Thoughts

Yesterday a friend of mine told me something that is really hard to come to terms with. You think you know someone quite well, but then they tell you something that changes everything. And you wonder;
"will our relationship ever be as simple and comfortable as it used to be before I knew?"

Sunday snow

It snowed today. As my brother and I walked home from church we could see small single snowflakes falling slowly to the ground. It takes about 45 minutes to walk home and when we came home it had started to fall a bit more snow, but still not very much.
I don't want Christmas to come. I have bought one Christmas present and I don't want to go shopping for more. I don't like shopping.
And I would like to celebrate in England with my friends there.
Though the community we were part of meant work six days a week and everyone had to share the load on days like Christmas day and New Years Eve - I still loved it.

I have spent the weekend just sitting home doin' nothin'.
Oh, there was some alcohol... and brownies...
I feel totaly depressed.

I should be happy that I got a job so soon after getting home.
The friend who followed me to Sweden went back to England and the next day I started working. Though I feel like a robot. I go up and drive to work, I work, I come home, I eat dinner, I surf and then Zzz. I am not happy.
I should be happy.
Tomorrow I'm off work since they're on a course so there's nothing for me to do, but I'm gonna work at my Mum's job, because they need people and I've been there before. I should be grateful, and I don't even have to work there, I offered to do so myself. It's just the fact that I am NOT happy...
Whatever I'm doing I am bored.
I read books to flee reality some days.
I'm trying to pray but I feel disconnected with God.

Life seems meaningless.
What am I supposed to do next year?
I have grades good enough to get me into ANY course or program at university, but I don't want to study anything.
I don't want to be in Sweden. I don't want to speak Swedish. I miss English. I miss UK.

Is it true - Yohanna

Listening to my favourite Icelandic artist again...
Yohanna came second in the Eurovision Song Contest this year with a song called "Is it true?".
I have heard the French, German and Spanish versions before, but today I found a Russian version as well!
I think I prefer the French version, though I don't understand it.
In the German version they have changed the lyrics a lot.

I wonder how come she hasn't done an Icelandic version :P
I'm waiting for the Swedish, ha ha.

Samuel Harfst

I listen to a wide variety of music, in my own opinion, that is :)
Some days I feel like Green Day, other days it's U2, or Whitney Houston, or Shawn McDonald, or Yohanna, or Kent.
It's always different.
One band that I can listen to no matter what mood I'm in is my favourite;
Samuel Harfst.
It's a German band that sings in both German and English.
It's simple music. Apparently it's called Neofolk music.
The lyrics are deep and profound.

The first time I heard a song by them was in England. A German friend played the guitar and sang their song "Das Privileg zu sein".
She had a powerpoint presentation with the lyrics in German up on a screen, but the girl doing AV seemed to have ZERO language skills so she never once had the right verse or anything up on the screen, it was always showing a wrong part of the song.
It was incredibly annoying, because it was a good melody and I could tell by looking at the screen that it was a very beautiful song.
I asked my friend where the song came from and she gave me the name of the band,
and I was stuck.
I listened to that first song, "Das Privileg zu sein" a countless number of times every day for like two weeks!
The rest of their songs are good aswell, though I'm not that into their English ones, there's more depth and beauty in the German ones.

I found an interview with the front man of the band, Samuel Harfst (yep, the band is named after him, surprise). I like them even more after reading that interview. He seems to be an amazing young Christian guy.
If you speak german; here's the link:

the Nobel day

Today is the 10th of December.
That means that the Nobel Peace Price will be awarded to Barack Obama in Oslo.
The real Nobel prices of Science, Literature, Chemistry and Economics will be awarded in Stockholm.
And it's my parents wedding anniversary.
They tied the knot 26 years ago on a freezing December day.
Today it's like 10 degrees outside; on their wedding it was several minus and lots of snow.
They planned on getting married in the summer of 1984, but then they found our house and bought it, and they couldn't afford two apartments and one house.
They wouldn't consider moving in together because they are born again Christians
and believe that sex belongs to marriage, and no, engagement doesn't count. I'm proud of them.

