Visit to Borås

I managed, on the second attempt, to go to my mother's place last week. We packed her car full with her belongings and drove to Borås on the Thursday. We made a stop on the way at Ullared, Sweden's largest outlet store. It's an interesting place that was featured in a reality show on tv, both last year and this. They sell clothes, electronics, toys, and lots of other things. The store can house 5500 visitors at the same time, on two floors. There are 62 cash registers. It's gigantic. My mother found some clothes, but I only got some small things. When we got to Borås, we unloaded the car and my mother moved back into her apartment. It's too small for me to stay in also, so I walked down to my sister's place, about 800 meters away.

My visit in Borås, which lasted exactly one week, was both relaxing and nice. There are outlet stores also in Borås, and I made some purchases, of course. A nightgown, a pair of shoes, some underwear and a few tops at extremely low prices. One outlet store had everything half price off, because they were going to move. My mother helps out at a charity shop, and I did too on the Saturday and Wednesday opening hours. We sold fabric, yarn, thread and lots of other things associated with sewing and handcrafts. It was quite fun to sort the buttons, measure the fabric and to hear what people would do with the items they bought. One person needed 40 meters of fabric for a wedding. I'm glad I didn't have to measure that length.

Sunday we made an excursion to an idyllic place by a lake, Hofsnäs. There was a trunk fleamarket there, and my sister and mother did some bargain shopping. We had a picnic lunch right by the lake. Very nice place.

The visit also included baby-sitting, grocery shopping, browsing of several second hand stores, cooking pizza the difficult way, creating numerous spaceships from Lego at my nephew's request and crossword puzzle solving. I have had a nice time, even the weather was great during my stay. I returned home Thursday evening by three trains (all of them on time - unbelievable). It has rained ever since.

I have been rather active indoors. I decided to throw out even more things from my bedroom. This time I discarded some towels. The curtains and tablecloths in the drawers needed to be reorganized and I threw some of those out too. I need more boxes to have in the closets, so I'm thinking of making a trip to Ikea one of these days.

Today I went to Lund, mostly to use the computer at work for my own purposes (I have access to some genealogy databases from it). There were some disturbing messages on the intranet, one including an obituary of a former employee. I could figure out from the other entries that my colleagues are having a tough time without me.