Another meeting

Monday evening there was another Centennial Committee meeting in Kristianstad. I had driven the car to work in the morning. I thought it would be lots of traffic going north in the evening, but there wasn't that much. It takes longer time to drive a car than to take the train. It is really beyond my horizon that so many people drive a car to and from work every day, when the buses and trains run so frequently. Especially now, when the cost for gas is very high. Anyway, the meeting was nice, a guy came over to film us when we introduced ourselves. It will be for a documentary about the concert in April (only on DVD). At the end of May there was a crossword puzzle in the local paper and the one who made it had used pictures from the concert and the clues had a Leroy Anderson theme. This week it's an international music festival in Kristianstad, with participants from several countries. The Moscow Area Symphony Orchestra will perform music by Leroy Anderson. I hope to see some of it this weekend.

This week the high schools have their graduations here. It's very noisy in town with lots of happy (and drunk) students and when you go to work at seven in the morning you often see young people dressed in ball gowns on their way home from a (I assume) great party.

Congratulations to Joyce and Pat who just got married!

Exhausting weekend

Since it was our national holiday on Friday, the library was closed. I went to Field's shopping center at Örestad near the Copenhagen airport. It's very convenient to go by train, it stops 200 meters from the entrance. Quite a few people had come to the conclusion that the stores in Denmark were open that day, so the trains were crowded and there were lots of Swedes in the shopping center. I didn't shop that much, just some underwear and a pair of summer pants. I decided to try a new restaurant in the food court, a Mexican place called Nachos. Pretty good food, but I wonder how much of it was really inspired by the Mexican cuisine. It wasn't particularly spicy. In the evening I drove, once again, to my mother's place.

Saturday my mother and I went to a department store to get some birthday presents for my nephew John. We ended up with some toys, but also other things like plants. So when we came home, I planted these flowers in the yard, and watered everything. It hasn't rained in a long time now, the earth is very dry. The entire weekend it was stifling hot weather. In the afternoon I went on a meeting at Furuboda. I was given instructions for the flea market in July. There is a risk/chance (depending on how you look at it) that I will be the one in charge of the whole thing this year. My mother has health issues, and I don't know if they can find anyone else. In the evening I walked down to the beach, just to see if the water was warm. It usually takes a while for the ocean to get so warm that it's possible to go fo a swim, but this year it seems to already be very ok to jump in. I didn't bring my swimsuit though, but I walked in the water for a while.

Today we met my aunt and uncle for lunch at Furuboda. It was very nice to see them, and we had a lot to talk about. We invited them for coffee and ice-cream afterwards.

After the usual cleaning, washing, watering, and tidying up I finally drove back to Kävlinge this evening.

Shopping

Monday I left work in the early afternoon and travelled back to Kävlinge to get the car. I then drove to Svågertorp, where there are many stores and also a big train station for the trains to Denmark. I didn't care about the trains though, I was more interested in the shopping. One of the biggest fabric stores is there, for example. I got some small things. On the way back I stopped at a mall to check the collection in the full-size woman's clothing store and ended up buying one very yellow top (my favorite colour). It was a nice evening, but it was very hot and I will think twice before I go by car to the Malmö area in rush hour again.

On Tuesday I stayed late at work to do some preparations for the exhibit, and decided that I didn't feel like cooking dinner. I went to the Chinese restaurant in Kävlinge instead. I hadn't been there in many years. The food was very nice; chicken in peanut sauce.

Wednesday evening I had picnic on my own in the park near the Church of Dome. I was waiting for a concert to start. At 7 the Lund Hemvärnskår Orchestra gave a summer concert outdoors in one of the town squares. They played very well. One of the pieces was Belle of the Ball by Leroy Anderson.

Some photos from the April 26 concert in Kristianstad can be found on this website: http://www.scoutz.se/Fotoalbum/Familj/KonsertLeroyAnderson2008/index4.html

I have been thinking of making a trip to the United States again. It's three years ago since last time. I'm planning on staying away Sep 2 - Nov 2 approximately. If anyone of my relatives reading this wants me to visit, please let me know. I'll start in the east and travel westward.

Tomorrow is our national holiday, and I will celebrate it by going shopping in Denmark!

