. My thought was that Rutger could get the wood tested for mold.

Recently, I saw this family-friendly testing kit during one of my many visits to the local Texan home-improvement store. I gave Marcia a ring and she graciously mailed me the ziploc bag with its little shards intact.

The kit was simple to use; I put the special solution into the petri dish, tweezed in the bits of wood (mold side down), and waited.

And guess what? Nothing happened. There was no growth at all. Sooz thinks maybe the mold didn't survive the rigors of its trip, but I think sitting outside in Aspö right now is even more harsh on a fungus than a baggie in Marcia's dresser.

I'll bring along another kit and we can test for mold in situ this May.

Oh My God

...is the title of one of the Melodifestival finalists this year, by the Moniker. I don't have the critical skills to describe it properly. Take a look and see for yourself.

The rest of the final ten to compete at the Globe this Saturday are almost as goofy. There's Swingfly's dual-rapper "Me and my Drum" with the bizarre drumming-girl break at 2:05.

And there's the lavishly-tattooed Nicke Borg, a long-time punk rocker who sings a power ballad in English. (Think Poison's "Every Rose has Its Thorn"). The tats come out around 1:25. Still don't get the trousers though.

The Playtones are a bunch of middle-aged guys doing a rockabilly number which should be a German entry, actually.

Danny's "In The Club" might have won in 1989.

I think the winner might be Erik Saade's catchy "Popular". It goes last in the final's running order, which is good. All the girls love him. Good thing it's not a lyrics contest, though, although the shattering-glass trick is pretty cool.

I will miss going to the Swedish pub in Marylebone to watch it, that's for sure.

Texan IKEA

No matter how many different IKEAs I shop in all over the world, it still amazes me how similar every store is. Our new store in exurban Texas was spookily like the one in Barkaby, down to some of the smallest details.

It gave me an odd feeling, as I've apparently associated shopping at IKEA with trips out to our stuga in an almost Pavlovian way. But now, we're looking at things for a very different kind of house. It will probably take me a few trips to recalibrate my thinking from 'small house and hard to transport' to 'big house and fill up the station wagon'.

By Texas standards, our house isn't all that big, although it is certainly larger than the average suburban English or Swedish home. As we've been unpacking and settling in, I've noticed a few fundamental differences between my new home and my previous ones in Europe.

There's a shortage of homes in the UK. Planning restrictions make it difficult to build new homes, and so the law of supply and demand make them increasingly expensive. As one reaction, homes are getting smaller and smaller. I posted previously about home sizes around the world, with the UK trailing the list with an average of 76 square meters, about a third the size of the homes in their former colonies.

Those problems don't exist where I live now. There's empty land seemingly everywhere, so it is easy to throw up housing subdivisions. On my way to IKEA, I drove past suburb after suburb, on a six-lane tollway that didn't exist when I lived here last. This creates a virtuous circle; land and homes are cheap, which attracts people and businesses, which in turn attracts more growth, and so on. This keeps costs of new homes down, or allows them to be built even larger at affordable prices. I've seen some real monster houses in my neighborhood.

However, this cycle has its drawbacks, too, which I'll save for further exploration in future posts.

More Melodifestival

We watched the 2nd and 3rd semi-final tonight. Eric Saade went through with a song a bit better than his catchy yet unfortunately titled "Manboy" from last year. Everything else was middle-of-the road except for Babsan, Sweden's answer to Dame Edna Everage.

The highlight for me was Lena Phillipson's interval performance in Linköping. I swear she looks better than I remember her from 1989.

Introduction IV

It's time for the fourth in a series of sort-of-yearly recaps and introductions. My last such update was about 9 months ago and lots has changed.

• Sooz, Ollie and I have indeed moved back to the USA at the end of the year. We're now in the middle of resettling into our home in Texas after nearly 12 years away.
• Grant is now a university student, happily settled into college life in North Carolina. (Perhaps too happily, but I digress).
• Living 5000 miles from our stuga, as opposed to only 900 before, will necessitate some changes to how we live there. Long weekends are out, so we'll be there for a few weeks at a time when we go. Sooz plans to escape the Texas heat as much as possible this summer, for example.
• I have a few projects still to complete. I want to put in a drop ceiling over the big deck, and to get a shed at last. But I think the focus of this blog will be moving away from building and more towards living in the archipelago.

