seven quick takes about stuff!

1. In Sweden offices always have a proper kitchen. I really appreciate that everyone eats lunch together and that desks are for working, not for eating. What I don't like is that sometimes people microwave 'food' which smells completely rancid. Exaggeration? Not by much.

Imagine a smell like 20 wet cats who have been living in a room that hasn't been cleaned in a year. Now imagine seeing a person eating the item giving off this smell, and just try to enjoy eating a sandwich. Hopefully you get the picture.

2. This is a great song that makes me really happy!



3. Greg and I have been playing a lot of cribbage lately. Neither of us is very good, but at least that makes us evenly matched. Maybe we're not really playing correctly, but we have a set of rules that we've agreed on based on various sets of cribbage rules we have found. The interesting thing we've found is that a hand that is statistically rare is not necessarily worth a ton of points, so a good poker hand doesn't really make a good cribbage hand. I still get excited if the turn card makes my hand a 'full house' though:)

4. The games we have in rotation that are fun for two people are: cribbage, bananagrams, and bohnanza. They pretty much take care of any type of game I'd be interested in playing. A numbers/card game. A word game. A strategy game. We need to learn the 2 player version of 7 Wonders, but we've been waiting to play the game the normal way a few times first before we play a modified version.

5. I am so glad that Christmas and New Years are on Wednesdays this year. This means we have a full two week vacation. Last year it seemed that everyone just used personal vacation days and didn't show up to the office, but this year we have official scheduled vacation, which is really so much better.

6. Plus Malory is coming to visit us! I think if we didn't have a friend coming for the holiday we would end up sitting at home far too often. I mean, I really do like sitting at home and reading books or playing games, but going on adventures is fun too:)

7. In my last quick takes, I mentioned that I had so many photos out one particular window that I might make a collection of them. Well, last week while I was sick, I went through a bunch of photos and I think I found 28 unique photos from the past year, taken out the same exact window. This will be the most riveting thing I've published to my blog!

The End & The Linkup!

Sick Day

On Monday I was spouting off the wonders of gargling salt water and how it has kept me from getting a cold so far this winter. By Tuesday afternoon I had a full-fledged cold. I've gone through almost a full box of tissues and nearly drank my weight in juice and tea. Yesterday at 2:40p I realized that there wasn't going to be much more daylight, so I figured I should open the shade and let some more light in. This was the view awaiting me.

Not a lot of daylight in these parts, but what we get can really be beautiful!

contra dancing in Denmark

My love of folk dancing started with contra dancing. All the talking I do about the goodness of contra is already toned down so that I don't scare people by my over-enthusiasm. So if you were already thinking that I had a crazy huge amount of enthusiasm for contra dance, it is really probably ten times larger.

That said, it is a shame that there is no contra dancing in Sweden. But luckily for me, there is in our near neighbor, Denmark. Although I guess I use 'near' somewhat loosely.

Several weekends ago there was a full weekend of dance, so Greg and I finally made the trip to join the fun. We traveled by train, which I love infinitely more than flying. Train travel is just so nice. (Although I learned that the Monday after we returned there was a train derailment south of Stockholm, which had caused a lot of issues and delays, so we lucked out that it didn't happen before/during our trip.)

Here are a few photos from around the web:

Greg and I with one of the callers. (source)

The band from the US; they are completely amazing. (source)

General merriment. (I'm actually way in the back of this one.) (source)