From the Department of Oops

WiseMan picked up a flyer at the Coop today. This is so bizarre, I have to translate it:

Important information for those of you who have the Coop 2014 calendar. Because of a printing error that crept in for the month of May we have put together an updated page that you can easily use to replace the month of May with. On the inside of this flyer you can find the month of May as it should be, just open it up and hang it up over the wrong one so that you have a calendar with the correct weekend days. Please note that the Monday after Pentecost, the 9th of June is NOT a holiday, please note this in your calendar. Midsummer day, Saturday the 21st of June, is a holiday, so please note this in your calendar as well. We are sorry for the problem and wish you all the best in 2014!

Ahem. Pentecost Monday has not been a holiday in Sweden for what, 5 years now? And they missed having the most holiest of the Swedish drinking holidays, Midsummer, marked as a holiday? On their Facebook page they note that the first of May was set on a Wednesday instead of Thursday, meaning they repeated May 2013. What did they do, outsource the printing to some cheap third world country where no one noticed anything? The motto of the year is: sustainability.

WiseGrandkids First Christmas

We celebrated our first Christmas with WiseGrandkid today. She was here with her parents and with WiseKid's birth brother (he was adopted by another couple, we kept contact with each other from early on). They wanted Maccaroni and Cheese for Christmas Dinner, so I made that with a salad.

WiseGrandkid was a darling princess. She can turn over now, and has two little toys she likes to play with. When her dad put her on his shoulders to carry her around, she hung on tight - grabbing his ears tightly!

We gave WiseGrandkid a songbook, a real book with pictures and music in it. When her mother looked through it she exclaimed at one picture: Oh, that's the song that came with the Pampers App! How fast the times are a-changin'

It was a peaceful evening, no in-depth discussions, no fighting, and far too much to eat.

I hope your Christmas Season is peaceful and joyous - all the best for 2014!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all!

This has got to be the smallest Christmas tree I ever had, but boy, it was the fastest I ever got a tree decorated.

So little time to blog, that will have to be a New Year's resolution: Blog more!

Hope all are able to enjoy some peace and companionship during the holiday season and gather their strength for 2014!

Swedish Moss

I was up in Sweden for the first weekend in Advent. We visited with friends, and I quite admired all of the Advent decorations she had: Glass containers with moss, twigs, candles, and such. She explained that they were out in the woods last week collecting stuff, and she had spent the week putting them together.

The next morning I went out in our woods and collected a whole basket of different sorts of moss, lichens, interesting twigs, red berries and such. I was flying back in the evening without checked luggage, so I was interested to see if I could get it all in. I had it packed in many different plastic bags that I could stuff into my backpack if necessary, and put them all in a paper bag.

The first job was getting to Copenhagen - trivial with the train. Second step - would they let me through security? Amazingly, my backpack was looked at twice, but the bag of moss went through without a blink of an eye. Third trial - checking in. No word at all, I just sailed through.

On the plane I put my backpack up in the overhead rack and the moss under the seat in front of me, and thus got my sack of moss home in one piece. I now have two nice Advent decorations, put moss on the floor of the creche, and still have a lot left over! Just put up a picture of the nicest one on the blog.

Grandmas

I went to an in-school training session on examination law (on account of being the chair of our program's examination board) on Friday. It was at the other school campus, the one I used to have my office at. I was quite pleased to meet some colleagues I haven't seen for a while, in particular one of the few other women in the computing departments.

After greetings and handball chat (she likes handball, too) we got down to business: She's a new grandmother, you see, first grandchild last month. Oh, I said, I'm a grandma now too, since July. She looked at me, shocked. "How old is your son?" "21".

And it turned out, we are both the same age, she had her first son at 21, and he is a dad now at 35. WiseKid was born when I was 35 and is a dad at 21. So I've caught up with her!

Both of us flunked the first Grandma Test: neither of us had a picture of our grandkids in our wallets. I guess I'd better get some pics sent to my phone.

Surveillance

Surveillance is one of the key words in Europe at the moment. Yes, some people have always suspected that we were being watched. But what has come to light in the last few months would not have been believable if it was part of the plot of some spy thriller.

In a way, it changes the way we communicate. Are we now forced to weigh every word we write? Do we assume that everything is being transcribed somewhere, stored to be held against us at an opportune moment? We can't even organize surprise birthday parties or purchase presents anymore without some pesky social media system tattling. "Your friend X just bought a Y, don't you want to buy one, too?"

I use a different email address for each of the blogs I write. I have recently started getting emails from my "friends" at Google, asking one of my addresses if it doesn't perhaps know one of the other ones. Of course, I access the blogs with the same IP address. But I don't want to give proof positive that these accounts are both mine. Should I be forced to use one email and one email only online?

I think not. In a way, I am a number of persons. When I correspond for work, I use a work email. When I write as a private person, I use a different address. And since I perhaps don't want my comments on a cooking page to be tied together with comments I made about a hotel or with comments on a political page, I find it vital to have dissimilar email addresses. When is it really important to know who exactly I am? Perhaps only if I don't pay my bills?

We need to think hard and fast about what kind of a digital world we want to live in, and what kind we have set up for ourselves. I think the two don't match at the moment.

Zwei Leben

Since the Oscar-nominated German-Norwegian film Zwei Leben (Two Lives) was only running until tomorrow, we decided to watch it this evening. WiseMan had already seen it in Norwegian/German, and as he noted later, it is a film that you can't watch twice because then the suspense is gone.

But during the film you don't know what to think. A normal, boring life is punctuated by flashbacks that include scraps of some nasty German history: Lebensborn, a project that took the offspring of Norwegian women and Nazi occupiers to German orphanages in order to increase the so-called Aryan race; and the Stasi, the East German secret service that had their fingers in everything. Seeing what the Stasi was up to then and discovering what the NSA is up to now is scary.

The story draws you in, as more and more strands of the two lives come unraveled and tangle themselves. At one point the question is raised: Is it always necessary to tell the truth? People were so much happier when they didn't know the deep, dark secrets.

A thought-provoking film, but probably not for a general, global audience.