A winter wedding with lots of snow sounds so romantic <3 But in the evening when they arrived to their new house, their friends had shoveled a huge heap of snow in front of the door!

I finished at 1 o'clock today. I am going to my brothers community for dinner (they have an open invitation to dinner every Thursday eve) as usual, so I called my Mom to ask if she and Dad had any plans for the evening. Since Mom finish at 4 and Dad at 6 I thought that I could prepare some nice food for them so that they could relax after work.
-Hi Mom, do you have any special plans for tonight?
-Any plans? Well, we are not going to your brothers community tonight.
-Doh, I understood that - it's your wedding anniversary! I mean, are you going out, or staying home?
- Long silence
-Heeeello....?
-I had forgot...

She just asked me to defrost some moose meat so I decided to bake brownies and do a strawberry thing to go with that. She was very confused when she came home and she didn't realize that the brownies were for them until I left without taking them with me!
I told her, it's the age.

reading Icelandic

I found an article in Icelandic about Yohanna - a very talented Icelandic singer that I really enjoy listening to (yes, she sings in English, so just search on youtube for her songs).
Just for fun I started reading, and discovered that I understood most of it!
Well, the languages are related and we studied Icelandic a little bit (like 2 lessons) when we had Swedish in High School.
I read the first paragraph and it almost gave me head ache trying to really focus and use my brain to understand. :)
If someone Icelandic reads this they are very welcome to correct me if I am wrong, but I think the first bit means this:

Jóhanna Guðrún Jónsdóttir söng sig inn í hjörtu landsmanna ung að árum.
Jóhanna Guðrún Jónsdóttir (Yohanna - J is pronounced like a Y in the Norse languages) sang her way into her countrymen's heart young and old (not sure about the two last words)
Hún hefur alla tíð sett sönginn í fyrsta sæti og það hefur kostað mikinn tíma og erfiði.
She has aways prioritized the singing and it has cost her a lot of time and hard work.

Voilá!
But my brain is aching...

Wednesday with synchronous diaphragmatic flutter

So tired this morning!
Left the house at 6.33 which meant that I parked the car at 6.57 and walked through the door at 6.59.
In time, phew.

I finished work at 12 today (makes me say "yeah" at the time, but my bank account won't agree with me), so I had lunch at home and then I went to visit my grandmother.
My grandmother is ancient. She's almost antique. ;)
Last Wednesday she turned 93. Not bad, eh?
She still lives in the house that she shared with my Grandfather until he passed away in 1994. During the last two-three years my parents have made a lot of changes in her garden so that she doesn't have too much to take care of.
She's just had her hearing aid adjusted and she now hears better than in a long time. All the noise confuses her and turns into a murmur in her head, so she takes of the hearing aid when she goes for her daily walk.
Wow, imagine being able to turn your hearing off when the noise of cars and traffic disturbs your walk!
We talked, and I helped her with some sewing.
She can't see very well, she couldn't even see my face though I sat close to her.
She told me that she felt isolated because she could never look someone in their eyes (to me it felt like she looked me in my eyes, but she was only seeing a blurry oval instead of my face).
She said to me you are young and have both eyes and ears. I remember it was so much fun to be young! Do you think it is fun?
I answered that I enjoyed life, but I have nothing to compare with.

Then I thought, man I'm so ungrateful for everything I have!
My Grandmother was borned during the 1st World War. Sweden was poorer back then, and my Grandmothers father wasn't good with money. My Grandmother started working early, but she had to give all the money to her father who spent it all.
Then when she was a year older than I am now the second World War started. It lasted until she was 29. It was hard times.
I wonder if I one day will be looking back at my youth and wonder why I didn't appreciate it more. Maybe I'll be looking back in regret. I hope not, but sometimes you won't get wiser without hindsight.

Carpe Diem, someone once said, and it's so true.
Make the most of opportunities, feel happy (oh yes, you can choose) and be grateful.

