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Thursday, March 31, 2016

Easter weekend

The weeks around Easter have been a little slower at work and I have been able to take some hours off. One day I went to Helsingborg just to have lunch and today I went to Ikea near Malmö to get some things for my mother. It went well, apart from the fact that the train service went down and it took an hour and a half to get back to Lund by two different buses. The buses to my town are all packed with people and I'm not even going to try. I went back to work instead to do some catching up.

The Easter weekend was very nice. I spent it at the summerhouse with my mother and two of her friends. There was lots of food, for example boiled eggs, salmon of various styles, pickled herring and Janson's Temptation (a potato gratin with anchovy). I tried a novelty dish - pickled herring with blueberry flavor. Kind of sweet and sour at the same time but pretty good taste. We kept busy with several chores my mother had prepared. After the remodelling last year she got new pieces of furniture from Ikea that we now had to assemble. It was a pretty big job. We didn't get the bed finished because there was a part missing - that's why I went to Ikea today. But we assembled the bedside table and a book case. My mother was also taking care of a small dog but I was the one walking it mostly. My mother has some problems with her hip so she couldn't walk that easily. We did two excursions; one to the local town to get groceries and one to do some bird watching. Every spring there are large amounts of cranes visiting an area close by to rest before heading further north. There were more than 5000 cranes in that field. Quite impressive.

After four days of eating, solving crosswords and (mostly) relaxing I returned home by train Monday. That too was problematic and took almost three hours. The reason was one we hadn't heard before - a kite got stuck in the electrical lines and to get it off they had to shut all the power.

This week at work only two things worth mentioning have happened. Tuesday we celebrated three people who have retired with two enormous cakes that lasted also the next day. I will miss especially one of them, a very experienced librarian who knows just about everything. Yesterday I took part in a very hands-on workshop regarding how to save water-damaged books. The teacher was a colleague and she gave us soaked books to save. It was all fake because in real life it's very difficult to save books which have been that water-damaged. But we leafed in some dry tissue paper between the pages and it worked to some degree. Normally, we buy a new book instead. It's only if that's not possible we try to dry it out. If you can't start leafing in dry paper right away you have to freeze the book, otherwise it will get mouldy. We definitely learned a few things there.

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