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Archive for December, 2008

We had dinner guests last night, so I took advantage of the house being tidied up and got some indoor photos.

Here’s the dining half of the lounge/dining room:

Here’s the lounge half:

And here’s our kitchen:

I’m looking forward to a quiet new year’s eve tonight, perhaps featuring a film on our big new TV (you can see the TV side-on at the far right of the lounge picture). I hope everyone has a lovely new year’s celebration, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.

New pregnancy symptom: carpal tunnel syndrome. Yes, the plague of computer users has struck me down at last. I’ve been a software engineer for 11 years, and spent 4 years learning to be one, so I’ve basically been in front of a computer for the last 15 years with no wrist problems to speak of – and now pregnancy-related tissue swelling is squeezing up nerves and causing my hands to take random naps.

It is worst at night (very annoying when my hands can sleep but I can’t) but they also start to tingle when I do almost anything that involves gripping anything – holding a knife, lifting a heavy kettle or bottle, knitting (oh no!), and a little when typing. During the day, a quick shake of the hands will usually relieve it, but in the nights I need to flap my hands around and change arm positions till I find a way to wake them up.

We had a quiet Christmas day in the house – we had planned to go up to Gothenburg but I was headachey and tired so we stayed in. We started painting in the second bedroom and then I had an afternoon nap while Linus pottered. On boxing day we hit the big sales and bought a TV and some new LCD monitors to use when working. We also looked at a few million sofas, but haven’t made a final decision on that yet. That evening we went for a delicious turkey dinner at L’s aunt & uncle’s.

Yesterday we ordered ourselves a baby buggy & car seat, and I’m somewhat relieved to have done that now. It’s a Britax travel system, where the car seat can snap into the buggy frame. It also comes with a flat bed and another seat, so apart from needing a bigger car seat at about 1 year you can continue using the system up till about age 4. We’re planning to use the flat bed as the baby’s first bed inside as well.

In the evening we had L’s cousins over for dinner, and they helped out with a whole lot of lifting and carrying and organising and painting. The second bedroom is now painted white (including the random black wall sections added by the teenage goth who lived in it before) and since our bedroom is quite small we will basically use that room as a giant wardrobe. Next chore is to clear out the third (smallest) bedroom so we can put a baby changing table and some storage in there. The baby will initially sleep in our room, but when it moves into a cot that room will be the nursery. However it is currently full of boxes of junk and it needs painting and has some old and dusty carpet that we probably want to replace.

Here’s a picture of the new car:

Today we took it for a spin to get rid of some boxes at the recycling place, and pick up our last christmas gifts, and buy a christmas tree. It handled all those tasks with ease – in our last car, the back seats did not fold down so it was impossible to put anything large in the car. But with the help of a new tarpaulin to protect its delicate boot, we got a nice big christmast tree into the back with no problems. Now we just need to find a place in the house for it … (the tree, not the car)

Here’s a couple of pictures of the house that Linus took today. The garden looks a little grim, but we have big plans for it.

In the pregnancy news, I had to take off all my rings today because my fingers have swollen up a little. They’re not particularly swollen or fat, but just enough to make the rings feel quite uncomfortable, especially when I’m somewhere warm (like the house, or the car, or the shops, or indeed anywhere that isn’t outdoors). So I have all my rings on a chain around my neck, which was a slightly early Christmas gift from Linus.

This was the view from our lounge shortly before sunrise yesterday morning:

The front of the house faces East, so the sun then popped up and blinded me throughout breakfast.

Today we picked up our (nearly) new car – a 1 year old Saab 9-5 station wagon. It’s a proper grownup family car, can run on petrol and/or ethanol, and can also go fast so L is happy. We also visited Skatteverket to apply for my personnummer, which is going to take some unspecified amount of time (usually 10 days, but it’s Christmas, so no-one knows). And of course we did some shopping – mostly Christmas shopping, but we got a tree holder for the Christmas tree that we don’t have yet.

In pregnancy news, the bump seemed to have a sudden growth spurt overnight on Saturday and I woke up feeling much bigger and heavier. Squirt is having some very active squirmy periods and I’m sometimes finding a little foot sticking out my right side, fairly high up. Occasionally I get some other body part poking lower down on my left hand side – I imagine Squirt is doing this:

Although, he/she is head-down, so you’ll have to invert that into an upside-down mini Travolta.