I still plan to blog on Swedish culture, and of course posting will increase when we're all actually on-island. I may well post a bit on issues of repatriation, but I will keep the focus on island living. No need to worry about too many off-topic ramblings, promise.

The Melodifestival is back!

The miracle of high-speed internet, along with hundreds of cable channels, makes it surprisingly easy to stay in touch with doings in Europe all the way from Texas.  However, I'm finding that the time change puts a big spin on things. For example, I watched the Manchester derby before sunrise with a cup of tea. (The result was sadly similar, though.)

It's not just the time change, it's the weather that is dislocating, too. Today was warm and sunny, not Melodifestival weather at all. But, as Margaret reminded me, back in Sweden, it is still cold and dark, perfect for six weekends of silly songs.

Sooz and I watched the first semi-final from Luleå tonight and it didn't disappoint. Jenny Silver is back again in much better form than last year.(Sadly, SVT doesn't allow linking of song videos while they're still in competition). The evening's winner was Swingfly, with a catchy yet insane three-way rap/dance number replete with drumming girls. My favorite part was the break by one of the drummers which went something like: "I'm so hot/you know you want some/I'm hotter than a fresh-baked bun/hotter than the sun/hotter than a smoking gun". Seriously.

I'll try to keep up with the competition's progress. There's some hum-dingers in store!

Radiator

We have a few radiators in our house; when we were there over Christmas, we had every one cranking to keep the place warm. After a day, it was actually quite toasty inside. When we left, I kept one running in the bathroom to keep the water and all of our perishables from freezing.

I am concerned, though, that I'm overheating the room, at great expense. All I really want it to be is 3 or 4°C (37-39°F), just to prevent freezing, nothing more. Without a having the benefit of being there to conduct a bit of trial and error on our radiator, I fearI'm turning it up higher than necessary.

I think I spotted the solution at Bauhaus over Christmas. Pictured here is a radiator with a full digital thermostat. All I need to do is type in 4°C, and I can be confident that temperature is maintained, and no more. I would be willing to bet I could pay for the radiator over just two winters in electricity savings. And we get the bonus of added warmth when we're at the house on cold days!

(I might buy one for our house in Texas, too. Frozen pipes are no fun.)

52 years ago today

I won't repeat my previous posts; click here for a reminder. The weather in the midwest is about as miserable as it was on the Winter Dance Party tour.

Now that I live in Texas, I might head out to Lubbock for a weekend. For now, however, if one wishes to remember the day, I'd recommend spending 99¢ here.

Irony...

When I woke up in my new home, it was 10°F (-12°C) outside, as opposed to 37°F (3°C) in Stavsnäs. Most of my water pipes are frozen, and there's more ice in my street than there was in Aspö harbor at Christmas.

All of the things I worked to prevent in Sweden are coming to pass in Texas!

Another island home

I found a really interesting article in Dwell about a home somewhat like ours. It is on a remote island off the coast of Maine, so it shares many of the the same logistical issues we had in building our own house. It's pretty much the same size, and was built by hand, largely of pine.

The island infrastructure isn't the same, however. This house has to generate and manage its own electricity, as well as capture its own water, as well water isn't available. Obviously a Cinderella is out of the question, so the house uses a composting toilet.

The article and its comments make for a good read, and I recommend it (and Dwell magazine itself) highly.

PS. Happy Birthday, Mom!

Fatboy Beanbags

Sooz found these extra-huge beanbags in the UK a year or so ago, and we've seen them in Stockholm as well, where they're charmingly called sittsäcks. They're very well made and are pretty decent pieces of furniture. Fatboys also come in a wide range of colors, and in indoor and outdoor fabrics.

We've thought one would be perfect for the stuga, to scrunch up in indoors, or out on the deck, or even in the woods. The problem is their high quality brings a high price. In Sweden the indoor models are $350, and the outdoor ones $500. That's pretty pricey for a beanbag, no matter how nice it is.

I did a bit of searching here in the USA, and found they sell for about a third less than the Swedish price. My idea was perhaps to buy one here and bring it to the stuga on my next trip, but with such a big item, I wasn't sure if it was checkable as baggage.

Fatboy's US headquarters is very close to my new office, so I called and spoke to a very friendly staff member who invited me over to take a look at a packaged Fatboy. I'll do that in the coming weeks, after our move here is more settled. Who knows, perhaps I'll be carrying one with me to Stockholm on our next trip!