Choir performance

Yesterday I spent most of the day at the archive in Lund. I had some research to do for the exhibit at the Historical Society this summer. I had to find the ancestors for a Swedish author named Gustaf Hellström. His mother's family was from Norra Strö also, and I will include this information in the exhibit (which will have the theme: famous people whose ancestors lived in Norra Strö). My great grandfather (on my father's side) was a salesman for Swedish Match in the early 1900's. He visited mostly east European countries. Just to see if he was listed anywhere, I searched for his name in the Ancestry database. I got one hit. It was an arrival record from 1951, saying that he had entered the United States by airplane on Nov 1! I was very surprised to see this. I had no idea about it. It listed a chemical company in New York City as his destination, so I assume he was going there for business.

Yesterday evening I listened to a choir performance in a small church outside Lund. It was the Augustana College Choir, consisting of students from the college in Rock Island, Illinois. Augustana College was founded by Swedish immigrants in 1860. I have been there once to visit the Swenson Center (research facility with Swedish-American material). The 75 people in the choir gave a great performance. The first piece was a wonderful version of Agnus Dei, and I knew it would be worth the trouble of going there (it was in a suburb). The repertoire contained both spirituals like Deep River and modern music like Blackbird by the Beatles. They even sang in Swedish, a piece called Pingst (Pentecost) that I had never heard before. They also sang the first lines of "Tryggare kan ingen vara", one of the old Swedish hymns my grandmother sometimes sang.

Today has been the usual laundry and tidying up day.

Weather

So, no one noticed the grammatical mistake in the previous blog entry? I saw it too late to bother about changing it.

The weather is very nice here. Very sunny and warm. This weekend it will be even warmer. Since Swedes live their lives in darkness for several months during winter, this season is what everybody is waiting for. Everybody except me, it seems like. This is the time of year when I suffer from sleeplessness and I can't be outside without wearing sun-glasses. I can't stand the hot and sticky weather. That's why I normally work during the summer. Though I admit to the fact that it's nice to have slower days at work, to eat lots of ice-cream and go swimming in the sea.

I have made some use of my mother's car - I went to the mall in Löddeköpinge yesterday evening. It's a big place with many different stores. I didn't shop that much, just some groceries.

Shopping in Kristianstad

There was no grass to cut at my mother's place (the weather has been very sunny and the lawn was more brown than green), but instead the plants needed watering a lot. I also washed the car. Not that it was much use, because there is lots of pollen in the air and it covered the car again very quickly. My mother wanted to go to Kristianstad, and we managed to get her into the passenger seat and the wheel chair in the back. It's a small car, but very useful with a large trunk. We had ice-cream in town and then went shopping. I was surprised to see so many stores that still have steps. It's not only disabled people who have problems getting in, it also prevents people with baby-strollers to go shopping there. Almost all the walking streets in Kristianstad are covered with cobble stones, so the wheel chair ride wasn't particularly smooth either. But we took it easy and slowly. My mother was happy just to see something else than her house. Both of us bought some clothes at our favorite store, Kappahl. I found a pair of jeans about half price off, and my mother got two tops from the sales rack.

Today I went through the exhibit material I had used at the concert. I needed to know if everything was there (it wasn't) and I wanted to see if I can use some of it again on June 29 (I can). My mother and I also engaged ourselves in cooking. We made a very tasty vegetarian lasagne that we ate outside on the deck. She wanted to get rid of the chicken (which she doesn't eat) in the freezer, so we cooked it too and I brought it home to have for lunch at work.

Speech

The most interesting event of the week was a speech I and a colleague had to give in front of almost 100 other colleagues on Tuesday. It was all the other librarians at the university. We had a conference day, where people from the different libraries presented their on-going projects. Some examples: teaching students how to write references, evaluating a library website, making 2000 year old papyri available online, scanning and electronic delivery of journal articles and much more. Our speech was about the project we are doing in the stacks, where we use technical support to sort the requests to stacks, and have an electronic answering system so that the student doesn't have to show up in person to get the answer that the book is unavailable (we email them directly from the stacks now - a great improvement from before). Our speech was very well received, and we got a lot of questions afterwards.

Today's desk duty was uneventful. There were no visitors at all the first three hours, and then 30 minutes before closing two scholars came to read old books. The number of visitors varies a great deal. Some days it's so busy I have no time to do the tasks I bring with me.

This weekend I will visit my mother again. No doubt she has a long to-do list for me.