That’s my best guess to what’s going on, anyway.

Late last night, Linus decided to have a play around with the box of bits that Telia had sent out for our broadband package. They hadn’t given us an installation date, but had mentioned it could take “up to 30 days”, so we pretty much assumed it would not be up and running until after Christmas. But he wanted something to play with so decided to plug everything in and see what happened. And lo and behold, we were connected!

And, if I may add, it works pretty damn well. The speed is nice and nippy and the router was preconfigured so that everything worked right out of the box. The package also includes broadband phone and TV, but the phone part is not active yet and we don’t have a TV so have no idea if the TV part works. So far, we are most impressed.

We headed out this morning for some shopping, heading first to Ikea where we picked up a few kitchen bits, some more towels, curtain rails for the kitchen, christmas decorations, and assorted odds & sods. Then we went to the building store next door where L found his Christmas present (a nifty compact B&D electric screwdriver) and some plain white paint for the two small bedrooms. We looked for a heated towel rail but only found a few and they were a little small and disappointing. Then we hit some electronics stores and picked up a Christmas present and got some information about LCD TVs – but we’ll wait until the mellandags-rea (“between-day” sales, the sales held between christmas & new year) before buying one.

All done with shopping, we then went to Kinnas for a delicious lasagne dinner and to pick up some of the stuff that has been living in her loft – a few wedding gifts from last year and a Christmas parcel from NZ.

Tomorrow we need to go in to Skatteverket (the tax authority) to register L as living in Sweden again, and to see if I can get a Personnummer – the all-encompassing ID number for Swedish residents, that I will need before I can get health care, a bank account, a mobile phone, and so on. Rather than having one number for the Inland Revenue, another on your passport, another on your driver’s license, another for the NHS, and who knows what else, the Swedes use this one number for all occasions. The number consists of your birthdate plus four other digits (do they really not get more than 9,999 births a year? maybe some people get an extra digit) so it’s actually easy enough to remember.

Apart from our visit to Skatteverket, the other top priority is to go to the car dealership that is holding a Saab 9-5 for us. Hopefully it is everything we are looking for in a Saab, and we will be driving it away tomorrow. Yay, new car, with heated seats!

So we arrived in Sweden last night, with one-way tickets, a house to move into and the money from our flat sale winging its way to my account. It was chilly but not cold and Landvetter airport was quite deserted when we landed around 10pm. We collected our rental car (a volvo!) and got ourselves to our new home and a whole collection of surprises that lay within … firstly we had two christmas parcels from NZ which were an unexpected and exciting welcome! And then there was the house … carrying on from all her hard work this summer, L’s mum Kinna had wallpapered our bathroom and put up a new towel hook and toilet roll holder, bought and assembled a new bathroom cabinet, put up christmas lights and curtains, bought us some new towels and a hyacinth and a poinsettia and a subscription to Göteborgs Posten (the local newspaper), stocked the kitchen with some breakfast essentials, AND made our bed! After marvelling at how wonderful it all looked, we had a brief chat with her on the phone before falling into bed. I am so glad we bought a new bed last time we came over here – it feels all new and firm and comfortable and is a whole 20cm wider than the old bed in London, which is quite welcome when I feel like I’m wearing a tiny wiggly whale on my abdomen.

This morning we had a nice lie-in and a cup of tea in our nice new bed before getting ourselves up & about. We had some filmjölk (kindof very thin yoghurt) with hallonsyllt (raspberry jam) and flingor (cornflakes) for breakfast and made up a massive shopping list, which includes things such as “car”, “sofa”, “TV” and “something for the baby to sleep in”. Then we headed out. First stop was at Lollipop, a local convenience store that also serves as a post office and was holding a parcel containing equipment for the broadband connection we ordered before coming. Then we went to Majgården, another slightly larger convenience store that also has an excellent bakery. We picked up an äpple och kanel krans – a big apple and cinnamon bready-cakey-thing with a hole in the middle. We went off to Kinna’s little house and had some cake and tea with her, then paid a quick visit to L’s aunt & uncle as well. It was about 2pm by this time, and despite breakfast being late and having eaten cake, we were a little hungry. So we stopped at a takeaway/sweet shop where I had köttbullar (meatballs) with potatismos (mash), lyngonsyllt (lingon berry jam) and sås (gravy). Linus had an enourmous tunnbröd (thin bread) wrap containing sausage, mash, salad, mayonnaise and gherkins. It was approximately as big as his head.