As I sat there and talked to my dear old Grandmother I got synchronous diaphragmatic flutter, also known as "hiccup". :)
Hick
And then I heard my Grandmother go hick as well, making fun of me.
I couldn't believe that she had heard my hiccup!
I have grown up being used to shouting at her to make her hear; and now, after readjusting her hearing aid she can hear hiccups!
Hallelujah!

Monday Culinarian experience

I am sitting in my room and just enjoying the aftertaste of good food.
I had homemade pizza for dinner, but the best part was the bllberry kind-of-ice-cream that I had for dessert. I made it myself last Friday :)
I mixed frozen bilberries and strawberries with vanilla flavoured curd and "vaniljvisp" (a vanilla flavoured product with long shelf life that resembles single cream). It tasted amazing when Mum and I had this Friday and even better after dinner today! Then ten minutes ago Dad came up with a cup of hot "glögg", Swedish mulled wine. It tasted seriously good, flavoured with lingonberries and bilberries.

I think I'll go downstairs and get another cup once my parents have gone to sleep ;)

If you are from England and like mulled wine; try some Swedish mulled wine it's five times better than yours!
If you are from Germany and like mulled wine; ours is ten times better! moahaha

They only sell in around Christmas because it's a Christmas thing, but they have such a variety in the stores! White or red wine, alcohol or non-alcohol, chocolate, lingonberries, bilberries, cloudberries, vanilla etc etc...
My favourite is whie wine with cloudberries by Dufvenkrooks.

Well, I'm going for that cup of glögg now!
Good night!

Prins

I was online on facebook yesterday and wrote
on a Canadian friend's wall.
A friend of his had written before me and her surname was Prins.
It may not be very surprising that the meaning of the word prins is prince in Swedish.
It also means prince in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese and Dutch.
Now, all of these languages are germanic, but where does the word originally come from?

Well, Wikipedia is my friend :)

Prince, from French "Prince" (itself from the Latin root princeps), is a general term for a monarch, for a member of a monarchs' or former monarch's family, and is a hereditary title in some members of Europe's highest nobility. The feminine equivalent is a princess.

The Latin word prīnceps (older Latin *prīsmo-kaps, literally "the one who takes the first [place/position]"), became the usual title of the informal leader of the Roman senate some centuries before the transition to empire, the princeps senatus.

It seems like the French imported the word and from French it spread to most of Western and Central Europe.
I guess it makes sense that the word for Prince became "international" like this, since the royal families often had contact with each other; diplomatic, intellectual or marriage wise.
I find this fascinating!
That the word princeps turned into prince and then it spread through the languages of Europe and turned into variations such as Prionnsa in Scottish Gaelic, Princ in Slovenian and Prinţ in Romanian.

I wish I had a surname that meant something, and had a history like that.
Cedergren is Swedish for Cedar and branch - Cedarbranch simply.
Though you would say Branch of Cedar in English.

Sunday silence

It's Sunday, the second of Advent.
My parents got wireless Internet yesterday so it is with a feeling of pleasure that I use my computer upstairs, sitting in my bed.
Yesterday I listened to Yohanna on youtube. She's an Icelandic singer that participated in the Eurovision Contest this year. Her song "Is it true" was performed i English and she has also recorded versions in French, German and Spanish.
I browsed among her other songs and found some very good ones that I will listen to again. Walking on water for example.
It was when I was listening to her song Beautiful Silence that I thought to myself;
- Is it really possible to sing about silence?
Song is a great way to express thoughts and emotions.
But is it possible to describe silence, and your appreciation for it, with noise?
Doesn't that defeat the object?
One of my favourite songs is Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence and I think they have captured the beauty of silence by finishing off the song in such a way as they have.

Writing poems about silence makes more sense than songs. But should those poems be read out loud? Or should they be appreciated - in silence?
Sometimes we don't hear silence until we have listened to a sound and it stops.
Or maybe it's more of a being made aware kind of thing...

Silence is underestimated. Sometimes I feel like I can't hear my own thoughts until all the noise around me is silenced. I used to climb up on Castle Rock in the Valley of Rocks just to enjoy the silence. And maybe it's in silence, when we hear our own thoughts, that we finally can hear God?