Special pie filling and strange sleeping habits

I can’t believe it’s already Friday? Where has the week gone? Anyway, nothing super exciting to report. On Monday a colleague from the US brought me my coveted pumpkin pie filling. I missed it at Thanksgiving last year and you can’t buy canned pumpkin in Sweden. (I tried using a real pumpkin once but it was WAY too much work!) Right, so this US colleague was planning to come to Sweden for the week and asked me to help her with various administrative tasks. I’ve helped her in the past so I thought, why not ask her to bring the pie filling? After asking her I spoke with a colleague here in Sweden with whom she was planning to meet. It was then that I found out who she was. Turns out this person, who brought me pie filling, is the daughter of the former president of a Central American country. (He was president in the 80s and is now high up in the UN.) I certainly wasn’t expecting that! But she was really nice and even brought me three cans!

We still don’t have phone, TV, or internet; however, Telia was supposed to send a technician over this morning so hopefully the phone will be working when I get home today. Maybe we’ll even get the TV and Internet working by next week? That would be great…
Sometimes I do weird things in my sleep. My mom told me that once when I was little I got out of bed, went downstairs to where my parents were watching TV, turned the TV off and sat on the couch (all in my sleep!) Then one time in college I woke up to find my bed quilt balled up and placed in my laundry basket and then put in the closet. I vaguely remembered putting it there when I woke up in the morning. Well, last night I achieved new levels of sleep-weirdness. I woke-up in the middle of the night and rolled over to look at my clock. Only the clock wasn’t there! I sleepily looked around and realized that my head was at the wrong end of the bed! My head, and pillow mind you, were at the foot of my bed and my feet were down by the alarm clock! I certainly wasn’t lying that way when I went to bed! I have no idea how I ended up like that! Weird, weird, weird!

Settling In

Well I feel like we’ve had a pretty productive weekend. We did a ton of work on the house (although there is still much to do!) I think our biggest accomplishment was fixing the old leaky faucet for only 10kr! We brought the leaky cold-water tap with us to a few hardware stores, but no one knew how to fix it. We finally ended up buying new hot and cold water taps for 350kr, but in the end we managed to fix it with a new o-ring for only 10kr! We took the taps back to the store and celebrated by finally sitting in the jacuzzi and opening a bottle of champagne (to celebrate our new house!) (We were previously unable to fill the jacuzzi because of the leaky faucet problem, and were too tired to open the champagne last weekend when we moved in!)

We also sent the contract back to the phone company on Friday, so maybe; hopefully, they will connect our phone this week. I’d say that internet would soon follow, but that’s really just wishful thinking now, isn’t it? As for TV? Let’s just say I’m happy we stalked up on DVDs in China; who knows when the stupid phone/internet/TV (Telia) company will send us a cable box. We should seriously bill Telia for all of the hours (MANY) that we have spend calling their customer service over the past few weeks. Seriously, why should we be punished just because we want to keep our old phone number!

Not much else to report unless you want to see a list of all the things we did around the house this weekend. The list would be long, but perhaps boring. ;)

Moved In

We moved into our new house over the weekend. It was a lot of work, but it went pretty smoothly. It’s hard to believe how much junk we had crammed into our two-bedroom apartment, but once you start pulling stuff out from the depths of the closets it really adds up! We still have a lot of stuff in boxes and a long way to go before the house will be in order, but at least we have gotten past the extreme crazy stage. We have the kitchen up and running and our bedroom is mostly in order. We also cleaned out our new jacuzzi tub and used the sauna for the first time. :)

I think that we will be very happy there. The street is very quiet and the yard is very green. There are many things that we want/need to change around the house, but we will take it one step at a time…
Worth mentioning: Yesterday I was so pleased! I received an enormous bouquet of flowers at work, sent from a company in England that I have been working with lately. I had just finished helping them with a big project (I spent a month on it,) and they wanted to thank me for my hard work. It feels really nice to be appreciated!