From there it was more visiting, to L’s grandparents house, where we had further cake and tea and coffee. With no-one left to visit, we went to the local shopping mall, Kungsmässan. As it was getting late in the day, we didn’t intend to knock a great many things off the giant shopping list, but we did manage to buy some slippers (ours are in transit with the shipping company, somewhere between London and Sweden). The house is warm (it’s 11pm and I’m in a top & light cardigan, L has his shirt sleeves rolled up) but slippers are still a necessity in my book. We spoke to someone in the 3 mobile phone store about getting phones, but they said that until we have been living in Sweden for 6 months they would not give us accounts. Later we spoke to a salesman in another electronics shop and it sounds like 3 are the only provider with such a preposterous rule, which is good news.

Our last big chore of the day was some grocery shipping at ICA, the supermarket in Kungsmässan. We stocked up on essential food and made our way home for some dinner. In the vege department I saw a perslijrot – parsley root – ie, the root of a parsley plant. Yeah, it turns out you can eat that. Who knew? I had just seen something about it in one of Kinna’s gardening magazines and decided we should try one, so we had it shaved in a salad with celeriac and a little balsamic dressing. It tastes a lot like carrot. Not particularly exciting, but kindof nice and kindof different.

So now we have an even longer shopping and todo list – we have two small bedrooms to paint and a few curtains to put up, and we have a shopping list to take to Ikea tomorrow. The house is so livable as it is, but we are enjoying doing some nesting, and it is more exciting to be nesting here than it was in the London flat – the difference between tidying a place up just to sell it, and tidying a place up because you’re going to actually live in it. It still feels quite surreal to be here – more like a vacation than an actual move.

Thanks to everyone who came along to our leaving drinks on Friday night. There’s a bunch of photos here.

Tonight we went for one last meal at our local Argentinian steak restaurant, the Santa Maria Del Sur. Tomorrow we’ll be sorting through our stuff to try and identify things that are not worth shipping, before the movers come on Wednesday. Only 2 more sleeps in this flat, and only 4 more in London!

The week before last, we snuck off to Paris for a 3 night mini break, and (unlike my other half-dozen or so trips to Paris) we even managed to do some touristy stuff.

Our first outing was to the Chateaux de Versailles:

Which was sparkly.

The next day we descended into the Paris catacombs:

Not so sparkly. I was a little alarmed by the sign warning of the 130 steps down and 83 steps up that would be required, since even unpacking the dishwasher makes me start panting these days. But actually the staircases weren’t too much of a problem, and we went straight to a cafe for refreshments when we got out.

We also went to see Keith Jarrett doing a solo improvisation concert, and took a nice dinner cruise on the Seine. The set menu included a bottle of champagne and a bottle of wine per couple – I had half a glass of champagne, and Linus made a valiant effort and managed to polish off most of the rest.

Back in London, we are in the thick of moving arrangements for the big shift to Sweden. The movers are coming next Wednesday to take our stuff, and we fly over on Friday. We are staying with my cousin in north London for the last 2 nights after all our belongings have left. The BMW is on Ebay and we’ve been looking at Saabs on the internet – ooh, to have a car with functional heating! What a treat!

There’s not much news on the pregnancy front. We had a bit of a growth spurt last week, so I suddently felt a bit heavier and really notice the increased waddle and the difficulty of rolling over in bed. I had my last appointment with our local GP yesterday, all was fine and she was confident that baby is head-down at the moment, so I’m hoping he/she stays that way. I’ll be 33 weeks when we fly, but SAS will accept pregnant lumps up to 36 weeks and I have a “fit to fly” letter from the GP so all should be fine.

Here’s a picture of the whole family in Paris: