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Thursday, July 28, 2011

Visit to Ängelholm

Last weekend I did even more trips in the province. Saturday it was raining, but I still took the train to Ängelholm in the northwest. When I got there it stopped raining, so that was convenient. My mother had been there last summer and recommended it, so that's why I visited. She was right, Ängelholm is a very nice town. There was a farmer's market in the main square, a fleamarket in another square, a marching band entertained, there were small shops with a little different selections than the stores in the big cities and it was a pretty environment. There was a fabric store that was going out of business, so I made a huge bargain on fabric with dalahorses on. There was a pamphlet at the tourist information with all the second hand stores marked on a map, so I went to several of them and bought a few small things. A very nice visit.

Sunday I intended on visiting the trunk fleamarket in Helsingborg, but it was raining quite a lot (not so lucky as the day before), so I took the bus to the mall at Väla instead. It's the end of the summer, so many stores had a lot on sale. Only got a top and some souvenirs, though.

The week at work has been fairly busy. We are trying to get a few projects done while there aren't that many visitors. The only department that has a lot of visitors is the manuscript reading room. Lots of people come here to do research during summer, it's genealogists and scholars who are able to come here only during this season. They travel from all over Scandinavia (sometimes from much further away) to read old books and handwritten material.

A note about the weather: it's raining! A lot! Not very pleasant for those who have their vacation right now, but I don't complain that much. My mother actually thinks it's great, because she picks wild raspberries and blueberries in huge amounts.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Visit to Simrishamn

I spent last weekend at the summer house. My mother and I went to Simrishamn by bus on the Saturday. The main reason being the large fleamarket in the park there. Very crowded bus, there were other things going on in that area also. We made a few purchases, I got a new wallet, for instance. Several of my mother's acquaintances were standing there selling things, so it took a long time to go through it all. She had to stop at a few places to chat. We also walked up and down the main street, looking in the expensive touristy shops. We had a lovely buffet lunch at an Italian-style deli. It was a very nice visit in Simrishamn, but we were pretty tired when we came home.

Sunday we got visitors for lunch, and we had a nice time eating out on the deck. It was not the best weather, but we endured. In the afternoon I returned to my apartment again. It took much longer time than it should have, the train service is not that reliable, apparently. That delay is going to get me another free day pass. If the train is more than 20 minutes delayed, they have to give you some sort of compensation, and it's usually a free day pass. Sometimes I don't bother about sending in the form, but this time I did.

The week at work so far has been slow. There are actually too many people working in the stacks this week. So I have spent most of the time trying to clear my desk and get those things done I never have time for during the semesters. Sort documents and file them, for instance. Very boring, but I really need to get it done.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Visit to Ystad

I don't seem to get much writing done here. I'm busy with preparations for the trip and then I make visits to other cities after work, so I'm not at home much. This Monday I totally missed my laundry time (I went shopping in Malmö instead), so I only got an hour and a half to do all of it. I have been in Helsingborg and the mall outside Lund also.

Last Saturday I made it to Ystad, a very nice town on the south coast of Skåne. It's an old town with small houses in medieval style, where several buildings actually are from the 13th and 14th centuries. There are about 300 old timber frame houses that are typical of the Skåne region. I visited the center of town, where there are small shops and a fleamarket at one of the squares. I also went to the monastery, which was built in the mid 13th century. I walked through the rose-, cabbage- and herbgardens right next to it. Very nice place. There was a flute concert that I listened to for a while also.

Sunday my mother arrived in Lund by train in the morning and we walked down to the trunk fleamarket area in the southern part of town. It was very crowded. My mother had brought a trolley on wheels for all her purchases. It was almost full when we were done a couple of hours later. The weather was hot and sunny, and I started to get burnt so I bought a large scarf to cover my shoulders. Later I also found a nice white linen jacket for 25 SEK (=4 USD). We had lunch in Lund and since it was rather early in the day, we took the bus to the mall Nova. My mother had never been there before. We just browsed through most of the stores and didn't get much. In the afternoon we returned by train to our respective homes.

The weather is not hot and sunny anymore, unfortunately. It has been raining a lot and it's pretty cold. But my mother is happy, because there are lots of blueberries in the forest. Also mushrooms.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Projects at work

There were a few things on my desk at work this Monday, but it wasn't anything urgent. During the summer we try to do some projects and one of the extra staff members had finished checking the entire open collection for missing books. She wasn't happy about the results. Of 300 missing books she had found four. This week I also instructed three students in the art of making the compact shelving system at a storage function the way you want it to. Not particularly successful, the technician had to come and fix the lights in the ceiling and then the shelves got stuck several times. But the students were persistent and managed to start on the project I had given them. They are moving journals from an open collection into storage, because these journals are now scanned and availabale online, so no one uses the physical volumes much.

I had desk duty twice this week and there were few visitors, but I got some paper work done while I sat there. There is an endless amount of documents they send you that you should read through, so I did some of that. We are re-organizing the library and there are lots of documents relating to that right now. We are turning the information-, circulation- and reception desks into one large desk in a few months.

One interesting thing at work happened today. I passed by the information desk looking for a misplaced book when I was asked by the attending librarian to help out with a question. First, the visitor asked for family information for a well known person who lived in the early 19th century. So we tried to find that, but then he said he was related to this person, but couldn't find out how. He based this on the fact that they had the same last name. (This is the moment when experienced researchers sigh and roll their eyes, but I tried to hide it). So we started with the visitor's family instead. It is rather easy for me to do it, since we have access to most records online. He was clueless, he had never done research before. So I was nice and found his ancestors several generations back until he understood that there could be no connection to the famous person.

Since I have the summer pass to ride the trains and buses, I have made some short excursions this week. Mainly to shopping centers. I'm looking for souvenirs to bring on my trip in August. Tomorrow I was thinking I would try to get to Ystad, if it doesn't rain. Sunday perhaps my mother (who also has a summer pass) will come to visit.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Midsummer and fleamarket

The day before the Midsummer holiday was a really bad day in the history of local public transportation. It's a day when enormous amounts of people travel and there were so many problems. The train I was on was lead onto the wrong track and had to return to Lund for another attempt to go north. It sounds crazy, but it's not the first time it happens. When we got close to Kristianstad, the train stopped out in nowhere and we were told that all trains had a red light due to technical problems. I am extremely experienced and spent most of the waiting time half asleep. I had a place to sit and the air conditioning functioned. You can't have higher standards than that.

The Midsummer weekend was nice, the food (herring) tasted really well and we had the family oriented kind of holiday. My nephew insisted on the fact that we should build Hagrid's house of lego blocks, so we did. It was complicated, but turned out great. Even a few spiders and some of the characters from the Harry Potter movies were included. Apart from this I spent as much time as possible just relaxing (often in the folding chair on the deck). The strawberries tasted also great, by the way.

The work with the fleamarket at Furuboda started Monday and ended Saturday. There were lots of items that we needed to sort through and place on different tables. We organize the items in a rather detailed way, we decide on the prices beforehand. So the items on one table all cost the same amount (it's easier for the one selling). The actual sale was on the Friday. There was some last minute panic when three people didn't show up as planned, but we made it. I sold books and paintings. My sister sold lamps, and my mother the items on the 20 SEK table. Selling books went really well, we got comments from the antique book dealers about the high quality of the assortment. We have no way of arranging this, the books (and all other things) come from people who have given all their belongings to Furuboda in accordance with their wills. Some of the better things were auctioned off, but it didn't go that well this year. There were some paintings and pieces of furniture that were sent to an auction house also, I hope they will do better. The fleamarket was open also a few hours yesterday, and we sold some more things then. It had rained very much during the night and the items outside were soaking wet. The buyers got big discounts on the things that were left.

During this past week we have also celebrated my mother's birthday with a cake, been in Åhus for a delicious buffet meal, been in town to check out the sales (no purchases!), made our own elderberry lemonade and taken a bicycle ride to pick wild strawberries in the forest. My sister and I also managed to visit two fleamarket stores in Åhus yesterday, and we both found nice things. I got several egg cups and a few old books with cookie recipes. My sister and her family went home yesterday.

When my mother and I woke up today we noticed that there was no water..... Not good. We found out after a while that there was a water pipe leak in Åhus. I still don't know if they have fixed it, but I hope so. It's difficult to manage without such a basic thing as fresh water. I left in the morning and came back to my apartment in the early afternoon. It's 30 centigrades on my balcony but most of the flowers are still alive. The weather changed a few days ago, so it's now more like a Swedish summer - hot and humid. The messages in my work e-mail were not that disturbing, but I don't know what is waiting for me on my desk tomorrow.