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.