UPDATE: Spending this past week in our house here in Texas, with our furniture consisting only of couple of kitchen chairs, have caused us to rethink. We ordered a new sofa, but that's a month away. So we hit upon the idea of buying our fatboy (the outdoor model in turquoise) now, so we can get good use out of it immediately. We can either keep it, or repack it for taking to Aspö this summer.

UPDATE 2: The Fatboy arrived, in a big box, which I think was too large; I'm sure I can repack it for travel. It is a lovely color and fits two of us (three's a stretch) just fine. Grant's fear about us old folks having trouble getting in and out of it are partially founded. We can negotiate the process well enough, it's just not very elegant.

First home?

We're back in our previous home here in Texas. Sooz and Ollie made the journey from London pretty much none the worse for wear. Being back into our 'real' house has got me thinking about our Swedish house and the relationship between the two.

During our time in London, we lived in rented accommodation, so we didn't spend much energy (or money) on our houses there; but we spent a lot of both on our little stuga. Now that we're back in our house here, we can see it will be requiring our time and money. So what does that mean for our stuga? Will it be out of sight, out of mind? Will I go to Sweden to get away from home projects, instead of looking forward to them?

There's a lot to think about along these lines, and I'll share some thoughts as I develop them (between my evening chores of unpacking boxes).

Boxer TV

I had posted previously about our TV set in the stuga. Currently, we can pick up the state broadcaster, SVT, along with two commercial channels. We're pretty well covered with news and other uplifting fare on SVT, along with constant reruns of "Scrubs" and "Two and a Half Men" on the commercial channels.

Like all TV's sold in Europe over the past few years, ours has the capability to receive paid programming through an internal smart card. Each country in the EU has at least one provider of encrypted broadcasts which can be unlocked through the provider's card. Swedish subscription TV is from Boxer, and they have a range of channels which can be unlocked.

I borrowed Camille's Boxer card when we were over at Christmas and tried it on our TV to see if it worked. Sure enough, it did, and I found a wide range of channels we were able to receive.

Boxer sells a product that I suspect is designed for stuga owners. Their prepaid card costs 795kr (about $115) to buy, and then it can be filled up online in monthly increments. We could, in theory, have the card in our TV, and then call ahead to turn it on when we go to the house for a month.

I say "in theory", because I was just barely able to convince Sooz to install a TV for last year's World Cup. She has reservations, and rightly so, about coming out to our peaceful island getaway and spending time watching lots of TV. So, for now at least, my Boxer test was just a technical exercise.

Table Saw

When I was at Jula with Rutger, shopping for post-Christmas fireworks, I found this table saw on sale for only 799 kronor. I had been eying one for some time, and this was a great deal, so I bought it to sit in Rutger's garage until the spring.

I have planned to put a drop ceiling in the over the front deck, and to add a few recessed lights. To do that, I'll need to cut a bunch of boards precisely and my hand-sawing skills (as evidenced by some of my completed projects) are not up to that task.

There are also lots of other projects around the house that would benefit from such a saw, plus it's cool. I did promise Sooz I would ask Janne for instruction before I started using it!

Swedish news round-up

• Just after our freezing Christmas, there's a January thaw right now, causing other sorts of disruption in the country. The 10 day forecast for Stavsnäs is pretty much consistently above freezing. That should help my electric bill!
• A dog friendly cinema has opened not far from Marcia and Rutger's house. Not sure if Ollie would enjoy, say, a Michael Bay film. He might prefer something more local.
• And in perhaps the most exciting news (to me, at least), Agneta has recently she's had a change of heart about a reunion with her band-mates.

Happy New Year

We're back in London now, but not for long. Grant and I leave tomorrow for good, and Sooz and Ollie follow about 10 days later.

We had a great time in Sweden, as usual, and again as usual, we're already planning our next trip back.  Sooz is going to attend William and Kate's wedding (not as an invited guest, of course) and I'll meet up with her afterward for both of us to spend the first week of May in Sweden.

Our general plan is for us to return in mid-June; me to stay for 2 weeks and her for a month or so. But we have a lot going on between now and then, so our plans may change.

Since it's going to be 4 months until we're back to our house, and we'll be pretty busy resettling in America, I think blogging will slow down a bit. I do have a number of topics I've saved up, though, so things won't be entirely quiet!